Do Bugs just have the best Sigils?

[Aesthetica Purple]

Don't get me wrong, a lot of really good sigils are on non-bug creatures, but like, SO many of the most useful Sigils that have carried me through games are naturally on bugs! Morsel, Corpseeater, Bee Spawner, Bifurcated/Trifurcated Strike, and heaven help me, Unkillable!

I honestly think Unkillable is my favorite Sigil in the game. I'm not positive on whether or not it's considered good-I can't imagine it isn't, to be honest-but that doesn't matter anyway, because it is just the most fun to experiment around with, regardless! I fell in love the second I put Unkillable on a Skink.

[YetiChow]

Unkillable is probably the strongest sigil in the game -- not only does it completely negate the "once it's gone, it's gone" risk of using a powerful card early, it can also be combined with so many other sigils for great effect. You can use Unkillable to enhance any "role" of card -- whether it's simply a never-ending supply of blocker cards, or a sacrifice that you can keep using, or a "throwaway" attacker that only needs to defeat a specific enemy and can then be a sacrifice or blocker... or right up to the most broken combos like "yeah I'd like to create a card that gives me a rabbit and a random item every time I play it, and when I sac the rabbit it comes back to my hand too so I now have an arbitrarily large hand size!"

Unkillable is available on the Ouroboros too of course, but Ouro's built-in gimmick is already so strong that it's probably not worth pulling Unkillable off of it to use elsewhere.

[Dlanor]

Some of the best cards are bugs, but a lot of the worst cards are bugs too. Bugs have the Ring Worm card, and also the 3 ant cards are some of the weakest and least consistent in the entire game.

[YetiChow]

Originally posted by Totopo:

Some of the best cards are bugs, but a lot of the worst cards are bugs too. Bugs have the Ring Worm card, and also the 3 ant cards are some of the weakest and least consistent in the entire game.

flying ants are IMO incredibly consistent -- a 1 blood flying creature that can easily be buffed is nothing to sniff at, especially not when that deck guarantees you start with a buffing creature and inherently rewards you for sticking with an insect theme (dramatically increasing your chances if picking up more ants in the near future.)

Considering that "high-level play" involves ruthlessly ignoring 80% of the game to focus on a single strategy... compared to that, I'd say that making a conscious effort to pick up a couple more ants and give them good sigils is comparatively very easy!

At the "top end", sure, the ant deck falls off in consistency once you've given up literally all of the safety cushioning built into low-level play. But for most players just working their way through the first few challenge levels in a casual manner, the ant deck is going to be a fun change of pace and a fairly consistent way to notch up a couple of victories before they unlock the truly breakable stuff. When I was using the ant deck, its lack of ability to go above 4 damage per lane per turn was never an issue -- by the time I needed any kind of higher "firepower" I had it. Obviously that's not going to be true once I start getting into grizzlies and such... but that's well past the realms of where most people are going to stop enjoying the game and go "meh, I can see where this is going and I'm not enough of a masochist to chase all the achievements and skulls."

[Dlanor]

Originally posted by YetiChow:

flying ants are IMO incredibly consistent -- a 1 blood flying creature that can easily be buffed is nothing to sniff at, especially not when that deck guarantees you start with a buffing creature and inherently rewards you for sticking with an insect theme (dramatically increasing your chances if picking up more ants in the near future.)

Considering that "high-level play" involves ruthlessly ignoring 80% of the game to focus on a single strategy... compared to that, I'd say that making a conscious effort to pick up a couple more ants and give them good sigils is comparatively very easy!

At the "top end", sure, the ant deck falls off in consistency once you've given up literally all of the safety cushioning built into low-level play. But for most players just working their way through the first few challenge levels in a casual manner, the ant deck is going to be a fun change of pace and a fairly consistent way to notch up a couple of victories before they unlock the truly breakable stuff. When I was using the ant deck, its lack of ability to go above 4 damage per lane per turn was never an issue -- by the time I needed any kind of higher "firepower" I had it. Obviously that's not going to be true once I start getting into grizzlies and such... but that's well past the realms of where most people are going to stop enjoying the game and go "meh, I can see where this is going and I'm not enough of a masochist to chase all the achievements and skulls."

Flying Ants are trash though, I have no clue what you're talking about. Sparrows have more health and can actually be attack-buffed at fires and events, unlike Flying Ants.

High level play consists of using Hand Manip to remove most RNG from a run, and Ants are some of the worst cards in the game to hand manip because 1 mildly buffed ant never wins you the game when almost any other 1-drop could, it's basically just ants and mirror tentacle that are bad, but at least Mirror Tentacle has some value. That doesn't mean Ants are good before high level play, they're still some of the worst cards in the game, it's just that the game is easy enough that you can still win using some of the worst cards in the game on lower difficulties.

You're not wrong in that Ants are a fun change of pace, but OP isn't asking about what is fun, they're asking about the best cards and sigils. All 3 Ants are weak cards that require synergies to ever be good, which is awful in a game where most other 1-blood cards can be buffed to be instant win conditions that guaranteed win the battle instantly AND guaranteed start in your opening hand. Opinions don't really matter when it comes to what is consistent, ants are almost never consistent because they require drawing multiple specific cards to work in a game with little draw.

[YetiChow]

Originally posted by Totopo:

Originally posted by YetiChow:

flying ants are IMO incredibly consistent -- a 1 blood flying creature that can easily be buffed is nothing to sniff at, especially not when that deck guarantees you start with a buffing creature and inherently rewards you for sticking with an insect theme (dramatically increasing your chances if picking up more ants in the near future.)

Considering that "high-level play" involves ruthlessly ignoring 80% of the game to focus on a single strategy... compared to that, I'd say that making a conscious effort to pick up a couple more ants and give them good sigils is comparatively very easy!

At the "top end", sure, the ant deck falls off in consistency once you've given up literally all of the safety cushioning built into low-level play. But for most players just working their way through the first few challenge levels in a casual manner, the ant deck is going to be a fun change of pace and a fairly consistent way to notch up a couple of victories before they unlock the truly breakable stuff. When I was using the ant deck, its lack of ability to go above 4 damage per lane per turn was never an issue -- by the time I needed any kind of higher "firepower" I had it. Obviously that's not going to be true once I start getting into grizzlies and such... but that's well past the realms of where most people are going to stop enjoying the game and go "meh, I can see where this is going and I'm not enough of a masochist to chase all the achievements and skulls."

Flying Ants are trash though, I have no clue what you're talking about. Sparrows have more health and can actually be attack-buffed at fires and events, unlike Flying Ants.

High level play consists of using Hand Manip to remove most RNG from a run, and Ants are some of the worst cards in the game to hand manip because 1 mildly buffed ant never wins you the game when any other 1-drop could. That doesn't mean Ants are good before high level play, they're still some of the worst cards in the game, it's just that the game is easy enough that you can still win using some of the worst cards in the game on lower difficulties.

You're not wrong in that Ants are a fun change of pace, but OP isn't asking about what is fun, they're asking about the best cards and sigils. All 3 Ants are weak cards that require synergies to ever be good, which is awful in a game where most other 1-blood cards can be buffed to be instant win conditions that guaranteed win the battle instantly AND guaranteed start in your opening hand. Opinions don't really matter when it comes to what is consistent, ants are almost never consistent because they require drawing multiple specific cards to work in a game with little draw.

At low-level play (i.e. no 15-point-value challenges active), you can literally just win with the ant deck on the third or fourth turn in a very consistent manner. Sac the skunk to the flying ant at first opportunity so that you can use it to negate a 1-damage creature, it will get you 2 teeth on the scale which gives you a buffer while you're drawing your 2 squirrels to pull up the ant queen. Then on turn 3 you play the ant queen against an unopposed space, you're doing 4 damage and you likely have only taken 1 damage so far so when you add the previous damage from the flying ant you should hit 5 damage on turn 3. Or, if you want to play a bit smarter, you put the AQ against whatever came down against you on turn 2, chances are that 2 damage is enough to kill it, and then you're sitting at around 3 teeth up on the scale so on turn 4 when you play the extra ant you're dealing 9 damage and probably getting at least 5 overflow damage.

Alternatively, you keep the skunk and use it to stall out any 2-damage enemies on the first turn, put the flying ant (assuming you have it) on an unopposed space on the second turn to help balance the scales or else just pick up a squirrel, on the third turn you play the AQ (if you have 2 squirrels great, otherwise you sac the skunk + 1 squirrel) and then, if you didn't have to sac the skunk to play the AQ you can sac it to summon the AQ's spawned ant instead.

Once you have that engine up and running, it's incredibly easy to get ahead of the curve and stay there. Just pick insects whenever you get the chance, build up regular ants into "support" units (give them sigils like Pack Alpha, Bone King, Hoarder or Bees Within), put Warren or Bees Within on your AQs, and turn your flying ants into monsters by using Bifurcated/Trifurcated Strike or Double Strike... there are multiple ways to turn your handful of ants into a win condition, and since you're not dealing with all of the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ form challenge skulls yet, there's no rush to do it.

[Dlanor]

Originally posted by YetiChow:

At low-level play (i.e. no 15-point-value challenges active), you can literally just win with the ant deck on the third or fourth turn in a very consistent manner.

Yes, like I already said ants are not a big enough handicap to make you lose every time on low difficulties. You seem to have major confusion over what the word "consistent" means, ants are not consistent by any measure. Let me describe what consistency sounds like using multiple examples:

You have Pelt Lice that you buffed to 3 attack, and a deck with 6 Pelts you bought from Trapper, with a total deck size of 11 (no 1 blood cards). There is a 94% chance you start with a Pelt in your opening hand, which allows you to summon the Pelt Lice for free and instantly kill the opponent because it is doing 3x2=6 damage. There is a 98.5% chance that you will have the Pelt Lice on turn 2, and in that 4.5% chance you didn't draw it turn 1 that means you have a minimum of 2 non-pelt non-lice cards to hold you over for the 1st turn.

Your deck has exactly 1 card that costs 1 blood, which is important because this means the game will force draw it every single time. You have buffed this card to deal lethal damage in any fight, for example a Mantis God that you had in your starter deck that you buffed on a fire twice. Or a deck with an Unkillable/Many Lives Black Goat, where the rest of the deck are all 2 and 3 blood cards strong enough to kill Leshy. There is 100% consistency you win every non-boss fight on turn 1.

Any situation where your deck will always have lethal damage in 100% of fights on turn 1. There are multiple ways to achieve this, for example a 3 card deck that has an Unkillable Warren and any 1/2 cost card and a buffed Dire Wolf with Fecundity, or a 5 card deck where 3 of the cards are 3 attack Mantis Gods because you copied the 1st one you made at Goobert/Mycologist events.

Those are what consistent strategies look like. "Hope you happen to draw multiple ant cards that you aren't guaranteed to draw and hope you survive long enough to have the resources to summon them while you hoard them" is not a consistent strategy, it is factually one of the least consistent strategies you can possibly use. Do not confuse the game being easy enough to win using an inconsistent strategy with the idea that those inconsistent strategies are somehow consistent.

[Cruxin]

Originally posted by YetiChow:

a 1 blood flying creature that can easily be buffed

power literally cannot be buffed on ants, which is the most important stat.

Originally posted by YetiChow:

At low-level play (i.e. no 15-point-value challenges active), you can literally just win with the ant deck on the third or fourth turn in a very consistent manner

Yeah, and on any level of play, even 250, a regular mantis with power buffed twice wins EVERY match on the FIRST turn. Ants are anything but consistent, and you need a LOT of both blood and ants for them to be strong. Not worth.

[YetiChow]

Originally posted by Cruxin:

Originally posted by YetiChow:

a 1 blood flying creature that can easily be buffed

power literally cannot be buffed on ants, which is the most important stat.

Originally posted by YetiChow:

At low-level play (i.e. no 15-point-value challenges active), you can literally just win with the ant deck on the third or fourth turn in a very consistent manner

Yeah, and on any level of play, even 250, a regular mantis with power buffed twice wins EVERY match on the FIRST turn. Ants are anything but consistent, and you need a LOT of both blood and ants for them to be strong. Not worth.

1) campfires are not the only way to buff total attack damage -- attack power is only one part of what makes up attack damage. There's number of strikes, and whether or not it's flying, and then you get the Bloodlust sigil and so on. Besides which, playing more ants does buff the attack power up to a point.

2) if you get 2 stumps against you and an opponent creature on a third space, (there is a map which starts that way!), or come up against a mole/mole manthen that super-broken mantis STILL isn't going to be an instant win unless it also has Double Strike

Originally posted by Totopo:

Originally posted by YetiChow:

At low-level play (i.e. no 15-point-value challenges active), you can literally just win with the ant deck on the third or fourth turn in a very consistent manner.

Yes, like I already said ants are not a big enough handicap to make you lose every time on low difficulties. You seem to have major confusion over what the word "consistent" means, ants are not consistent by any measure. Let me describe what consistency sounds like using multiple examples:

You have Pelt Lice that you buffed to 3 attack, and a deck with 6 Pelts you bought from Trapper, with a total deck size of 11 (no 1 blood cards). There is a 94% chance you start with a Pelt in your opening hand, which allows you to summon the Pelt Lice for free and instantly kill the opponent because it is doing 3x2=6 damage. There is a 98.5% chance that you will have the Pelt Lice on turn 2, and in that 4.5% chance you didn't draw it turn 1 that means you have a minimum of 2 non-pelt non-lice cards to hold you over for the 1st turn.

Your deck has exactly 1 card that costs 1 blood, which is important because this means the game will force draw it every single time. You have buffed this card to deal lethal damage in any fight, for example a Mantis God that you had in your starter deck that you buffed on a fire twice. Or a deck with an Unkillable/Many Lives Black Goat, where the rest of the deck are all 2 and 3 blood cards strong enough to kill Leshy. There is 100% consistency you win every non-boss fight on turn 1.

Any situation where your deck will always have lethal damage in 100% of fights on turn 1. There are multiple ways to achieve this, for example a 3 card deck that has an Unkillable Warren and any 1/2 cost card and a buffed Dire Wolf with Fecundity, or a 5 card deck where 3 of the cards are 3 attack Mantis Gods because you copied the 1st one you made at Goobert/Mycologist events.

Those are what consistent strategies look like. "Hope you happen to draw multiple ant cards that you aren't guaranteed to draw and hope you survive long enough to have the resources to summon them while you hoard them" is not a consistent strategy, it is factually one of the least consistent strategies you can possibly use. Do not confuse the game being easy enough to win using an inconsistent strategy with the idea that those inconsistent strategies are somehow consistent.

In low-level play, you don't need to win on the first turn and thus "consistency" becomes about whether you can consistently win every fight rather than whether you can first-turn-win every fight. As long as you can consistently survive the first turn (and with my above-mentioned strategy where you turn the flying ant into a neutraliser that also does chip damage, you can easily survive 2-3 turns with no other ants out), you have plenty of time to draw the only other card in your deck at that point and play it

[Dlanor]

Originally posted by YetiChow:

In low-level play, you don't need to win on the first turn and thus "consistency" becomes about whether you can consistently win every fight rather than whether you can first-turn-win every fight. As long as you can consistently survive the first turn (and with my above-mentioned strategy where you turn the flying ant into a neutraliser that also does chip damage, you can easily survive 2-3 turns with no other ants out), you have plenty of time to draw the only other card in your deck at that point and play it

This is still just completely wrong. Even in low level play, there will still sometimes be enemy fights where Leshy is going to summon a 3/3 Turkey Vulture with Double Strike on the first turn. A strategy that cannot counter this every time is not consistent. I just laid out 3 strategies that DO counter it. Ants are factually less consistent because you are nowhere near guaranteed victory even if you end up with an amazing Ant deck.

[msgameandcake]

Generally I find that the best way to run an "ant deck" isn't even to use any actual ant cards at all, but to use the ant-summoning sigil. A Geck with both Unkillable and Ant Spawner lets you fill up the board with ants every turn. Get one sigil on it through infusion, the other on it through a Reptile totem. It still requires a pretty specific sequence of events, but at the very least getting an Unkillable Geck is a pretty good goal to have already, so finding a way to ant it up would be the major twist at that point. Oh, and of course, Geck is a 0-cost, so it works great for hand manipulation so long as you do something appropriate with the other two 0-cost cards in its starting deck like giving them Hoarder or otherwise getting rid of them. Tadpole shares the same Reptile Kin, of course, so if a totem is involved you help that card out too.

[Aesthetica Purple]

It's entertaining to me that this discussion ended up at the Ant Deck debate again-this is literally a convo I've had in someone else's Discussion. Pretty sure it was even with Totopo.

My take on them now has shifted some. I do agree with Totopo, of all the things Ant Decks can do, consistency isn't one of them. However, I do disagree with the statement they "aren't fun" or can't be good. Sure, them being good does require some good RNG, which inherently makes it less consistent then other decks, but that doesn't mean they can't still be effective-and moreover, IMO, fun! My first few wins in KM was with an Ant Deck. Now, I've realized that thinking and experimenting with cards like the Skink or the Mealworm is more consistent, ESPECIALLY near the endgame of KM.

TL;DR, I agree now that Ants aren't consistent, but gosh darnit they're still fun!

[Dlanor]

Originally posted by Dainty Lady:

However, I do disagree with the statement they "aren't fun" or can't be good.

I don't think anybody has said they can't be fun, I've said the exact opposite. They can win runs, just not as well as other stuff, because instead of efficiency they have an odd gimmick that can be fun but just never above average due to the cost of summoning enough of them to make it worth it.

[Aesthetica Purple]

Originally posted by Totopo:

Originally posted by Dainty Lady:

However, I do disagree with the statement they "aren't fun" or can't be good.

I don't think anybody has said they can't be fun, I've said the exact opposite. They can win runs, just not as well as other stuff, because instead of efficiency they have an odd gimmick that can be fun but just never above average due to the cost of summoning enough of them to make it worth it.

Ah. well then I have grossly misinterpreted your statements, apologies. Something you said during our string in the other person's discussion had led me to believe you found them "boring" but I see now I was mistaken.

[mco12]

The last time I played was in mid February so this could be outdated.

But for "Do Bugs just have the best Sigils?" Yes

Furthermore, the other big thing they had/have going for them is they had/have more totem combos that will outright with a game--Ants that make ants, bees that make bees.

[Aesthetica Purple]

Originally posted by mco12:

The last time I played was in mid February so this could be outdated.

But for "Do Bugs just have the best Sigils?" Yes

Furthermore, the other big thing they had/have going for them is they had/have more totem combos that will outright with a game--Ants that make ants, bees that make bees.

Oh my dude, I totally agree. Especially with the totem thing. I just did a run where I ended up getting a Corpseeater bug totem. I was basically carried in the final fight with Leshy by a Cockroach, and only won because I drew a Mealworm. The Cockroach was literally unkillable, anytime it died it would just literally replay itself.