Honest Opinions: How good are imps? I think they're the worst.

[marbeltoast]

I tried for the first time to play an honest to goodness imp deck at covenant 18 earlier today. I was hellhorned/melting remnant, and thought that if I could get a few good imps, I could use a transendimp with endless and wickstone to apply a massive effect every turn.

It happened, but not like I hoped it would. I'd never really used transendimp before, and only just today learned that it's own effect doesn't count as a summon effect. I know, the card wording is unambiguous, but I wasn't really paying that close attention. I thought "summon is the imp effect, so if it's an imp, it has summon!". How wrong I was.

I'd got the artifact that causes summon effects to proc twice, and played both of my two welder helpers, but when I dropped transendimp, he only gave 30 armour, not 60. It seems like the devs designed this card to be as weak as humanly (or devilishly) possible.

I was expecting this card to snowball into a crazy armour factory, giving out 15*2, once for each welder helper, and then having the effect double again because of the artifact, and then, when I next played transendimp, it's own effect would be part of the next effect, for an amount of armour somewhere in the hundreds.

If, when the stars align and all goes according to plan, why is transendimp, the knockout punch of the imp archetype, so bloody feeble? The other classes can do crazy stuff. They get to have totally broken builds, why not the imps? Why are they so much weaker than all the other cards?

[luisedgm]

Imps are quite unreliable, i hope they add extra champions for each Clan, having an Imp champion for Hellhorned that makes Imps better would be awesome.

I know this isn't a suggestion thread, but i would love to play this:

The Imperator
Takes 1 Space
3 dmg 3 health
Resolve: Adds a random Imp card to your hand
Old imp, very well dressed

Impaler
Incant: Adds 1/2/3 Rage stacks to friendly units
Small bonus to health

Impetuous
Summon: Repeats all Summon effects triggered so far this battle 1/2/3 times over
Extinguish: Return to hand
Moderate bonus to health

Improviser
Revenge: Summons 1/2/3 random Imps
Large bonus to health

[Ruibarian]

Some strategies rely on key rare cards, imps are one of them. Consumer of Crowns with a multistrike rune can set you up for most of a run. There aren't many other cards that can do that. Even just playing a Consumer of Crowns without upgrades is a force to be reckoned with.

Imps as standalones are okay. Molten imp eats a hit for an important unit, clears support units, and since it's a unit, essentially it has Consume, so your deck is more consistent at the Final Wave. The Rage imp is really good in a rage run, I had a 43k Daily where I just quintupled the rare Rage demon that makes Rage effects apply more damage, and playing 3 of the Rage Imps was really useful for both keeping them alive and making them hit for over 100 damage with multistrike.

You have to think about why you want the imp, and you can't just force all imps. The only time I want the rare imp cards is when a run starts with multiple imps from Covenant.

[The Laughing Traitor]

Honestly, I usually end up with one imp with the Endless (and perhaps Rage, eventually) modification whenever I play Hellhorned. Molting Imp is reasonably good at clearing squishy backlines in this role, the Welder can sub in as an off-line tank just slapped up front, and there are some rather effective Consume spells to abuse depending on your allied faction. This also lets you run the Sacrifice Imp spell who's name currently escapes me if a bit of extra energy would be useful from time to time. More than one is rarely worth the cost though.

The imps as a massed group need some specific support, though. As allies to the Stygian Guard Impolate can become your Grand Finale spell once you get more than five or six imps in the deck. The Waxfolk can benefit from their deaths and then recur them a bit more naturally than other allies can as well. The big payoff for the strategy, though, is definitely the ability to run some of the largest vanilla minions in the game in both the native Consumer of Crowns and by generating enough energy to summon Umbra's colossus.

[Ancey]

I'll put it this way. I've won more times with Imps than I have with Umbra morsels.

[Drecon]

In general it's a trap to go 100% on a single strategy. You usually want a few things that interact in a good way rather than just going blind on one single thing.
For me, this means that Imps are usually a fine addition to an already good deck. There are some nice synergies and combos with them and they fit nicely into some other decks. Going for a full Imp-deck is usually a trap though.

[ShadeDragon]

I've had infinite transcendimps do really well, but they need some backup, and the most important imps are the rage and molten, the armor one kind of hurts your gameplan, the Frozen imp relic is great for the strategy as well.

[Leopanther]

I think imps are fine as they are, they can add some nice support to a deck for little cost. They struggle a bit if you try to make the deck focused on them - but there are cases where it can work out even then. Their main appeal for me is the 1-capacity, which often makes them fit in floors where you can't put anything else. And you can still upgrade them from their rather useless 1/1 stats. A 1/26 welding Imp with 'Endless' can be a quite convenient tank that you can replace wherever he's needed the most after the enemies chew through him, as an example.

[Terrarius]

The way i see it:
There are some good standalone imps.
The payoff cards can be crazy.
Transendimp can still provide crazy value for a 1drop. Slap endless on it and it becomees quite the wall after you have dropped some armorimps
Eater of crowns with multistrike can almost win you the game on his own.
Impressive with the cube that gives you an imp each turn is a very good damagesource.

[Dlanor]

Your issue was assuming Trans Imp would be strong just because you played 2 Welder Helpers.

In a real Imp deck, Trans Imp will do the following, with X of course being the number of that imp you played:

Give 15X armor
Nuke enemies for 5X AOE damage
Gain 4X energy
Generate an instant X consume cards
Give 3X rage to the entire floor

Now, it's true, no 1 of these effects is broken, they're all worth about 1 card for 1 energy. But when you're triggering basically any 2 of these, you're getting value. 30 armor for 1 is not bad just because you had another strong card giving 30 armor for 1. The true strength of Trans Imp is giving 1 massive turn, where suddenly the enemies are all dead or damaged, your tank is reinforced greatly, your entire floor has a big damage boost, and you have extra strong cards to play with extra energy to play them. There are other interesting interactions too, like in an Architect deck Trans imp will give free capacity, in a deck with Hollows he will give himself lots of free max health.

Imp decks are great when you make them work. Cards that sacrifice imps are 100% consistent with the artifact that generates free imps every turn. Imp units are all essentially good cheap spells with a token attached, there's nothing terrible about any of them. Eater of Crowns can slaughter bosses in fights where the imps with rage and armor fall to Sweep.

The Imp deck has no real weaknesses per se, it provides instant card generation from multiple sources (not just the artifact, but Imp in a Box and Scholarly Imp, which you can even chain together), and it can even draw real cards through a spell, which not many decks can do. It has AOE damage, it has huge single-target damage from Implosion, it has protection, it has huge energy gains for playing expensive cards, it has damage scaling built into the concept of many small units gaining huge amounts of Rage, it has Eater of Crowns to slaughter bosses, it has Trans Imp to be the single highest value card in the entire game.

The only issue with an imp deck is the difficulty of finding the pieces. In live streams, one of the devs talked about the possible option of more champions coming in the future, and of course someone here mentioned that too. If a new Hellhorned Champion comes, they could have it synergize with Imp decks very well. One as simple as having a "Summon" effect would be great, making Trans Imp better, without directly needing to deal with imps. But imagine how much easier building Imp decks would be if there was a new Hellhorned Champ with the text "Strike: Add an Imp to your hand" (incant doesn't really make sense, that's a Stygian exclusive effect) or something similar. BAM, instant Imp deck. Better yet, imagine if the alternate Champs came with alternate starter cards. Torch could be replaced with "Mini Imp-in-a-box", a 1 cost spell that generates 1 random imp on use, similar to Umbra's Shadesplitter.

[jasta85]

Imps work very well with melting remnant, when you go for a revive deck build (my personal favorite). As you bring back imps, they are now 0 cost, get boosted stats and get their usual summon buff. then they die and next turn I bring them back and use them again. I've had imps with 50+ damage and health in some missions after constantly killing and bringing them back, sometimes multiple times in the same turn (bring imp out, use a sacrifice imp card, use revive card, bring back imp, use it again).

It gets absolutely insane if you do this build and get the imp that uses all summon abilities that have been used up until then. You get something like 30 rage buff, 50 fire damage and 75 armor when you drop him after a match of recycling imps.

[Urfarah]

I gotta say, the best, most consistent, imp experiences I had, by faaaaaaaaar, were playing Remnant + Hellhorned, with a Dark Calling Rector Flicker. They were good even before Imp-in-a-Box or Imp-cicle. And, once, I ended up with a Consumer of Crowns with x9 multistrike (because of Onehorn's Tome with doublestack), it was quite hilarious. He doesn't always appear though, so I usually go with a Demon Fiend instead and it is equally effective (lucked out and got a Wildwood Tome during an event, that was fun).

[Misguided]

Originally posted by marbeltoast:

I'd got the artifact that causes summon effects to proc twice, and played both of my two welder helpers, but when I dropped transendimp, he only gave 30 armour, not 60. It seems like the devs designed this card to be as weak as humanly (or devilishly) possible.

It worked exactly like this on my most recent win with both rage and energy. I put endless on transcendimp and was getting 18 stacks of rage and 8 energy every turn from three rage and one energy imps.

Are you sure you didn’t play one of the welders after?

[Isilith]

Game needs alot of content, from truely random maps(and larger ones with more options and variance) to more units, random events, minigames. I'd like to see almost a board game like mode. The game is fun but each run is too similar.

[Tactical Drongo]

go with remnant and revival tactic
you can use your imps over and over again and they get stronger in the process
not sure how effective that is in the long run though

[marbeltoast]

Originally posted by Misguided:

Originally posted by marbeltoast:

I'd got the artifact that causes summon effects to proc twice, and played both of my two welder helpers, but when I dropped transendimp, he only gave 30 armour, not 60. It seems like the devs designed this card to be as weak as humanly (or devilishly) possible.

It worked exactly like this on my most recent win with both rage and energy. I put endless on transcendimp and was getting 18 stacks of rage and 8 energy every turn from three rage and one energy imps.

Are you sure you didn’t play one of the welders after?

Certain. The transendimp's wickstone/endless upgrades meant that it was being played every turn. I had both welder imps of the floor where it was being played. It didn't occur to me to take a screenshot, so I unfortunately have no way to verify, aside from further testing.