I can not make shaman work

[Popfuse]

I just can't her cards seem decent to me but every time I turn around I hit a roadblock. Banshee replies heavily on getting the buildings to make it work warriors and skirmishers rely heaily on getting the buff cards. Like it seems no every mission I've played with her I've only ever had one piece of each puzzle.

[Fel]

I'm not too sure myself if I'm not missing something with that leader but as far as I've understood most of it seems to rely on soul siphon cards.
More specifically the normal units serve as a buffer to give time and souls to those cards.

When you manage to get some of these cards with a few hundred souls between kills and the active power, they pretty much always become really potent.


Another way that works but that requires pretty specific cards is with the curse, more specifically having a lot of cards to stack curses up to high amounts and activating the altar to make the curse's damage happen more often.
If you can manage to get at least a few tens of curses on enemies, they end up dying pretty quickly.


You have several cards that are based around sacrificing your own units, among those wailing wall can make your walls really strong, especially when combined with canibal that can increase the units HP.
Chief is a great target for that since it is useless after being deployed, ent is timed anyway and has a very high HP pool as well, making it a good candidate.
Earth spirit and skelraton are both decent candidates as well since you can typically get them for free and they have a decently high HP.

Similarly, offering allows you to remove a unit and add damage to the other units on that wall for 15 seconds, allowing banshees for example to become quite scary.
Their attack has 0 damage but AoE and applies curse but with damage increase they deal damage in AoE which is quite potent.
Earth spirits and skelratons are "free" units that can easily be sacrificed, acolyte is cheap enough to be a decent target as well.


The witch is a decent healer if you have ways to get free earth spirits and skelratons as well since they die/expire even without needing enemies or skills that remove units, allowing your other units to be healed often.

Still, I have a harder time with this leader for some reason, probably because I am too used to making death balls with most of the other leaders.
The power also requires a lot more timing than with other leaders and levels on it seem to matter a lot if you need souls either for siphon cards or for buildings/labours.

[Rubyeyed]

Try to get necromancers, they summon skeletons all the time = free souls. Also, when you level up a little you unlock Temple building that gives extra souls per death. Leader ability when leveled up with medium sized deck is also pretty powerful to charge all your buildings and cards in hand.

For offense I use curse cards + Altar.

Shaman has good unlocks down the road that make the whole experience a lot easier.

Personally shaman is my second favourite leader. Playing scientist on the other hand is hell.

[Popfuse]

Thanks I'll try my best to figure out some of these strategies. Thank you for the advice.

[Vushe]

IMO, the bare minimum a Curse Shaman (Pollution 20) needs to win is:

- 2-3x methods of AOE curse application (Doom or Soul Towers are best. Desecrate, Wailing or Dark Spell in a pinch)
- A distraction of 2 moth conjurers (more the better) or sub in a Elementalist
-10+ banshees on each side (less is needed if you have lvl 2 banshees)
- 2-3 fast economy cards (marionette, talisman and holy crab can be good too. Funeral if you are going Soul Tower route with Necro)
- 1 sprout (or a hoard card like brew)

Up to wave 19 all you need are banshees and moths. 20 and beyond you will want to pre-cast Doom (x2) or pre-set up Soul Towers (use necro for fuel or use a leveled up hero ability).
Keep banshees back 1 wall, walk them forward as mobs spawn (helps protect against arrows, gun barrels, and mini crabs).
as mobs run towards your wall, cast moth conjurer and confuse the enemy, when confuse wears off cast your next conjurer (moth or Elementalist doesn't matter)
by the time your distraction is dead, redraw your cards, sprout to get your full hand and then repeat with Doom > moth > Elementalist (moth) > econ card. This will lock down your opponent for a while and they will die to your 90+ stacks of curse from Doom/Tower/Banshees. I keep my deck small so that 1 sprout means I have most of my deck on hand which allows you to keep the combo rolling. Cast it quick or else sprout becomes a dead card once it gains 10 souls. Also sprout + Elementalist for lots of meaty bodies quickly.

Keep in mind, moth conjurer is only good so long as the moth is alive. Once moth is dead the moth conjurer can go too so you can summon a fresh one. Moths are cursed like skelerat and will die over time. I think you can cast Soul Healing to prevent it but not sure how useful that is.

If playing on Coastal, round 30, don't play your combo while the Octopus does the suck-in animation. He'll destroy your cards and make you a sad shaman rat.

Curse Shaman is all about buying time for curse to finish and can be very money hungry. Might be a more refined way of doing this, but that is my typical strategy.

Luxury items are Altar (-1 to -2s on curse is nuts), Fire Station (lots of wall re-building), Temples (if you are going Soul Tower route), Death Sentence, Beehive (limited range confuse is great), Vines (can help separate packs and make it more manageable, careful it can interfere with moth flight), Smithy, Graveyard (can be nice to call back your moths but can cost you money as it won't recall your econ cards), Summoning Pit, Library, Baths and Purifying Plants.

I find it less reliable but you can do reaper + witch/priestess with some elementals/skirmishers/acolytes so your reapers can attack safely from the mid ranks. Needs a lot of population and necro can be a luxury to keep pumping out stacked reapers.

[Sotato Pack]

moth summoners are one of the most ridiculous cards in the game and will help you kill waves you have no business beating with deficient armies, very good for utilizing them untill you get other cards in shaman deck that will combo well

[Fel]

The shaman is also the only leader that can afford to only fortify one side (and maybe raise the outer wall's HP on the other side) by sending enemies from the other side over there as well with the tornado.
The other leaders need to rely on a random event to get that effect.

[Tackles]

This is a post I made in a different thread on Shaman. Hope there's something useful here for you!

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First and foremost, your ideal deck size is 30 to 40 cards. Not 10 like the other leaders. Shammy needs a fat graveyard in order to use their leader ability. Don't be shy about picking up certain cards. For example, here are some hot cards that I never feel bad about getting, and the amounts I'd suggest:

Forbidden trade (3)
Rummage (3)
Spellbook (2)
Sprout (2)
Exorcism (2)
Divination (1 to 2)
Enchant (1 to 2)
Oracle (lategame only: 1+)
Doom (midgame or later: 1+)
Death sentence (2)
Wailing (lategame only, as many as possible)
Moth Conjurer (2)
Chief (midgame 1, lategame, as many as possible)
Purifying Plants (3)
Mushroom Farm (2)
Ghost Tower (1 or 2 depending on your econ)
Temple (1 or 2 depending on your econ)
Graveyard (2 by endgame)
Altar (2 by endgame)
Totem (1 or 2 if you can)
Public Bath (1 or 2)
Plaza (1 or 2)

As for military, it's tricky. Early on, pick up one Banshee, and spam as many banshees and guards as you possibly can, because at wave 9, you will get an event that lets you give +2 damage to all deployed troops. If you don't get an early sprout, you can probably get out 14 total ranged units. If you DO get an early sprout, that number can go up to 18. And if fortune smiles on you and you get a sprout plus a rummage, then I've gone as high as 26 guards & banshees by the end of wave 9. If you do it right, that army will carry you up to wave 20. Skirmishers should only be used as a last resort, to block enemies trying to jump your walls. If you prioritize skirmishers in the early game, you will lose. They suck early on.

Druid, witch, priestess, necromancer... forget them. They'll merely clog your deck up. Until they stand behind the wall, forget them. Especially druid, since mass druid all attacks the same enemy at once, which totally invalidates their role as crowd control.

Moth conjurer is insane. Amazing. I'd almost say he's broken, he's so good. A single moth conjurer can tank an entire enemy wave long enough to let your ranged guys DPS them down. He synergizes with graveyard super hard, because once his moth dies, and he dies, you can pull him out of the graveyard and deploy him again for even more tanking goodness.

Chief is probably the best endgame (wave 20+) unit in the Shammy's arsenal. Not because skirmishers are good, but because they're curse resistant, give card draw, and have synergy with so many other cards. Chief lvl 2 plus graveyard can give you 9 souls per use (18 with a level 1 temple, 27 souls with a level 2 temple), as well as delaying lategame waves long enough to let Doom and Oracle kill everything. Because they are curse resistant, you should spam Wailing as much as possible, so that when your skirmishers die, they apply curse to the enemies in the wailing range. Seriously, I thought wailing was garbage until I discovered this synergy. Now it's my most reliable way to win. Preach synergizes well with Chief, because it discounts the Skirmishers too. Divination doesn't discount the skirmishers, so for this application, Preach is strictly better.

Elementalist is okay. Not as good as Chief. Mainly because instead of giving you cards like Chief does, Elementalist takes your cards away. And in waves 20+, his earth elementals - even level 2 - will die super fast to enemies. They are not reliable tanks, and cannot be reliably cycled with Graveyard because you need a full hand in order to power him.

Okay, on to general concepts...

Normally a big deck is bad. But with Shaman its vital to go big. That's because the combo of Sprout / Rummage / Spellbook lets you grab a Sprout with Spellbook, play it for 3 or 5 card draw, then Rummage to pull it back out of your graveyard. If you have 2 copies of each of those 3 cards, and you've been buying mainly soul drain cards, you can go through your entire 30 card deck in one or two draws. If you have Overturn, especially level 2 Overturn, it gets even faster.

Speaking of Overturn, if you use Divination before you Overturn, every card you draw is discounted. If your Divination was big enough, every card you draw is free. I can't stress this enough - Every Single Card - is free. The only limit to what you can play is your unit cap and the animation speed. It's ridiculous.

So you fill your hand with soul drain cards by using spellbook and rummage, make sure your graveyard is full or close to full. Hit the leader ability to power up all your cards. Use any Enchant cards in your hand to power up every OTHER card by the same amount. At that point, you can either deploy the cards for their great effects, or even better, fire off an Exorcism for anywhere from a few thousand to a few tens of thousand gold. I've gotten 15,000 gold from a single Exorcism before this way. It's the only econ you need.

Hmm what else. Sorry if this isn't organized super well. :)

Wave 20 will wipe you unless you have a solution that involves curse. Darkspell or Devastate plus Purifying Plant is a very solid solution. So is Banshee plus Purifying Plant. If you've got a lot of gold, you can run Ghost Tower, but just make sure it's ready to go by wave 20. If you're running Ghost Tower, it's a good idea to run Altar too, since they synergize so well. If you can run 2 level 2 altars, your curses will do 500% damage, which vaporizes basically anything in the game, including the wave 30 bosses. Also for wave 20, moth conjurer can save your life if all you have is Darkspell or something. My point is don't go into it thinking Guards alone will save you. There's too much beef to carve through.

Make sure you have a single Repair. It's never too early to buy Repair. You can do without it, but it'll save you a lot of pain.

Actually there's a great combo that will let you skip repair, if you're feeling lucky. Ent & Wailing Wall lets you add 200 health to any wall you want. If both Ent & Wailing Wall are upgraded to level 2, each application will add a massive 600 health to the wall in question. You don't even need the Ent to have any soul charge. Just summon him with 0 charge, and immediately hit him with Wailing. Boom free max HP up. Oh, and in addition to the max HP gain, it also HEALS the wall for the same amount. So in reality it would give you double the amount shown as effective extra health.

Wife is the best advisor in the game. Get her, always, and at all costs.

Similarly, Public Bath will delay enemy waves, which effectively lets you use your leader ability more often. This is important, since if you don't have Public Bath for wave 20+, you won't be able to use your leader ability every wave, making Doom and Oracle less reliable.

Holy Crab has phenomenal synergy with Rummage. So if you get a few Rummage cards early on, or even better, Spellbook & Rummage together, Holy Crab can crank out a lot of gold for you.

Honey looks harmless, but it's pure clog. Skip it.

Brew is okay if you have a lot of population. I'd run it if I had a Breed card, but couldn't find an Exorcism to use as my main econ source.

Shamanic Tree makes Moth Conjurer even better since the moth stays alive longer.

Alright what else...

Once you hit wave 20+, you're going to want to aggressively switch from a Banshee / Guard army, into a Chief (or Elementalist if you can't find a Chief), Graveyard, Divination, Wailing, Doom setup. The sad truth is that Guards & Banshees can't DPS down lizards fast enough. Get a doom or two cooking, feed suicide troops into a Wailing zone over and over with Chief, toss in a moth conjurer if you can, and drop a massive leader ability to make Doom execute as soon as all the enemies have entered the screen. Then hit Altar to maximize the curse damage and the wave will be over shortly thereafter. Don't be shy about letting your Guards & Banshees die once you have your endgame setup deployed. They're eating up valuable population that your Dooms, Oracles, Chiefs & Skirmishers need.

[101Evsey]

I don't know if this will help you but I was able to win a game with shaman once.
I had a couple ghost towers which activate curses all enemies, I also had a couple dark spell cards which curse enemies. I basically kept cursing the hell out of everything, and had a bunch of random fighters to hold the line till the curses shredded everything. It even killed the turtle boss very quickly as long you keep activating curses.

[Dasorine]

there are a bunch of ways to win with shaman, probably the easiest one is to get necromancer asap and start stacking them in a backline wall to fuel soul skills and buildings and just spam what ever up front until you get buildings and cards to deal with stuff via souls (summoning pile, desecrate, release)

Once you start unlocking cards things get a bit easier, banshee's are the only range unit you need (not a fan of moth summoners, their moths die so fast and only get one) and once you have witches you can use necromancers up front, the constant skeletons will keep everything alive as long as you can get a decent number of necros up (5 seems to be where it starts snowballing)

[Ryvaku]

I think how i made it work was spamming curse cards on the enemy with getting lucky draws for Elementalist and Earth Golem building. Banshee unlock becomes very useful down the line.

[AvangionQ]

I've been having trouble with the Shaman as well ... gonna give it another go soon