England Lvl 6 +

[Gruet_garbo]

I have lost more games to England 3+ than to any other Country. Build x2 is just really hard to deal with. I've read that Lightning is the key to taking down England in the base game due to its ability to speed up powers for itself and other Spirits. Are there other recommended Spirits in the base game?

[Songbird]

None of the base game spirits have a particularly great England matchup, at least not solo. I think the top two for solo are probably Thunderspeaker and Ocean. Both have innates that destroy towns regardless of health. Ocean gets an insane amount of energy, but will need to draft powers that can reach inland, and will have to be very careful about manipulating where the escalations take place. Thunderspeaker mostly needs to scale up while not losing Dahan, then can fuel a major and Manifestation off lots of G3 usage.

[Treyell]

Green.

[WolfRowland92]

In my experience, England is the hardest adversary in general. Some spirits are worse against some other adversaries, but their are very few spirits that have and advantage over England than vs any other adversary. For the most part, if you are only using base game, the best way to combat them at higher difficulties is to get some lucky power pulls or gamble with major powers early. Some Expansions add some better ways to deal with them especially a lot of the events can swing a risky move in your favor

[Songbird]

Originally posted by Treyell:

Green.

Green does pretty well, but it's not as good into England solo as it is on a team. It's one of Green's worse matchups without an ideal partner, since you only have your Defend 4 to generate fear until you can start playing majors a few turns in (and you're really looking for energy generation on minors or Entwined Power so you can reclaim loop). Still better than the four low-complexity spirits and BoDaN.

[Gruet_garbo]

I heard that Serpent Slumbering is supposed to be good vs. England, but I'm confused how that works since Serpent is so limited in card plays early game and can't snipe invaders.

[Songbird]

Originally posted by Sidewalker_42:

I heard that Serpent Slumbering is supposed to be good vs. England, but I'm confused how that works since Serpent is so limited in card plays early game and can't snipe invaders.

+4 energy button, tons of elements. You can threshold Volcanic Eruption as early as turn 3 if you really want to. And as long as you don't lose to the loss condition and pick a board where you don't have two lands of the same terrain 3 lands apart (this is only board A on the balanced boards), you can defend the ravaging pair of lands for the early game while you scale up.

[Avloren]

Originally posted by Sidewalker_42:

I heard that Serpent Slumbering is supposed to be good vs. England, but I'm confused how that works since Serpent is so limited in card plays early game and can't snipe invaders.

England is a slow adversary that gives you plenty of time to scale up and get majors. Which you'll need to do, because England does eventually build up massive lands that only majors can handle. Also England is resistant to many effects in the minor deck (moving/killing explorers does next to nothing, towns have enough health to survive almost any minor damage effect, forget blight removal since blight isn't England's main threat, etc.).

So it's an adversary that rewards energy+majors over card plays+minors, and having a strong late game over a fast early game. It should be obvious why that makes for a great Serpent matchup. Serpent is low on card plays for most of the game, but great at majors (with your track elements and energy from growth, you should have an easy time playing and thresholding most majors even on 2 plays). Plus you get an extremely powerful endgame to make up for a bit of a slow start, and England is possibly the only adversary so slow that Serpent can reliably reach that endgame in time for it to matter.

On the flip side, any spirit that can't really handle majors and wants to focus on card plays and minors might struggle here. Likewise any spirit that very quickly reaches a semi-strong reclaim loop, but can't scale much past that. So.. Lightning and River are terrible here.