Spirits for beginners

[Julie Ward]

Hello, I have bought the game plus all expansions but am a little overwhelmed. Can anyone please advise which spirits are the best for helping you to learn the game please? Thanks in advance.

[S0FTERSIN]

Originally posted by Julie Ward:

Hello, I have bought the game plus all expansions but am a little overwhelmed. Can anyone please advise which spirits are the best for helping you to learn the game please? Thanks in advance.

Welcome to SI, Julie!

TIP: When setting up your game, if you right click the character portrait it will pull up the character card. At the top left of the character card, click the circular arrow to flip the character card over. On the bottom right of this side of the card you will see the spirit's complexity level (i.e., low, moderate, high).

I personally would recommend River, who is a low complexity spirit and one of my favorites. However, most of the low complexity spirits should be sufficient for learning. When I started playing SI in January, I played through all of the low complexity spirits first, then moderate, then high; after ~200 hours I was able to solo play (& win) a difficulty 17 game using 4 spirits.

NOTE: Lightning is a low complexity spirit, but has the ability to make slow powers fast. To better learn/understand the slow/fast phases, I would recommend playing a different low complexity spirit first.

[Julie Ward]

Ok thank you very much for your reply, much appreciated.

[Songbird]

If you are on base difficulty playing solo, any of the low complexity spirits works. The Horizons spirits are all low complexity and designed for players learning the game as well, and generally function better with a variety of openings than the base game low-complexity spirits (which tend to struggle if they don't open in a particular way). However, at base (0) difficulty, 100% win rate is trivial with any spirit once you're familiar with the game, so that's not a concern off the bat, and I don't necessarily want to recommend buying Horizons for you since it's DLC here instead of a standalone product you could play first like the physical version.

River teaches the importance of control (preventing builds) and playing to scale, since its innate power is stronger than many major powers once it is maxed out. It also teaches how to use slow powers effectively. River emphasizes ignoring problems that are too big to solve now in favor of staying ahead of small problems, as even a built-up land only blights once, and its slow powers can always be used on lands that just explored.

Earth is a very slow, stall-y spirit that makes virtually zero progress towards winning with its initial cards and has difficulty getting new powers. It sort of has a focus on defense, though its Dahan movement is pretty poor unless you follow a very specific play pattern. It gets the energy to play major powers, but is one of the worst spirits in the game at thresholding them until extremely late.

Lightning has no defense, which is problematic, and it has severe energy issues if it ever wants to actually play Raging Storm. Lightning is very pigeonholed into reclaiming repeatedly after a couple turns because this is the only way for it to gain new cards. It will need to not play as many cards as possible every turn, or it will never be able to grow, and it needs to draft carefully minding its limited energy budget. Its ability to make slow powers fast is very strong, but it can lead to the mindset that using powers in the fast phase is always better, or lead to issues where players don't learn to think about what the board will look like in the slow phase when their powers resolve and what turn they need to play slow powers on for them to be effective.

Shadows is very limited in how it can play because it has a very underpowered early game and a nearly useless special rule because of that. At base difficulty, though, it can still effectively control explorers and try to remove towns from relevant lands, looking to create inland lands with no source of explorers to get ahead. It has a powerful combo where it can use Concealing Shadows to clear a land with a ton of buildings, but takes a blight doing this and leaves most of its Dahan in a single empty land. After its weak early game, its tracks start to ramp up quickly and makes it able to play around its card drafts well. Shadows also generates 8 fear with its starting hand, which is insanely high, meaning it gets small advantages from fear cards more often.

With any spirit, it is incredibly important to look at the condition for winning the game. You can tread water for a while, but you need to look at some point at which terror level win condition you are most likely to hit and the fastest you can hit it. I often see a lot of new players losing by the invader deck running out, which is crazy because base difficulty can very consistently be won on turn 4 or 5 (and even most max level adversaries can be beaten on turn 5-7).

[Yippo the Clown]

I would normally find Vital Strength to be very good for beginners because it's slow and steady (always gaining a presence) which can take some of the difficulty out of deciding when to gain power vs when to reclaim and consolidate, while its passive defend can give you areas where you just don't need to worry for the time being.

Personal view, though.