Envenom: Is there a deck it's useful in?

[AshBird]

It's a poison card, but it's got no value to a proper poison deck, since it's much too costly, slow, and relies on using a lot of attacks for offense (as opposed to Catalyst). Other Silent archetypes based around discard or defense obviously wouldn't use it either.

I have admittedly never tried Silent with something like a shiv build or other build where they spam low-cost attacks or multi-hits... assuming these decks are good enough to be worth building towards in the first place, do they use Envenom as a way to add extra damage on top of their mass attacking?

Or is Envenom basically a total waste of a rare card?

[Christ]

Envenom is far from being useless and I have no clue why you wouldn't try it or try shiv builds to experiment my favorite kind of deck for silent is shivs it's very fun

[AshBird]

Originally posted by Christ:

Envenom is far from being useless and I have no clue why you wouldn't try it or try shiv builds to experiment my favorite kind of deck for silent is shivs it's very fun

I've got nothing against the shiv build, I just haven't had a run yet where I drew those kinds of cards early enough to build around them. Or if they did come up, there was something more important like Prepared in the draw too.

[robofish126]

Envenom is a poison card for non-poison decks. Its very handy for elite and boss fights as poison gives finality and buys you time. Even outside of it, a 1 energy power giving an extra damage or two (or three, or four) per attack is not a bad rate.

Just played a game with it, I was playing a spammy deck (which I couldn't quite get to be infinite) and saw Time Eater coming. I already had Envenom and a Deadly Poison, so I picked/upgraded a Catalyst, then with Well Laid Plans kept Catalyst in my hand until I was sure tripling Poison would be enough to kill Time Eater on its turn before he could do his obnoxious heal+cure debuffs abilities. Deadly Poison and the Catalyst alone would not have been enough, without Envenom allowing me to chip him down to half health and get some poison stacks going, I would've died.

[wckowalski]

I once had a good deck with envenom and lots of shivs and 0 and 1 cost attacks and energy gain and draw cards. I also had snecko skull which made envenom twice as effective.

[Thor]

Envenom also works really well with 'The Specimen' boss relic, which transfer poisons to the next living enemy, really cleans-up group/minion fights in a jiffy.

[crate]

Envenom is a strength-gain card, not a poison card. Don't be fooled by the text including the word "poison".

[itssirtou]

It could certainly do wtih a cost decrease. It just doesn't seem like a 2 cost power.

[Ashardalon]

why would you take prepared instead of a shiv focussed
discard focussed is harder to make good and even then prepared isnt a great card
its completely useless without effect on discard cards or relics

meanwhile envenom fits in almost anything sinse silent tends to play lots of cheap cards anyway

[Anti]

It's generally pretty bad, but decent in combination with Sadistic Nature.

[AshBird]

Originally posted by Ashardalon:

why would you take prepared instead of a shiv focussed
discard focussed is harder to make good and even then prepared isnt a great card
its completely useless without effect on discard cards or relics

meanwhile envenom fits in almost anything sinse silent tends to play lots of cheap cards anyway

Prepared helps cycle through your deck with basically no overhead and is also useful in Poison builds, or frankly almost any build. You get to select your hand better and draw into the combo synergies that almost any good deck is gonna have, and even super early on it can save a bad hand like drawing all Defend on the enemy's buff turn. There's no downside to it, outside of certain fights that are made to punish skill use or per-turn card use.

Along with Well-laid Plans, it's one of the silent cards that is powerful in a diversity of possible decks, and even though it's best in Discard decks, it doesn't constrain you to a certain build or hurt you if your build doesn't go the way you expect.

[Ashardalon]

thing is you play the card to draw the card you would have drawn instead of prepared then discard one
upgraded it makes cycle a bit better but there are so many better draw cards for the silent
the downside is that even the upgraded version reduses your hand size by one
play the card -1 draw 2 cards +2 discard two cards -2 = -1
and while well laid plans is nice, especially in a mummy hand power deck, a lot of silent builds end with an empty hand

prepared is honestly only good for discard focussed and as a defense against burns or other curses in my eyes

it has a use sinse removing base cards is a lot of effort in this game but once you do it turns into a dead card that needs removing too

[Pothocket]

Yeah, I like prepared even though it seems like a "do nothing" card. It's great to take early before the deck starts taking shape because then you're free to take cards that have discard synergy. And if you don't see those cards that's ok too because it's not like prepared will slow your deck down like other dead cards. It'll still be of some value by removing curses/burns from hand

[bc]

Main problem of shiv builds is that all cards that buff shivs are either uncomon or rare. I personally prefer accuracy or thousand cuts over envenom, but sometimes you are at the point when you have bunch of shivs generators and not a single shiv buffer, so if game offers me envenom i instantly pick it. Also need to mention that snecko skull is very cheap and common relic (i think it cost around 150-170g) which boost your dmg in shiv decks like crazy

[Moki]

I've had an amazing run with Snecko Skull, Envenom and Shiv build. You stack Poison incredibly fast and I believe I ended up with ~100 stacks on The Awoken (may have had Catalyst as well).

[NixBoxDone]

I always thought envenom was more of a side pick. Say you found the snecko skull on a shiv deck for example, or got it offered to you as one of three picks and the other two either cripple your deck or do nothing for you.

That's the perfect situation to pick up envenom: it's just one card pick, it synergizes with the rest of your deck and a relic you picked up anyways and it may offer you a way to deal more damage if you haven't gotten all the really good cards for your chosen approach.

Not all cards need to be wow-amazing I can't believe it's not bacon awesome. I appreciate the ones that are just kinda nice to have if they happen to fit in with what you're already using.