Share your deck building strategy

[sandman25dcsss]

I noticed I use the same strategy every time no matter which characters I have, here is my way of thinking:
1) higher tier cards are usually better (more damage per AP, more healing per AP, more defense per AP) so I want to use all my APs on them
2) I should either remove tier 1 cards or make them intrinsic. Never add tier 1 card unless you are going for something specific like Throwing daggers + Fan of Knives combo and even then you may want to wait until your combo is actually ready
3) Removing is scarce and I still need defenses while building my deck so I always make my defenses intrinsic first
4) After getting golden cards I check my deck again and instantly reroll whatever I no longer need and slowly improve my deck, even removing silver tier cards regularly.
It was interesting first dozen times, but now I feel bored doing the same strategy again and again.
How do you play?

[dacarnix]

It's fascinating that we have such different approaches and yet both find ourselves in such a rut. My style goes more like this:
1) Find the most efficient card in a given tier (brown, silver, or gold) for the character's highest stat. Change all cards to that card at the earliest opportunity.
2) Prioritize upgrading gold, then silver, but brown if the opportunity presents itself and/or the upgrade gives a crucial benefit like drawing an extra card, granting a stack of agility, etc.
3) Gradually reduce the quantity of lower-tier cards in favor of higher-tier cards.

I find that by late in Act II, I'm only even getting to activate 1 character (occasionally 2). Focusing on efficient offense leads to very dead enemies by that point in the game.

[sandman25dcsss]

Originally posted by dacarnix:

It's fascinating that we have such different approaches and yet both find ourselves in such a rut. My style goes more like this:
1) Find the most efficient card in a given tier (brown, silver, or gold) for the character's highest stat. Change all cards to that card at the earliest opportunity.
2) Prioritize upgrading gold, then silver, but brown if the opportunity presents itself and/or the upgrade gives a crucial benefit like drawing an extra card, granting a stack of agility, etc.
3) Gradually reduce the quantity of lower-tier cards in favor of higher-tier cards.

I find that by late in Act II, I'm only even getting to activate 1 character (occasionally 2). Focusing on efficient offense leads to very dead enemies by that point in the game.

Interesting, I will try your approach. Does it mean you don't keep and don't improve defense cards?
I play realm mode mostly, it is more dynamic IMHO: you can get 4-5 levels from a single battle.

[Zeel Ara]

Decide what cards I will want in my deck. Count how many are gold and silver. Compare those numbers to the starting deck amount of gold and silvers. Never add *any* card that doesn't push towards that criteria. Which also means to never, under any circumstances, adding a bronze card. If the rarity is needed then it doesn't matter what card I add, since it'll be rerolled later anyway. First focus is on getting the correct number of silvers and golds.

Don't need defense early on, since positioning (and offense, for that matter) gives far better mitigation per AP than any early game defense card, so early rerolls are spent finding some decent offense to carry the deck until the rarity ratios have been filled. Once the correct amount of silvers (and later golds) have been added, I reroll them into the correct cards. Excess rerolls are used on getting the correct bronze cards.

[dacarnix]

Originally posted by sandman25dcsss:

Interesting, I will try your approach. Does it mean you don't keep and don't improve defense cards?
I play realm mode mostly, it is more dynamic IMHO: you can get 4-5 levels from a single battle.

Mostly. Defense cards don't move you towards the goal of reducing the enemy health to 0, so in Realm mode for sure I ditch them.

In the campaign mode, it's nice to keep one or two around (among all three characters) just in case you run into cactus terrain or enemies with the cactus ability. It's... odd... that the biggest threat to a godlike spellwielder is a cactus, but I suppose they need to have some weakness.

Fluffeh's plan of attack sounds very similar to mine, just phrased differently.

[sandman25dcsss]

I am really surprised. Realm mode has at least 3 bosses with unavoidable attacks, I always have some defenses for every character. And it looks like I am the only one who uses Intrinsic to "remove" cards. My record is 19 cards (without Expend property) in my deck and I had them every turn in my hand.

[sandman25dcsss]

I decided to play without rerolls, it is much more challenging IMHO

[Zeel Ara]

Originally posted by sandman25dcsss:

I decided to play without rerolls, it is much more challenging IMHO

I had the thought of trying that, but never got around to actually doing it. It's obvious that it'll be more challenging, since rerolling is a surefire way to trivialize the deckbuilding aspect of the game, but I haven't tried out if it's also more fun, on top of being more difficult. Thanks for reminding me! I'll try it ASAP <3

[sandman25dcsss]

Originally posted by Fluffeh:

I had the thought of trying that, but never got around to actually doing it. It's obvious that it'll be more challenging, since rerolling is a surefire way to trivialize the deckbuilding aspect of the game, but I haven't tried out if it's also more fun, on top of being more difficult. Thanks for reminding me! I'll try it ASAP <3

If you remember, we hoped a new beta would contain option to disable rerolls for experiments. Fortunately, we can do it on our own.

[Zeel Ara]

Oh yea that's right! I still really hope the devs decide to try out some of the more extreme takes on balance overhauls in short duration beta branches. It would be really interesting to me personally, and I suspect that it would be healthy for the game as well. For now, though, I'm happy to wait and see what they go with in the next big patch, and continue to play with my self-imposed limitations.

[sandman25dcsss]

Unfortunately, the game is still too easy even without rerolls. You need luck to find just a single good card and then you can improve it as much as you want and clone when ready. I ended with 3 primal aspects (bearform) for Druid, 2 epicenteres (nice AoE) for Golemancer and 3 dark fires (nice AoE) for Warlock, reached 6th realm easily. I even have some synergy with druid as bear giving blood ticks for warlock.
I don't use intrinsic cards, just relying on luck every turn to play whatever I have in hand, it is not as bad as I expected.

[lobstermadness]

Anything that increases AP is good for all character builds. Damage is important but in higher levels you need either movement or defense against enemies that hit like a truck.

[jdavh]

1) aim to get talents nodes first since they can be changed as needed acording to how the current build is shaping up, keep pathing to get talent nodes to keep adding passives

2) try to get one or two tier two (silver) cards that are solid through nodes at that point re-roll cards that arent going to be useful in the build from the starter deck

3) get the first gold card aiming for one that works well with gear i have as well as the silver cards i have picked up......... or just the most op if thats a thing on that character

4) level and master that gold card as well as other cards in the deck as well as re-rolling what isnt needed

5) clone the most important card in the deck once it is fully leveled and mastered

6) keep pathing towards talents while picking up stat boosts that are relevant to the most important cards in the deck, as a note if there are talents in non main stats that would be solid taking a few stat points in that stat to access higher talents at this point is a good move

7) remove redundancy, i often try to avoid taking discard nodes until later this way i can figure out what cards are actually useless in the current build. until this point i find its often better to re-roll a card that isnt working to try for something that is already in the deck or to try for something to experiment with.

8) further stat up (this includes hp and initiative nodes), at this point ill have maxed level and have most if not all cards in the deck full level, so level the cards that arent maxed aiming to use the level nodes to open pathing to stats or talents (did i mention that i always try to path towards talents).

9) end up picking up a card so that i can take level nodes again. this does happen in endless runs, you have all your stuff maxed and the stuff you want can only be reached by taking a level nodes....... so this is when you pick a card that can fit the deck with a good few levels that can be added to it (gold cards tend to be good for this and can find some fun combos and interaction). this way you can speed up how quickly you can path to what you want to get.

**10) gear skills: this ones a bit different since it fits both deck building as well as gearing. card draw and AP are the most important effects on gear other than legendary effects, ap and card draw ARE more important than a legendary effect that has no use to your build. runes are also a key point in the actual deck building, whether you slot in mirror, stat changing, intrinsic, fury/channel/agility generation, purging, healing etc it doesnt matter what you boost a card with will drastically alter the value of a card in the deck. any skill that costs zero are exceptionally useful when socketed for use as generators or sustain (throwing dagger or sidestep), an expend card that is intrinsic with the rune that reduces the first use can be amazing as well (force armor for example). this part of deck building i often somewhat avoid in favor of focusing on the main deck first (so early void things that dont immediately fit the deck). once i hit somewhere around step 5-7 (depending on the gear that i have drop awesome legionaries with good skills and three sockets make me quickly look at runes though) then i start to really take a good look at the runes i have and what they can really do with the deck. in the late game a tri-socket skill that has legendary synergies can completely alter your decks opening strategy, though your overall plan for extended fights should remain the same (boss fights) just augmented by those boosted skills.

[sandman25dcsss]

Thank you for the detailed description!
I have one comment: don't just look at what runes you have, think which runes you need and buy them. It can be really fun. Once I found 2 Blackwakes (1H weapon which decreases cost of Grivity Surge), I bought mirror runes and intrinsic runes and on turn 1 I always had 4 cards which cost 0 AP, deal damage to square and give 1 AP.

[sandman25dcsss]

The game has much more decision-making when not using rerolls. I ended ignoring even golden cards after a while, even removed 2 of them. The decks were much larger than normal so exhaustion didn't cause serious problems. Pierre is a real tank, this is first time I went for spamming magic missile, it is quite efficient card when costing zero and giving channel while dealing 80+ damage. With everyone having 7-8 AP it became boring and I haven't seen vampire queen in any of 21 realms.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2462378340
Good side of decks without rerolls that I had almost all types of attacks: ice, fire, shock, physical so even fighting enemies with 2 resistances was fine. I hoped to get totem of rage, but totem of Int was quite respectable too provided all 3 characters cared about Int.