New Player Progression Guide [WIP]

How to spend your ingots, good starter decks, and general newbie tips.

Preface

So you've decided to give this crazy game a shot. Done the tutorial, maybe given the campaign a try and beat up the neophyte bot and bought a few packs.

First of all, welcome! It's been literally years since I was a newbie, but I still remember how lost I was at first.

Without any further ado though, lets get to the what you came here for: the guide!

What should I do first?

This is largely a matter of opinion, but you have a few options.

Your first option is to play against the bot. You'll find neophyte almost laughably easy after just a few matches, just pick either Listrata or Liet and go to town. You'll earn just 50 silver per win but you're almost guaranteed to win. After a few matches you'll unlock higher bots, and then multiplayer. Feel free to dip your toes into either option, but be warned that they might be a bit more than you can handle right now.

The second option, which I think is the superior one for this early in the game, is to play through the campaign. You'll be facing neophyte still, but here you get better rewards, and the first chapter is almost a second tutorial that explains what some of the cards do. Just go as far as you can and you'll be sitting pretty.

Not really a third option, but something that merits mention: quests! Quests are going to be your best friend while you're a newbie and probably throughout your entire career with this game. Not only do they give you lots of silver, they also give you tickets (important later) and free gold packs. Do not ignore your quests!

Finally, every week on saturday and sunday ingot and silver gains from matches are doubled. This includes all skirmishes and mp, but not tourney. Possibly applies to campaign rewards too.

A tip for speeding up your matches is to open up the options and crank up the AI speed. It's good to leave it nice and slow until you get the gist of how things work though.

Spending Silver/Ingots

Once you've built up a nice bit of silver from your chosen method of advancement and quests, it's time to hit the shop. Unless you've already made a purchase or completed all your quests, you're going to only have one option here: oak packs.

Now, don't panic. Common cards are your workhorses. Many of them are very, very good, and all of your decks will be built on the backs of them. And Oak packs are bar none the best way to max those out.

Anyway, go ahead and pop open your gold pack if you've earned one, and then as many oaks as you can afford. Go ahead and pick whatever appeals to you most, you'll get everything sooner or later, but keep these things in mind:

1. Always, always, always, always take the hero first if there's one in your pack. This applies no matter what rarity or pack you've opened. If you get an epic and Gretta is in there, take Gretta, I don't care what coins you pulled. The more heroes you have, the sooner you get all the hero cards, and the more silver you get by leveling your heroes up including through card pick exp. And besides, it broadens your horizons way more than any single cards or coin can, I cannot stress this enough.

2. Early on, you'll probably want to focus on Vespitole (green) cards. Especially true if loan, ballista, usury, corruption, sybilline scrolls, malediction or synod drops. These are all very good cards and some decks revolve entirely around them. Loan in particular is what makes Vespitole work anywhere outside of low tier bots.

3. Generally you'll want to pick whichever card has the least ticks towards being fully upgraded. Cards have three upgrade levels, the first by unlocking the card, the second by picking it 4 more times, and the third by picking it another 20. You can speed this up with ingots, see below.

Now, you'll get two things out of all this pack opening: A bigger collection, and a pile of ingots. Picking a card you already own gives you some ingots and exp to all heroes of that faction you own in addition to the tick, and picking a maxed one doubles both the EXP and ingot gain. Additionally, all matches other than neophyte ones will also award ingots, ingots are super important. Each upgrade tick a card has is basically worth an amount of ingots based on rarity, and you can spend the difference in ingots to jump a card to its next upgrade level.

For Reference:
Common: 2.5 on pick, each tick worth 20
Uncommon: 10 on pick, each tick worth 80
Scarce: 50 on pick, each tick worth 300
Rare: 200 on pick, each tick worth 1000
There are no epic cards other than coins or heroes.

So, essentially, when you pick a card you haven't maxed yet, you get both the raw ingots they award and the value of the tick itself. This is why oak packs are best for upgrading common cards, it has the best effective ingot value/silver ratio of all the packs except for gem packs if you have all your rares maxed. You probably don't have all your rares maxed.

But, as far as what to spend your ingots on: Don't. Not yet. You'll want to save every ingot you get for now, and max out all your commons through oak packs alone. It will go quicker than it sounds, trust me. If you absolutely must, you can upgrade one or two commons to finish out a deck and move on to a better bot for faster packs.

Once all commons are maxed, you're at a crossroads: You can get all your uncommons done too through oak packs with a little more effort, or you can spend some money and unlock the better packs. Silver packs will get your uncommons done about as fast as oaks did for your commons, ditto with golds and scarces. If you choose to remain free to play, you'll struggle to upgrade scarces and rares quickly.

That said, I managed to get all my scarces and rares upgraded once, and many scarces maxed before I finally opened up golds, so it's not all doom and gloom. It'll just take you a bit longer, and you may end up spending those ingots on scarces instead of rares.

Once you spend the money, the packs are open permanently. You will not have to make a 10 dollar purchase for every gold pack.

Edit:

Once all commons are maxed, you now get silver packs for free! You need to wait on scarces for gold though. This means that if you intend to stay free to play, you'll likely be spending most of your ingots on scarces, which will set your rares back a bit. Once you have gold packs you'll be just fine though, at that point each pack will be guaranteed to either be a rare, epic, or 100 ingots for you.

Beyond the Bots

Once you've got a nice little collection going, and maybe branched out into the other factions, by now you should have a bit better of an understanding of the game. In depth strategy is beyond the scope of this guide, but see the section on good decks for newbies to get you started. This section is about what to do with them.

Once you've won at least one match using all four of the factions, tourney will be unlocked for you. Tourney will probably be where you want to be if you want to experience the pvp for now, as it puts everyone on equal footing in terms of coins and card upgrades. Wins here will get you 400 silver, and if you do well enough you'll get some extra rewards. I can't offer much in the way of strategy, but I can explain the basics:

You have 11 packs to open, one will give you the option of 3 heroes, 3 will give the option of 6 cards, 3 will give 5 cards, and 4 will give 4 cards to choose from. You are not locked into any one faction, and in fact this mode has special heroes you won't see elsewhere, you can stumble upon some unique combos not possible anywhere else in the game.

You will play matches until you either win 8 times, or lose 3 times overall, receiving rewards based on how many wins you got.

0-2 Wins: Free Oak pack
3-4 Wins: Free Silver pack
5 Wins: Free Gold pack
6 Wins: Free gold pack and you get to pick one of the cards from your draft deck to keep
7 Wins: Free gold pack and you get to pick one of the cards from your draft deck to keep, and a ticket
8 Wins: Free gold pack and you get to pick two of the cards from your draft deck to keep, and a ticket

After losing, if it is not your third loss, you can pick one card in your deck to reroll via a 4 pack.

You can try normal matchmaking too, and there are some cheap decks you can put together that will do well there. MP has the best rewards for both wins and losses on the weekends when they double (tourney rewards do not) so it's worth getting yourself acquainted with it if you can get a deck together.

Starter Decks [WIP]

Vespitole Allies

This will probably be your first deck out of the gate until you can unlock the cards to move on to other strategies. Try to focus on these cards when buying packs if you're looking to stick with it:

• Vintner
  
• Wealthy Patron
  
• Courtesan
  
• Ballista
  
• Mercenary
  
• Palisade
  
• Marshal
  
• Spice Route
  
• Courtly Intrigue
  
• Collect Taxes
  
• Loan

These cards are all common and uncommon, meaning you'll upgrade them pretty quickly. A good core is Vintner/Courtesan/Patron and 1-2 interceptors such as palisade and mercenary, but militia and serf can work too. If you want to use a higher power one like soldier or knight you'll need to focus more on economy to be able to afford them at this stage. Loan is a card you will want at least upgraded before using it seriously, and it's best for affording the big impact cards covered by the next section.

Once you've got your core built, it's time to personalize your deck. A few good options for this are:

Benediction. This one is scarce, but it will net you huge gains, especially with Marshal in play.

Merchant Guild. Since you're playing Listrata, you'll get this one naturally. Will help you afford the big cards.

Harvest/Spy Network/Liturgy. Harvest will synergize with Merchant Guild, though Vintners do that pretty well already. The main advantage of these three is you can get an attack for each ally in play, though for harvest you'll need an ally you can convert the food with. Liturgy, while more expensive, is the most versatile. You can use it for economy, attack, or for healing.

Inquisitor. A rare, so you'll probably be running this one unupgraded if you can get it, but he will allow you to convert all of your food and magic into two attacks each. Not to be underestimated.

Bounty. A win condition when used correctly. Merchant guild (or corruption or tithe) will be needed to make full use of this.

Once you've unlocked another vespitole hero, you can adapt this strategy to them easily enough by focusing more on skulls (for Sofocatro) or on big cost big impact cards (for Pocchi).

Liet Rites

Your other option out of the gate, but a less straightforward one. Daramek is a much more complicated faction than Vespitole is on the whole, and much more combo dependent. Rather than using one big card to make a big play, your big plays will be with lots of little cards working together. If you want to get started with these guys, try to focus on these cards when buying packs:

• Gold Panners
  
• Orphan Gang
  
• Rite of Combat
  
• Rite of Brood
  
• Ritual Slaughter
  
• Feast
  
• Cull the Herd
  
• Rat Catcher
  
• Scrivener
  
• Scavengers
  
• Sacred Tortoise
  
• Shepherd's Gift
  
• Goat Outrider
  
• Herd of Goats
  
• Bloodlust

Daramek, unlike Vespitole, does not get a free draw on every single card they buy, so you'll have to approach how you play the game differently with them. Don't buy everything in your bank just because you can, that's a one way ticket to messing up both your bank restocks AND your draws. A simple deck you can try to acquaint yourself with them is this:

• Orphan Gang x2
  
• Gold Panners x2
  
• Rat Catcher
  
• Scrivener
  
• Rite of Brood
  
• Cull the Herd
  
• Rite of Combat
  
• Overseer/Goat Outrider

Buy one or two panners. Even if they get killed they are effectively a coin anyway, so no need to worry too much about messing up your economy. If you're running overseer, each one you play will give you two gold, if you're running outrider they'll be harder to kill and will help you afford the huge price tag.

Other than that, your goal is to get a rite of brood or combat into play as often as possible. Try to save up enough gold to buy one and then end turn, so that next turn you can get it from your bank and then get three or four activations from your coins alone. Scriveners will be a big help in getting these onto the field consistently, again an overseer will get you two rites per scrivener as you play them while goat outriders will help you use the on turn draw more.

Rat Catcher and Cull the Herd are your main cycling engine. Playing cull will activate your rites once when you play it, and again when you play the ally you draw. Same with Rat Catcher. If you get a catcher with your cull, even better. If you get a scrivener with the catcher who then redraws the cull, even even better. This is the main way for you to make your big plays, chaining the various draw effects into each other.

Whittle your opponent down with rite of combat and orphan gang, then finish them with the resources from rite of brood. Simple as that, if a bit more roundabout.

[SavageHorseman]

@RatElemental I have added you to discuss something

[Nova]

@Arkidents You will continue to receive oak packs from doing the first daily quest each day. I would advise you to save them to complete the quests that require you to open packs, or for when new common cards are released.

[Arkidents]

Hello. I maxed all my commons, but I am still receiving oak packs on quests. Is that normal? Should I save them instead of opening them?

[MadLad]

Great guide so far.
I'm just gonna add:
1. Metris intend to focus on being a mirror deck to your foe. Metris could be anyone weakness if you play your card carefully. They could steal both a unit or single-use card (except altar, timed use, or permanent on-field cards). They could also ignore intercept with Waylay (Single use) and those timed (Arsenic is permanent on-field) poison cards (Belladona, Hemlock). Most of their cards get destroyed after use.
2. Endazu intend to focus on late game play. Endazu could discard a card or the worst, destroy a card (even coin card). Most of Endazu card require charging which take turns before they reach their maximum potential.

[Shiro]

nice basic stuff, explains things well
I've actually read this some time ago and it provided some help. Now I'm not newbie tho :)

[TombiWan]

Nice guide! Looking forward to see it finished.

About tournaments, I would stress their importance more. You get three free entries each day just by doing your dailies and they cap at 10, which means you can (and should) play it very often. Each run gives at least 150g and an oak pack but potentially a lot more, since 400g for each win is a lot and there's also the potential of getting gold packs and keeping the rare cards you drafted.

[btrotta]

Thanks for the guide, can't wait to see the starter decks.