Hi guys,
I have just played a match against this very stupid build that can actually win without any fight or attacking creatures… And honestly feeling harmless against an unbalanced game is really a bad thing (in particular in the current moment with the new creatures and tweaks of Oversky)
Costruction:
bunch of elementals red/yellow (for fast land in a double collection spot)
3 Divine Guardians (summoned and placed for double collection)
yellow/red removals (all of them)
wind soldiers
red events that can damage directly the opponent orb…
SO:
When the guardian starts double collection they get 5-6 faeria per turn and every single creature the opponent play don’t stand for 1 round…
Once they have 10 faeria they can wipe out the board and use the rest of the match sniping every single creature the opponent summon (while they can still double collecting). All the resources are used only to snipe the creatures played, preventing aggression to Divine Guardians AND opponent’s collection (while they are in double collection)…
My end game was a spell with -9 points among one of my creatures and my orb AND -3 directly from flame event.
Honestly it is so ridiculous I can’t believe this build can exist after months in my honest opinion. The opponent can’t even swallow the Guardians. The only counter could be haste, but even with that you can just watch an other Guardian summoned…
Pls guys, an easy solution is to disable the Faeria collection ability of Divine Guardian. This is not a build it’s just a trash way to rank up demoralizing the other players that are trying to play this beautiful game…
Regardless of the deck someone is playing, Faeria definitely relies on an economy with the wells. If you let the opponent get two cards double collecting you will almost certainly lose regardless of the deck. That’s 4 extra Faeria per turn plus the 3 you normally get. With 1 from the power wheel they can generate 8 faeria per turn. I don’t know any deck that can win against that. Taunts and even fairly weak minions can kill divine guardian because she has no attack. Maybe think about ways you would have countered the person with your deck if you were going up against them again?
I have 5 swallow cards in my deck, so anything different from Divine Guardian (with Divine attribute that makes it untargetable by every card you can have in hand) can be easily resolved.
I had no idea what Divine attribute does, until I encountered this ** build. Others pure spells build don’t use the double collector to save resources, so having a minor production and a less frequent draw an extra card during their turn. This version exploit Divine Guardian totally to have +2 extra faeria per turn and more draws, so the hand is more versatile and the area spells used more effective.
Their deck is based on sniping one by one all the creatures you play with a faeria collection advantage of 2. The only defense is haste unit that can attack the same turn you play them. But if you have some haste creatures, that hardly is enough, cause he has 3 Guardians in the deck. Others creatures don’t stand a turn cause they run last nightmare, wind soldier, derelict towers, fire bombs, soul drain, firestorm. And if you have no more creatures on board. Hellfire is 9 points directly to your orb…
It’s just a ** stupid build very expensive…
I have seen Cappucino’s streaming and he won using 3 libraries (the first 2 were instantly destroyed) to generate enough faeria (with no collectors on board) and Radiance to restore health.
So you can understand that’s not a build everyone has/runs. Also if Capp would have lost his third library he would have lost the match…
I could not imagine that this works so well as you have described it although I really believe that it worked when you faced it. Maybe this deck that you described can be one of those decks which seem to be not good in theory but can perform surprisingly well in practice.
What I do not get is that the opponent is not sleeping until the point where you install the two divine guardians between the wells. Therefore, typically there should be some opposing creatures near the wells which simply destroy your divine guardians once you play them. However, before you have installed the divine guardians between the wells you have really no faeria advantage so that sniping everything that the enemy plays is not possible at this stage of the game at all. In my opinion the enemy has the faeria advantage at this stage because you have mostly events on hand while the enemy can keep playing creatures which can collect if they survive and it is unlikely that you always have the faeria efficient answers on hand. Example: The enemy has farm boy on field while you have Last Nightmare, Firebomb and Flame Burst on hand. If you want to remove the farm boy you are forced to use a faeria unefficient card in this case.
the order of play for that deck is: 2 elementals and one divine guardian (if played early it’s aside his well). So that is 4x2+2 faeria of deployment in the first 3 rounds with always one collector near his well (+4 faeria per turn in early game, like you).
The other cards stay in hand till he needs removal to protect the guardian.
So as you see the guardian going for double collection you play creatures with 3-4 life (i was playing blue, so in practice warriors, archons and battle frogs, cause you don’t have resources or enough special lands for anything else), in the best situation two played in one turn for us.
The removal cost is 1 faeria for 1 damage done. So he just need to play an efficient combination of removals (he has just played 3 creatures until now). Best shot is 2 firebombs in hand for my same cost of resources, also removing my two only collectors (so I m behind now from my next turn). Other combination apparently less efficient as immediate cost (because I loose my collectors anyway) are: firestorm + 2 removals (seifer’s wrath, soul drain, wind soldier [that can also collect], flame burst), last nightmare for any single target. He is full of removals because he has only 3 creatures in his deck (elementals and guardians). He runs also Hellfire (9 damage splitted for 7 faeria) and derelict tower (very efficient, because optimize the others removals and you have to use emperor’s command in case [2 faeria used to remove a structure used already once] without adding an other creature/collector on your side).
If you play a strong creature also last nightmare is efficient (he used one on my first whale, while my second whale got swallowed by a flower because it can’t swallow the guardian [and one flower cost 3 while your suffering whale 6])
The problem is that Divine Guardian is un-targetable by everything, to protect his main ability (let you survive by a lethal hit to your orb), so if used as double collector (for 2 faeria cost) is extremely functional. Because you can’t even swallow her with any new card.
Also they could run some flowers as removal cause it’s cheap than last nightmare and in middle game you are already dying without an efficient response (you have no collectors since turns…).
That’s why i’m asking to remove its capability to collect. Those players are just exploiting the Divine attribute to kill safely your orb without a single fight. The only reason why you don’t see many decks like this is just because it’s very expensive with full epic set of Divine Guardian, Firestorm and Hellfire (the others are mostly rare anyway)…
You said you didn’t know what divine was when you first met it. How often have you seen this trick?
Everyone gets games where their opponent draws the cards they need and destroys you. Maybe they always draw the perfect buff so they win every fight. Maybe they draw the perfect snipes. Maybe they draw all 4 elementals and play 3W on turn 4 (I have).
This game has huge RNG. You need heaps of games before you can draw any conclusions on how good any strat or deck is.
Your argumentation is: “you have met this deck once”, so “you are newbie or just unlucky”…
But you haven’t analyzed the deck I described, its mulligan statistic, the average cost of the spells I listed, the statistical presence of a double haste creature in any hand (because Guardian has 4 life, and they run 3 guardians in their decks)…
But I can tell you, the chance that anyone has 4 or more haste creatures in his deck are very low for any player that isn’t running yellow rush… Also you need to inflict 4 damage to kill the guardian from the closest land that can summon the haste creatures and the guardian changes position next turn, so your summoning lands should be positioned in a narrower specific ways to summon haste creature to clear both the positions between the wells.
Also killing the first guardian then, you are still not collecting because in case your haste creature survives (wind soldiers doesn’t for example), it has 2-3 life points and it’s going to die with any spells he has in hand… because he runs something like 42 (!!!) direct damage to your orb in the deck and need only 20 to be inflicted, so in double collection are 4 turn without any creature of yours able to remove his double collector… it’s easier than you think if you have enough memoria to craft that deck…
There is exponential growth in this game. If you’re ahead you’re likely to get more ahead as time goes on, and it can spiral out of control. However, as games are short and RNG and good card choice can drastically change the situation, it’s ok. It’s designed for it.
The observation I gave above is that if it were OP an equivalent one with farm boys instead of guardians would work against the decks that lack snipe (or haste, I’ll add). But here’s an analysis:
Your starting scenario is when you’re no creatures and facing 2 double-collectors. But this is already like being down 3 goals to none. If you can’t stop them getting to that point you’ve probably lost already - although very occasionally you can come back with something like 3 wishes or a massive firestorm.
Does that deck have a big advantage in getting to that scenario? I don’t really think so. You need to have secured the side(s) of the board first before using Divine Guardian(s) as any creature beats them. The Guardians are fairly irrelevant in getting to that almost-won position. So that means you just need to consider the rest of the deck - the snipe + elementals.
If a snipe + elemental deck was OP, it’d’ve shown up in the meta by now. It’s pretty rare to be able to use mass snipe without wasting some damage, and that usually means you’re spending more faeria than what you kill. Even if you can match faeria-for-faeria, you usually can’t match card-for-card unless you use AoE, which means letting your opponent get lots of creatures 1st.
In the streaming of yesterday Luuu has shown as this build works. He also haven’t used elementals for land. he lost one match on 3 because misplayed to remove a whale in middle game (empty whale) and lost his guardian. He also played 2 guardians on both side to have same result as the hand let him. He won also against an expert player we all know…
Your reasoning is good, just I don’t like this build. It’s an unfair winning with no strategy most of the time. You could literally play it on a single line to get the same result of the whole board…
I just went against this build using a standard red/yellow combat deck with no new cards. it was a relatively slow game, but I won solidly. The one divine guardian never got to double collect, and I wound up holding board and double collecting the whole game while he wasted faeria on single target removal as I spammed high hp creatures. He used a few crystals and I used my creatures to destroy the crystals with combat effects damaging his orb as I did.
edit:
Played against the deck again with the same combat burn deck. This time they had a much stronger start and were able to use crystals to control the board while divine guardians went up both sides. Still I managed to use a well timed Groundshaker to knock down his buildings, then waited a turn and used a Garudan to take out his collectors on both sides. He kept controlling the board because he had lots of faeria saved, but I was able to put out enough HPs on board so his hellfires wouldn’t do much good, wound up winning with about 5 hp left. Much closer than before, but still won.
I think this build is potentially strong against a frog tosser / whale / crystal meta since all of those rely on targeting for creature removal. But that has more to do with those cards being so OP that they dominate the meta and this deck being developed specifically to counter them.
not really worth watching, there seems to be some sort of targeting bug for aquablad the whole time he’s using divine guardian. Derelict towers weren’t working and it looks like opponents couldn’t target orb with their creatures.
I indicated the first game where he lost AGAINST a Divine Guardian deck. The issues with buildings are irrelevant in that game because the tower is part of the Divine Guardian deck (and cannot target Divine cards anyway).
Still it’s a play"style" that has no fun for both players and produce constant frustration for the opponent.
But if you play Divine Guardian deck getting fun I ll take it back…
