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Welcome to my guide!
I have played hundreds of games of Pandora, and I am still getting better (not perfect yet!), but I will do my best to share what I have learned so far.
First, a basic value lesson about value.
Has anyone else noticed the difference between these two cards?
[Card=177]Verduran Force[/Card]
[Card=203]Barbarian Ogre[/Card]
The only difference between these cards is one costs an extra faeria. This gives Verduran force a high rating on my tier list and Barbarian Ogre is low. The only reason Barbarian Ogre isn’t lower is because red has cards like [Card=247]Ogre Dance[/Card] which gives you a potential Barbarian Ogre for 4 faeria.
It is supremely important that you get the most value in all games in Faeria (and all card games), not just Pandora. This should be obvious when you frogify a big enemy creature and kill it with a 4/4 (4 power, 4 toughtness) creature. You just spent 4 faeria to kill his 7 faeria creature, then killed the 2/2 from frogify, while keeping your 4/4 (now a 4/2) alive for farming wells or killing something else or hitting his face.
Getting value applies to the cards you pick too. You want to pick cards that give you the most potential for value. This is what makes cards like [Card=223]Bomb Slinger[/Card] or [Card=4]Syland Horsemaster[/Card] so great. In fact, any card that allows you to play surprise tricks should be valued highly and sometimes higher than simply good creatures, like Verduran Force.
The best surprise event is [Card=175]Elderwood Embrace[/Card], and the best surprise creature is Syland Horsemaster. [Card=124]Triton Banquet[/Card] can actually be great in a lot of situations too, but it’s not quite as great as Elderwood Embrace because with Elderwood Embrace you often get to kill one of their creatures and keep your own.
Keep in mind that you cannot make your whole deck surprise tricks; you need some solid creatures too. Likewise your deck will not do well if you only have solid creatures. However, if you are going red damage to the face you can get only solid creatures that do face damage. Which brings me to the next section: archetypes.
There are a few archetypes I have tried,
and I will label them from most consistent to least consistent.
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Red Burn (with yellow or green or mono red)–if you can get lucky enough to have the right cards come up with this when you draft it, it can be really hard to beat, especially when paired with treasures like [Card=425]Hammer of Destruction[/Card] or [Card=417]Equinox Automaton[/Card], that do even more face damage.
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Red/Green Crackthorn–this deck is incredibly hard to deal with in ladder and in Pandora as well. Even if you cannot draft a crackthorn, the synergy between red control spells and big green creatures in Pandora makes the red/green deck the most consistently winning deck in Pandora, because you aren’t as dependant on getting the best cards as you are with red burn.
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Yellow Haste–Just like in ladder, Yellow Haste is a solid deck. However, like in red burn, you are dependant on getting the right yellow cards. If the game only hands you yellow fliers and no haste creatures, you are SOL. However, if you do not have a lot of time to spend, this is the fastest deck to win or lose games.
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Blue tricks–It’s fun to build a deck around blue and have transform effects such as [Card=85]Mirror Phantasm[/Card] and [Card=88]Frogify[/Card]. You can out-value their big creatures with these transforms and get early board control. This is what makes [Card=125]Aurora, Myth Maker[/Card] the best legendary in the game; well, at least in Pandora. If you build a blue tricks deck you can splash another color or just go straight blue.
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Beefy Green–the most simple deck to play, and is more solid if you can include at least a couple of tricks. If you want to go pure green like this make sure you always pick a Syland Horsemaster when it comes up, or [Card=134]Sagami Grovecaller[/Card].
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Other archetypes I have tried that can sometimes be good if you get the right cards: Yellow flying, Blue/Green [Card=311]Apex Predator[/Card], Red/Blue [Card=312]Icerock Behemoth[/Card] (with [Card=94]Auroras Creation[/Card] if possible), GY sac deck, etc. There are quite a few more but I am unable to think of them at the moment (will update).
Let me explain the numbers of my tier list for treasures. With treasures, you want to pick the ones that give you the most board control possible, for the cheapest amount possible. You also want treasures that can be used in many situations. [Card=422]Void Guardian[/Card] and [Card=406]Ocarina[/Card] are far too situational. You usually have to be already winning to want to play either of those. The same logic goes for how I chose numbers to rate many of the other cards, too. If it’s too situational of a card, like [Card=291]Celestial Tower[/Card], you don’t often want to pick it. Now, Celestial Tower is actually the same ability as Syland Horsemaster, so why is it bad? It’s bad because Syland is also a creature, a creature that can farm faeria or kill enemies.
The best average faeria cost in Pandora is between 4-4.5. If you can get under 4 and do a rush or an overrun deck, great. If you are 20 cards in and you are in danger of going above 5 average faeria, you had better start picking some low cost cards or your deck is in danger of losing board control.
This is my first draft of this guide, so bear with me as I update it. I hope you all learned something and make sure you wreck it in Faeria next time you play!
-parashara
