Melding Paradigms Part IV (Battleblow)

Melding Paradigms Part IV - Battleblow Melds

Battleblow Sources: 

Alert Guard (3-Star Neander with Battleblow 8)
He is easily found in Coin Altar and Mazes

Battleblow is one of the most common melds. Here are the skills that go well with Battleblow.

Bullseye

The best Battleblow carriers are the cards that have Bullseye skill. It makes sure that your creature doesn't miss the hit, and also that your damage is not reflected back to you with dodge runes.

Anathema, Manticore, Michael and Paladin

Commonly used cards are

• Anathema (5 star)
• Pit Dragon (5 star)
• Titania (5 star)
• Paladin (4 star)
• Valkyrie (4 star)
• Michael (4 star)
• Manticore (3 star)

Titania, Michael and Manticore are my favourites in this group. Titania is so good that she has a full page for herself (here).

Michael already has Warlust which gives him a high damage against creatures with large HP pool like Octavius. When battleblow procs, he does more than 6000 damage and one-shot-kills any creature, including creatures with Sacrifice skill.

Manticore is an easily available 3 star creature, it can paralyze up to three enemy cards, has a 2-turn timer, and has Rebirth. It also fits nice with a Morti deck. It is one of the best early melds.

Sweeping Blow

Another common combination is cards with Sweeping Blow.

These are not as good as their Bullseye counterparts. You will not use them since late mid-game because of commonly found Dodge-rune with enemy creatures. A Dodge-rune reflects back the attack to your cards and its adjacent creatures as direct damage. You really dont want to get hit back with direct damage from your own Battleblow-Graboid! 

These cards would still be useful in gauntlet where your opponents doesn't have runes.

The commonly used ones are

• Ash Beast
• Graboid
• Swordmaster
• Techno Chief
• Demonic Templar

I should also mention the three star creature Border Ranger which already has battleblow and Sweeping Blow - makes it open to other good melds like Dodge 8.

Border Ranger already has Battleblow and Sweeping Blow

Other Cards

Sentry Angel is a good cheap early meld. He is tanky and can dish out quite some damage before going down.

Centaur Chief has Warlust and Miasma. He can be a very high-attack situational card against some Neander decks. I would suggest Frost Armor on him though.

What are the cards you have battleblow on? 

Also check out
Melding Paradigms Part 1 (Recycle and Revive carriers)
Melding Paradigms Part II (Sacrifice Carriers)
Melding Paradigms Part III (Immunity Carriers)

For posts on other game topics, check out the index page HERE. If you have opinions, questions , complaints or suggestions, or if you need help or advice, feel free to comment or drop me an email.

Thanks for reading!

Vitality Grimoire 5

Vitality Grimoire 5 - Kill All Enemy Creatures

Vitality is the easiest Grimoire and starters can do it using the 2 star Hero 'Defiler'.

Vitality Grimoire 5 consists of creatures with 200 HP and 1 attack, however they take only 1 damage from any attacks. They also heal about 6 damage per turn. The challenge is to cause damage as many times as possible to kill the entire deck before turn 50.

The Absolute Beginner Deck

The deck consists of 2 star hero Defiler, 5 Treant Guides at level 10, One treant guide melded with Vodoo from Dark Witch(Another 3 star creature). If you have a 5 star Gorgon or Spirit Siren, you can use either of them instead of the melded Treant Guide.

Defiler's skill work in Vitality Grimoire

Treant Guides are 3-star Faen creatures farmable from the Explorer's Map (Map 4). If you do not know how to do 'explore' for creatures, check out this walkthrough here.

Treant Guide is the only creature in the game with two Mass Heal skills!

You need to have at-least a 3-star Heal Amplify rune on Defiler. There should be a Voodoo rune of level 5 or 6 on the creature with Voodoo. The creature with Voodoo should be the last to be dropped, so that it can stop the enemy hero from activating its hero skill.

Voodoo rune reduces enemy Hero's rage

Defiler's skill kills the enemy cards and the Treants heal the damage, and you win.

Other Decks

There are other alternatives for mid-game players.

A Vile Songstress along with almost any deck can defeat Vitality Grimoire (I use a one card deck with a Virgo). Enemy units (which has just 200 HP) die of the damage when Requiem is negated.

Vile Songstress

If you have Pisces, you could use her to reflect the magic damage and win the Grimoire.

The 5 star creature Anubis can also kill the creatures in one shot.

Do you know any other ways to win this Grimoire? What deck do you use? Please let us know in the comments.


For posts on other game topics, check out the index page HERE. If you have opinions, questions , complaints or suggestions, or if you need help or advice, feel free to comment.

Deck Heroes Deathmort

Deathmort

Deathmort 

It is debatable which the best 4-star hero is. The worst, however, is Deathmort and his puppet.

Deathmort summons a 'Puppet' which takes damage in place of the hero, and converts that damage taken into attack. Unfortunately, the puppet has no survival skills and dies just too easily to make use of all that attack. It is the weakest summon among all, and does not bring anything to the table that we might make use of.

The ideal talents for Deathmort would be Morti Aura(increases HP of all Morti creatures in your hand), Cripple (reduces enemy attack) and Undying(grants rebirth to your creatures). However, I would suggest to get Wight with the same talent set instead of Deathmort as your Morti hero.

There are no situational uses for Deathmort.


For posts on other game topics and reviews of other heroes, check out the index page HERE. If you have opinions, questions , complaints or suggestions, or if you need help or advice, feel free to comment. Thanks for reading!

Deck Heroes Wight

Morti 4 Star Hero - Wight 

Wight and his skill

Wight is the arguably the strongest all round player-vs-player 4 star hero. His skill 'Death Curse' increases the damage exponentially over time. You can look at the below table to see his damage increase round after round at different levels.


(Turns listed downwards in the yellow column, Hero level listed towards the right in green row)

Damage per turn	Level 1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
0	400	450	500	550	600	650	700	750	800	900
1	440	540	650	770	900	1040	1190	1350	1520	1800
2	484	648	845	1078	1350	1664	2023	2430	2888	3600
3	532	778	1099	1509	2025	2662	3439	4374	5487	7200
4	586	933	1428	2113	3038	4260	5846	7873	10426	14400
5	644	1120	1856	2958	4556	6816	9939	14172	19809	28800

Years ago, Wight used to work in guild maps as well. People used him to one-shot maps. Now death curse is cleared by Mantra and Wight is not useful for guild maps.

The recommended skills for Wight are Morti Aura(increases HP of all Morti creatures in your hand), Cripple (reduces enemy attack) and Undying(grants rebirth to your creatures)

It is good to have a few non-Morti creatures in a Wight deck, because you don't want Undying to trigger as soon as 3 of your creatures are out. The more creatures get Undying, the better.

Death Curse targets the enemies with highest HP, and this usually are the strongest creatures. He is really handy when you face a low level deck with just one or two top tier creatures like Virgo which are otherwise indestructible.

Undying is particularly useful in the Gauntlet when you want most of your cards alive after each battle. I would recommend to get Wight as soon as you can!

For posts on other game topics, check out the index page HERE. If you have opinions, questions , complaints or suggestions, or if you need help or advice, feel free to comment. Thanks for reading!

Deck Heroes Predator

4 Star Hero Review - Predator

You get a free Predator at level 25

Predator is one of those Heroes for which you need to build a specialized deck. It is absolutely worth the effort, because a well-built Predator deck can punch way above it's weight.

Another thing is that you get Predator for free at level 25 as a level-up reward, so there is no reason to not use him.

The recommended skills for Predator are Faen Aura (increase HP of Faen creatures) and Agile (80% chance to dodge attacks).

Predator requires an almost fully Faen deck. The specialty of the Faen faction is that they buff each other very well. 3-star Frost Ragers with Sprite Link 7 (increase attack on all your Faen creatures by 175) is one of the best early melds that you can make to rank in the tournament with Predator. Typically you can make a deck with an average 4000 HP, 1200 attack, with 70-80% of the creatures having Frost Armor or dodge, and more than 850 heal! There is a post dedicated to Frost Rager decks here.

Predator's summon, the Grizzly soaks up to 80% of damage dealt to the hero, and reduces magic damage and basic attack damage to 50% on self. So if you hit Predator with a basic damage of 3000, the grizzly reduces it to 300 (600 damage after 80% reduction, then reducing it by 50% again to 300), and then heals 300 damage by itself, even disregarding rip. It is the toughest 4 star summon you can get.

Grizzly - the toughest 4 star summon in the game

Grizzly Skills

Every time the grizzly takes damage in place of your Hero, it reduces the enemy Hero rage by 20. If the enemy deck has creatures like Dahlia, Gorgon etc, then it is bye-bye to enemy Hero rage. Even 5 star heroes become helpless if they cannot activate their skill.

Situational Uses

Predator can be used to clear Protean Grimoire in 4 star. You only need to have a high level Hero-vigor rune on Predator and have to drop cards one by one until all but one card is left. Grizzly will soak up the damage from enemies and keep your Predator alive.

Predator can also be used to clear Protean Grimoire in 5 star using a Henrietta deck. You can find the post about Protean Grimoire here.

Tournament

I have a friend who reached top 1000 in tournament with two predator decks. I myself used it till I was around 3000-5000 rank or so. Grizzly's rage-reduction is a good way to fight against 5 star heroes who have much stronger skills. For example, Vile songstress lose her rage every round when the requiemed creatures hit your Predator!

There is also a pretty 3 star Faen magic deck. However, that requires good leveled up runes, which I lacked and hence it did not work for me that well.

All in all, Predator is one of the best 4 star heroes for the tournament. You must make the best use of your free Predator!

For posts on other game topics, check out the index page HERE. If you have opinions, questions , complaints or suggestions, or if you need help or advice, feel free to comment. Thanks for reading!

Earth Totem Blood Warlocks

The Blood Warlock Deck!

Here is a small Haiku dedicated to my favourite 3* deck.

Blood warlocks en-masse. 
Kickass. In guild map battles,
2 million damass

If you are still here after reading my lame haiku, I will share my secret guild map recipe with you.

Use a Berserker hero with blood warlocks, with Earth Totem melded to a few of them. Earth Totem level 6 gives 300 HP to all Neander creatures. I wouldnt wince if you meld Earth Totem 10 from a Nidhogg onto a blood warlock, the Blood Warlocks are that good.

My warlock deck

Berserker's boars at level 5 unlock a skill of increasing your Neander creatures' damage permanently. And three such boars could be existing at a time, each could add upto 230 attack to each blood warlock, for a total of 690 attack, every round.

2x100+30 = 230 per boar per round!

In the below screenshot of a guild map attack, you can see a level 10 blood warlock at the bottom. (It is faint, you might need to open the picture to see)

^^level 10 blood warlock!

Now you know where these 2 million+ damage came from.

When Berserker is at level 10, the boars resist retreat and instakill. Pretty good against Arch Devas, Revenants and Hell Wolfs.

With a blue heal-amplify rune, a warlock heals for 200. With a purple heal-amplify rune at level 7, they heal for 276. (I have two from glory altar. They are super rare and might take you a long time to get) That is a total of 2000-2760 heal from 10 healers. You can also use a few frost-armor oracles to shield against heavy hitters, if required.

Healing is the key for a Berserker deck!

With a Blight 4 rune (pretty common) partially levelled up on my hero , the warlocks deal 450 poison damage each to three creatures, followed by 150 next round. That is an extra 1800 damage every round per warlock (450x3 from first activation and 150x3 during the enemy rounds).

Mixed with two or three recyclers, this deck also helped me clear the gauntlet daily. (Keep your deck power as low as possible until the time you are interested in clearing gauntlets daily).

What is best about this deck is that there are no entry barriers. You can start farming Berserker shards regularly once the ore mine is open to you at level 25. Blood Warlocks are available on map 6, which can again be cleared using Frost Rager decks. (Refer to the walkthrough here if you are facing problem progressing, or just post a question in the comments here if you need more guidance).

For posts on other game topics, check out the index page HERE. If you have opinions, questions or suggestions, feel free to comment. Thanks for reading!

Equipment and Crafting Guide

Deck Heroes Equipment Crafting

The number of mechanics involved in crafting can make it a bit tedious and confusing. If you are new to crafting, know that everyone has gone through a bit of confusion early on and became familiar with crafting only over time and after experimentation. However, it is worth the effort.

Equipment is worn by your character, which becomes available in all your decks, irrespective of the heroes and decks you use. This makes it a very very powerful feature to focus on.

Additionally, equipment do not add to the costs of your decks.

There are 6 equipment slots available. I have listed them as three pairs. The items in a pair uses the same set of crafting materials to make, and their powers are reciprocal.

Weapon - Provides a chance for basic attacks to do double damage (Critical Hit)

Armor - Reduces the critical hit chance of your enemy's weapon

Helmet - Decreases the dodge chance of enemy creatures.

Boots - Increases all your creatures' dodge.

Belt - Increases the damage from all your creature 'skills' - like poison damage for example.

Gloves - Reduces the damage from enemy creature 'skills' - like poison damage for example. 

What to craft first?

Before we go into crafting, it is very important to understand which equipment are most important and which all are not useful. This greatly influences the crafting choices you make.

Belt is the most important end game equipment in my opinion. It might affect the damage output of only a few of your creatures, but when it does, it does big. Say, a Taurus that would otherwise hit for 5000 damage will hit for 7000 with a +40% belt bonus. This decides whether you encounter 4 wounded angry creatures next round along with an enemy hero with full rage bar, of if the board is cleared of the enemy creatures.

The impact of gloves is even more. That is because a 100 damage reducing to 60 is a bigger change than hundred increasing to 140. However, except in player-vs-player situations, you know what kind of deck you are going to face and you can plan accordingly. For example, you don't need gloves against a deck full of magic dealers, you just need a Mithrill Drone ;)

Level 5 orange belt and gloves are must to have.

Boots are good to have. Even at 15% dodge, all your creatures getting 15% dodge makes an impact. However basic attacks become less consequential as you progress, and some hero talents like 'Group Tactics' (100% dodge to all your creatures) makes boots redundant.

Helmet enables you to hit even creatures with 100% dodge, and consistently hit creatures with low levels of dodge.

Level 5 orange helmet and boots are good to have. 

Weapon is somewhat useless. Armor is utterly useless. These slots are better used for blue Noble Lord or purple Planeswalker equipments with special skills (using sparks).

How to get Orange Materials?

You can get common Orange materials in two ways. One is to keep producing green through smelting and upgrade them to gold.

The other is using the following formula (I first saw it put in forum by a player called Japoon)

1 white + 1 white = level 1 white equipment

1 purple + 1 white + level 1 white equipment = level 1 purple equipment

2 purple + level 1 purple equipment = level 1 gold equipment

Dismantle the  level gold equipment = 1 gold material

This process has two advantages. One is that it takes only 3 purples and 3 whites to get an orange material, instead of 4 purples. That is about 25% more profitable.

The second is that, you can use this technique to convert between different kinds of materials. For example, you can use two purple materials and a level 1 purple sword to craft a level 1 gold belt, and then dismantle it to get gold material for belt. Similarly you can also use a gold level 1 sword to craft any other level 1 gold equipment, using only white materials for the latter.

A level 1 equipment needs only two materials to make, and an optional equipment.Level 3 and level 5 equipment require 4 materials and a lower level equipment as fodder.

It should be noted that only the tier-1 materials (the ones that you use to craft level 1 equipment) can be converted between different types. The two extra materials required for level 5 needs to be smelted.

Level 5 Gold Equipment

Since your final goal is the level 5 gold equipment, we shall start from there.

To craft a level 5 gold equipment, you need 4 gold materials and a level 3 gold equipment. This gives you a 42% chance for success. That is the maximum chance of success you can get for level 5 gold equipment.

To craft the required level 3 gold equipment, use 2 oranges and 2 purples. Preferably use the lower level orange materials (the ones used for crafting level 1 equipment) to craft your level 3. These are easier to get as you can convert these from other tier-1 materials.

Four of failed purple equipment can be upgraded into a level 5 gold item with lowest possible stats. (for example, you can use one purple level 5 sword and 3 purple level 5 gloves into a gold level 5 sword or glove, more or less like how you upgrade materials) Level 5 gold Planeswalker require level 5 gold normal equipment, so I would recommend keeping these purples for some later day.

Special Skills with Sparks!

You need 100 sparks to craft a blue equipment with a special skill, 250 sparks for a skill on a purple equipment, and 1000 sparks to put skill on an orange equipment.

The 'common' skills are muddle, harrow, unholy rites and law.These can be gained from any equipment of blue level and above. Better skills like confine, blitz and salvage are available on purple and above.

Blue 'Noble Lord' equipment has the possibility of a very good skill called 'Bladeshard'. I would recommend to spend sparks only on blue noble lord equipment until you get bladeshard.

The description of BladeShard

Once you have bladeshard, you can go for other skills with 100 sparks or a chance for better skills on purple and above. 

To craft blue Noble Lord equipment, you need to craft a level 5 Lord Equipment and use it as fodder for the Level 5 Noble Lord. (Note: Lord and Noble Lord equipment are always of level 5). See a typical recipe below (sorry for the low clarity pictures, I don't have better ones right now)

Craft Lord Armor first

Use Lord Armor to craft Noble Lord Armor, this time using sparks

With good equipment, your anathemas dodge like rabbits and horned beasts hit like trucks. I have felt that this has diminished the game somewhat by taking away strategic depth in deck building. On the plus side, it is a feature that rewards patience. 

What do you think about the equipment feature? Do you have any other tips? Please let us know in comments.

For posts on other game topics, check out the index page HERE. If you have opinions, questions , complaints or suggestions, or if you need help or advice, feel free to comment. Thanks for reading!

Frost Rager and her Awesome Melds

Frost Rager

What are the best 3 star melds in Deck Heroes?This is a series on the 3 star creature melds that make it to the endgame.

Frost Rager is the most versatile 3 star card in the game. There are a variety of melds that can make her strong enough to be used even in the Tournament.

Soul Swap Rager

soulswap rune steals 3% attack per level, upto 30% at level 10

Soul Swap does magic damage to one enemy creature and steals life from it. With a Soul Swap rune, it also steals up to 30% of the enemy card's "base attack". i.e if the enemy card has 1000 attack to begin, it will become 700, 400, 100 and 0 on subsequent activations of soulswap, each time cumulatively increasing your Frost Rager's attack by 300,300,300 and 100.

THIS ALSO WORKS IN GUILD MAPS - This is the only attack reduction that works in guild maps and cannot be cleared by Mantra.

Now you have a card that resists physical damage with Frost Armor, has double regeneration from Restoration and Soul Swap, decreases the enemy attack every round, and also increases your own attack every round. What more do you need?

Sprite Rager

Frost Rager melded with Sprite Link 7 (+175 attack for all Faen creatures) from Faen Mesmer or Dream Guide.

This is the most effective PvP(Player vs Player) meld if there are multiple Frost Ragers in your deck - and it takes quite something to be better than a Soul Swap Rager!

Four or five Frost Ragers with Sprite Link, one or two recycle horned beasts, one or two Ash Beasts (if you have him), along with the Predator hero that you get for free at level 25 makes an incredibly strong deck.

Predator should have Faen Aura (up to +400 HP for all Faen creatures, activates three times cumulative) and Agile (up to 80% dodge for your Faen creatures, activated twice).

Predator Skills

This deck is much much stronger that it looks. The high level of dodge will let you place your first few creatures comfortably without harm. The 5 Frost Rages adds +850 attack and +1500 hit points to each of your creatures. Faen Aura adds another 1000+ HP in three activations. So your entire deck will have 3500-4500 hitpoints and 1200-1600 attack, with most of them having Frost Armor or Dodge. From level 5 onwards, your grizzly will provide heal. That is a total of 5 healers (two horned beasts, two ash beasts, one grizzly). They in total heal about 850 hitpoints every round if you have atleast a 3* healing rune on Predator.

Let's summarize. Average 4000 HP, 1200 attack, with 70-80% creatures having Frost Armor/Dodge, and +850 heal for this already tanky deck! How will you beat it?

I used this deck till I was around rank 3000 in Tournament. One of my friends (who had very good runes to compliment) used two of such decks to get below rank 1000 in the tournament and also to rank 1st in his arena (his was a fresh arena group with very few high level players, still a big achievement with a 3* deck!). This deck will also helped me clear the Gauntlet daily, without much trouble. Incredibly powerful deck for mid-game.

Note:
This deck is susceptible to Chainstrike, so avoid facing Titania with this.

Bless Rager

Frost Rager with Bless (from Blood Warlock). Useful in early guild map decks as an extra bless card with Frost Armor.


For posts on other game topics, check out the index page HERE. If you have opinions, questions , complaints or suggestions, or if you need help or advice, feel free to comment. Thanks for reading!