Welcome to Deck Heroes Guide and Walkthrough.
The first part of this walkthrough covers the most important milestones and game concepts until you are level 20.
As soon as you begin the game, a fairy named Alice will guide you through the tutorial. Alice is Deck Heroes' mascot and the most loved name in the game (you will know the reason soon!).
Alice will guide you through the explorer map and give you '
Flame Brave', '
Magic Weaver' and will show you how to enhance your creatures with essences. You will enhance Flame Brave to level 5 and unlock the powerful magic ability
Pyre. You are going to rely on Flame Brave for quite some time.
The Combat Controls
The combat screen has 4 parts. The "
Deck" from which your cards are dealt to your "
hand", The "
Hand" from which you play cards to the
board, the "
Board" where your cards fight, and the "
Graveyard" where destroyed cards go - more or less like real card games. Cards are dealt from deck to your hand, in random order, one card per turn. Each card has a "wait" turn which it needs to finish after coming to your hand. Once the "wait turns" are finished, you are free to play that card. Wait turn is shown near an icon of an hourglass on the left side of a creature.
The order in which you play your cards early on doesn't matter because the initial levels are designed to make you win no matter what. It makes a difference as you progress to more difficult levels.
Once you finish map 1 (
Dirgewood)
and goes to map 2 (
Selene'ndal), you get a new hero,
Nightraider. Nightraider is not better than your Stormkalar hero, she is of the same level.
Alice will soon tell you about unsealing creatures. You can
unseal your first creature once you have reached map 5.
Mazes
From map 2 onward you can play in
Maze. Mazes help you level up fast and get gold. If you get something called a
controlled dice while playing the maze, just hold on to them. They will become valuable from maze 7 onward where you can use them to land on
gold chests, which has a chance to give you some rare 5 star cards.
A Word on Essences
Essences are hard to get at this stage. Use them wisely. Always enhance a card to either level 5 or level 10, not to the levels in between. It is only at level 5 and level 10 new skills are unlocked.
The only cards you should level up before level 20 are
Frost Rager (you will get one soon),
Magic Weaver and
Flame Brave. Upgrading a card to level 10 is expensive, more so in case of Flame Brave which is a 4 star card. So try to get all of them to level 5 before you upgrade any one to level 10. I'd recommend to upgrade Frost Rager to level 10 first. That will give your entire team a huge HP boost and increase your survivability. Magic Weaver is a good second candidate for level 10 because Incinerate is a powerful offensive skill.
Alchemy
Once you claim the growth pack that comes in mail, you get a notification in the events window. If you follow it, you will come to the
Alchemy page. Alchemy is a way where the game rewards you for piling up gems without spending. If you put gems into alchemy, you will get 120-130% of gems back immediately. After the alchemy for 50 gems, the next alchemy is at 500, 1500, 5000, 20,000, 50,000, 100,000 and 500,000.
Spend 50 gems in Alchemy to gain 60 gems back
Frost Rager
Alice will next take you to Arcadia and gift you with a "
Frost Rager". This is a very powerful card with the potential to become an endgame card. Soon the "
Bazaar" will also be unlocked. Buy only
essence and
energy from the Bazaar with coins until you are level 25. Also don't spend anything trying to buy a better Hero. You will get a powerful 4 star hero (
Predator) for free at level 25. Any Hero you buy now will become obsolete.
In map 3, you can also do '
explore' for Frost Rager shards. It is totally worth getting three Frost Ragers for your first deck. '
Frost Armor' doesnt look like a useful skill when your enemies have only 150 attack, but soon your enemies will start hitting for 1000+ damage and you need Frost Ragers to survive that. At level 5, Frost Rager heals the damage it takes from physical attacks, and at level 10 gives health buff to your entire team.
Click on 3-3 to open the Exploration option
Click on the magnifying glass to explore for Frost Rager Shards.
10 Shards will complete a Frost Rager.
You can also click on a creature and select "source" tab to open the exploration option.
Playing Your Hand in the Combat
While playing cards from your
hand to the
board, try to play tanky creatures like Frost Rager to the left. Healers like Magic Weaver and casters like Flame brave should be played to the right, away from enemy hits. Sometimes you might also want to wait a turn until the opponent has played, so that you get to hit her creatures before her creatures hit yours.
Coupons, Gold and Essences Raining!
At this point you will need more essences to enhance your cards.
The ones listed below are the only cards you should enhance now. The other cards you have must wait until you can get more essences from a guild.
Frost Rager,
Magic Weaver,
Frost Rager(a second one),
Flame Brave,
Frost Rager(a third one).
There are a few ways to gain essences.
One is to go through maps 1 and 2 and complete the dungeons in second difficulty level. Each dungeon will give you an essence II.
Another is to finish mazes to get essence cards.
A third option is to buy 'map guides' with gems. Map guides are good value at this level. However, you get a steady stream of essences, gold and great cards for free once you join a good guild (guilds unlock at level 20). I would not recommend to spend gems on map guides if you are not planning to spend money. First Map guide can be seen in map 3, the picture of a scroll and magnifying glass on the top center.
There is a 4th option too. A geat option. A fantastic option.
SECRET CODES GIVEAWAYS!!!
Secret Code Giveaways
These are codes released by IGG as rewards for specific events. The codes given here are for the US/English server. I don't know whether it works for other servers, or they have a different set of codes.
You get the gifts in your mailbox as you enter the codes. While redeeming from your mailbox,
do not claim the glory points now! You will get raided and you will lose it. Wait until you need to upgrade skills for your Predator Hero (level 25) or to draw runes from the runes altar (level 35) before you redeem the glory points from the mail. Claim all other stuff from the mailbox.
Here is how to claim them.
Click on your profile picture to find out your
IGG ID. Note it down.
Click on the "
notice" icon on the right of your screen. The notice page shows up.
Scroll down the menu under Alice and click on "
Secret Code Giveaway". Press "go".
Enter your IGG ID and the below codes one by one to claim the rewards.
- GNYSFH98DHTP (317 Glory Points, 31,000 Gold, 3 Dragon Rider Shards)
- GAX74K3QX6ND (300 Glory Points, 3 Coupons, 3 Dragon Rider Shards)
- GXCMJJEY8J2A (30 Gems, 300 Glory Points, 3 Coupons)
- GAFQ8DJEQ88A (5 coupons, 5 Hydra Shards, 5000 Glory)
- GHU6BAQNHDSC (5 Odin Shards, 5 Coupons, Essence IV)
- GJJB5AW8U787 (Human meld IV - 5 coupons- 360,000 gold)
Claim your rewards (except glory points) from your mailbox. Use your coupons in the coupon altar to draw creatures. Now that you have a lot of gold, you can also make some 5x draws in the coin altar if you wish. Atleast one essence II is guaranteed with each 5x coin draw. Dont spend all your gold there, you need gold to upgrade your cards too.
Do not spend your essences on any 4 star creatures you get from the coupon altar yet. Most of the 4 star creatures are useless. Until you join a guild and start to get gold and essences, stick with upgrading only the 6 faen cards we have picked. (The exception is if you plan to spend a lot of money to buy gems. Then you could experiment without much difference)
The Colosseum
The
Colosseum will get unlocked at level 12. Fight there with the deck we have been building. If you have a Frost Rager or Magic Weaver at level 10, you should be able to win a few battles. As you climb up the Arena ranking, you will be rewarded with gems. Stockpile gems. You will learn soon that the game rewards you in many ways for stockpiling gems, mainly through
Alice Bond and
Alchemy.
Alice Bond
Alice Bond is an event where you purchase
bonds for gems and gets back 1.5 times gems in installments. It is like Alchemy, but spread over 7 weeks instead of the instantaneous deal. You also get rare and unique 5 star cards when you redeem the first installment of the bond (which is immediately after you purchase). This is the most rewarding event in the entire game and
the reason why the name 'Alice' is so loved in Deck heroes. This is also the only a way a free-to-play player can amass 100,000 gems and compete with the top spenders.
The bonds are available for 4000, 8000, 16000, 30000 and 60,000 gems. If you don't plan to purchase gems with money, I'd recommend to stockpile and get 50,000 gems through Alice Bond before you start spending.
The Rush to Level 20
After claiming the bronze chests in first three maps (bottom right corner of the maps), you will have enough shards to complete an
Ursa Major. It is a great card, but its usefulness comes later. For now, it is not as good as a Frost Rager.
From level 15 onward you can increase your
combat speed by clicking the small button above the "graveyard".
Once you are level 18, "
Trials" is unlocked. It is a good place to gain experience and gold.
When you are level 20, you get a new growth pack in mail. It is 10,000 glory points. DO NOT CLAIM IT NOW. Claim it only when you can actually use glory points, otherwise you might lose the glory points in raids.
At level 20, you can now join a guild.
Guilds
Joining a good guild is the most important decision you make in Deck Heroes.
Most good guilds have huge stockpiles of essences, 5 star creature shards and 4 star creature cards. Unfortunately you wont usually find them recruiting in the global chat. To join a good guild, go to the forums and ask if anyone would take you in.
The energy spent by players in a guild go as "contribution" to the guild map. Much of the guilds recruiting from the global chat are "energy farms", which means that they are guilds set up by alt-accounts of established players to farm new players for contribution. They pile up the contribution, then kick out all members, and then the player's main account will go in, clear all the maps and take the shards.
If you don't get a steady stream of stuff from the guild, then you are getting farmed. If the guild has a "free-for-all" shard system, and very few shards to keep claiming, then you are getting farmed. If the guild has no communication channel outside the game, then you are not only getting farmed, you are also missing out on good company and learning.
The game does not have a reliable way to communicate between players. Most guilds in the game use an app called "Line" to communicate. If you are joining a guild from global chat, make sure that they have "Line" (or a facebook group or whatever). If a guild doesn't have any communication channels, then it is a farm run by the an established player (or unknowingly run by a clueless player - small chance).
There is a wait time of 7 days to join a new guild after you leave one. It might be less expensive to ask in the forums for someone to take you in rather than wasting weeks experimenting and switching guilds. (URL for the forum thread given below)
http://deckheroes.freeforums.net/thread/7450/looking-guild-thread
I stress this point so much because I have been farmed by such guilds over a few months before I made a request in the forum and got to know good company. I don't want you to get cheated.
This concludes the beginners guide to Deck Heroes. For other advanced game topics, please visit the index page
HERE.
Thanks for reading and Good Luck to you!