V-Mundi

All posts by: Alice White

Epic: Base Set Sage Alignment

Sage cards feature wizards, magic, crystals, ice, magic constructs and other arcane concepts. They control the most out of all alignments and have unblockable offensive habits. Using a combination of literally “unblockable” Champions, burn damage, freezing, and control, Sage can easily swing for game in very large chunks of damage albeit far between. Sage usually has an answer for any situation.

The biggest weakness of Sage is likely to be their lack of threats. While they can usually answer any threat or just work around it, Sage themselves generally do not have Champions that force action from the opponent, at least not on a spot-removal basis. This is because their Champions tend to be flashes rather than of the permanent type.

The few permanents they have, such as Steel Golem tend to be hard to remove anyway as they have Untargetable. Only about 5 Champions in Sage qualify (2 of which are hard to get rid of, but not impossible like Steel Golem and Sea Titan) and of those five, most hardly qualify as threats at all, usually just sporting big Airborne bodies or the ability to deal small burn damage. Their strength then, is in the ability to use lots of powerful flashes usually at Event-speed. Let’s take a look at the Power distribution for Sage.

  • Condition Data
    Sum gold Sage champion power 84
    Avg gold Sage champion power 8.4
    Sum silver Sage champion power 12
    Avg silver Sage champion power 3

  • This table’s data shows that Sage is 84/116 (Wild total) or 72% of the max, making Sage the second-highest Power card pool available. Their average is also 8.4 which is very close to Wild’s 8.9, so their averages don’t even suffer degradation. With such high Power bodies, 5 very usable airborne, 3 very usable big bodies (10+), 3 freeze cards, and even a breakthrough, Sage adds a ton of very usable offensive Champions to its library of high-control and high-draw. With so many “clean” methods of offensive strategy, which to choose? Generally, you want to maximize as many of those as possible without sacrificing other things the alignment is good at.

Two champions were discounted as it confounds the data. Thought Plucker has 1 Power and Time Bender has 2 Power but operates more like a reusable Event, so it was left out. Forcemage Apprentice was ignored in Silvers as it has 0 Power and is only used for direct damage (of which it can reliably get 6 each round).

Despite the high average power of Sage Silver champions, they cannot do the same kinds of hurt as Evil due to the fact that Evil Silvers have better abilities. They can grow, break things that block them, are unbreakable, more of them have blitz, and can control discards. Remember that all of these statistics come with caveats. For example, Sage has some interesting dynamics in their Airborne champions, which warrants a comparison with Good’s.

  • Alignment Sum Avg Max
    Good 36 / 49 6.0 / 8.2 10 / 15
    Sage 29 / 27 5.8 / 5.4 8 / 8
    Evil 17 / 14 5.7 / 4.7 6 / 5
    Wild 6 / 6 6.0 / 6.0 6 / 6
  • So can Sage do better than Good if they try for an Airborne strategy? From the data, it’s pretty obvious that Sage is better than Wild and Evil all around with airborne. However, it’s a bit fuzzy with its ability to compete with Good in the air. The max absolutely can’t, but if one tailors one’s Sage deck specifically to deal with Good, you can include a 6/8 to deal with their 6/8, an 8/8 for their 6/6, a 6/4 to their 5/6, and a 5/4 to their 4/5. All having superiority in these mappings (or at least a tie). Good still has a 10/15 and a 5/9 that you can’t answer. What I’m saying is that Winter Fairy can’t really compete with Good at all but the rest of your stuff can do same or better as long as you can kill Thundurus and Angelic Protector (good luck).

As Sage can clearly rival Good in the air, is better than anything but Wild on the ground, and can freeze anything it can’t pierce right through, it’s actually one of the stronger offensive strategies, requiring very little defense to make up for it.


Offense

Defensive strategies in Epic have to eventually service an offensive strategy and somehow deal 30 damage. Sage’s offense is already spectacular both on the ground and in the air, and anywhere it doesn’t presently have superiority. Therefore, it can be lax about defense. But it isn’t. Sage sports some pretty great defense.

Including some Untargetable champions as well as four things above 9 defense (a 10, 12, 13, and 14). Nine is a specific number in epic that refers to the best average, which is a 9/9 as well as two prominent kill events Hurricane and Drain Essence which deal 9 damage. Though two of those are actually immune to the targetting of Drain Essence anyway.

  • Condition Data
    Sum gold Sage champion defense 89
    Avg gold Sage champion defense 8.9
    Sum silver Sage champion defense 10
    Avg silver Sage champion defense 2.5

  • While Sage’s Silver defense is so bad it rivals Evil, the Gold defense rivals Wild! With an 89/123 it has  72% of Wild’s 123 defense sum. The same as its offense ratio. So this means the average body of Sage is 8/9, while Wild is 9/9. Obviously these are rounded and both alignments can increase their average by omitting weaker cards. Just by running some of your best offensive strategies in Sage, you get good defenders for free. This means your biggest battle against things like Evil and Wild will be your ability to control the outliers. Evil is going to control you and you have to control Wild. In the air, you have to control Good’s outliers. This makes a powerful one-two punch of body-control for Sage.
transform

Its control is serious business too. Transform is strictly better than Bitten, possibly better than Inner Demon (depending on whose turn you have to use it on) and also potentially better than Banishment (again depending on whose turn). The same goes for Wave of Transformation. It also has powerful hand control in the forms of Thought Plucker and Psionic Assault which can easily be 2 discards each, plus both can be recurring.

Time Bender is a recurring ability to banish your opponent’s best Silvers or bounce their Golds every turn. Sea Titan comes in with the same bounce, netting you gold advantage. Time Bender can boardwipe with bounce, netting either a loss or gain with gold depending on how you time it. Turn gives you control of something, and the conditions change based on whose turn it is but you can get it permanently, which is +1 gold use for you, -1 for the opponent if it’s permanent! Stand Alone is one of the best board wipes when you have supremacy, usually air supremacy. All of the Sage control is very high quality; they aren’t scrounging for effects here. If anything, it’s difficult to decide what not to put into a deck.


Defense

Best champions are always going to be partially subjective but after picking criteria, you can at least try to be impartial. So here is Djinn of the Sands and Ice Drake.

Sage’s best champions are very serious indeed. Djinn of the Sands is the best airborne+blitz in the game, sporting an 8/8 body immediately due to its counters, with the option to draw when you’re in desperate need. This can beat out any air champion besides Thundurus or Angelic Protector, the latter of which can’t kill Djinn either. It’s a truly horrific card that gets slapped down and immediately threatens 27% of your life total, then threatens to do it again next turn. For this reason, Djinn of the Sands has to be dealt with immediately. He’s not even color locked!

Ice Drake is a game winning card. With a body that goes toe-to-toe with the average Good air champion, he can ambushed in at the end of the opponent’s turn to freeze all their stuff from blocking you, then immediately be part of the upcoming mass-attack. Even if your opponent is playing some control, he’s a flash not a permanent and so it’s not possible to stop that freeze with control. The best an opponent can hope to do is board wipe since you telegraphed your big attack. Ceasefire was actually an annoying one to run into since they can stop the kill-shot and still draw. When you see Ice Drake in your hand, plan for your endgame.

Honorable mentions: Juggernaut and Frost Giant.

Juggernaut sports breakthrough+blitz which is practically unheard of. In fact, it’s the only champion in base set with this combination. That means it gets to throw 9 damage out immediately, which is 30% of someone’s life, and they can only mitigate it, not stop it. Since it’s unbreakable, it’s truly unstoppable too. Juggernaut is a threat of the highest caliber and must be responded to on the next turn or with banishment immediately. This is basically Djinn of the Sands-lite, as blitz+breakthrough is roughly equivalent to blitz+air most of the time. The draw a card tops the crazy cake with a fuck-you candle and since it’s the only part behind loyalty, it could technically go in non-Sage main decks. Frost Giant is sported here for the exact same reasons as the Ice Drake, except he isn’t color-locked at all, just doesn’t have as good a backup plan (airborne) and can only be used on your turn. Nevertheless, he wins games.

In summary, Sage has great offense, great defense, excellent control, sometimes higher quality cards than other alignments, what little burn it has is great, not extremely color locked, great draw, and basically great everything. Its only real weakness is a below average number of threats to draw required opponent control like a lightning rod, which means its attackers get hit with the control (which is not what you want), however some of its attackers are unbreakable or untargetable which makes up for it.

Sage generally has an answer for everything during play. Opponent plays a bunch of silvers? Make them discard so they can’t recover easily, skipping gold turns. Opponent can summon a bunch of huge things to block? Freeze them or burn directly. Opponent’s groundlings are too much to handle? Air superiority. Opponent has lots of blitz? You have lots of control that works well on their turn. Unbreakables? You have banish. There aren’t a lot of situations that can be drummed up that Sage can’t somehow escape if the player is good enough or conservative enough leading up to it.

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Hopefully you all found this an informative and helpful article. If so, be sure to share this with your friends!

Epic: Evil Deck

If you haven’t checked out the base set Evil analysis, do that now!

Epic decks are not required to stay “pure” colored. So when you talk about having an “Evil” deck, what you must know is what it means to be Evil. Evil is all about messing with your opponent so that you can strike back. Weaken them, minimize their plays and use your own to make a stand. You must choose an offensive strategy in this game and there are only really a few: you can swing in the air, freeze, swing wide, simplify the game for opportunity swings, breakthrough (+blitz) on the ground, or burn.

Evil has a lot of options including burn (Soul Hunter and Blood Drinker), airborne (Succubus and Angel of Death), wide (Demon and Zombie token production), breakthrough (Trihorror), and control (myriad of kill cards). However, most of them would fail miserably as there are only 1-2 cards that can participate in the offensive strategy, leaving Evil high and dry most of the time and easily stopped. The strategies that they can most easily and consistently deploy are swinging wide and control. This actually makes for a deadly combination. Each time they use a spot-removal card, the field becomes filtered such that the opponent’s field is relatively weaker. Not just in number but in quality as well, since you as the Evil player want to target what hurts them the most.

As for the wide method, Evil excels at this. With good (and unbreakable) Silver champions as well as tons of token producers, it’s trivial to get this engine going. When attempting, you’ll want an easy way to get 3 Demons or 6 Zombies to try this. Force the opponent to block your unbreakables or big stuff, then attack individually with each token/silver to deal damage over what they can afford to block realistically (using groups to threaten kills where applicable). This method is extremely weak to board wipes. If a board wipe hits, it might not just stagnate your strategy but potentially force you to minus if you overextended to get your tokens and silvers out. In general, each gold is worth 5 zombies or 3 demons. In addition, if you used any of your spot-removal before the next board wipe, that also counts against cards that you minused. Be very aware of this as you play an Evil deck. Try a low-cost way of baiting out the first board wipe early. This can cause an opponent to waste a turn and leave you with free-reign to use your control and tokens for 7-8 turns if the game lasts that long.

However, you always have the ability to respond to threats. Don’t worry if an opponent board wipes after playing a threat and having it broken. This generally indicates that you have wrecked their main play and they’re doing damage control trying to drain your hand. That’s the moment you should immediately stop playing conservatively since you know they’ve used up a threat and a board wipe. Aggro hard.

Note about board wipes and this particular deck: This deck is not weak to board wipes even if its main offensive strategy can be. This is because of its ability to dodge AOEs. Any time you have lots of silvers with Blitz, you can easily recover from a just-played board wipe. The same goes for some golds with blitz and anything unbreakable on your turn. Trihorror also dodges board wipes due to its ability and Final Task can bring back Trihorror, unbreakable stuff or just whatever is needed. Corpse Taker can immediately return something after an opponent board wipes so you can just re-play it. If you play smart, growing your field back from a board wipe is trivial in the deck on purpose.

Legend for deck keypoints:

  • OPP – Counts as playable on the opponent’s turn. This is essential to keeping good rhythm and affecting game play every single turn. Doesn’t count re-usable.
  • DRW – Draws at least 2 cards, or is a draw engine. Required to keep playing cards every turn including on the opponent’s turn, especially if you’re board wiping.
  • TKN – Used for anything that helps you swing wide (or produce Tokens which can also swing wide). Main offensive strategy. Doesn’t necessarily only mean “Tokens”.
  • CTL – Control. Spot-removal used to control threats on the field and filter the opponent’s best Champions away.
  • MVP – Don’t squander these as they’re your best cards. Deck has more MVPs than usual due to specific plays.
Demon Nuke
Silver 0: 15

3 Corpse Taker – Dodge a board wipe or opponent’s control, re-use MVPs or Trihorror, situational use. MVP

3 Wither – Used to wipe out other token strategies and 18/22 or 82% of Silvers (includes Tokens),  6/51 or 12% of Golds cards in base set or 33% of Champions total. Can also screw discards. CTL OPP

3 Dark Knight – Great recovery from a board wipe and works for your own as well. Augment your wide swinging with Dark Knight but don’t play it too early. TKN OPP

3 Thrasher Demon – Recovery from a board wipe and always trades up. Used for aggro. TKN

3 Guilt Demon – Recovery from a board wipe and can screw the opponent’s discard so they can’t Recycle. Use that sparingly as you have Necromancer.TKN OPP

Gold 1: 45

Removal: 25
3 Murderous Necromancer – Major threat the opponent must immediately kill. Provides a turn of good defense and repeated kills. Can help with offense potentially. TKN CTL

3 Medusa – Has a blocking body that can ambush for control too. One of the best cards for control.OPP CTL

3 Dark Assassin – Yet another threat like Murderous Necromancer but can be used immediately and doubles as an attacker. CTL

2 Angel of Death – Great AOE if you want and potential Air damage.

3 Apocalypse – Run mostly for the draw but the deck must have AOEs to gain advantage sometimes. Many other decks will out-body you, hence the large amount of board wipes. OPP DRW

2 Drain Essence – Kill spell for all the Silvers in the game and 37/51 or 72% of Golds plus the life gain rivaling that of Inner Peace makes for an excellent poptart. This goes doubly well with your other control cards which will naturally filter out anything that has 10+ defense. OPP CTL

3 Bitten – Generic control but works best on the opponent’s turn unlike Inner Demon. Most control will likely be played on the opponent’s turn. OPP DRW CTL

3 Inheritance of the Meek (Good) – AOE specifically for banishing out anything that isn’t a token, letting you often swing for game. This results in Inheritance of the Meek often being your endgame solution if drawn. Note: You can board wipe with this during an opponent’s turn! OPP DRW TKN CTL

3 Zombie Apocalypse – A great AOE to play when your token population is low, since you don’t get anything back for them. Works well at converting used up Silvers and Trihorror into masses of Zombies. If you have Wither in hand, you can disgustingly wipe out the opponent’s new toys as well. Note: You can board wipe with this during an opponent’s turn! OPP DRW TKN

Offense: 14
3 Trihorror – I would call this “MVP” if it wasn’t usable basically any time. Trihorror is something you actually want to slap down ASAP since it has breakthrough and you lose nothing if it dies, in fact he just splits into equal power and defense worth of Demons. This card is ridiculous and can be used with Final Task for stupidity as well as Corpse Taker to frustrate an opponent. This is also the best body in Evil. TKN

3 Infernal Gatekeeper – Main token generator. Be careful when you play this card as it’s usually a huge target the moment it hits the field. Try to ally every single turn, burning your health with you. If possible, resurrect a Righteous champion or use Drain Essence to replenish this HP. Reconsider if you mulligan 4+ cards in your opening hand how many you can afford to get. Generally rule of thumb is no more than 4 Demons from one Infernal Gatekeeper or you tend to suffer greatly during boardwipe. However, Inheritance of the Meek can turn extras into game. TKN MVP

2 Demon Breach – Used seldomly unless a board wipe was just played. Demon Breach is great on your own turn but only works on an opponent’s if you have no need for draw or have no control cards. On your turn, Demon Breach explodes into 3 demons and can come back any time you have a spare gold laying around to help pay for loyalty and re-play it. OPP TKN

3 The Risen – Can swing for game if there’s a clear field from an AOE set up previous turn. Also useful for a fast 9 extra damage to the wide swinging wall of tokens that turn, plus the extra power for everything else. Doesn’t count as OPP since it’s very bad at that moment. TKN DRW

3 Necromancer Lord – Most important card in the deck and can be used to recover from a board wipe. Use this sparingly and smartly and you can easily go for game. Remember the types of offense strategies (burn/freeze/air/breakthrough) and try those, or just go for blitz. Proper use of this requires dodging opponent’s Recycle attempts and knowing the better cards in the game. MVP

Utility: 6
3 Thought Plucker (Sage) – Pure draw and hand filtering engine. OPP DRW

3 Final Task – Combos with Trihorror effectively and useful with many others. Grab Corpse Taker on an opponent’s turn, then use Taker’s ability to grab a Champion you can permanently call next turn. Use it on an unbreakable. Use on Necromancer Lord to get a permanent Champion of your opponent’s instead of temporary. Thought Plucker on your turn gives you a total of Draw 2 Discard 2(opponent) which is far more than Final Task’s alternate effect. Murderous Necromancer for 3 zombies immediately and a kill. Angel of Death for an AOE with wings. Then there are a myriad of opponent’s cards!. OPP DRW

dark_knight
thrasher_demon
wither
guilt_demon
thought_plucker
murderous_necromancer
infernal_gatekeeper
trihorror
medusa
necromancer_lord
the_risen
final_task
drain_essence
demon_breach
dark_assassin
bitten
apocalypse
zombie_apocalypse
angel_of_death
inheritance_of_the_meek

 

Key Point stats

Keypoint totals:

  • OPP – 12 unique, 34 total cards. 57% of the deck works well on the opponent’s turn.
  • TKN – 10 unique, 29 total cards. 48% of the deck swings wide.
  • DRW – 7 unique, 21 total cards. 35% of the deck can give net hand advantage after it’s played.
  • CTL – 7 unique, 20 total cards. 33% of the deck can filter the field and answer threats.

Intersection – 173% total, spillover (intersection) of 73%. Cards, on average have 1.7 of the deck’s key points on each card. Therefore each draw in this deck has a quality rating of 1.7.


Draw quality (+10). Reminder this is extra over the normal 100%.

Please note that card quality does not mean anything objective. It’s a subjective self-measure of how well the deck does what it says it wants to. It measures synergy.

Card Changes

Right now, there are only 6 cards (10% of the deck, or 1/10 draws) that can confound loyalty/ally.

  • Loyalty/Ally – 6 unique, 17 total cards. 28% of the deck requires at least two other Evils.
  • Removable – 1 unique, 2 total cards. 5% of the loyals can be removed if something better is used.
  • Confound – 2 unique, 6 total cards. 10% of the deck screws up 28% of the deck. Low screw rate and basically only ever need the 3 minimum cards to activate a loyalty.

Removable Cards:

  • Angel of Death. This card is great but basically exists for you to dodge your own AOE as explained before and then get an extra attacker out of it. Not quite synergistic and can be replaced by Avenging Angel (Good).
  • Drain Essence. It’s pretty extra in this deck but works well for the purposes of healing. If you want something else that can help you stay alive while benefiting from existing control, try Drinker of Blood which also dodges your AOEs.
  • Demon Breach. While it’s part of your attacking strategy, Demon Breach is just one of those cards that can easily be changed into something else without much loss occurring at all. It’s helpful but can sometimes fall flat. For something that really helps you swing wide, try Deadly Raid (Sage).
  • Wither. Can be removed for the final copies of Deadly Raid and Avenging Angel if you don’t have all three of each in. Keep any remaining copies.

This is also covered in “Deck Stats” but here is a comprehensive list of the major cards recommended for this deck if you swap anything (within Base Set).

avenging_angel
deadly_raid
drinker_of_blood

Listed in order of desirability. Check below for what to replace and the updated Deck Stats.

Replace:

  1. Angel of Death
  2. Wither

Deck Stats:

  • No positive change. Purely for aggro and protection.
  • Small amount of control omitted.

Replace:

  1. Demon Breach
  2. Wither

Deck Stats:

  • OPP +5% (both are bad on opponent’s turn but this one has draw)
  • DRW +5%
  • Small amount of Control omitted.
  • Overall +10% (change to intersection/card quality)

Replace:

  1. Drain Essence
  2. Wither

Deck Stats:

  • OPP -3%
  • CTL -3%
  • Overall -6% (change to intersection/card quality)
  • Change is purely for more bodies, more AOE dodge and draining/direct damage which is consistent

Stats with All Changes

  • OPP – 59% of the deck works well on the opponent’s turn.
  • TKN – 48% of the deck swings wide.
  • DRW – 40% of the deck can give net hand advantage after it’s played.
  • CTL – 30% of the deck can filter the field and answer threats.

Intersection – 177% total, spillover (intersection) of 77%. Cards, on average have 1.8 of the deck’s key points on each card. Therefore each draw in this deck has a quality rating of 1.8.


Draw quality (+10). Reminder this is extra over the normal 100%.

New loyalty problems:

  • Loyalty/Ally – 5 unique, 15 total cards. 25% of the deck requires at least two other Evils.
  • Confound – 4 unique, 12 total cards. 20% of the deck screws up 25% of the deck. Not a horrible screw rate, about a comfortable need of 4 cards in hand for Loyalty.

Recommended change method for maximum deck efficacy. No efficiency changed, only card quality.

Stats with 2 Changes

Using only Avenging Angel and Deadly Raid, the stats become the following:

  • OPP – 62% of the deck works well on the opponent’s turn.
  • TKN – 48% of the deck swings wide.
  • DRW – 40% of the deck can give net hand advantage after it’s played.
  • CTL – 33% of the deck can filter the field and answer threats.

Intersection – 183% total, spillover (intersection) of 83%. Cards, on average have 1.8 of the deck’s key points on each card. Therefore each draw in this deck has a quality rating of 1.8.


Draw quality (+10). Reminder this is extra over the normal 100%.

New loyalty problems:

  • Loyalty/Ally – 5 unique, 15 total cards. 25% of the deck requires at least two other Evils.
  • Confound – 4 unique, 12 total cards. 20% of the deck screws up 25% of the deck. Not a horrible screw rate, about a comfortable need of 4 cards in hand for Loyalty.

Recommended change for less efficacy but the same efficiency as the above with slightly less card quality than the default.

This deck tends to be very fun to play for someone who enjoys field control and tempo-geared decks. Your own champions are about middle-power when they come down and you can filter your opponent down to that level with control cards. You’ll basically never run out of hand either. Always having a board wipe in hand for the right moment is crucial in Epic and this Evil deck has it in spades. Being able to answer any threat feels so safe and comfy. Evil really lacks decent bodies and hardcore Demon support in the base set but we make due with what we have here. Using a few “go for game” cards like Inheritance of the Meet, The Risen, or Deadly Raid can make the game end very quickly and suddenly if the opponent is not prepared.

This deck is easily frustrated by anything that can pull out a lot of healing while successfully fogging it. Thankfully, it’s difficult to actually pull something like that off against this deck. It can also become very easily frustrated by human token spam as it lacks much air or breakthrough.

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Epic: Base Set Evil Alignment

Evil cards feature many demons, vampires, undead and horror-centric concepts. Their overall theme is to control as hard as possible while punishing over-extension and going in for medium damage. The alignment tends to rely heavily on strong but mass-produced tokens and Blitz on the ground for damage.

Most of their champions are either mass-produced 2/2 Zombies or 4/4 Demons; with several blitzy, unbreakable ground attackers and a couple notable airborne. This leads Evil to rely very heavily on its control mechanics to set the pace of the game and get in damage. It has an easy time responding to any threat card.

Most of Evil’s individual damage attempts are rather weak. Let me illustrate this:

  • Condition Data
    Sum gold Evil champion power 66
    Avg gold Evil champion power 6
    Sum silver Evil champion power 18
    Avg silver Evil champion power 3

  • The data in this table shows that Evil gold champions are about the same as Good champions on average, even though there are less Evils. Their averages in both sections are a bit higher when discounting zombie tokens and anything that produces zombie tokens as these are definitely the weakest point in Evil. Don’t count too much on zombies unless you can get a lot of them immediately (Murderous Necromancer/The Risen). They essentially exist to block non-breakthrough champions and render them useless.

*One champion was discounted as it confounds the data. Necromancer Lord has 1 Power but operates more like a reusable Event, so it was left out. Thrasher Demon was counted as a 3/3 for Silvers since it should always attack immediately.

What might be surprising is the relative high power of your Silvers. Most of the time, Silvers are 1/3 or less the power of a Gold champion but in Evil, this is not the case. They are usually around 1/2 or better depending on what you choose to run in your deck. Note that for this data, the Zombie and Demon tokens were counted in Silver simply because Evil uses them as an offensive method

The clearest strategy in Evil seems to be pumping out a lot of little guys while popping your opponent’s big ground stuff so they have a clear field. It’s nearly trivial for you to play a kill every single turn on your opponent’s turn, then drop multiple Demons/Zombies/Silvers and just go to town. This also leaves you with a decent defense wall and many combinations of blocking to get efficient block-kills. Opponents will have to rely on board wipes to start gaining their own advantage while denying yours. “Swinging wide” is actually a completely viable strategy in Epic, it’s usually just not done since board wipes make that very costly. This will be Evil’s greatest strength and weakness.

While their average gold champion power is high, it’s pretty clear that their total is nowhere near Wild’s 116, giving them a ratio of 57%, the lowest in base set. Though it’s not that far off from Good—only 5%.


Offense

Defensive strategies in Epic have to eventually service an offensive strategy and somehow deal 30 damage. Evil’s offense is nothing to write home about, so it needs to have decent defense or its bodies on the field aren’t going to be very good for much at all. Defense can be serviceable in Evil if used to create a massive token wall or use large champions to block off attacks while throwing kill cards at anything it can’t block. In Evil there are 6 reliable single-target kills and 4 board wipes.

With 30 possible copies of something that can kill, you won’t have any trouble figuring out how to stall and build your army, then push the red button to start over. With so many threat cards in Evil (5) you can easily make a deck that forces opponents to run dry while you’re controlling, setting up a wall and then finally going for offense. You could even grind-game using the same tactics.

  • Condition Data
    Sum gold Evil champion defense 65
    Avg gold Evil champion defense 5.9
    Sum silver Evil champion defense 14
    Avg silver Evil champion defense 2.3

  • Evil clearly has the worst defense in base set by far. It’s significantly lower than Good and Sage, having only 53% of Wild’s 123 defense sum. That’s easily 20% less than the others and that’s a major problem. The average body on an evil gold is 6/6 and the average silver is 3/2. Obviously all these numbers can slightly increase if you run as many Demon tokens as possible and try not to use, for example Corpse Taker, as an attacker or blocker.

So how do you make these bad Evil bodies on the field workable? The simplest solution is to exploit their gratuitous number of board wipes and kill cards to “filter” the game down for your opponent. For example, if you have a few of your average Evils out (6/6) and a few average Wilds out (9/9), what you can do is tilt the average downward by killing their best stuff (Burrowing Wurm, Kong, etc.) and leaving the weaklings to get trampled by your army. Then you can just expoit the huge number of Demons and Zombies to swing wide and block wide—even blocking for a kill sometimes.


Defense

Once again, “best card” is always going to be a difficult concept to define in a rigorous way. As usual, I’m going with how these cards compare with other cards that do the same job in any alignment. So I present Necromancer Lord and Trihorror.

Evil’s best cards aren’t necessarily in the same candle light as other alignments but they are pretty amazing. Necromancer Lord is a very fast unit that can grab the best units in the game, so it has to be mentioned. I don’t know of any way to construct a working Evil deck without Necromancer Lord since you can get anything you’ve killed (or that has died) which is quite a lot. Take care to use this ability to deny Recycle as well, which can deny your ability right back. As for Trihorror, I’m not saying it should go in every Evil deck but I am saying it’s one of their best cards and outclasses several other huge breakthroughs. A Burrowing Worm with nothing to lose when it dies, ouch. One of the terrifying things you can do with this is Final Task it out for 12/12 blitz+breakthrough and then when it dies at the end of turn you get three 4/4 Demons. Using this in combination with Infernal Gatekeeper is a road to a demon army. The best part is how it survives board wipes.

Honorable mention: Infernal Gatekeeper.

Infernal Gatekeeper just dumps Demons on the field everywhere. Normally, you would be wary of losing 1 life for some trash tokens that can easily be replaced but in a color that has life drain, Infernal Gatekeeper works really well, especially for Demon army decks. At first, it’s a purely defensive card, allowing you to tank the average Wild if you can throw a zombie in there and then pump Demons for a really wide swing.

murderous_necromancer
Overall, despite Good being considered the weakest alignment in base by most fans, Evil is skirting the line pretty close. It lacks any usable form of body on average so most of its strategies rely on the opponent’s champions being targetable and breakable. Some won’t be, so Evil has to come up with some creative ways to remove a lot of badass Sage cards. What’s great about Evil is how it can reach outside its own deck to pull more offense and defense out of the aether with the mass of tokens.

It can easily generate them three at a time, so with Zombies you’re talking 6/6 getting added to the field and with Demons that’s 12/12 (that Trihorror makes more sense to you now I bet). The best part being that they’re split up so if you want, you can attack in a group as though it were one big creature all along!

While Evil’s negative points are really negative, its good points are really good. This alignment has the most kill I’ve seen in any of them and can easily and consistently board wipe and spot-remove all day. Since it can just cripple any deck that relies on permanents over flashes, Evil tends to hamstring winning points while gathering up its own. This makes it decided not the weakest alignment in base set, nor even close despite its low body numbers.

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Epic: Good Deck

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If you haven’t checked out the base set Good analysis, do that now!

In Epic, you really need to choose one of only a few offensive methods to get in your damage and win. You can go with Airborne, Breakthrough, burn, swing wide, control, or freeze. This deck chooses to exploit the fact that Good has the best airbornes in Epic and use this fact to its advantage to beat out other Airborne strategies, as well as fogging direct damage (and some Breakthrough) with life gain. It can’t really do anything about freezing except for Ceasefire. Make sure you’re wiping the field regularly to stop their damage buildup on the ground from getting too intense.

Common Plays

Use your cards listed in the decklist’s Offense category, to swing in the air, dealing damage. Here’s how you should do this in general, based on a few factors:

  1. Always swing if the opponent has no blockers in the air. Use just one of your champions to attack if you think you might have to block.
  2. With Gold Dragon, swinging into air blockers is fine if you can gain some health back. Try to keep the Dragon up so you don’t lose it.
  3. Ambush in Angelic Protector (or use Brave Squire) on your own turn if they block your air and it would die. It now won’t die.
  4. Don’t try to use removal when attacking as a group. You’ll still be counted as blocked. Use group attacks if you need to reduce the opponent’s opportunities to play gold cards.
  5. Always use “bait” cards before your MVPs. Bait is stuff that the opponent must kill such as High King, or else they’re going to eat dirt every turn.
  6. Thundurus should usually be played before Gold Dragon. It’s bait, Gold has blitz anyway, Thundurus can block for a turn, and it doesn’t matter if it’s telegraphed since Gold Dragon is worth more to you.
  7. Always try to pair Lord of the Arena with Faithful Pegasus over other humans since it gives you 13 damage in the air.
  8. High King and other removal should always target firstly, threats, then air blockers, then other things. Threats are other things similar to High King that force you to respond or the opponent will gain too much ground.
  9. Use Brave Squire on your air attacks when you see an opening, since you get the protection and the (practically) double damage.
  10. Ceasefire is best used when an opponent starts with their weakest champion.

Offense Priority

Play attackers in this order of priority:

  1. Angel of Light/MVP if you will die without gaining the life.
  2. Angel of Mercy if an MVP is dead (grabbing in Offense Priority order)
  3. Thundurus if playing Gold Dragon next turn, or needing bait for either MVP
  4. MVP (Avenging Angel and Gold Dragon)
  5. Angelic Protector if an MVP is attacking on your turn. Or if one is out and it’s the opponent’s turn and they are attacking.
  6. Angel of Light if you have nothing else.
  7. Angel of Mercy if you have nothing else (though at this point, you can probably resurrect any of the above).

Opponent Turn Priority

General case for how to spend your gold on an opponent’s turn:

  1. Inner Peace/Angel of Light if you will die without the life gain.
  2. Stand Alone if you will die without it or as “nuke timing” to open up a blitz attack on your next turn
  3. Ceasefire if the opponent will attack with a total of 10+ damage outside their first attack, especially if they attack with their weakest first.
  4. Banishment if something must die on the opponent’s turn to live/protect something, etc.
  5. Ambush blocker if you will die without it. (Choose the least valuable)
  6. Resurrection/Angel of Mercy if an MVP is dead or will die
  7. Brave Squire/Angelic Protector if an MVP, Thundurus or Angel of Mercy (with those targets) might die
  8. Noble Unicorn
  9. Use various Draw 2 effects if your own hand is 3 or less.
  10. Ambush in an Attacker setup (see Offensive Priority)
  11. Courageous Soul to set up a decent attacking turn.
  12. Other things (Inner Peace because you want to, Angel of Light because why not, etc.)

Legend for deck keypoints:

  • OPP – Counts as playable on the opponent’s turn. This is essential to keeping good rhythm and affecting game play every single turn. Doesn’t count re-usable.
  • AIR – Airborne, as is required for this strategy to work. Higher number means the deck has lower overall Power but is more consistent.
  • DRW – Draws at least 2 cards, or is a draw engine. Required to keep playing cards every turn including on the opponent’s turn, especially if you’re board wiping.
  • PRO – Protection. This could be anything from unbreakable to untargetable but basically means this unit provides or has protection from enemy cards so that the main strategy won’t crumble.
  • MVP – Don’t squander these as they’re your best cards.
GOOD Stuff
Silver 0: 12

3 Faithful Pegasus – Replaces itself and can make our non-airborne into fliers so they aren’t uselessly sitting on the ground. Very devastating with Lord of the Arena. AIR

3 Courageous Soul – Playable on opponent’s turn. The buff still happens even if he’s blocked. Can boost our air army in case we get two or more at a time. OPP

3 Brave Squire – Use this to go all-in with an attack, knowing it can’t die, or use it to protect your best cards and block. PRO OPP

3 Priestess of Angeline – Life gain every time you play a card and it threatens to block when you’ve used it three times. Just using it three times is sufficient but more is better.

Gold 1: 48

Removal: 18
3 High King – Repeated use of banishment. Using it on the opponent’s turn to react to new things can cause it to be destroyed, so normally you would hold this until needed and only snipe things you can see.

3 Palace Guard – More High King but has a blocker body and can be used with Faithful Pegasus.

3 Banishment – More spot-removal but draws a card if played on your own turn. OPP

3 Lord of the Arena – At first it may seem like an attacker but really it’s a kill spell. Since it’s opponent’s choice, it’s less good than High King but it can be used with Faithful Pegasus for massive damage.

3 Divine Judgment – AOE removal, generally one of the things you wait on to start the field over. Your High Kings and Thundurus will be left alone! OPP DRW

3 Stand Alone (Sage) – Chosen for its specific help to this deck, allowing a selective AOE. Using this while you both have airborne is probably a bad idea. 10% of the deck is AOEs so you get these on average right when you need them. OPP DRW

Offense: 18
3 Thundurus – There’s no synergy in this deck for Thundurus in this version. However, he makes a great unbanishable for your Divine Judgments and can tank just about anything in the air and on the ground. Thundurus is excellent when paired with Gold Dragon and just fine as a single attacker in the air on his own. AIR

3 Gold Dragon – Makes you practically invincible if more than it attacks. Makes you definitely invincible if attacking with Thundurus. AIR MVP

3 Angel of Light – Basically Inner Peace with wings. Play this as an ambush at the end of an opponent’s turn or when you can block safely for 6. AIR OPP

3 Avenging Angel – A card so good it can go in almost any Epic deck. This card makes you invincible and practically has to be responded to on the turn it’s played. AIR PRO MVP

3 Angelic Protector – Use this card on the opponent’s turn (usually) to stop target/break of your MVPs or your attackers, then it starts becoming an attacker. AIR PRO OPP

3 Angel of Mercy – The most disgusting protection. Since you can ambush this in on the opponent’s turn, you can basically just let stuff die and then bring it back. Used on MVPs or attackers. AIR PRO OPP

Utility/Defense: 12
3 Noble Unicorn – Draw engine. Bring it out on the opponent’s turn at all costs so you can get the benefits immediately. OPP DRW

3 Inner Peace – Card is ridiculous once you set up a couple blockers. You can get this back over and over and spam it on the opponent’s turn. Potentially removable for Wave of Transformation or Memory Spirit. It’s in this version since it serves as a buffer and OPP. OPP

3 Ceasefire – A very unpopular card that gives mad draw while essentially skipping the rest of the opponent’s turn. Be sure to get a blocker ready to go since you have to throw one under the bus. OPP DRW PRO

3 Resurrection – Less powerful than Angel of Mercy but essentially gives us more copies of her effect. Be sure you save your gold for this if you know you need protection on an MVP. OPP PRO DRW

faithful_pegasus
brave_squire
courageous_soul
priestess_of_angeline
stand_alone
inner_peace
divine_judgment
high_king
banishment
ceasefire
resurrection
noble_unicorn
lord_of_the_arena
palace_guard
angel_of_mercy
angelic_protector
thundarus
gold_dragon
avenging_angel
angel_of_light

Key Point stats

Keypoint totals:

  • OPP – 12 unique, 36 total cards. 60% of the deck works on the opponent’s turn.
  • AIR – 7 unique, 21 total cards. 35% of the deck swings in the air.
  • DRW – 5 unique, 15 total cards. 25% of the deck can give net hand advantage after it’s played.
  • PRO – 6 unique, 18 total cards. 30% of the deck can protect you or your cards.

Intersection – 150% total, spillover (intersection) of 50%. Cards, on average have 1.5 of the deck’s key points on each card. Therefore each draw in this deck has a quality rating of 1.5. This could potentially be increased by using some Sage cards but would reduce ally and loyalty probabilities.


Draw quality (+10). Reminder this is extra over the normal 100%.

Please note that card quality does not mean anything objective. It’s a subjective self-measure of how well the deck does what it says it wants to. It measures synergy.

Card Changes

Right now, there are only 3 cards (5% of the deck, or 1/20 draws) that can confound loyalty/ally. Using Memory Spirit which is the first choice, would drop that to 1/10 cards but may not be so bad.

  • Loyalty/Ally – 6 uniques, 18 total cards. 30% of the deck requires at least two other Goods.
  • Removable – 3 uniques, 9 total cards. 15% of the loyals can be removed if something better is used.
  • Confound – 1 unique, 3 total cards. 5% of the deck screws up 30% of the deck. Very low screw rate and basically only ever need the 3 minimum cards to activate a loyalty.

Removable Cards:

  • Inner Peace. I mentioned this in the deck list but Inner Peace can be removed for something like Memory Spirit (Sage) which hits AIR, OPP and can re-use events such as Ceasefire or your AOEs. Right now, it’s being used to repeatedly trigger Loyalty/Ally over and over, so this may be the last one you attempt to remove. If it does get removed and you want something similar in its place, go for Mighty Blow (Wild, DRW, OPP) which has one keypoint over Inner Peace and can slap down at the right moment to win the game 2 turns earlier. When the opponent is at 14-16 life and you have one attacker, Mighty Blow is excellent. Its uses are going to be mostly limited to openings that you have created, however.
  • Palace Guard. Basically just here for the body. It’s a great card but if an attacker such as Winter Fairy (Sage, AIR, DRW) goes here, it can give draw. The deck has a lot of removal as-is.
  • Lord of the Arena. It’s re-usable Palace Guard so you should consider keeping this over it if you remove only one. And definitely remove this before Inner Peace as it’s one of the repeated-use ally cards. While its 2-card combo is really amazing, Lord of the Area is basically just removal you have to work for and is worse than High King most of the time. Though it and Palace Guard are both good blockers and that’s why both are still in the deck. Possibly remove for Winter Fairy, Wave of Transformation, or Kong if you really want something beefy that can kill. I recommend keeping Lord over Kong since it has blitz. Try to replace with something that has ambush or blitz and can be a legit attacker (specifically, Memory Spirit if you don’t have it in already).
  • Priestess of Angeline. She’s really just here for the extra life on top of Angel of Light and Inner Peace. If you do replace cards such that you now have at least 6 Sage that cost gold, you can run three Muse (Sage, OPP, DRW) over Priestess of Angeline.

This is also covered in “Deck Stats” but here is a comprehensive list of the major cards recommended for this deck if you swap anything (within Base Set).

memory_spirit
muse
winter_fairy

Listed in order of desirability. Check below for what to replace and the updated Deck Stats.

Replace:

  1. Palace Guard
  2. Lord of the Arena

Deck Stats:

  • OPP +5%
  • AIR +5%
  • Overall +10% (change to intersection/card quality)

Replace (only if using 6 gold Sage):

  1. Priestess of Angeline

Deck Stats:

  • OPP +5%
  • DRW +5%
  • Overall +10% (change to intersection/card quality)

Replace:

  1. Palace Guard
  2. Lord of the Arena
  3. Consider Memory Spirit and Muse first!

Deck Stats:

  • AIR +5%
  • DRW +5%
  • Overall +10% (change to intersection/card quality)

Stats with All Changes

  • OPP – 14 unique, 42 total cards. 70% of the deck works on the opponent’s turn.
  • AIR – 9 unique, 27 total cards. 45% of the deck swings in the air.
  • DRW – 7 unique, 21 total cards. 35% of the deck can give net hand advantage after it’s played.
  • PRO – 6 unique, 18 total cards. 30% of the deck can protect you or your cards.

Intersection – 180% total, spillover (intersection) of 80%. Cards, on average have 1.8 of the deck’s key points on each card. Therefore each draw in this deck has a quality rating of 1.8.


Draw quality (+10). Reminder this is extra over the normal 100%.

New loyalty problems:

 

  • Loyalty/Ally – 4 uniques, 12 total cards. 20% of the deck requires at least two other Goods.
  • Confound – 4 unique, 12 total cards. 20% of the deck screws up 20% of the deck. Basically, you’ll need 4 cards in hand most of the time to activate one Loyalty.
  • Reminder that technically Muse doesn’t cause a problem for the Ally cards, only Loyals, so this math is slightly off (looks worse than it is).

Recommended change method for maximum deck efficacy. Less efficient method, but not prohibitively.

Stats with 2 Changes

Using only the first two changes, Memory Spirit and Muse, the stats become the following:

  • OPP – 15 unique, 45 total cards. 70% of the deck works on the opponent’s turn.
  • AIR – 8 unique, 24 total cards. 40% of the deck swings in the air.
  • DRW – 6 unique, 18 total cards. 30% of the deck can give net hand advantage after it’s played.
  • PRO – 6 unique, 18 total cards. 30% of the deck can protect you or your cards.

Intersection – 170% total, spillover (intersection) of 70%. Cards, on average have 1.7 of the deck’s key points on each card. Therefore each draw in this deck has a quality rating of 1.7.


Draw quality (+10). Reminder this is extra over the normal 100%.

New loyalty problems:

  • Loyalty/Ally – 4 uniques, 12 total cards. 20% of the deck requires at least two other Goods.
  • Confound – 3 unique, 9 total cards. 15% of the deck screws up 20% of the deck. You’ll need 4 in hand for some loyalties but not all of them.
  • Reminder that technically Muse doesn’t cause a problem for the Ally cards, only Loyals, so this math is slightly off (looks worse than it is).

Recommended change if you prefer a middle ground on extra efficacy while only giving up a small amount of efficiency.

 

My final thoughts on this deck are that it’s very fun to play and when it “goes off” it’s almost sure to win. It has to go off, though. Most specifically, the trends I notice winning the most games are the following:

  • Using at least 1 MVP for at least 3 of the game’s turns total
  • Nuking for at least +3
  • Drawing at least 6 extra cards off things like Noble Unicorn
  • Using Thundurus’ ability ever
  • Attacking in the air 5 turns

If you can do any of these, you usually end up winning. If you can do several, you can significantly increase the chances that you win. Though Good is widely regarded as the worst pure alignment in base set (and I can agree with that), the problems it has can be mitigated if constructed and played correctly. This is my attempt to put it as on-par with other decks as possible. By giving it minimum 1.5 card quality, it means the draws in this deck go significantly farther than a generic Good deck. At the 1.7 modified version (which I prefer, actually) the card quality is so significant that you can get 2-3 of those winning points bare minimum every game.

Its goals seem good enough that the card quality is leaning more toward an objective measure of how good it is, rather than a pure synergy assessment. Swinging in the air, drawing cards and playing on the opponent’s turns are some of the most fundamentally necessary things in all of Epic. Protecting the ability to swing in the air is very nearly the same as doing more of it as well.

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Epic: Base Set Good Alignment

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Good cards feature many angels, priests, military soldiers and human-centric concepts. Their overall theme is to defend as hard as possible while punishing over-extension and going in for medium damage that is difficult to block. The alignment tends to rely heavily upon Airborne to deal their damage. Most of their champions are either going to produce a lot of 1/1 Human tokens or fly overhead and attack directly. Naturally, this means that many of Good’s champions are going to be weaker. It’s a natural fact in Epic that when a card is a token or airborne, it’s weaker to balance out the game’s combat system.

When you combine two types of damage generation (medium and weak), you get a very slow offensive game. This means you have to make up for it with defense. Good has just the means to take care of defense. Let’s break down their actual power bodies, not regarding abilities at all.

 

  • Sum total of Gold Champion Power = 72
  • Average of Gold Champion Power = 6*
  • Sum of Silver Champion Power = 13
  • Average of Silver Champion Power = 2.17

*One champion was discounted as it confounds the data. High King has 0 Power but operates more like a reusable Event, so it was left out.

As you can see, with their golds being an average of 6 Power, they aren’t competing very well. Their power sum is 72 total, which reflects their standing against the highest power alignment, Wild (116), which is 62% of the total. Being about 2/3 of the best isn’t very good when you have this much room for gradation. Therefore, Good must (and does) have an alternate solution. Instead, it uses the fact that it can gain a lot of life, block with ambush, play its options close to the chest, and swing over the heads of most blockers in the game. In fact, their average for airborne golds remains the same at 6.

  • Sum of Airborne gold power = 36
  • Average Airborne gold power = 6

They even have an airborne silver that’s a 5/5. The total non-good gold airbornes is 52 out of 10 cards, which is 5.2 average. This means, the average Good airborne beats the average non-Good airborne by 1 point in damage. So if the two were to just swing over and over, one card from good could kill in 5 turns, while every other color would take almost 6 turns. Reminder, that’s just a control scenario and doesn’t necessarily reflect any given game. This does mean that Good’s entire offensive strategy is to kill in the air.

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Defensive strategies are all about surviving while setting something up. Since ultimately the game must revolve around killing at 30 damage in constructed (never try to draw out in 60-card constructed), defense is a way to set up one’s offense. As Good has a pretty bad offense, it must therefore have good defense. Its primary strategy seems to be sitting behind huge blockers, huge numbers of small blockers, and gaining life en-masse to keep the opponent placing out Champions.

Once there are enough on the field, Good wipes the board and punishes the overextension, swinging in those moments where you start over fresh with very little board presence. As such, spot-removal in Good is actually best used on the opponent’s turn just after a board wipe (or the game start) to keep the opponent’s pace low while you swing with airborne. Or else when the opponent plays an airborne blocker. Or else when you have ambushed an attacker on your opponent’s turn, you can play spot removal on your turn. Any of these three will net you the best possible use of tempo control with spot-removal, and stave off that eventual board wipe while letting you chip some damage.

If Good can hit with 1 flyer per turn (average) for 5 straight turns, they can usually win barring odd scenarios. Generally, this means their defensive strategy is to just stuff a ton of humans onto the ground (or midrange blockers on the ground to stop breakthrough) and spam life replenishment on the opponent’s turns where they aren’t using spot-removal. Inner Peace is a particularly nasty reusable life gain that can sometimes fog an opponent’s entire attacking turn even if you have no blockers. Otherwise though, it can steadily pad out your life for those inevitable turns where the opponent takes the upper hand.

  • Sum of Gold defense Champions = 90
  • Average of Gold defense Champions = 7.5*

*One champion was discounted as it confounds the data. High King has 1 Defense but operates more like a reusable Event, so it was left out. Again.

As a percentage of the highest alignment Defense, Good has 73% of Wild’s (123, avg 9.5) defense, which is the highest again in Base Set. This is pretty good when compared to the other alignments which are all below Good, though Sage has 87 total, which is very close to Good’s 90. It’s significantly tankier than Evil but its tokens are much weaker and Evil also uses token walls.

Good really starts to shine with its life gain. As the average damage from the highest (Wild) is 9 per Champion, Good must therefore gain 9 life per turn per champion that it does not block to break even. Cards like Inner Peace and the Righteous-givers really take this to heart. Namely two ridiculous cards that I will cover later can easily make you not only break even but be practically unkillable.

Defining what is the “best card” is always difficult. What I’ve chosen to go with is how these cards compare with other cards that do the same job in any alignment. So I present Gold Dragon and Avenging Angel.

avenging_angel
gold_dragon

Both of these cards make you invincible while they’re on the field (since Righteous means you gain your Power as life when you damage anything), have the average airborne damage in Good (6) which is 1 higher than the mainstream, both attack immediately, and both swing in the freaking air. It’s actually difficult to say which of the two is more insane. Basically, when either of these cards hit the field, the opponent has to get rid of them immediately or you’re going to dominate the game. These cards will easily win you games. At 6 total copies (in every Good deck), that’s 10% of a constructed deck. If you set up a draw engine with a Noble Unicorn, after your opening turn, it only takes 4 draws to see one of them. Their biggest weakness is hurr-durr “dies to removal” which is basically anything’s weakness.

Honorable mentions: Angel of Mercy and Angel of Light.

angel_of_mercy
angel_of_light

These two are provably less ridiculous champions, however they both have a major advantage over Avenging Angel and Gold Dragon—Ambush, so you can play them on an opponent’s turn, have super-blitz (basically prep them on your first attacking turn), use their abilities one turn earlier, and open up your turn for more options including life gain and spot removal. Angel of Mercy is amazing since it can get back all of the other 3 cards after they inevitably die. Since there’s practically no opportunity cost for not playing her, you have every incentive to hold on to this angel until the perfect moment. Angel of Light is one turn of Inner Peace slapped onto a fast airborne champion. That’s just amazing. Thier Power is all average or below, but since this makes 4 really good airbornes for you (and most decks struggle getting even that many), you’ll definitely have air superiority for the fight. With 10% more added to you deck, you now know that 20% of your deck are going to be some of the best cards in the game and that makes it very easy to draw (about 1 of these four cards in the opening hand).

Overall, Good is widely considered to be the weakest of the four alignments as of the base set. I can see exactly how players would reach that conclusion both theoretically and in practice. Good has the worst overall power, only a mid-line defense, and relies way too heavily on stalling—a tactic that is historically bad in card games, since it gives opponents more turns play terrifying cards. It can also be very frustrating to play against as it gains a ton of life, which naturally tests the patience of card gamers.
Are you just griefing me? You’re not even hurting me, this game is just taking forever. ~Some Asshole

 

However, the good points that Good has are the best. It has arguably the best two champions in the base set and can both protect and resurrect them almost endlessly. Not to mention the scary draw engine it can use to get to these champions. However, two does not a deck make. This is where Good starts running into trouble. Their biggest weakness is actually consistency. Some games, Good “goes off” and does some pretty spectacular stuff, allowing it to compete and often win. Other games, it bricks and continues to brick. By the time you get what you need to fix everything, the game is already lost. Epic doesn’t have time for all this gathering.

Worse still, two of its best four cards are alignment-locked to Good (and Angel of Light is dependent). With very little ability to splash in other alignments that may fix its weaknesses, Good ranks firmly as the lowest of the four pure colors in base set.

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Hopefully you all found this an informative and helpful article. If so, be sure to share this with your friends!

Epic Card Game Review

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Epic is a game where two Elder Gods are vying for superiority. Each can call upon mighty champions or game changing events to alter destiny. The cards themselves and the gameplay really exemplify this. But is this game worth a shit?

angel_of_mercy

The game is fully card-based, so what you get is a cheap box full of cards. The box won’t hold more than a single sleeved preconstructed deck (60) of cards despite it coming with 128. The box is also low quality. Basically, getting a storage option is necessary to keep the cards protected. If you buy 3 boxes for a full playset, get a large storage option (384 sleeved cards).

The cards themselves are of middle quality. I was able to safely have 20 matches shuffling these before I saw wear on the edges enough to make me want sleeves. On a scale of “Yu-Gi-Oh” to “Vanguard” I give them a “Pokemon”. Anyone who has felt all 3 know that Vanguard is amazing, Yu-Gi-Oh feels like you pulled it out of a garbage dump and Pokemon is dead center. I did find out that the cards are slightly hydrophobic, which no other TCG is to my knowledge besides Cardfight Vanguard. It gets major props for that smooth waxy finish protecting it.

The card frame design is pretty amazing considering the subpar quality of White Wizard’s other game, Star Realms. This far and away beats other card games out there right now.

The art in this game is fabulous and takes your breath away like in Star Realms. White Wizard seems to have found a handful of amazing artists who they reuse frequently and are on par or better than Magic’s new Zendikar art.

How does a game of Epic play? Each player can have Champions (cards with Power/Defense) in their deck or Events, which are cards that go to the discard after resolving.

First, players each gain 1 “gold” which is used to pay for all of the powerful champions. Gold champions must make up at least 2/3 of a player’s deck. Currently, only 1 gold cost Champions exist which is necessary due to how the game is balanced. Champions with a 0 cost are silver and can be played any number of times per turn. However you may only have up to 1/3 of a constructed deck being silvers.

Next, the turn player draws a card and play begins. The turn player may attack in any order, play cards in any order, and attack-and-play in any order. What this means is that you can start right off with an attack, then play a Champion, then attack, play an Event, etc. There’s no fixed phase system in play. This greatly increases the number of choices a player has. When a Champion is placed into play, it goes into the “Preparation” zone face up. This denotes that it cannot use its expend (turn sideways) abilities or attack that turn, but can block on the opponent’s turn. If a Champion has blitz, it ignores those restrictions while in that zone. Before this phase is actually a step where the turn player prepares all of their champions, taking them out of that zone and turning them vertically.

A player may attack and play cards until they are either content with their actions or have no more to take, then end their turn. This is the last time an opponent could play a card on the turn player’s turn. Only Events and Champions with Ambush can be played on an opponent’s turn and only during specific moments. These moments are:

  • When your opponent attacks, you can play an ambush or event
  • When you would declare a block, you can play an ambush or event
  • When your opponent’s turn starts to end, you can play an ambush or event

These seem limited, and relative to other games they are—but for Epic this is just right. There’s no “stack” in Epic, and they got rid of the old version of this game’s hideous “the line” as well (Epic was once an old terrible TCG). Instead, due to the new rules about when cards can be played, a card is fully resolved before priority of play passes to another player. So for instance, if you ambush in a Champion when the opponent attacks, you have time to declare it as a blocker too!

Combat essentially works the way you think it will (attack, block, subtract power from defense, break 0 defense champions) but with an important twist: An attacking player may declare an attack group of any size. This completely ruins the problem in Magic the Gathering where two players’ fields become a Game of Chicken. Your opponent can also block with any size group against yours. Usually both players have equal field standing and will be attacking and blocking one at a time. This is because a player chooses how her Champion’s power is divided among the opponent’s defense which could leave a player with many broken Champions depending on the situation. Combat feels fresh and fast in Epic, with many “back and forth moments”.

You start with 30 life. Attack your opponent directly or play burn events to reduce their life to 0 and win!

There are 4 factions, Good, Wild, Sage, and Evil. Each have a unique feel and do different things without straying too far from one another.

Good

Focuses on spamming tiny humans for guard, airborne angels (air champions can only be stopped by other airborne) and rapidly increasing their health. They feel powerful as they continue to move the opponent’s goalposts. Most of their attacks will be in the air and direct while having a huge ground army for guard as well as playing keep away with life. This makes for a gap-engineering play style.

Evil

Has several ways to synergize its champions, often by getting many types of boons from spamming mid-point demons or weak zombies. When I say “spam” in this game is mean it. Put 3 zombies into play. 3 demons. 6 humans. 4 wolves. Fuck your face. In addition Evil can nuke the most and has highest sheer quantity of spot removal.

Wild

Wild decks drop big shit that’s fast and aim fire at your face. Tons of their best stuff has Blitz which allows you to do things NOW, Ambush which is for very impatient people who want to summon on an opponent’s turn, and the ability to take huge 18 power champions and Breakthrough opposing guard for spillover damage. What if you aren’t going spasticly fast or hard enough? Make them eat fireballs to the face.

Sage

Sage focuses on having an answer to everything. Between constantly increasing their hand and options, Sage can usually play cards on their turn and opponent’s every round. With absolutely ridiculous endurance and reduction of chance, it’s rare you can come up with a situation to put Sage into that it can’t get out of. All your stuff is unkillable? Okay, they are just wolves now. By the way, freeze your whole field while I hit you in the air and drop dragons on your champions. My turn…draw 2 cards.

The actual exchanges in the game require tight assessment from both players. There is a lot of interactions. Despite this, you cannot stop your opponent from doing anything. It just happens to you. The best you can muster is an after-the-fact play. With 2/3 of cards costing 1 gold (the rest are free) and each player getting 1g per each turn (yours and your opponents) games can afford to have epic exchanges right off the bat with no boring buildup such as in magic, but no spunk-gargle cardspam such as in Yu-Gi-Oh. My best take on the feel is “Midgame in a MtG World Tournament” at all times starting at turn 1.

Throw the rulebook away. It’s useless garbage and worth less than the paper it’s printed on. My first 10 games were incorrect due to its terrible wording. Get the rules from the official site.

Magic players will struggle. You will constantly try to “translate” the game into MtG terms and fail because this is not Magic. In addition, you won’t be able to keep up with the deadly pace if you’re used to turns 1-3 being “do nothing but set up”.

Some reviewers and casual board gamers have called Epics games “swingy”. The idea being that since every single card is game shattering, it just randomly screws you. However, I have not found this. Maybe because my opponents are pro tour material. Every single card played can turn the game so that counts for your own. The entire game is about seeing the right play and reducing misplays.

Final Thoughts

Can I recommend this game?

I am morally obligated to. It beats every TCG on the market despite not being one (it’s an ECG, or Expandable Card Game). Epic comes with 1 of every tournament legal card you need. 3 boxes ($10-14 each) gets you a full playset and enough to cube draft. The base box has 4 balanced 30 card preconstructed decks. It has a reusable sealed format built in to each box as well as draft and open draft. The rules support multi-player and even some unique multi-player formats. The main site also states that more formats are coming. Basically $30-46 gets you every card for every format for a great game.

Verdict: We’ll be supporting this one on V-Mundi.

More

If you’re looking to get started more on Epic, try the following:

Top

Download Digimon Battle Evolution

Digimon Battle Evolution is a Digimon card game for two players made by me. Based on the Playstation 1 title “Digimon World: Digital Card Battles” with several changed and updated rules, many altered cards (plus new cards) and completely new game features and concepts. Pick a powerful partner Digimon that easily evolves. Play a deck containing any of eight types of Digimon, or mix-and-match types.

Each player will send out their Digimon, evolve, and support them with their own cards. The Digimon battle until one player achieves 4 KOs! Digimon Battle Evolution is an Expandable Card Game, (ECG) and is free for life. Several expansion sets are currently planned.

Right now, you can print the cards for play or download the module on Tabletop Simulator to play digitally.

Print & Play

Follow this process if you’d like to print out the cards and play with them. Note: I will not be able to organize a printable version of the full 500+ unique cards (with different printable counts), since it is quite difficult. I suggest that you start with a deck list and print only those cards. More detailed version of these steps including starter decks here.

  1. Save any card images from this site’s Card Gallery
  2. Download TCG Proxy Generator (Windows / Mac OS)
  3. Open the Proxy Generator application
  4. Drag cards you saved into the application on the upper-right corner as it instructs. Fill the page and you can click “Next Page” to make more.
  5. Check any options you want and press “Print” when done. Save the filename with the “.pdf” extension, since it’s not set by default.
  6. Open the PDF you created in a viewer such as Adobe Reader and print it (usually on normal copy paper).
  7. The resulting print should be a 3×3 cards page (or pages) where each card is 2.5″ by 3.5″. Cut those cards out.
  8. Take card sleeves that are Standard poker size (such as Magic: The Gathering or Pokemon) and slip these printed cards and some sort of other game card into the sleeve.
  9. Play!

Download & Play

 

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TABLETOP SIMULATOR MODULE:

 http://steamcommunit…s/?id=710666368

Or search “Digimon Battle Evolution” in the Steam Workshop for TTS.

Full Article

What’s wrong with this picture

What’s wrong with this picture?

The Cardfight Wikia is actually using my custom clan icons for Gold Paladin, Narukami, and Angel Feather.

Someone seriously thought these were legit and official. I’m super flattered and boy I love that those are popular enough to put on the wiki, but unless you want to be dishonest, those aren’t official.

But I have to say, this is totally amazing and awesome. I feel awesome.