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Ah, missed that. It would be too damn strong otherwise, especially since Energy already has Tick Bomb to destroy structures outright, and Incendiaries that deals 3 damage to all structures.
Echo on
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AegisFear My DanceOvershot Toronto, Landed in OttawaRegistered Userregular
For a second I thought I read the Growth creature as "increase your opponent's resources by 1", which made me wonder why the hell anyone would ever play considering the lacklustre stats by comparison.
Dust Runner is amazing. It is almost good enough to make me switch back to Energy.
"All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes to make it possible." - T.E. Lawrence
Man the random single card buy is the way to go. Just got a God Hand and a Kinfolk Brave out of 5 draws. And a Wildling and a Plating.
I still feel as though it's too early in my play to go heavy random single; I need packs to build up a card collection if I'm ever going to have a chance to branch away from my wolves into another deck type.
On the other hand, somehow I need to find some quakes.
Okay, I'm turning to those with more experience. I have a Energy-Splashed-With-1-Cost-Growth deck that I'm enjoying. It does well against pure Energy decks and has good, close games with Order. Pure Growth, though? I can do nothing 75% of the time.
Now, outside "Have better luck on Drawing Scrolls" which is the counter to everything, is there an accepted Energy counter to, specifically, Great Wolves and their Wolf-Tide decks? They have too much health to direct damage down, they can easily eat an entire row of defenses in 1-2 turns and short of Iron Ogres (which I don't run, because the 7 cost ends up being too restraining in my deck) nothing I have can stand toe-to-toe without a Potion or Plating.
The two cards I fear the most playing against Energy are Potion of Resistance and Thunder Surge. It's hard to maintain any kind of decent offensive or defensive positioning with Thunder Surge to contend with, and if one wipes out your whole army it's extremely hard to recover. You also want Violent Dispersal if you don't have them already (they're expensive, though). You should have at least some form of cooldown reduction if you don't want to fall behind in aggression.
I don't know what your deck looks like, but I would recommend against relying too much on structures. I don't think I've ever not recovered from a Destroyer contain eventually. I find that I have the hardest time dealing with Gravelock decks due to Growth's inability to selectively snipe Elders, but a good Barrage/Concentrated Fire ranged can potentially work (its lynchpins are much more easily blitzed by Veterans and the like, though, so good defenses like potions or Hellspitter Mortars are twice as important).
I didn't post my deck because I'm still tweaking and looking for a few scrolls (the other issue I notice most is my complete lack of Draw Scrolls, as I haven't gotten any Libraries, so the only cards I have that draw anything is Burns; also need more Memorials). I think part of the problem was I cut my cooldown reduction cards because, when the draws are going well, I didn't need them. I'll try shoehorning them back in, see if that helps my speed disadvantage.
Thunder Surge and Violent Dispersal are both in there, but when the opponent has 2-3 buffed Great Wolves out they don't do a whole lot of good.
I don't really rely on structures, only sporting 1-2 Goo and 1 Destroyer, though I did throw three Coils in, almost solely because they seem to set every person I play off and into "Must. Kill." and I suddenly only have to worry about defending whatever lane has a Coil in the back of it. I'm light on Gravelocks (only at 3 of the ones that regenerate), so I might try to shuffle some more in.
Thanks for the help, back to tweaking. Also drooling over Dust Runners. God, the lack of (non-suicidal) cost 1s is the entire reason I splashed green.
This game definitely scratches an itch I didn't knew I had but I am not 100% sold on the game. How does this game compare to other card games?
It's a game that doesn't try to be a successor to M:tG, which is almost always a good thing. It's not well balanced, but unlike most other cards games the cards are tweaked instead of being banned / restricted / rotated.
The biggest weakness that Scrolls has is that it's much more luck-driven than other card games, mostly thanks to a lack of a mulligan option. The biggest strength, in my opinion, is that it addresses the issue of dead cards sitting in your hand - which in theory should allow for a greater variety of competitive decks (once the card pool gets larger).
Also, it is super, super easy to put a good deck together. You can pick-up the most expensive, sought after cards in the game for about 1000 Gold (...although the trading system in the game is currently 'go to Trade chat, spam your buy/sell request'. Game needs an auction house something fierce), which is about 5 games against the AI, or just a couple of Trials. Boosters containing at least one rare go for 1000 gold.
There is zero pay to win. You can buy 'shards' with real money, but these shards can't be traded for cards - just used to buy booster packs or avatars. The game's monetized mostly via the up front payment.
EDIT:
@Bloodsheed , Three words: Potion of Resistance. 1,000,000 attack strength Great Wolf attacks your PoR enchanted Hellspitter Mortar? No problem, it only does 1 damage.
Thunder Surge is also a lynchpin for energy. Two of them will clear-out a substantial chunk of Growth's offensive, and they will have a hard time recovering unless they can follow-up with a Fertile Soil.
I gave Duel of Champions a try. I like it better, even though it's grindy. I feel like I get more strategic to choices to make with the card pool I have access to, even if it's not as large a percentage of the total pool like in Scrolls.
I gave Duel of Champions a try. I like it better, even though it's grindy. I feel like I get more strategic to choices to make with the card pool I have access to, even if it's not as large a percentage of the total pool like in Scrolls.
The PvE stuff is also more fun.
Make sure you follow the guide in the OP, and you'll get enough funbucks to buy a 120-card booster box.
The Relentless Foe trial is bugged. Instead of giving all of the opposing units Machination Mindset & Blast Strike, it gives all of his units Blast Strike and all of your units Machination Mindset. Thanks for the free gold!
the one with the really high health General you have to kill instead of his idols was surprisingly manageable. if I had to kill his idols instead totally woulda lost that, but they AI was like "I'm going to put my high health unit on the front lines" the entire fight. I just had to make sure the killing blow was a big surprise attack so AI wouldn't start shielding him properly instead.
I gave Duel of Champions a try. I like it better, even though it's grindy. I feel like I get more strategic to choices to make with the card pool I have access to, even if it's not as large a percentage of the total pool like in Scrolls.
The PvE stuff is also more fun.
Make sure you follow the guide in the OP, and you'll get enough funbucks to buy a 120-card booster box.
I didn't see the OP till well after I'd been playing. I even made a second account before reading the OP to fix some problems I had.
I bought one pack with funbux, so I guess I'm going to have to work a bit harder to get the full box.
I have to say, if you enjoy PvE be aware that DoC's campaign dries up real quick. There are more Trials in Scrolls than missions in the DoC campaign.
Also thanks for the tip re: Relentless Foe. Another 800g added to the bank. Now I just need to buy an actual scroll with it rather than gambling it away.
Let's get all sophisticated & start talking about high concept things, even if we might not be sure what high concept means, exactly
My take on fundamental strategy in Scrolls thus far (some/most of it is pretty obvious stuff, but I figured why not bring it up anyway):
The board is broken-up into three regions: two outer staging wings on either side consisting of a single lane of hexes each and a central area that should see most of the aggressive plays from either player. Your ultimate goal is to control the centermost lane of hexes:
The concepts at work her are simple enough - when your units become active, with a few exceptions, they can attack the lane they are in, the lane above their position of the lane below their position. The middle 3 lanes therefore provide the most options for attack, while the middle lane is the one most exposed to attack by units in aggressive positions. If you can eliminate the enemy's idol in the middle lane before they can eliminate yours, you can then concentrate on attacking / defending areas that your opponent has fewer active options in while being down an idol.
You can contest the center obviously by playing units into it, or by dropping units into the outer wings - where they cannot be attacked by centrally placed units - as a feint maneuver, or by dropping artillery units into the lanes just above or just below the center where they can control central space while your opponent cannot directly threaten them with units sitting right in moneyville.
If I'm the first player to drop a unit onto the field, I almost always drop it right on the money. If it's an aggressive unit like a Kinfolk Brave, it gives me the initiative & allows me to threaten the 3 most active lanes; if it's a passive unit like this memorial, I'm set to protect anything I want to drop in the center.
The wings of the board are where you want to go if you feel like the center has been lost to you; they aren't active spaces, but are difficult to mount effective attacks against because they're effectively bottlenecked (there's only one lane with access to either wing). It is a much, much better idea to concede middle ground for a while and just play units into these safe areas if you feel that you've lost out in tempo / aggression to your opponent - attacking ineffectually into a superior position will just guarantee a loss most of the time.
That's basically how I try to play as well. Though if the enemy is pushing hard I'll give up the top two or bottom two lanes and fill up the other three in order to condense my forces behind easily Plating/PoR'ed defenses. Another tactic I've found is to Fort Knox an outside lane, but in an enticing way, usually with a Coil at the back (oh how people go nuts to kill that Coil), work on the two lanes directly above/below, and then, once they have destroyed my two abandoned idols, plunk down a force on the opposite outside edge, forcing them to either give up attacking my power base or lose.
So I grabbed this last night after watching several twitches. I havent played any ranked yet but I have enjoyed the hell out of the added unit placement and movements with a traditional mana mechanic with the scrolls. I like the diagram above but from what I have seen the individuals tend to always push along this route. It may not be high level but unless I am playing lobbers (I picked Order as my frist deck) I just like to grab any 1-2 lanes I can stack up on and burst through. It may just be the way Order plays because I can get some solid units on the field quickly and burst very early in the game and I have been using this to skirmish the opponent. I just never put my 5+ mana units on the top or bottom lanes.
@The Ender: Minor correction: your first offensive unit on an empty board should be placed in the CENTER of the middle lane, not the front. You get more movement options at no drawback.
It may not be high level but unless I am playing lobbers (I picked Order as my frist deck) I just like to grab any 1-2 lanes I can stack up on and burst through.
Burst through to what? The idols? You shouldn't be focusing on idols in the early game. 95% of the time you should be wholly focused on killing opposing units unless you think you can win almost immediately. Killing idols is a formality if you have good board control. If you kill the central idol on turn 6 and then lose your entire army to a stack that was massing up off to the side, you aren't ahead. Half of why controlling the middle is so good is because it makes it so easy to sidestep and suppress any new units that get summoned.
That said, when your opponent already has board control, keeping your units alive long enough to mass up is better then throwing them one by one into the meatgrinder, so ceding the middle and building up a flank is usually the right call in that circumstance. But that's a defensive maneuver, not an offensive one. If you're ahead and your opponent tries this, it's better to reposition and hunt them down than stick to your idol...provided they're summoning real threats and have nothing else on the board, that is. Don't overcommit to kill a Sister of the Fox is no man's land or anything.
Basically you want to summon units as close to the middle as you can without suiciding them. How close that is depends on how well you're doing.
I watched people win yesterday at middle ranking by harrasing the opponents build up points with structures and throw away units while continuing to control outside of the middle where the opponent was hell bent on controlling. I guess it might not be viable for high end play but these guys were above 1500 rating. As Order it seemed as if I had the ability to play all sorts of decently powered units at 6 or even 5 mana and keep the opponent in check on the board while controlling my area as well.
Also I am still learning like I said. I have watched many games come down to exactly what you were saying coming down to a favorable card draw or just sheer placement. I will try to learn this a bit more this weekend / It seems like in the few games I played when you start skirmishing the pylons the opponent will respond and you can then adjust accordingly (whether he rushes down or tries to fortify).
The most important cards are Quake and Fertile Soil. Both allow you to get huge card advantages over your opponent and eventually just roll over them.
I'm wondering why your running champions ring (I always for the 2 cost too much considering the squishieness of most growth creatures makes it so you often only get 1 maybe 2 attacks)
Personally I'd run 3x nutrition instead (maybe 2x and drop 1x of another scroll for something else) for either a 2nd way to turn 3 greatwolf/veteran (vaettr>fox>nutrition on fox or vaettr>vaettr>Why didn't they punish my vaettr plays jeez) or an amazing late game turn by sacrificing a basically dead unit (1 hp front line veteran + nutrition is the difference between godhand and bearpaw+crimsonbull+godhand).
Other scrolls I feel could be more valuable:
Binding roots (for psudo removal seeing as we lack removal)
ancestral totems (I can see you not running this due to cost but +1 damage to every critter would quite often add more then +2 to one on a given turn)
Dryadic power (psudo removal or +3 health on an important almost dead critter)
DBG (nice 3 cost drop works as a wall and can be used to keep up your hps)
Vitrol aura (Not all that great but really good in the mirror match in which all bar 2 creatures will either die outright or be within ragged wolf threat range, in non mirror it's not as good energy kinda just laughs at it, it could be used to force a removal scroll in the order match up which does protect your other enchantments a bit).
Granted I'm only 1700 rating so I'd like to hear your reasoning on this matter.
Well keep in mind that 1700 and where I am now is like 5 wins. I'm not really an expert.
I was running Champ's Ring as a mini Crimson Bull, it allows a creature to kill something it otherwise wouldn't have been able to, and it can stay on the board as a threat. I've since taken it out, but it's not a bad option.
Personal opinion on the other cards:
I haven't tried Nutrition, and also haven't seen it run ever. It's a net -1 card advantage, and getting things out earlier is nice but not worth the card disadvantage.
Binding Roots seems okay, but when other Growth cards afford you the opportunity to kill a problem unit instead, it's not as great.
Ancestral Totem is good, but it's also 4 cost for a 2 health body. Its one of those things that I'd sideboard if it were an option.
Dryadic Power is great against Growth, but I'm thinking less so against Order and Energy. GvG seems to be more of a slugfest, whereas the others use more positioning.
DBG I'd like to try, I usually don't see it played but it's a pain when it does drop.
Vitriol Aura means that unit is probably only going to be attacked by something that can kill it, and the resulting poison may not kill the attacker. Haven't seen it played for that reason.
Dust Runner is completely ridiculous as 1 drop, I can definitely see splashing solely for it. DR -> Speed, DR -> Rallying, or DR -> Bombard is incredibly good.
I haven't tried Nutrition, and also haven't seen it run ever. It's a net -1 card advantage, and getting things out earlier is nice but not worth the card disadvantage.
CA is sort-of interesting in Scrolls in that I think it's not as valuable as it is in other CCGs (particularly M:tG) because resources aren't something you can plop as a free action. You often have to choose between resources or more cards, and in the end I think resources actually slightly edge-out more cards, at least for a while, because there aren't any instant-speed spells/abilities. Nutrition actually represents pseudo card advantage in the long run because it means you can afford to scrap a dead draw to dig for more cards without having to worry about falling behind in resources.
Example: Turn 3, Nutrition on Sisters of the Fox. Down 1 card (Sisters already replaced itself), but up 2 resources. T4, I don't have to plop, so I draw an extra card instead (+1 CA). T5, I don't have to plop, so I draw another extra card (+1 CA). Now I'm up two cards, and I had an extra resource on T4. That's pretty significant.
It's also flexible, in that you can just use it to straight-up ramp if you have a powerful card with a high cost that you want to bring into play.
I've given up on Nutrition in a mono deck. The situations in which it does anything are just too narrow. You have to pay one for the spell itself, so sacrificing a Sister of the Fox only nets you 1. There are no 3-cost creatures worth playing. Brothers and better are generally too good to sacrifice unless they're dead this turn anyway or it's a dire emergency. Mangy Wolves would be a good target, except by the time you have enough spare resources for it to be worth summoning one you've already moved past the point where Nutrition is worth anything for leapfrogging up your summon lines (except maybe for a Jarl). Sacrificing a Sister on turn 3 for an early Brother of the Wolf or turn 4 for an early Great Wolf is nice, but if you were lucky enough to get those draws you could probably get by without it, and it's incredibly situational in any other circumstance.
I'm more intrigued by it for dual decks, since if you use it on the opposite color you get a much better return (since the one growth you spent on Nutrition itself doesn't count against what you're earning). It would be especially nice in a structure-heavy E/G deck, if such a thing exists, since structures are typically high-cost but easily rendered doomed or useless (Nutrition is the one that still works on structures, right?).
I haven't tried Nutrition, and also haven't seen it run ever. It's a net -1 card advantage, and getting things out earlier is nice but not worth the card disadvantage.
CA is sort-of interesting in Scrolls in that I think it's not as valuable as it is in other CCGs (particularly M:tG) because resources aren't something you can plop as a free action. You often have to choose between resources or more cards, and in the end I think resources actually slightly edge-out more cards, at least for a while, because there aren't any instant-speed spells/abilities. Nutrition actually represents pseudo card advantage in the long run because it means you can afford to scrap a dead draw to dig for more cards without having to worry about falling behind in resources.
Example: Turn 3, Nutrition on Sisters of the Fox. Down 1 card (Sisters already replaced itself), but up 2 resources. T4, I don't have to plop, so I draw an extra card instead (+1 CA). T5, I don't have to plop, so I draw another extra card (+1 CA). Now I'm up two cards, and I had an extra resource on T4. That's pretty significant.
It's also flexible, in that you can just use it to straight-up ramp if you have a powerful card with a high cost that you want to bring into play.
Nutrition's great in my opinion.
Unless I'm missing something you would still have to discard for resources on T4 and T5, Nutrition adds to your current resources, not total resources. It'd be broken to hell and back if it was total.
I've given up on Nutrition in a mono deck. The situations in which it does anything are just too narrow. You have to pay one for the spell itself, so sacrificing a Sister of the Fox only nets you 1. There are no 3-cost creatures worth playing. Brothers and better are generally too good to sacrifice unless they're dead this turn anyway or its a dire emergency. Mangy Wolves would be a good target, except by the time you have enough spare resources for it to be worth summoning one you've already moved past the point where Nutrition is worth anything for leapfrogging up your summon lines (except maybe for a Jarl). Sacrificing a Sister on turn 3 for an early Brother of the Wolf or turn 4 for an early Great Wolf is nice, but if you were lucky enough to get those draws you could probably get by without it, and it's incredibly situational in any other circumstance.
I'm more intrigued by it for dual decks, since if you use it on the opposite color you get a much better return (since the one growth you spent on Nutrition itself doesn't count against what you're earning). It would be especially nice in a structure-heavy E/G deck, if such a thing exists, since structures are typically high-cost but easily rendered doomed or useless (Nutrition is the one that still works on structures, right?).
Pretty much this. I don't feel it is worth using Nutrition in the early game to get a stronger unit out faster than normal. I think it does have a place midgame, however... but it is very situational. Let's say you are at 6 resources. At this point sac'ing a high cost unit (probably one that is about to die anyway) can get you up to around 10 resources for that turn. This means you can play a Great Wolf + Rally, or other crazy combos at a much earlier point in the game. Again, it doesn't come up very often, so there are probably better growth cards you could have in your deck.
It's like they took the likeness of Nicholas Cage and said, "Y'know what? Still doesn't quite make me want to punch the screen. Let's give him the derp gape and see what happens."
"There we go; now I want to use that hole in his face as a bottle opener. It's perfect."
Man this game. Jumped on last night after dinner to play a few matches and work my way through more trials to practice the other two decks. I look up and it is 11pm.... damn.
I am inching towards a growth deck similar to what Moebius posted earlier. Just need another Fertile Growth and a God Hand and I'll be good to go. Then I guess I'll use the proceeds of my winnings to fund a dual colour splash... but that is a bit farther off.
Well, it is really cool how 3x Noadidi are now required for Growth decks and they're 1k each because of the heinously stupid way they added in cards. I'm really uninterested in playing this game if that's how they're going to expand the card pool.
Yeah, Noaidi is retarded. It's going for 700 according to scrollsprices.com, and it's uncommon. When an uncommon card has that much demand, you know you have an issue.
Not buying any at the moment because it's all but guaranteed to be either nerfed or entirely removed from the card pool.
In fairness, Beta is Beta, and even the most well established CCGs make mistakes. On a scale where the extreme end examples are Memory Jar & Operatives, Naoidi is bad but not a dealbreaker as far as I'm concerned.
Well, the underlying issue is that introducing a single new card in isolation instantly creates a situation where there's huge demand and next to no supply. It doesn't really matter if it's overpowered or not, as long as it's desirable.
The thing about Scrolls's small card pool is that it's very, very easy to reach a point where buying cards from the store is no longer cost-effective. It took all of like three days before I couldn't justify buying boosters anymore because the odds of getting a common or uncommon that I didn't already have either from past boosters or very cheap trades is almost zero, and there are barely any rares with a market price high enough to pay for the whole pack.
So now there's a huge market of people who need three Noaidi but effectively can't get them from the store (because they'd have to spend like tens of thousands on cards they don't need anymore). So the entire Noaidi market is cornered by a mix of a handful of novices who are still buying packs and not-so-economically-savvy people who are spending thousands to try and get one randomly. In other words, most people don't have them and most of the ones who do have stupidly high costs to try and recoup.
It's probably better to hold off on introducing new cards until you have a lot of them at once, so the store prices can provide some kind of ceiling to the market. There's going to be a huge gold rush when Decay comes out, but since buying Decay scrolls for 175 from the store will actually provide valuable trade fodder, the market will be kept in check to at least some degree.
But Dust Runner isn't going for a lot, for example, and it would've been a decent card if not for the huge meta distortion caused by Naoidi. I think I agree in principle, though, that releasing handfuls of new stuff here or there isn't the greatest idea. :P
...So, basically, game's broke right now. When one of the fastest aggro creatures 'isn't fast enough' just because it doesn't havefucking haste, and anything without haste can't be expected to live long enough to attack even if it's cooldown is 1, you have a problem.
...So, basically, game's broke right now. When one of the fastest aggro creatures 'isn't fast enough' just because it doesn't having fucking haste, and anything without haste can't be expected to live long enough to attack even if it's cooldown is 1, you have a problem.
I think that's mostly specific to the Decimation deck, which is just kind of dumb in general. One cooldown isn't fast enough because neither player has any interest in keeping other units on the field to protect anything. For all intents and purposes, the deck doesn't use creatures at all. They're removal. The only reason he's using Kinfolk Veterans instead of Burns is because you can't Burn an idol. (And because Fertile Soil is Growth and not Energy, I guess.)
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Unlikely, since it also says "creatures" and Waking Stones is a structure. Alas!
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[5e] Dural Melairkyn - AC 18 | HP 40 | Melee +5/1d8+3 | Spell +4/DC 12
On the other hand, somehow I need to find some quakes.
I didn't post my deck because I'm still tweaking and looking for a few scrolls (the other issue I notice most is my complete lack of Draw Scrolls, as I haven't gotten any Libraries, so the only cards I have that draw anything is Burns; also need more Memorials). I think part of the problem was I cut my cooldown reduction cards because, when the draws are going well, I didn't need them. I'll try shoehorning them back in, see if that helps my speed disadvantage.
Thunder Surge and Violent Dispersal are both in there, but when the opponent has 2-3 buffed Great Wolves out they don't do a whole lot of good.
I don't really rely on structures, only sporting 1-2 Goo and 1 Destroyer, though I did throw three Coils in, almost solely because they seem to set every person I play off and into "Must. Kill." and I suddenly only have to worry about defending whatever lane has a Coil in the back of it. I'm light on Gravelocks (only at 3 of the ones that regenerate), so I might try to shuffle some more in.
Thanks for the help, back to tweaking. Also drooling over Dust Runners. God, the lack of (non-suicidal) cost 1s is the entire reason I splashed green.
It's a game that doesn't try to be a successor to M:tG, which is almost always a good thing. It's not well balanced, but unlike most other cards games the cards are tweaked instead of being banned / restricted / rotated.
The biggest weakness that Scrolls has is that it's much more luck-driven than other card games, mostly thanks to a lack of a mulligan option. The biggest strength, in my opinion, is that it addresses the issue of dead cards sitting in your hand - which in theory should allow for a greater variety of competitive decks (once the card pool gets larger).
Also, it is super, super easy to put a good deck together. You can pick-up the most expensive, sought after cards in the game for about 1000 Gold (...although the trading system in the game is currently 'go to Trade chat, spam your buy/sell request'. Game needs an auction house something fierce), which is about 5 games against the AI, or just a couple of Trials. Boosters containing at least one rare go for 1000 gold.
There is zero pay to win. You can buy 'shards' with real money, but these shards can't be traded for cards - just used to buy booster packs or avatars. The game's monetized mostly via the up front payment.
EDIT:
@Bloodsheed , Three words: Potion of Resistance. 1,000,000 attack strength Great Wolf attacks your PoR enchanted Hellspitter Mortar? No problem, it only does 1 damage.
Thunder Surge is also a lynchpin for energy. Two of them will clear-out a substantial chunk of Growth's offensive, and they will have a hard time recovering unless they can follow-up with a Fertile Soil.
The PvE stuff is also more fun.
Make sure you follow the guide in the OP, and you'll get enough funbucks to buy a 120-card booster box.
The Relentless Foe trial is bugged. Instead of giving all of the opposing units Machination Mindset & Blast Strike, it gives all of his units Blast Strike and all of your units Machination Mindset. Thanks for the free gold!
the one with the really high health General you have to kill instead of his idols was surprisingly manageable. if I had to kill his idols instead totally woulda lost that, but they AI was like "I'm going to put my high health unit on the front lines" the entire fight. I just had to make sure the killing blow was a big surprise attack so AI wouldn't start shielding him properly instead.
That shit retarded.
I didn't see the OP till well after I'd been playing. I even made a second account before reading the OP to fix some problems I had.
I bought one pack with funbux, so I guess I'm going to have to work a bit harder to get the full box.
Also thanks for the tip re: Relentless Foe. Another 800g added to the bank. Now I just need to buy an actual scroll with it rather than gambling it away.
EDIT:
Dat lag. I'm pinging at about 70~ in League of Legends, but my ping in Scrolls must be a bajillion or so. Can't play at all.
Beta be beta.
My take on fundamental strategy in Scrolls thus far (some/most of it is pretty obvious stuff, but I figured why not bring it up anyway):
The board is broken-up into three regions: two outer staging wings on either side consisting of a single lane of hexes each and a central area that should see most of the aggressive plays from either player. Your ultimate goal is to control the centermost lane of hexes:
The concepts at work her are simple enough - when your units become active, with a few exceptions, they can attack the lane they are in, the lane above their position of the lane below their position. The middle 3 lanes therefore provide the most options for attack, while the middle lane is the one most exposed to attack by units in aggressive positions. If you can eliminate the enemy's idol in the middle lane before they can eliminate yours, you can then concentrate on attacking / defending areas that your opponent has fewer active options in while being down an idol.
You can contest the center obviously by playing units into it, or by dropping units into the outer wings - where they cannot be attacked by centrally placed units - as a feint maneuver, or by dropping artillery units into the lanes just above or just below the center where they can control central space while your opponent cannot directly threaten them with units sitting right in moneyville.
If I'm the first player to drop a unit onto the field, I almost always drop it right on the money. If it's an aggressive unit like a Kinfolk Brave, it gives me the initiative & allows me to threaten the 3 most active lanes; if it's a passive unit like this memorial, I'm set to protect anything I want to drop in the center.
The wings of the board are where you want to go if you feel like the center has been lost to you; they aren't active spaces, but are difficult to mount effective attacks against because they're effectively bottlenecked (there's only one lane with access to either wing). It is a much, much better idea to concede middle ground for a while and just play units into these safe areas if you feel that you've lost out in tempo / aggression to your opponent - attacking ineffectually into a superior position will just guarantee a loss most of the time.
Burst through to what? The idols? You shouldn't be focusing on idols in the early game. 95% of the time you should be wholly focused on killing opposing units unless you think you can win almost immediately. Killing idols is a formality if you have good board control. If you kill the central idol on turn 6 and then lose your entire army to a stack that was massing up off to the side, you aren't ahead. Half of why controlling the middle is so good is because it makes it so easy to sidestep and suppress any new units that get summoned.
That said, when your opponent already has board control, keeping your units alive long enough to mass up is better then throwing them one by one into the meatgrinder, so ceding the middle and building up a flank is usually the right call in that circumstance. But that's a defensive maneuver, not an offensive one. If you're ahead and your opponent tries this, it's better to reposition and hunt them down than stick to your idol...provided they're summoning real threats and have nothing else on the board, that is. Don't overcommit to kill a Sister of the Fox is no man's land or anything.
Basically you want to summon units as close to the middle as you can without suiciding them. How close that is depends on how well you're doing.
Also I am still learning like I said. I have watched many games come down to exactly what you were saying coming down to a favorable card draw or just sheer placement. I will try to learn this a bit more this weekend
I was running Champ's Ring as a mini Crimson Bull, it allows a creature to kill something it otherwise wouldn't have been able to, and it can stay on the board as a threat. I've since taken it out, but it's not a bad option.
Personal opinion on the other cards:
I haven't tried Nutrition, and also haven't seen it run ever. It's a net -1 card advantage, and getting things out earlier is nice but not worth the card disadvantage.
Binding Roots seems okay, but when other Growth cards afford you the opportunity to kill a problem unit instead, it's not as great.
Ancestral Totem is good, but it's also 4 cost for a 2 health body. Its one of those things that I'd sideboard if it were an option.
Dryadic Power is great against Growth, but I'm thinking less so against Order and Energy. GvG seems to be more of a slugfest, whereas the others use more positioning.
DBG I'd like to try, I usually don't see it played but it's a pain when it does drop.
Vitriol Aura means that unit is probably only going to be attacked by something that can kill it, and the resulting poison may not kill the attacker. Haven't seen it played for that reason.
CA is sort-of interesting in Scrolls in that I think it's not as valuable as it is in other CCGs (particularly M:tG) because resources aren't something you can plop as a free action. You often have to choose between resources or more cards, and in the end I think resources actually slightly edge-out more cards, at least for a while, because there aren't any instant-speed spells/abilities. Nutrition actually represents pseudo card advantage in the long run because it means you can afford to scrap a dead draw to dig for more cards without having to worry about falling behind in resources.
Example: Turn 3, Nutrition on Sisters of the Fox. Down 1 card (Sisters already replaced itself), but up 2 resources. T4, I don't have to plop, so I draw an extra card instead (+1 CA). T5, I don't have to plop, so I draw another extra card (+1 CA). Now I'm up two cards, and I had an extra resource on T4. That's pretty significant.
It's also flexible, in that you can just use it to straight-up ramp if you have a powerful card with a high cost that you want to bring into play.
Nutrition's great in my opinion.
I'm more intrigued by it for dual decks, since if you use it on the opposite color you get a much better return (since the one growth you spent on Nutrition itself doesn't count against what you're earning). It would be especially nice in a structure-heavy E/G deck, if such a thing exists, since structures are typically high-cost but easily rendered doomed or useless (Nutrition is the one that still works on structures, right?).
Pretty much this. I don't feel it is worth using Nutrition in the early game to get a stronger unit out faster than normal. I think it does have a place midgame, however... but it is very situational. Let's say you are at 6 resources. At this point sac'ing a high cost unit (probably one that is about to die anyway) can get you up to around 10 resources for that turn. This means you can play a Great Wolf + Rally, or other crazy combos at a much earlier point in the game. Again, it doesn't come up very often, so there are probably better growth cards you could have in your deck.
Just look at this asshole:
It's like they took the likeness of Nicholas Cage and said, "Y'know what? Still doesn't quite make me want to punch the screen. Let's give him the derp gape and see what happens."
"There we go; now I want to use that hole in his face as a bottle opener. It's perfect."
Oh good; I'm not the only one that feels that way about that guy. Screw him.
It's a crazy guy streaming Scrolls for like 7 hours every day. Plus he has adorable ferrets!
Not buying any at the moment because it's all but guaranteed to be either nerfed or entirely removed from the card pool.
In fairness, Beta is Beta, and even the most well established CCGs make mistakes. On a scale where the extreme end examples are Memory Jar & Operatives, Naoidi is bad but not a dealbreaker as far as I'm concerned.
The thing about Scrolls's small card pool is that it's very, very easy to reach a point where buying cards from the store is no longer cost-effective. It took all of like three days before I couldn't justify buying boosters anymore because the odds of getting a common or uncommon that I didn't already have either from past boosters or very cheap trades is almost zero, and there are barely any rares with a market price high enough to pay for the whole pack.
So now there's a huge market of people who need three Noaidi but effectively can't get them from the store (because they'd have to spend like tens of thousands on cards they don't need anymore). So the entire Noaidi market is cornered by a mix of a handful of novices who are still buying packs and not-so-economically-savvy people who are spending thousands to try and get one randomly. In other words, most people don't have them and most of the ones who do have stupidly high costs to try and recoup.
It's probably better to hold off on introducing new cards until you have a lot of them at once, so the store prices can provide some kind of ceiling to the market. There's going to be a huge gold rush when Decay comes out, but since buying Decay scrolls for 175 from the store will actually provide valuable trade fodder, the market will be kept in check to at least some degree.
...So, basically, game's broke right now. When one of the fastest aggro creatures 'isn't fast enough' just because it doesn't havefucking haste, and anything without haste can't be expected to live long enough to attack even if it's cooldown is 1, you have a problem.
...Which beats everything else out there right now. So, yeah - you're playing that or you're losing.
Game's broke.