EN
This week I’m continuing the new series focused on Gameplay Examples. Instead of moving to round three though, I decided I wanted to explain the decks that are being used.
The overall construction of the decks is key to understanding how to win. It’s important to have a strategy when choosing a Parallel, Paragon, and individual cards. The goal of this post is to share what the strategy for each deck is, and why the cards chosen fit into that overall strategy.
Remember, the game is still in active development. Any card functions, costs, or details are subject to change prior to game launch.
The Aetio Slap deck is a defensive deck designed to outlast the opponent and reach the win condition where Aetio delivers one kill shot to the opponent’s face.
In order to do that, we have to use up our entire deck. Here is what Aetio, Exalted Hydrolist reads:
Passive: The first time each turn a friendly Kathari Unit enters the Field, Waste the top card of your deck.
Active: If you have no cards left in your deck, create a 1/1 Kathari Iterant that gains all Stats and Keywords of Units in your Waste. This Iterant ignores Defender, and immediately attacks the Enemy.
As you can see, this Paragon is extremely powerful if you can speed run your deck. The tricky part when trying to do this is balancing enough defense and countermeasures against your opponent so that you can actually realize this strategy.
Now lets take a look at the full deck. If you would like to build your own version of the Aetio Slap, you can navigate to the Parallel website and use their new Deck Builder tool.
I’m going to pick out a few cards and explain their usefulness in the strategy.
Need to quickly draw more units to add them to the playing field? Cytokinesis has your back. Stacking this with Aetio’s Passive makes for quick deck presence and card burn.
Is your opponent building up some heavy damage on the Field? Annihilate is a girls (and boys) best friend. It will remove the threats post haste.
Need to slow your enemy down? Seeing Triple drops three defenders onto the board, frustrating opponents to no end.
Let’s be honest, every Marco deck is Aggro. That’s just a way of life for these mad scientists. This deck specifically is designed to quickly do damage to face and units without very much room for the enemy to maneuver.
We’ve chosen Catherine as our Paragon, because of her powerful passive and intense active. Here is what her card reads:
Passive: The second Unit you play each turn gets +1/+1
Active: Cost 4/4 Unit
Cannot be healed.
This Unit cannot attack normally. At the end of your turn, this Unit attacks a random enemy target.
Getting Catherine on the board in turn 4-6 is a popular Marco win condition. Normally by that time, they have done major damage to face and wiped out any board presence that their opponent has. Beware though, if you pull Catherine out too early, she could be Annihilated. Let’s take a look at this deck and a few specific cards:
Let’s talk specifics.
Would you like to buff another unit? Use low cost Ruthless Sergeant to activate Catherine’s Passive to add health and damage to an ally.
Tired of the field battle back and forth? Play Crack Shot for some quick damage to the face getting you closer to the Catherine win condition.
Is your opponent putting up a fight? That’s cute. Wipe most* or all of their board presence with Solar Grenade. *Conditions apply.
This was a quick overview of the two decks that are currently battling it out. If you are interested in more discussions like this, head to the Parallel Discord and check out the theory crafting channel. There are some alpha big brains in there. Catch you next week for round three!