The Gaming Den

Eidolon of Madness seems pretty good if your plan is to control the board with Death Sentence and Tribunal of Good and Evil. Since that is in fact a pretty good plan, Eidolon of Madness seems totally OK.

Or to put it another way: if your Turn 5 was to put down a Death Sentence and blow up your opponent's shit on Turn 6, why not put down an Eidolon on Turn 5 and then play the Death Sentence on Turn 6 and have it go off at the end of the turn? You don't have as much to set up on Turn 7, except of course there's nothing stopping you from dropping a Tribunal or a Death Sentence on Turn 7 as well.

If your opponent isn't a storm deck or a swarm deck, they probably don't even have a safe turn. Turn 4 you Death Sentence, it goes off on Turn 5 and you play the Eidolon. Turn 6 you play the Tribunal and it also goes off because the Eidolon has cracked. That's two random slayings on Turn 5 and Turn 6. There are decks that can spam their way through that, but also a lot that can't. Any deck that's trying to go big and untap with on-curve creatures is going to flat out lose.

The big problem I see is that it's a nonbo with Themis' Decree. The Decree is the best sweeper for go-wide strategies, but it's so good that it actually kills the Eidolon as well, and does so right in between when the Eidolon becomes active and when it triggers if you cast it on curve.

-Username17

Just played against the same deck (Daria Runecraft) six times in a row; especially frustrating with Seraph *not* being a decent matchup against that at all. Does the deck diversity get better at higher levels?

Shiritai wrote:Just played against the same deck (Daria Runecraft) six times in a row; especially frustrating with Seraph *not* being a decent matchup against that at all. Does the deck diversity get better at higher levels?

Well I'm in A3 and it doesn't feel like I see Daria that disproportionately often. Of course I'm Daria Rune trash myself.

If you want a better Daria matchup consider running more healing and possibly the Elana package. Daria plays a lot of burn and thus really doesn't like seeing healing effects on the other side of the table.

The meta at different levels is different. At A3 currently, I see mostly Daria Rune, Control Sword, Roach Forest, Control Blood, and Aggro Shadow (probably >90% of my games are one of those 5), and then maybe one game in ten or less is something weird like D-shift, PTP decks, Aggro blood, or Control Shadow. This hasn't been constant - there was some time where Daria was much more frequent, and others where Aggro Blood was everywhere

I think Daria is probably too strong right now and gets overplayed consequently - it's probably the thing I run into most often. It's still probably not been above 1/3rd of my recent games.

Lord Mistborn wrote:If you want a better Daria matchup consider running more healing and possibly the Elana package. Daria plays a lot of burn and thus really doesn't like seeing healing effects on the other side of the table.

Yeah, I should probably stop running my budget Seraph now that I've hit C, at least until I get the necessary life gain cards. I switched to aggro Shadow, went against yet another Daria, and this time came out on top.

I definitely found that of my budget productions made out of the jank I happened to draw that Jank Nephthys > Jank Daria > Jank Discard Dragoon > Other Jank > Jank Havencraft. So I ended up investing in Shadowcraft mostly because Shadowcraft was already pretty good with a deck that was mostly composed of basics and commons. Nephthys wants you to replace as many creatures as you can with spells in order to maximize the number of slots that are given to creatures with Last Word effects - but Shadowcraft can get a lot of mileage out of commons like Impious Resurrection and a lot of the key Last Words creatures are commons or basics (Attendant of the Night and Hell's Unleasher, for example). So I fabricated a Mordecai, an Urd, and a Death's Breath and my Shadowcraft deck puts up 6+ win streaks at C0. I suspect I should be playing it less in order to grind out the bonuses for winning ranked matches with other decks before opposition hardens up. A turn 3 Attendant into a turn 4 Urd is beatable, but only barely.

On the flip side, I can't really get Havencraft to not be a pile of ass even after pulling some rares and Al Mi-raj. Havencraft basically doesn't play the same game as the other factions, and either wins or loses according to their matchup, but pretty much just loses if they don't get their synergy pieces together. When I play against Havencraft, the matches are basically never close, where I either run them over with little resistance or they completely control the pace of the game and just arbitrarily win at some point.

-Username17

Havencraft seems remarkably good in Take Two. It seems harder for people to just run over you quickly, meaning that the ridiculous value for mana you get out of amulets is a very big deal.

So they're finally dropping a couple nerfs on Damia and Forest Roach (for a Feb 26 patch):

- Piercing Rune's mana cost after an evolve from 1 to 2.
- Goblin Mage now tutors for Followers costing 2 or less rather than exactly 2.

Started with Runecraft, any advice on how to balance the ratio of earth sigil and earth rite cards?

I've had OK success with just using no earth cards and only focusing on spellboost

FrankTrollman wrote:So I ended up investing in Shadowcraft mostly because Shadowcraft was already pretty good with a deck that was mostly composed of basics and commons. Nephthys wants you to replace as many creatures as you can with spells in order to maximize the number of slots that are given to creatures with Last Word effects - but Shadowcraft can get a lot of mileage out of commons like Impious Resurrection and a lot of the key Last Words creatures are commons or basics (Attendant of the Night and Hell's Unleasher, for example). So I fabricated a Mordecai, an Urd, and a Death's Breath and my Shadowcraft deck puts up 6+ win streaks at C0. I suspect I should be playing it less in order to grind out the bonuses for winning ranked matches with other decks before opposition hardens up. A turn 3 Attendant into a turn 4 Urd is beatable, but only barely.
-Username17

That matches up pretty much perfectly with my experiences although honestly I haven't been logging in much. I organically stumbled into what looks like a janky netdeck just because Nep's synergies and combos are both obvious and cheap. I mostly built it by running it up against the hardest AI swordcraft deck until it could consistently avoid being curved to death and from there I rode a 26-2 record to D3 before deciding to hold back a bit for the purposes of easy daily farming. The 2 losses were to D-shift decks--Nep doesn't explosively blow people out so much as she wipes the board and sets up inevitability so it really hurts against Dshift when I can't Urd out a lich on turn 4 and speed up the game.

As someone currently in AA0 who did a bunch of their early climbing playing mostly D-Shift before switching to mostly playing Daria Rune and Roach Forest I'm really skeptical of the Nephthys deck and control in general when they don't have some powerful combo finish.

Nep is a control deck that's usually built to guarantee that when Nep comes down on turn 8 she always drags out a Mordecai and a Khawy. This kills their best guy gains some life and makes 10 power worth of followers 5 of which is very difficult to get rid of. The thing is I'm not sure if that's good enough.

Seraph, D-shift, and White Wolf are all spending turn 8 setting up to straight up win the game next turn and it feels like those decks put an absolute limit to how much of a durdle your deck can be.

TBH, I haven't really been playing with any expectation of beating dshift after seeing it in action a few times. I've mostly been running Nep because I pulled her and Urd in my freebie packs and because it's an archetype where you can plausibly build a third of your deck out of bronze and silver Bahamut cards. Aside from Mordecai the only stuff I had to craft was a bunch of bronzes. TBH it's more of a liches and Khawy deck more than anything, and that's workable in the lowbie trenches with some half-decent mulligans.

D-Shift and Seraph may well be bad matchups for Nephthys, but you get a lot of brawling out of Liches in the early and middle game. A turn 4 Urd is something that your opponent needs to answer because it's 8 power on the field with a last words to make another 4/4 already set up. Many games you end up winning before turn 8 simply because you're making such a string of 4/4s and killing dudes so effectively that you count to 20 before Nephthys even comes out. My Nephthys Shadowcraft record against Roach is very good, and I've heard that's a favorable matchup.

I guess the answer is that you aren't a control deck, you're a mid range deck that has a pretty good plan for pushing reach damage through Bahamut because the big daddy dragon doesn't do dick diddly to Mordecai.


According to Mastercraft Nephthys Shadowcraft pilots:

Favorable:

Roach Forestcraft
Dragoncraft Decks
Aggro Decks

Unfavorable:

D-Shift Runecraft
Seraph Havencraft

So yeah, that matches my experience pretty well. You only beat D-Shift or Seraph if they stumble on their early control effects or fail to land their combo, but you smack around Swordcraft and Roach decks by just going big enough early enough that they have to trade off their early bullshit and run out of steam. And then you crush Dragoncraft decks by just having card advantage and wearing them down.

So yeah: Midrange deck in the classic sense.

-Username17

So with the app down for maintenece and nerfs forthcoming it seems like an auspicious time to consider what the new meta will look like. Right now I can think of three likely scenarios.

Scenario one, very little actually changes. According to Gamepress the next best deck after Roach and Daria is Tempo Forest and it's east to imagining Tempo Forest simply replacing Roach as top deck.

Scenario two, the meta slows down. It possible with Roach off the table people are able to build control decks that perform well against the field. Of course if that happens then it will be springtime for Seraph and especially D-shift.

Scenario three Swordcraft takes over the Meta. According to Gamepress 3/5 of the tier 2 decks are Sword decks. With the all the more prevelent decks receiving nerfs we could see Sword rise to the same level of dominance that Rune and Forest currently enjoy.

Personally I'd like to see meta with more control if only because D-shift is my favorite deck to play.

I'm not sure how effective the nerfs will actually be.

Goblin mage will now search for cards that cost 2 or less instead of only cards which cost 2, which means either getting rid of all your 1 drops or accepting that you can no longer use goblin mage to reliably tutor for roaches. Both of those are shitty choices for aggro roach. Rhinoceroach remains an insanely powerful card, but rhinoceroach decks will be much less reliable.

Piercing rune's cheapcast is now more expensive. Piercing rune was insanely undercosted; for 1 point you could deal 2 damage to an enemy follower and 2 damage to your enemy leader. For comparison, consider vampiric kiss; for 2 points you could deal 2 damage to an enemy follower and heal your leader for 2. That is a worse card (if you're going to swing net life totals in your favor by 2, you would almost always rather do it by bringing your opponent closer to death) for twice the cost, and vampiric kiss is already a pretty great card for control bloodcraft. Now piercing rune's cheapcast costs 2 points, bringing it in line with the cost of other cards which do similar while still leaving it hands down the best one. The problem is that while piercing rune was an amazing value, there is absolutely no fucking way that piercing rune alone is responsible for runecraft's dominance.

Who or what is Granblue, and how many characters in Shadowverse are Granblue characters?

Anyway, I went through and read their description of why those chose to nerf Piercing Rune and Goblin Mage, and it makes sense. Their primary concern was not that Runecraft decks make up almost a third of the meta at top tables or that another quarter of the meta is Rhinoroach, it's that in the Runecraft mirror they were looking at a big difference in win percentage based on who got to go second.

Simply put, the Levi -> Crimson Sorcery -> Piercing Rune turn 4 was just too good. That's four power of creatures and 7 damage, 5 of which can go to face on an empty board on turn fucking 4. That's not much more explosive than Vania + Summon Bloodkin (7 power of creatures and 3 face damage on an empty board), but you also spellboost the cards in your hand twice for doing it. But if you look at the effects in the mirror when both players are trying to do it, you are looking at both players being able to clear the board pretty easily and doing a lot of their face damage with evolution points. That means that going second is a huge advantage. You get the first Evolution point and more evolution points total and you draw more cards. So you're not really "behind" at any critical point in the game but you have more evolution points (and thus more crimson sorcery to go to face) through the game.

Honestly, I don't think nerfing Piercing Rune is going to do a whole lot to bring that under control. Yes, Turn 4 is less explosive (making it less explosive than a Vania Bloodkin turn rather than more), but the total amount of face damage and spellboost you get off an evolution point is the same. Going second in a Runecraft mirror is still a massive advantage. The fact that you have to wait on the Crimson Sorcery to cast on a later turn if you want to get the Rune in there doesn't really matter because your opponent wasn't literally dying on turn 4 even so. It will definitely move a few percentage points from the second player to the first, but the second player is still the person to bet on.

As to whether it will seriously impact Rhinoroach, my guess is that it will. Rhinoroach can't get their explosive turns if they don't have 1 cost followers to play, and if they have a big chance of getting a Water Fairy or an Elf Child May whenever they drop a zero cost goblin mage from a Fortune Hunter Feena, their one turn kills are going to be a lot rarer. And without those one turn kills, the deck is bad and full of bad cards.

As to what replaces it, my guess is that various Swordcraft decks take pretty much all of the metaspace lost by Forestcraft and probably the tiny amount of metaspace lost by Runecraft as well. Swordcraft has three decks in the top tiers, and can adapt quickly to any change in the meta. If putting a Ward creature in play on turn 6 is less important, Swordcraft can just go to face more and harder.

Meanwhile, it's come to my attention that not only are some of the characters Granblue characters, but Rage of Bahamut is a game in its own right. So there's already art prepared for some of the Gods in Tempest of the Gods. Like Mars. Tempest of the Gods looks like it's going to have more stuff for Swordcraft and Havencraft, for the most part. I don't know how I feel about that.

As far as Havencraft goes, I don't actually feel like many of my games as or against Havencraft are particularly close. Every so often I get into a race where it's down to the wire or whatever, but mostly it's just heavily matchup dependant. The Havencraft player is really not playing the same game as the person on the other end of the table, so chances are they are going to either lose badly or go way over the top of whatever the other player is doing. You'd think that with as few decks as there are in Tier 1, that you could adapt a Havencraft deck that had ridiculously strong game against more than half the field and then post positive win rates. I don't really understand how you can have a meta that doesn't have at least one Havencraft deck posting positive win rates. And I fear that a Havencraft centered expansion could leave us with a Havencraft toolbox so versatile that no meta can exist where one version or another of Havencraft is not the best deck.

-Username17

Granblue Fantasy is, according to Wikipedia, a JRPG on iOS. There doesn't appear to be any way to get it for Android in England.

Rage of Bahamut is defunct in English speaking areas for some reason. There were a couple of animes based on it that may well also have had characters from Shadowverse.

Doing a bit of research, it is apparently called Granblue Fantasy to remind people that some of the concept artists and composers and shit worked on SNES-era Final Fantasy titles. I tried to do some research into actual plot, and it led me to Doujin which appeared to say that the horned Dragoncraft ladies from Shadowverse were being mind wiped and sold as sex slaves. I strongly suspect that is not that actual plotline of Granblue.

Anyway, from a character standpoint, the only character I really feel the need to spend Rupies to replace is Formonde the Bloodcraft dude. His shtick is that he is incomprehensibly old and powerful and searching the world for a battle he cannot win with contemptuous ease. And that shtick would make more sense on any of the other factions. As is, Bloodcraft's big thing is getting big bonuses for running under half life and spending your own life for bigger effects. This means that even battles where you start ahead on turn 1 and never fall behind are always numerically nail biters. You're playing Red Deck Wins or Sacrifice Control, thematically you should be a scrappy underdog. Replacing his dumb ass with Vania is the best 500 Rupies I ever spent.

-Username17

I googled "Granblue Fantasy plot" and did not find dragonnewt art

OgreBattle wrote:I googled "Granblue Fantasy plot" and did not find dragonnewt art

Obviously, you weren't looking in the right places.

Omegonthesane wrote:Granblue Fantasy is, according to Wikipedia, a JRPG on iOS. There doesn't appear to be any way to get it for Android in England.

It's out for Android, and you can get it pretty easily just by making a Japanese Google Play account or using one of those sketchy apps to download it. But the game is also just playable on the web with a full English translation. Last time I tried it out, you didn't even need a VPN. The Android/iOS app is actually just a wrapper for the web app.

I dunno, playing aggro Bloodcraft doesn't thematically make me feel like some kind of scrappy underdog so much as "being so full of rage and/or spite and/or bloodlust that I am willing to cut myself to hurt my enemy". Having bought Vania I feel like I have to show off that I threw 500 rupees at cosmetics, I just wish she was taking matches remotely as seriously as Urias or Luna does.

That and her "claim you will win the match" emote is impossible to take seriously or even see as over-the-top camp. The voice actor does not help here but no amount of acting is going to save the visuals of a tween raising normal hands into a claw gesture and rushing towards the camera.

tween

"She only LOOKS that age officer, she's a centuries old vampire"

One of these days I'm going to describe an NPC as a typical wizened old crone, then have her act like a twelve year old. Just to mess with my two players who are huge anime fans.

Zaranthan wrote:One of these days I'm going to describe an NPC as a typical wizened old crone, then have her act like a twelve year old. Just to mess with my two players who are huge anime fans.

That's a boss fight in Let It Die, Crowley

OgreBattle wrote:

tween

"She only LOOKS that age officer, she's a centuries old vampire"

If the Internet has taught me anything, frustration without an outlet turns to incandescent rage.

Now imagine the sexual frustration not being able to get any for centuries. The intellectual and socia frustration of being seen as a child for centuries. Ghost help you if your undead hormones are forever caught in angsty tween frustration.

I can see an eternal loli going full on BURN MAIM KILL pretty easily. Look at the prototype for that gimmick; Claudia from the Lestat series. She notably flipped shit.