This week we have a challenge that involves writing about our favorite strategy. This is something I could write a lot of posts about, but I will cover one I find to be pretty timeless, and it has been something I have won a lot with the last year. It was especially good in the period where Grimbardun Smith was everywhere - often with Lily Shieldpaw as the summoner. The strategy I will present was a perfect counter to those setups.
Apart from this strategy, I like to play off-meta lineups, particularly with Skargore. I believe I am one among only a handful of players that actually consider her usable. But I will keep my Skargore secrets for now. If this challenge comes up again, or if I feel inspired, I might write about my plays with her.
My strategy will be a familiar one to many of the more experienced players: It is the Unhittable Chaos Agent with Conqueror Jacek.
The Lineup
Breakdown
Summoner
Conqueror Jacek is our summoner for this strategy. He is among the summoners that can provide the most speed in the game. In addition, we get
Piercing
, which allows us to burst right through any armor in our opponent's team. Scattershot is both a good and a bad thing. Sometimes, this allows us to attack vulnerable backlines hidden behind a taunt, or ignore that Fog of War would make all our units target the frontline. Other times, we end up spreading our damage too widely and not kill units before in the later rounds. It balances Jacek nicely because, without scattershot his abilities would likely be too strong, while with scattershot he can't control his battles as much as other summoners.
Frontline
Chaos agent is our frontline. This looks weird to anyone that has not encountered this setup before. However, Chaos Agent has good speed,
Phase
and
Dodge
. This is what makes him so good here. He can evade all attack types, and has dodge to increase the chance of it happening. On top of it all, he has
Backfire
to push some damage back against every attacker that fail to hit him. The plan is that Chaos Agent will not be hit at all.
Support slot / offtank
We place Scavo Chemist in our second position. He is cheap, and provices a lot of abilities that we can make great use of.
Cleanse
can remove annoying abilities such as Slow and Weaken from our Chaos Agent.
Slow
fits right into our strategy, increasing the chance of enemy units missing our Chaos Agent. Finally,
Headwinds
is a decent damage reduction ability that is most handy in the situations where we end up facing an enemy Jacek.
Semi-support / damage dealer
Sorriel the Bale will be in our third position. He is vulnerable, so not really ideal to place so far up front, but our later units are even more valuable so we have to do it this way. The most important part of Sorriel is that he provides
Blind
. Blind gives all enemy units another 15% miss chance - perfect for what we are trying to do. Sometimes we can substitude Spirit Hoarder in this slot if we don't have enough mana for Sorriel.
Rust
also serves to increase the potency of our two ranged backline units. Sorriel also deals a decent amount of damage, but can often be punished hard by Magic Reflect.
Glass cannon - Main damage source.
Djinn Inferni is where our damage comes from. Do not underestimate him.
Giant Killer
can really put a huge dent in a lot of units we tend to face at the mana levels where we can play this lineup. Otherwise, 5 damage and
Stun
make him very attractive. We place him in the fourth slot because that is often the most difficult position to target. We want to protect this guy.
Backline #1 and speed booster
Supply Runner is a core card for most Jacek Setups, and this is true here aswell. It already has good speed, gives
Swiftness
to further increase the speed of our whole team.
Strengthen
also gives a bit more tankyness to our whole squad, which it needs in case our tank fails.
Backline #2 and speed booster
Finally, our last unit is Countess Sinash. We use her for much the same reason as Supply Runner. She is also a good damage source, but what we want is again the
Swiftness
. Sometimes
Affliction
can serve a purpose to negate healing, but we can't really make it target anything specific due to scattershot, so this is just something we say "thank you" for each time it happens - we can't count on it.
Blast
and 4 damage makes her a potent damage dealer, but also vulnerable to Return Fire.
When to use
In general this is a strategy that can be used as long as all the cards are playable, and there is not a Magic Reflect or Return Fire ruleset. In those rules, our units are likely to kill themselves, and we need them all alive to make sure that Chaos Agent has the best chance of dodging everything. Another ruleset that has to be avoided for all costs is the Aim True ruleset.
Good rules for this strategy are Keep your distance - we don't use any melee units. The Fog of War rule is also great, because we don't have to worry about Sneak units.
Battle Examples
Battle 1
victor-alexander's team:
lordcagor's team:
Battle 2
| flaxion vs. bafi | |
|---|
| Type | Ranked |
| Format | Wild |
| Mana | 39 |
| Elements | Red, Blue, Green, White, Black |
| Winner | bafi |
flaxion's team:
bafi's team:
Battle 3
synist3r's team:
hametaro's team:
Battle 4
mofu2021's team:
cabqueen's team:
Final words
I hope you found this strategy useful. Never seen it before - now make it part of your repertoire. Know it already - never hurts with a refresher of how awesome it is to play this.
The battle links and summaries were made with spltools, specifically the function discussed in this post.
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Best wishes
@Kalkulus
