@strangestories: Firefist is good if you buff it; so basically it's good with Uterra.

@daouzin: From what I could glean from the trailer, the game certainly seems interesting. How long do matches take? In my old-age I find that is becoming more and more of a factor in my gaming decisions.

Yeah, but that was pre-release so I don't think that counts. Now that the open beta has started, people have spent real money on these cards, and are starting to associate real value to them.

Firefist Uranti has an above-average body making him difficult to one-shot by both removal and blockers. On the other hand, he generally needs to combo with another card to become really effective. This puts him in the odd place of being a "deal with me" card that requires a bit more nursing to get going than others. That said, because of his resilience you can generally expect him to 3-for-2 or better if you have the right combo going. It's not as good as the 2-for-1 you can expect from some of the bigger bombs, but he also demands immediate attention because otherwise he becomes a card advantage machine.

@bisonhero said:

Firefist Uranti is good if you're running Tempys/Uterra; they can get huge pretty quickly with Lifeshaper Savants.

As for the other card you mentioned: yeah, it's currently bugged. It won't gain the armor if the attack bonus is passive from other cards (Battle Technician, Alloyin General) but it will if it's from a direct spell (Heavy Artillery, Enrage, etc.).

@starvinggamer: First game is the longest for people and can take 30 minutes to an hour, but we're trying to figure out a good tutorial system that enables players to learn the majority of the mechanics by doing a guided tutorial. My regular group of play testers can play games in about 20 minutes to 40 minutes, but we've recently made some game changes that we hope will bring that down to 15 to 30 minutes.

Thanks for checking it out, btw, appreciate it!

@daouzin: Yeah, of course. Let me know when there's more info to be had.

Pulled 2 legendaries yesterday, one from a basic and one from a normal booster. Got a Heart Tree and a Synapsis Oracle. Both are really fun cards, level III Synapsis Oracle is amazing to have. I'm trying to figure out how to make a strong tempys blitz deck with cards like Pyre Giant and Ashurian Mystic but it never works out. Anyone have any suggestions about what cards are needed to build a deck like that? (by that I mean a deck that just burns down your opponent as fast as possible)

@cjduke: Tempys aggro is really fucking rough. Obviously first and foremost you want cards that take it to the face, but it's pretty easy for your opponent to trade well against your more aggressive creatures. Basically you want big hitters with Aggressive and Mobility. Things like Wind Primordial, Ashurian Mystic, Flamestoke Shaman, and Windcaller Shaman are great lower-rarity choices. 3x Flamestoke Shaman is basically mandatory. Magma Hounds are also very good for that little extra ping to finish your opponent's creatures off. Going into Heroic+, Seismic Adept, Stormforged Avatars (if you're going mono-Tempys), Cinderfist Brawlers, Pyre Giants, and Fervent Assault are all solid picks. Uranti Bolt is fantastic for buying time later in the game, level one gets you 2 turns of their biggest attacker not hitting you so you are free to go for the face.

But the real crux of this whole shebang, the keys that makes Tempys aggro possible, are Firestorm and a splash of Nekrium for Epidemic. It almost doesn't matter what faction you're playing against, the opponent is eventually going to gain board control against you by trading well with your attackers. Your job is to go for the face, ignoring their creatures as much as is reasonable. Then, once they've gotten far enough ahead that they're going to be able to start swinging back in a meaningful way, you drop a Firestorm to reset the board and start again.

At lower rarities though, you may be better suited running Tempys/Uterra. Deepbranch Prowler, Grove Huntress, Enrage, and Shardplate Delvers are all potent cards for aggressive decks.

@starvinggamer: Yeah, it is a really tough way to play. I have a full playset of most of the cards you listed, I just don't have any firestorms or epidemics so it isn't really working out.

At least I just pulled and Echowisp in a basic booster today, getting lucky!

Currently the game is too mutch pay to win for my liking mainly because you need heroics and legendaries are so mutch more powerfull and theyre drop rate is meaningless in f2p where you only play 30mins a day. If it was same as scrolls where you get ingame currency from every match, then there wouldbe chance to just grind them and also point to play matches vs people. I realy dont understand why they havent gone to that model if theyre going to block freely gained cards from market. That would get people to play more as there woulbe actualy be point when you get some in-game currency even from losing and lot more for winning.

In Scrolls you cant pay your way to win reasonably, because they have heavily limited the ways you can get money into the game and if you dont like random cards you can trade ingame money for people for cards and that is actualy fast way to get the kind of deck you want.

Solforge has decent ideas but the f2p model theyre using is bad.

So, am I reading this right? If you don't want to pay money in hopes of getting a "rare" digital card in a game that's still in beta, and all the cards you currently have are total garbage, there is literally zero reason to play beyond the 30 or so minutes it takes to get all the Silver you can earn in a given day? Grinding and playing the game is completely meaningless?

Man, they are really pushing the "pay to win" angle HARD.

@kj869: I haven't played Scrolls so I can't speak to that, but the F2P model in SolForge currently is significantly more generous than any other F2P DCG I've played. They give you more cards in 30 minutes of play than other games give you with hours of grinding. That said, more ways to earn cards as an F2P player are on their way including free draft events, a single player campaign, and a way to convert extra cards into something.

The reason cards earned via F2P means are going to be blocked from trading is to preserve the economy. Because the game is so generous, it would be extremely easy to set up a large number of bot accounts to grind for cards. With bots flooding the market with cards, it wouldn't take long for prices to bottom out giving players no reason to buy actual packs over singles. With no players buying packs, the revenue stream dies and the game along with it.

Oh, and I don't play DCG's to earn fake currency. That sounds like work. I play them to have fun. Not having to grind out wins for hours allows me to do things like mess around with my unheroic deck (no Heroics/no Legendaries) and not stress about whether or not I win or lose.

Dunno if any of you guys still care about this, but the deck that won the recent Reddit 256-man tournament had 0 Legendaries in it, ultimately triumphing over a deck with 12 Legendaries. Here's the list:

Creatures (15):

• 3 Darkshaper Savant
• 3 Flameshaper Savant
• 3 Grimgaunt Predator
• 3 Magma Hound
• 3 Master of Elements

Spells (15):

• 3 Cull the Weak
• 3 Epidemic
• 3 Lightning Spark
• 3 Static Shock
• 3 Uranti Bolt

Defeated:

Creatures (24):

• 3 Arboris, Grove Dragon
• 3 Echowisp
• 3 Everflame Phoenix
• 3 Gemhide Basher
• 3 Glowstride Stag
• 2 Leafkin Progenitor
• 3 Lightbringer Cleric
• 3 Rootforged Avatar
• 1 Uterra Packmaster

Spells (6):

• 2 Botanimate
• 1 Feral Instinct
• 3 Ferocious Roar

Foolish second player didn't have any savants!

@starvinggamer: Of course a Savant deck won. It also seems the the loosing deck would be really bad against Savants once they get to the mid game.

Unrelated note, this game makes me really glad that I don't use the name DarkShaper in online games any more.

@starvinggamer: How does that Darkshaper deck deal with a level 3 Scrapforge Titan, aside from Darkshaping and Epidemicing it enough that it's eventually in Cull the Weak range? Even that seems slow/costly in terms of card advantage.

I've lost so many damn games to max level Scrapforge Titan, to the point that I should probably put Blight Walker in my Nekrium/Alloyin deck.

Well, Blight Walker doesn't do enough damage to punch through the armor :P

That said, the general plan of the deck is to use the Shaper engine, backed up by Predators, to generate massive amounts of momentum during player level 2. Most Alloyin decks, especially ones that are diverting resources to leveling up Scrapforge Titans, are going to be giving up so much advantage early on that by the time they hit level 3, even if they manage to draw into a level 3 Titan, it's going to be far too little, too late to make up the difference.

@jokersmilez: I haven't paid a cent for the game, am still new to CCG games, and I've managed to become a pretty competitive player with the amount of cards I've won from the three daily prizes. Sure, it requires a bit of luck in regards to the kinds of cards you draw, but you eventually start getting the mid-level packs as rewards, and soon enough you have a pretty awesome bunch of cards to pick from.

And @starvinggamer, I finally have a really competitive deck again! Built one around life-giving clerics and stags in order to keep my health above 100 for a beastly dragon I managed to snag during one of my draws. It's bolstered by a couple of grimgaunt predators, some of those chubby zombies that deal damage to all of your enemy's cards when they die (that's crazy handy, by the way), and a whole bunch of bolstering spells, such as necrovive (a must on that dragon) and the Spirit of the Grimgaunt card (I think that's the name of it). I'm now winning about half the games I play, with the bulk of my losses coming from decks similar to that tournament one you posted. I suspect in the hands of a more experienced CCG player, my deck could be even shinier and better played, but for me, this is huge progress.

@sparky_buzzsaw: Yeah, an Arboris deck was second place in the tournament so it seems like there's some definite viability there. I'm glad to hear you're having fun and the F2P stuff is working out for you :D

@starvinggamer: Oh right, in my mind Blight Walker just destroyed whatever it battles with. Anyway, I recognize that Scrapforge Titan is slow, but even when I generate a really solid mid game, unless I am like a turn away from winning, my deck just doesn't have enough free cards to Darkshaper my way out of the Titan, and he just wrecks everything and is untouchable.

@sparky_buzzsaw: It's just really frustrating for new players who only have the starter cards to basically be forced into getting their asses kicked by everyone who has been playing awhile or just play against the computer for 10 minutes a day every day for a couple weeks until they've built up enough cards to get something half decent. For a new player, there's no incentive to play longer than that unless you spend money which doesn't exactly make you want to spend money.

From everything I've read about tournament winning decks and from the play experience I do have (about 50 games vs. people), Savants are really strong. And in over a week of getting every daily bonus and using all my silver on boosters, I've managed to get 1 Darkshaper and 1 Steelshaper and that's it. Maybe this is the norm for F2P CCG's but it really seems to discourage F2P.

That said, I've managed to put together a deck that so far is nearly undefeated in about 20 games (mostly against Darkshaper Savant/Predator decks because almost everyone else seems to playing some version of those).

Creatures (15):

• 3 Alloyin General
• 3 Metamind Adept
• 2 Battle Techtician
• 3 Deepbranch Prowler
• 3 Deepwood Bear Rider
• 1 Shardplate Delver

Spells (15):

• 3 Electronet
• 3 Heavy Artillery
• 2 Energy Surge
• 3 Feral Instinct
• 2 Enrage
• 2 Ferocious Roar

Maybe it's because I have a lot of CCG experience and I'm not playing against great players but my deck just seems to overwhelm people in the mid game. They can't seem to get anything of their own rolling because they can't ignore 3-4 creatures hitting them for 10+ each and they spend everything they've got trying to keep my creatures down.

I'd like to try it against more experienced players with established decks because maybe I've just been lucky and matched against players just trying to copy a "top tier" deck without really knowing how to play. However, it feels does good to beat players with Legendary and "stronger" cards in their decks when I'm just running some random aggro deck I've pieced together in a few days of mostly bad boosters.

I'm going to be all over the Android version of this, seems like a great game for tablets.

Isn't this kind of a bad thing? At first, news like this seems like, "Hey, you don't need them fancy cards to be good. And it's not pay to win because anyone can!". But thinking about it, it just seems to reinforce the absurd amount of randomness and huge swings that this game based on. Maybe it's really saying, "Hey, don't waste your time getting them fancy cards, anyone can beat you!"

Only to people that are determined to see flaws in the game to begin with. It was a 256-man tournament. You can't random your way through a bracket that big, no matter how lucky you are. It's not like Joe-nobody suddenly just showed up with a slapdash deck and pulled one out. The player who won was an accomplished Dutch WoW:TCG player with a focused, well-designed deck. Winners of previous tournaments are players that have consistently put in strong results since before the open beta began.

The results don't mean that anyone can slap a deck of commons together and beat a good deck, it just means that powerful cards are found at all rarities. Stacking your deck with rare cards does not guarantee victory in any CCG.

That being said, the deck he won with revolved around Savants, arguably the strongest cards in the game but don't happen to be that rare. In fact, 10 of the top 16 decks in that Reddit tournament were running 3 (the maximum) Flamershaper Savants. That doesn't sound like "an absurd amount of randomness" to me (even if it does speak to some balance issues).

@mb: definitely check it out. It's crazy amounts f fun, and while I can't speak for it on Android, I'm sure it's the same as on the iPad which is my preferred platform for it. The Steam version is fine but the fonts are much smaller.

@jokersmilez said:

Still, getting back to StarvingGamer's original statement, fine, you don't need Legendaries to have a winning tournament deck. But you do need basically a ton of Heroics and some very particular Rares (why can't any of these digital card games just call them "uncommons"). Stuff like the Savants, Cull the Weak, Uranti Bolt, and a few commons are useful, but other than that select few, the vast majority of commons and rares that you get from the basic boosters are pretty terrible.

The fact is, most Legendaries DO pretty much wreck casual decks, and the deck from the Reddit tourney only overcame those Legendaries because it's leveraging the most broken Heroics and Rares (and Magma Hounds, possibly the best common creature in the game).

In this CCG, stacking your deck with Rares does guarantee victory in 99% of matchmaking. MtG and some other CCGs give incentives to use commons as the workhorses of your deck, to fill in parts of your mana curve, or to enhance some synergy. In Solforge, so many common creatures are vanilla cannon fodder that you should never play when you could instead play Heroics like Avatars or Grimgaunt Predators with equivalent stats, or any number of Legendaries with stupidly high stats and special abilities. A couple of the common spells are playable, but stuff like Dreadbolt and Botanimate and Ferocious Roar are leagues above most of the common spells (especially the ones that enchant your creature with some effect but otherwise give no stat boost).

I'd argue that just as many commons in a game like MtG are completely worthless. Unless they're mana dorks or ramp spells or you're playing Red Deck Wins, you're going to be curving out with Rares, Mythics, and a few Uncommons. But the power ramp in MtG has taken that game so many weird places it's not really a relevant comparison. That game is expensive.

But you're right, Heroics seem like the real workhorses of competitive SolForge. That said, I've fought against plenty of decks chock full of Heroics and Legendaries while piloting one of my Unheroic decks and I'm still winning significantly more often than I'm losing. My Alloyin/Tempys Unheroic deck doesn't even use Savants, and that's the one that does the best. It's a CCG so of course the more expensive cards are going to make winning easier, but a well constructed deck with a thoughtful pilot can make up some of the difference.

@bisonhero: I think his original post was about how it's pointless to spend money to get "Legendary" cards if you can get beat with easy to obtain cards even by F2P players, but it sounds like you're talking about balance. Yes, most commons are trash and most legendaries are powerful when matched with good rares and heroics that make a deck actually work together. But MtG wasn't that different from that, but vastly increased mechanics, complexity, and number of cards meant that commons and uncommons could remain competitive even against rare-stacked decks with most good decks only relying on a handful of rares (dual lands were the rare staple from when I played). Back in my MtG days, I would take great pleasure in playing a Standard deck with 0 rares in it for the sheer joy of dismantling some spoiled kid who got his mom to buy him all the cards necessary for some tournament winning decklist he found online.

I agree that the power level of most legendary and heroics are a bit too strong. I think the power level of commons needs to come up to try and balance out the power curve between commons, rares, heroics and legendaries (Lord knows how many total garbage rares are in Magic) but I guess the F2P model makes them weight the power more towards the more difficult to acquire cards to incentivize spending money, which is pretty scummy but whatever.

@starvinggamer: I wish this game had a "draft mode" which focused more on building a deck with what you've got instead of grinding for as many Savants, Grimgaunt Predators, and other OP shit. The last few years I played MtG was only draft because it's way more fun and really focuses on the skill of the player rather than the size of their wallet.

@jokersmilez: Draft is coming in the next major update due in October. You will be able to earn an average of one free draft each week as part of your dailies. If you're good enough you'll be able to go infinite. In their current test build, "good enough" is 3-0 which seems crazy generous to me so that may end up changing.

Looking forward to the next update. Played a decent chunk of the game, but I'm finding myself less and less interested in SolForge, in it's current form.

Looking forward to the next update. Played a decent chunk of the game, but I'm finding myself less and less interested in SolForge, in it's current form.

@starvinggamer: Given the randomness of drafts 3-0 seems a tad generous but not overly so, maybe like 5-1 would be a better subset; granted the Solforge community doesn't seem to be particularly good.

For those that care, patch drops tomorrow. Notable updates include:

• "Next Game" button lights up when it is your turn in another game and takes you there directly
• Additional deck slots can be purchased for 25,000 Silver or 280 Gold
• Mono-faction preconstructed decks from closed beta are going to be sold for 3,600 Gold; each one includes 2 Legendaries, a slew of Heroics, and comes with a free deck slot
• Daily Rewards have a global reset at midnight, Pacific time
• "Voltron" Alloyin robot got a bunch of buffs, is still laughably unplayable as a deck theme

Full patch notes here: https://solforgegame.com/forum/general-discussion/solforge-3-1-2-patch-notes/

@starvinggamer: Yep, I continue to not understand this magical scenario where a unicorn and a leprechaun join forces to somehow have you begin your turn with 5 Guardian Pieces in play, allowing you to use the activated ability of Forge Guardian Gamma.

@starvinggamer: While I have you here: how in the fuck are decks full of 3x Echowisp, 3x Uterra Packmaster, 3x Leafkin Progenitor, and some other assorted Uterra "make multiple creatures" bullshit even remotely fair?

Well, those are 9 Legendaries right there so that's part of the answer. On an individual basis:

• Echowisp - more of a strong defensive card than an offensive one, it's only especially powerful against mono-Alloyin. Both Tempys and Nekrium have answers for them that you would want to play anyways and often splash if you're going dual-faction, and it's irrelevant in the mirror.
• Uterra Packmaster - only worthwhile if you're in the lead, which Uterra is good at building early. They're mediocre if you have an even board-state with your opponent and worthless if you're on the defensive. Also they disincentivize splashing which can limit your options.
• Leafkin Progenitor - also only really notable against Alloyin, it is easily countered by Tempys and Nekrium and is really fucking terrible past level 1. If the early lead they build for you doesn't win you the game, you're going to be cursing them every time you draw them mid to late game.

Basically mono-Uterra swarm beatdown has a lot of ways to hit you hard and fast, but well constructed decks of equal quality (rarity-wise) will have numerous answers to the biggest problems in Uterra. The Uterra player then has to rely on good draws, and moreso on bad draws for his opponent, in order to build a lead big enough, early enough. Of all the various top-tier decks, mono-Uterra has a tendency to feel the most overwhelmingly unfair when used against mid-tier brews.

I've followed Brian Kibler for a long time (at some points literally, I have WoW tcg promo's signed by him!) I've been following Solforge for a while now. glad to see there are other duders interested (and I was super excited when Drew started talking about it XD) my name on there is Wadtomaton if anyone wants to add me to friends lists or whatnot.

@starvinggamer: Yeah, the game that prompted me saying that was a game where after the first shuffle, he was drawing all of his level 2 cards, while I just kept drawing a bunch of my level 1 stuff, so maybe he got lucky. Still, as much as I have stuff like Epidemic to hilariously counter Echowisp, if I don't happen to have one in hand when Echowisp is played, then I'm suddenly staring down a bunch of points of damage that I'm going to have to waste some creatures blocking, or just ignore for a turn and hope I draw an Epidemic.

I just started playing mono Uterra and I have been crushing people. I have 1 Echowisp and 1 Packmaster I pulled from packs and I just stacked the deck with 3 Avatar's, 3 Prowler's, 3 Frostwild beast tracker, 3 Cavern Hydra, 3 Gemhide Basher and so on.... I generally always get board advantage from having such big creatures out early and with 3 Lifeshaper Savants and 3 Feroucious Roars my creatures always stay pretty big through the early and mid game. By late game I usually have such good board advantage plus plenty of breakthrough damage that I win before my opponents big creatures can really start doing damage. The Gemhide Basher's are AMAZING at shutting down mid and late game savants, and Grimguant predators and devourers. I also have a Heart Tree which can be really really strong for maintaining board advantage. It is a simple, but very easy way to play the game and I find it a lot more fun than the savant decks most people like to run. I'm thinking about buying the Uterra deck to get another Echowisp and Packmaster and then probably start splashing Nekrium to run Epidemic. I already went 13-2 today so it works pretty great. My two losses were to a tempys/nekrium savant deck with devourers of course.

Anyway I have been looking for other interesting/unique decks to run. I like to build a lot of different decks that try to utilize as many different cards as I can that I own so if anyone has some cool suggestions I would really appreciate it!

Savant nerf incoming. While their stats won't be changed, their ability will only trigger off of cards of the same faction.

How do Oratek Warhammer work??? As far as I can tell it isn't doing what it says.

@budwyzer: Well first its secondary ability is Allied Alloyin which means you have to have an Alloyin card in your hand when you play it in order for the ability to activate. If it does, you will see a red exclamation mark on the card while it's in play. While the ability is active, during your battle phase if the Warhammer deals damage directly to your opponent and not one of your opponent's creatures, you should be given the opportunity to select one of your cards in hand and level it. Normally you can only level up two cards in your hand per turn by playing them, but this gets around that limitation by letting you level an additional card whenever the Warhammer hits your opponent during your turn. The next time you draw that card it will be a higher level.