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Echo

Staff Writer
Joined 05/29/2019 Achieve Points 860 Posts 318

Echo's Comments

  • Echo's Avatar
    Staff Writer Cupcake 860 318 Posts Joined 05/29/2019
    Posted 2 years, 7 months ago

    Thanks for bringing this to my attention! For whatever reason, in the database we had an older version of that step of the quest being shown instead of the most recent one, which is not only worded in the same way as the other steps, but is also now called "defend the squirrels" instead of "protect the squirrels". So to answer the question, the three steps work the same way, you can make incremental progress on your hero power.

  • Echo's Avatar
    Staff Writer Cupcake 860 318 Posts Joined 05/29/2019
    Posted 2 years, 7 months ago

    Nope, you can hero power each turn to give incremental progress! The thing is just that I did not consider it most the time because for the required amounts of 4-5-6, relying on the hero power more than once is not only mana inefficient, but also slow enough to the point where by the time we would be able to finish each off the hero power, we would have already drawn into some of our attack buff cards.

    That being said, there are scenarios where a combination of attack buffs from cards and from the hero power can be faster than just the cards alone. The best example of this is with the 5 attack breakpoint and [cardPark Panther. The ability to attack with the panther once then hero power twice over the next two turns is more reliable than stringing together 2 Pounce and a hero power.

  • Echo's Avatar
    Staff Writer Cupcake 860 318 Posts Joined 05/29/2019
    Posted 2 years, 7 months ago

    I should have definitely considered Cornelius Roame more than I did. Realistically, this archetype of deck can protect him very well and it does fix the major issue that the deck has once we complete the quest. However the biggest issue with Roame to me is that he is very dependent on what type of decks are seeing play in order for him to truly be strong. For example, in a minion dominant meta, where we can truly go to town pinging everything down for 2, Roame is just going to sit back and draw through most of our deck, but if decks with lots of removal, such as a spell mage, control warlock, etc, become mainstream, Roame gets significantly harder to stay alive, and thus worse.

    That being said, Roame can probably find a home over something like Wandmaker in the current version of the list.

  • Echo's Avatar
    Staff Writer Cupcake 860 318 Posts Joined 05/29/2019
    Posted 2 years, 7 months ago

    Oasis Ally over Flurry (Rank 1) is definitely an oversight on my part, so thanks for pointing that out to me. 

    As for the whole big brained decklist existing out there, that definitely wouldn't surprise me. Mage has legitimately strong minions that just don't see play because Refreshing Spring Water and Incanter's Flow are two very nice cards. But running them also means running what could be staples like Wand Thief and Jandice Barov just not possible. The decklist here being just raw Spell Mage is almost entirely the fact that I couldn't come up with a list that felt good on its own, and thus just decided to use an already proven 'engine' for the deck.

    As for the archetype not needing the quest, I feel like its not that bad of a thing to try out since it effectively does just cycle itself, and later on discovers some more damage. I did not touch up much upon the first two rewards in the article since the whole series is mainly just "how fast is each quest on average", but the cantrip and discover are definitely two decent parts if you aren't trying to turbo through it. I'm very interested in seeing how this quest turns out since it's one of the few that I don't think needs to rely 100% on the final reward to get meaningful value out of.

  • Echo's Avatar
    Staff Writer Cupcake 860 318 Posts Joined 05/29/2019
    Posted 2 years, 7 months ago

    Rustrot Viper is definitely a nice option, though I usually don't include tech cards for whatever reason, probably just to get used to messing around with the core and then finding ways to adjust it from there to better counter the meta.

    As for the other changes, Mystery Winner -> Entrapped Sorceress definitely makes sense as its just a wider card pool that will usually provide something that we would like. As for cutting Explosive Trap and Bola Shot, I'm not a huge fan of, since I find them to be decent anti-aggro tools on their own, in addition to progressing the quest, as well as still being hesitant on the power of cards like Encumbered Pack Mule

    I'll probably revisit this list after toying around with it once the new set comes out since this and the DH questlines are probably the ones I'm interested in playing the most, for better or for worse. Thanks for the suggestions!

  • Echo's Avatar
    Staff Writer Cupcake 860 318 Posts Joined 05/29/2019
    Posted 2 years, 7 months ago

    Slate is very interesting for this type of deck. He works ludicrously well with some of the removal we are running, like Explosive Trap and Bola Shot but ultimately, I feel like having a free hero power that can just ping things off just makes running him a bit pointless. I do think there is a home for him in some type of this quest, especially in wild where you have cards like Rapid Fire, but I'm personally just not a fan of running cards that need to synergize with other cards in order to feel good in a class that, atleast in standard right now, does not have the ability to pick and choose cards from their deck.

  • Echo's Avatar
    Staff Writer Cupcake 860 318 Posts Joined 05/29/2019
    Posted 2 years, 7 months ago

    When I was first theorycrafting this list, I actually had a Lock and Load in it. I messed around with it back when the card first came out in TGT and it felt ok, so I wanted to do a bit of playtesting with it now and see if its changed at all. The biggest issue with the card is that more often than not it just gives you clunky garbage, which usually wouldn't be bad given that with the finished questline Hero Power, we can make most of the garbage into additional damage. However, Lock and Load also gives creatures, which is generally bad.

    Hunter has a fairly even split of creatures to spells, giving you a 44% chance to hit a spell off of Lock and Load. These spells will have an average mana cost of 2.71, (possibly 2.65, if Lock and Load can generate itself, which I don't think it can) which is decent, but theres still just too much whiff potential. If you were to have 2 spells in hand, the chances of getting 2 spells is only 20% and in my opinion, the consistency of things like Resizing Pouch outweighs the potential highroll of Lock and Load.

    That being said, I'd love it if this archetype gets refined, Lock and Load can sneak its way into the list. The card is very fun to play around with.

  • Echo's Avatar
    Staff Writer Cupcake 860 318 Posts Joined 05/29/2019
    Posted 2 years, 7 months ago

    Wouldn't surprise me if there's a better build out there for this quest. I tend to avoid playing druid like the plague and so don't have a lot of experience building for it. The way I tackled it is to use Guff as a finisher for matchups where the opponent player just barely starts to stabilize and we need some way of getting back at them.

    As for Mark of the Spikeshell, thats a pretty sick combo and could be interesting with Thickhide Kodo as you mentioned, or even stuff like Teacher's Pet if you were to take a more tried and true Guardian Animals build of the deck.

    Midrange Beast Druid does sound pretty interesting, though I'd have to spend some time playing around with it since the aforementioned lack of playing druid. End of the day, the goal I want for this series is less "how good is this theorycraft I came up with" and more "how fast can we reasonably complete the questline with the provided tools".

  • Echo's Avatar
    Staff Writer Cupcake 860 318 Posts Joined 05/29/2019
    Posted 2 years, 7 months ago

    Absolutely! There is so much more tools in wild like Claw, Gnash, and even things like Savage Roar can help out a bit depending on what you make yoru deck like. The main reason I decided to stick with standard for this deck, as well as all future decks for this mini series, is because its a format I'm more experienced with and the smaller card pool does help quite a bit with deckbuilding.

  • Echo's Avatar
    Staff Writer Cupcake 860 318 Posts Joined 05/29/2019
    Posted 2 years, 7 months ago

    Good catch! That is something that I did not consider, so I'll just write about it here to make up for that.

    For the first step, Solar Eclipse + Pounce can be found by turn 8 on average, which is obviously not the best look when we already expect to have the first step done by turn 3.

    As for the second step, we can just weave in a hero power with the aforementioned Eclipse + Pounce, which assuming we did not use either for the first step, can once again be found by turn 8 on average, which does help the consistency a bit, but ultimately doesn't make it faster.

    The final step is where things get a little bit more interesting. Solar Eclipse + either of the 3 mana attack buff spells does save time. The chance of having both of these cards in your hand go as 68% on turn 8 if you have not cast any of the 3 mana attack buffs, 53% to have by turn 9 if you've cast 1, and finally 53% to have by turn 14 if you've cast two of them.

    So all in all, Solar Eclipse can speed up the last step if you have cast none or one of the 3 mana attack buffs, but past then and it won't really speed things up on average.

    All this being said, the main card you want to pair with Solar Eclipse is actually Fungal Fortunes, simply because 6/8 of the cards that help speed up the quest are spells, and if you can pull the two off, you can expect to finish the last step significantly faster even if you have already used 2/4 of the 3 mana attack buffs.

  • Echo's Avatar
    Staff Writer Cupcake 860 318 Posts Joined 05/29/2019
    Posted 2 years, 7 months ago

    Do I have some news for you.

    In reply to United in Stormwind
  • Echo's Avatar
    Staff Writer Cupcake 860 318 Posts Joined 05/29/2019
    Posted 2 years, 7 months ago

    Glad you enjoyed it! More to come soon.

  • Echo's Avatar
    Staff Writer Cupcake 860 318 Posts Joined 05/29/2019
    Posted 2 years, 8 months ago
    Quote From dapperdog

    Wonder what is the interaction of this card with Perpetual Flame? Can this one card literally finish the entire quest?

    The quest requires you to play the overload card as opposed to cast so I think its safe to assume that Perpetual Flame would only trigger it once.

  • Echo's Avatar
    Staff Writer Cupcake 860 318 Posts Joined 05/29/2019
    Posted 2 years, 8 months ago

    The card is put back into the deck and a new one is drawn and you can't trade when your deck is empty.

    In reply to Tradeable
  • Echo's Avatar
    Staff Writer Cupcake 860 318 Posts Joined 05/29/2019
    Posted 2 years, 11 months ago

    Yeah, that's my biggest issue with the set, that being it feels too much like an HS expansion. The trailer is so 'cartoony' clashes with the usual seriousness that MTG has. As a degenerate storm player, there's a ton of cards here that I'm interested in trying out since Magecraft lends itself so easily to that sort of deck, but I can definitely see the cards being underwhelming if you don't play older formats. Hopefully, though you'll be able to find a few cards that'll pique your interest!

  • Echo's Avatar
    Staff Writer Cupcake 860 318 Posts Joined 05/29/2019
    Posted 2 years, 11 months ago

    It sparked up again when HSesports revealed the GM player lineup for this year. It caught a decent amount of traction and basically forced Blizzard to answer. This very much feels like a situation that Blizzard wanted to downplay but were unable to due to community backlash.

  • Echo's Avatar
    Staff Writer Cupcake 860 318 Posts Joined 05/29/2019
    Posted 2 years, 11 months ago

    Yeah, the flavor of this set is without a doubt one of the best parts of it. Both Strixhaven and Kaldheim feel like they have so much more personality behind them compared to last year's sets and I've been loving it. Granted I'm also heavily biased towards this set because I'm a dirty storm player, but that's beside the point.

  • Echo's Avatar
    Staff Writer Cupcake 860 318 Posts Joined 05/29/2019
    Posted 3 years, 1 month ago

    I do plan on returning to the series, but the last few months I have just been a bit too busy to be able to keep up with MTGA. Soon though.

  • Echo's Avatar
    Staff Writer Cupcake 860 318 Posts Joined 05/29/2019
    Posted 3 years, 1 month ago

    Immediately read that classic HS was a thing and got ecstatic to finally play 5 mana auctioneer again. Makes me wonder if they are ever going to do nerfs/buffs for it encase ramp druid, miracle rogue or zoo just become too dominant.

  • Echo's Avatar
    Staff Writer Cupcake 860 318 Posts Joined 05/29/2019
    Posted 3 years, 1 month ago

    I've been playing the deck quite a bit, about 30~ games with it. The deck is probably the biggest high roll deck we've ever seen in the game but besides that it is not incredibly problematic. The power of the deck comes from 2 legendaries, with 2 cards that draw for one of them, which results in games where you steamroll your opponent turn 5 with a '''''ramp''''' deck, but also games where you opening hand has a total mana cost of 30+ and you just die before you ever get the chance of doing anything fun. The overall winrate of the deck is fine.

    The high roll potential is the biggest reason why this deck might get something touched on. Being such a polarizing deck leads to a lot of bad play experiences for the opponents, as well as the player, resulting in a similar situation that turtle mage caused last year in Scholomance. Alec Dawson mentioned that he and the team are keeping an eye on the deck to make sure it doesn't evolve into something more problematic, but as of right now it feels more like a flavor-of-the-week deck to them than an actual meta-defining must nerf deck. 

    For the time being, if you are facing against them a lot, I'd recommend trying to play a deck thats able to take advantage of Nozdormu as much as possible, since its the easier of the two highroll cards to draw/play and has an easy counterplay. I've had a very solid winrate with a quest Envoy Rustwix warlock deck running two Twisting Nethers, two Hysteria, and two Dark Skies, so if your in a pocket meta where everybody and their mother is playing the deck, I'd recommend trying it out.

    In reply to Ramp Paladin?
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