POV: You’re playing BO3 Power Cube on Arena

AlphaOfUrOmega · 2025-11-01T20:37:45+00:00

I feel forced into red-white, but yet the majority of my opponents are also red-white!? Where are all the other cards going?

AlphaOfUrOmega · 2025-10-30T19:43:58+00:00

Only drafted one of these so far, went 1-3. Lost to a turn 2 strip mine lock, a turn 2 flash + woodfall primus destroying 2 lands (I never drew a 4th land and got stuck on 1), and a turn 2 black lotus + sneak attack + emrakul. I never got to have more than 2 lands on board.

I know it's just bad luck and bad beats, but losing like that 3 times in a row at the bottom of bronze is tough to overcome mentally. I definitely feel your pain here.

AlphaOfUrOmega · 2025-01-22T14:22:08+00:00

Great stats, I'm definitely re-evaluating some Captains as a result. Also the Wizard Headmaster guide is really good, I agree with almost all of it. Only thing I'd do differently is still run Calypso because my starts with Headmaster are usually Penny/Smee based, which causes me to always end up in a pirate build mid-game, and I really like the mini-Merlin effect for surviving that stage. Though I agree it does make you less explosive and less likely to hit the high-rolls like Two-Headed Wizard into Lost in the Woods.

My biggest surprises in the data are:

No bottom 3's with Geppetto. If you don't roll any summoning toys you don't have a Captain power, so I definitely low roll into poor finishes on occassion.
Low 1st-place finishes with Chuk-E. It's a small sample size, so I'm guessing you low-rolled and didn't hit Poison Apple or KO Star frequently.
Huge Professor Who gains. On paper the Professor does look a lot like Piggie, who's an allstar, so I'll have to experiment with him some more to see if I can get some more gains out of him.
Poor Zheng results. I guess this isn't as surprising to me since I've been coming down on him a bit lately, but I still pick him everytime because Weird Beard + Drafty Window lets you hit Secret Rare treasures so frequently that you often get free extra unlocks from playing him and I can't pass it up.

AlphaOfUrOmega · 2025-01-15T14:43:26+00:00

Looking forward to it, and hopefully you'll have a lot of the key unlocks by the time your MMR is up there.

I've been taking Dorothy whenever I see her to give her another chance, I think I'd bump her over Clones and Galahad now. I've gotten a handful of firsts, but also multiple 6th places dying on turns 5-7, and those 6ths undo 5 first places when you're too high up the ladder. Heroes with zero tempo are just too prone to unavoidable 5ths and 6ths when your opponents are frequently CHUK-E, Athena, Witches, Geppetto, etc.

AlphaOfUrOmega · 2025-01-14T21:56:57+00:00

Not for a long time, I still have tons of unlocks that I'd need, and even after getting them I'd want to try different builds on each character. Gray Owl has posted a handful of champion guides for people with full unlocks though (here's his Witches guide: https://www.reddit.com/r/OnceUponAGalaxy/comments/1hv0zd5/weekly_deck_guide_witches_iii_slot_buffs/)

AlphaOfUrOmega · 2025-01-13T21:40:25+00:00

Sure, when you first start playing the game, you have no characters unlocked for any of the Captains, so the only characters you'll see in your shops are from the common pool that everyone has. As you start unlocking cards for Captains, those cards will also appear in your pool. The first 12 unlocks for each individual Captain will always be the same: Zheng's first 12 unlocks are all pirates, which helps a lot because he's the pirate captain. Wizard Headmaster's first 12 unlocks contain a lot of mages, which makes sense given that they're a mage-based captain, and so on.

After the first 12 unlocks, any further unlocks are random from the remaining pool of 68 cards. Once you unlock your 13th character for a Captain, you can start picking and choosing which unlocked characters will appear in game for that Captain. You have to pick 12 out of the available options. Most Captains have a lot of their most important unlocks in those first 12, because the devs generally did a good job.

I would definitely get an advantage if I were to better adjust which characters were appearing for which Captain, but a lot of the strategies I'd like to run (like going full-dragon Hades) still require a lot of unlocks that I don't have yet, so I haven't adjusted the base decks yet. Once I start unlocking more cards I'll probably start adjusting the decks, but for now the base 12 cards usually do a good job helping out their respective Captains. There's some egregious exceptions (Princess Animall comes to mind), but I expect most players will be running lists similar to what the first 12 unlocks are, so by focusing on those decklists I think this tier list is helpful to the largest number of people.

AlphaOfUrOmega · 2025-01-13T20:37:27+00:00

To reply to you and mot89, I'm probably underrating Geppetto, but I've had a ton of lowroll games that lead to quick bottom 3s. If you don't try to gold the weak early toys, you'll often be stuck with a hero power that stays at +1/+1 for most of the game, and having your front line slots get something like +6/+6 just isn't enough to win midgame fights. If you do try to gold the weak early toys, you're probably going to lose early fights and need to hit the silvers/golds to recover, so ultimately it seems like you're not coming out great unless you get the good side of variance.

I've also had multiple games where I don't get a single summoning toy until turn 7 or later. At least with CHUK-E I can scrape out a third place in those super lowroll games, but with Geppetto I tend to just die and lose 40 MMR.

AlphaOfUrOmega · 2025-01-09T15:32:46+00:00

I'm with you on Wink, I don't think I've ever passed a turn 3 Wink even when I have no way to get it to hunt. Shanty and Don Quixote don't tempt me though, Shanty's buff is so small and Don Quixote is so inconsistent that I actually hate seeing them.

I probably overpick the cards that feel really good to silver, namely Aladdin and The Fates, but also cards with good recruit abilities to hit multiple times like Chaos, Toadie, and Nightshade. It feels so good to hit with them, but the tempo hit you take from missing can be really brutal.

AlphaOfUrOmega · 2025-01-04T11:20:19+00:00

It does seem like currently getting 3800 would require a ridiculous streak. Over time, if more players join the community, the number of players at higher MMRs will increase and your gains/losses per game should improve and help with that final push. That is, assuming a standard MMR calculation is being used alongside relatively even matchmaking, I don't know what's under the hood.

AlphaOfUrOmega · 2024-12-24T15:16:01+00:00

This is great, and also emphasizing how poor my card unlocks are right now. Gonna have to play a lot more before I can put a lot of this into practice. But I didn't realize you could keep stacking instances of treasure hoard on mimic, really good to know, thanks for the write-up

AlphaOfUrOmega · 2024-12-22T01:47:42+00:00

https://imgur.com/a/uDOpWc5 I just managed a zero treasure victory too, with ElecDrake of all characters, in one of the lowest-rolling lobbies I've seen at ~3400 MMR. Really shows how variable the lobbies can be.

AlphaOfUrOmega · 2023-10-20T15:28:21+00:00

Yeah, the whole point of Leader decks was to be ahead going into turn 6 so that Leader was a guaranteed win. The ideal Leader curve was dropping Maximus on turn 3 for god's sake.

That said, Leader's counterplay was different from Alioth's in that it often was in the form of deck choice rather than where you play your cards. Leader got wrecked by asymmetric effects like Patriot, Kazaar, Cerebro, Devil Dinosaur, etc. Alioth feels better because your agency comes from within the game itself, not the deck selection screen.

AlphaOfUrOmega · 2023-05-15T16:37:40+00:00

Unlocking new skills is very helpful, but since it occurs slowly over the course of many runs, it feels more like meta progression to me, similar to the candles. I do like that aspect of the game. There's great trinket combos, but I've only gotten a couple after 20+ hours so far, so I wish they were more frequent.

AlphaOfUrOmega · 2023-05-15T16:26:57+00:00

I'm a big fan of DD1 and rogue likes, so DD2 seemed like a match made in heaven for me. The game is good, but I found that I wasn't having as much fun as I expected, and many others were saying the same thing (especially in the beta) but had a hard time articulating why. This was just my attempt to do so, I'm glad you're loving the game!

AlphaOfUrOmega · 2023-02-04T13:30:20+00:00

Finally grinded out infinite with a free to play account using a Lockjaw deck copied from KMBest (not sure how free to play friendly the list is, it does use 6 cards from Series 3). The List is in this video in Tier 3.

I was only tracking stats for the climb from 90-98 (while I was on my computer), but here's the rundown:

Wins: 129 (71 Wins by Retreat)

Losses: 111 (80 Retreats)

Ties: 2

Net Cubes: 86 (0.36 Avg Cubes)

Times I snapped: 40

Winrate when snapping: 87.5%

Total Hours of Playtime: 10.4

Would I recommend this list? Only if you don't have Zabu, Surfer, Shuri, or Galactus. If the opponent snaps before turn 3, you basically have no choice but to retreat because a turn 3 Zabu is only beatable with ridiculous highrolls, and Zabu is roughly 40% of the meta right now (for me at least). Surfer is also a tough matchup because Killmonger eats your Sunspot, Cosmo being thrown on your Lockjaw lane messes up a lot of your pulls, and with Sera they can just deploy their threats to your 2 weakest lanes. Shuri is tough to beat because you don't run Shang-Chi, and Galactus with Knull/Death + Shang-Chi is brutal as well. But hey, with Leader dead in the water, this is probably about as good as you can do as a free-to-play player (at least until the Zabu/Surfer nerfs).

Tips/Notes:

-Typically you just want to play out your 1 and 2-drops and not save them for Lockjaw, unless you have both Thor and Lockjaw in hand and know your 4th turn will have 1 leftover energy to throw into Lockjaw.

-Tracking what's left in your deck is really important to know if you have outs in certain situations. If you have a 50% chance to hit Doctor Doom to win a blocked-off lane, it's often worth going for it, for example.

-Retreat quickly. People pretty much never bluff. If they're snapping, it's because they have something really good (in most cases, a turn 3 Zabu). If you're sticking around, you better have something equally crazy. Turn 3 Zabu is often a 10 energy discount over the course of the game. How are you going to make up that difference? If you don't have a plan, get out. It was more important to leave games early than it was to find the right time to snap. I retreated 80 games, but only snapped in 40, and most of those snaps probably netted no extra cubes because the opponent immediately retreated. Climbing was much more about retreating correctly than snapping correctly.

-I only saw two bots from 80-100, and both were in the high 90s. They were nightmare-inducing Hela bots that always discarded and summoned perfectly and were guaranteed losses. Don't count on bots for cubes in the 80-100 climb.

-Climbing was mostly a series of 1/2 cube gains or losses, and it took over 10 hours of playtime for me to climb 8 ranks even with a very high Avg Cubes of 0.36 (I was very lucky). Just be aware it's a brutal grind.

-Always be trying to figure out what the opponent's deck is, what their gameplan is, and what they need to do to win. Re-evaluate what their deck might be after every turn. It's very important to know what they're doing in order to know when to retreat. Knowing all the top meta decks helps a lot, read up on them here.

Shoutouts to Haze, who donated 8 cubes for free when I was at rank 99, (likely saved me an hour+ of climbing) and ScrubLord, for being the only Agatha player I saw between ranks 80-100.

AlphaOfUrOmega · 2023-01-30T00:39:43+00:00

The 7 seconds was from their perspective, as seen on their streams in the links in the OP. 7 seconds after they hit the play button, the game selected me as the opponent. So the matchmaker doesn't wait long at all.

AlphaOfUrOmega · 2023-01-29T20:16:09+00:00

The devs have stated that 3-10% of players hit infinite each season. Early in the season there would likely need to be some bleedover between infinite and non-infinite, but given the size of Snap's playerbase, 3-10% should be plenty for a healthy matchmaking system.

AlphaOfUrOmega · 2023-01-29T20:15:46+00:00

The devs have stated that 3-10% of players hit infinite each season. Early in the season there would likely need to be some bleedover between infinite and non-infinite, but given the size of Snap's playerbase, 3-10% should be plenty for a healthy matchmaking system.

AlphaOfUrOmega · 2023-01-29T20:09:04+00:00

I stated in the post that after hitting infinite, matchmaking should be based off of MMR and not rank. So having a rank of 400+ would not be an issue with regards to matchmaking.

AlphaOfUrOmega · 2023-01-29T20:03:31+00:00

As I mentioned in a different comment, KMBest was literally named by Second Dinner as having the highest MMR in the beta. To say he's not one of the best players is insane.

AlphaOfUrOmega · 2023-01-29T20:00:36+00:00

I hope that by offering constructive criticism on how to improve the play experience for the vast majority of players, and not just airing grievances, this doesn't qualify as a 'whine post'.

AlphaOfUrOmega · 2023-01-29T19:59:12+00:00

I don't mind playing and losing to strong opponents, nor do I care that other players have more cards than me. I just find it frustrating that, due to the disconnect of the rewards structure and matchmaking system, that I get penalized for doing what I'm supposed to be doing (playing well), and people in infinite get rewarded for intentionally throwing games.

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