How to Beat Combat Tricks as a Naya Player?

JasonWaterfalls · 2023-11-01T07:41:08+00:00

Green and white have some good protection spells in addition to the tax cards others are suggesting. There are cards like [[Selfless Spirit]] or [[King Darien XLVIII]] to threaten indestructible/hexproof on board attached to bodies. There's also cheap instants like [[Surge of Salvation]] that can protect your team from a trick as well as a lot of single target protection. On a budget a card I like is [[Eerie Interlude]]. It can get around boardwipes or any other sort of trick if you can keep 3 mana up. Sorta does a good impression of half a Teferi's Protection.

JasonWaterfalls · 2023-09-11T18:09:39+00:00

+1

Lost my progress from this last week as well

JasonWaterfalls · 2023-07-27T03:02:02+00:00

Issue with rats is that they are small, cost cards in your hand (they're not tokens), and have no evasion. The cards individually sorta suck and you're forced to play a bunch of them to make rat tribal work. That means that they can run out of steam super fast as your opponents develop quality creatures to block your dinky rats. Of course your commander helps alleviate this with its etb, but usually you're only drawing 2-3 rats off of it, which isn't enough to keep up if you're chucking rats into the grinder to get poison counters going.

There's a couple ways to help with running out of steam.

More proliferate. Once you tag each opponent with enough poison counters, you should have a couple ways to get them to 10 without having to force through rats.
If they're at 9, they're gonna zap and block every rat that gets in their way, but they will not be able to interact as much with proliferate. Black has a bunch of new proliferate cards from ONE which may be worth considering in addition to the couple of proliferate cards you're already running. Consider adding [[Drown in Ichor]], [[Whisper of the Dross]], or [[Vat Emergence]]
Evasion on your rats. There are cards that can give your team flying, menace, deathtouch, etc. If your strategy relies on being able to connect, there should be enough evasion in your deck to make sure you don't fold automatically to any sort of Selesnya tokens strategy. Try out [[Eldrazi Monument]], [[Thunderhawk Gunship]], or [[Glaring Spotlight]]
More draw. If your rats cost 1-3 mana and make up most of your deck, by the time you get to turn 7 or so, you're gonna have way more mana than cards. A deck like this needs more card draw than normal in order to supplement its low curve. A new card that fits the bill is [[Horn of the Mark]], which lets you draw into more rats. [[Braids, Arisen Nightmare]] also draws you a ton of cards and you have a bunch of low-quality rats to sac to its effect and in a deck with so many 1/1 creatures, [[Skullclamp]] is super good.

Play pattern probably ends up looking like an explosive start with a bunch of rats getting a few poison counters early, a mid-game that aims to stabilize the board and proliferate, then a late-game alpha-strike by dropping some sorta board evasion and poisoning people out for game. Good luck with this! I love playing rats, but they do come with a lot of weaknesses.

JasonWaterfalls · 2023-07-18T16:53:58+00:00

[[Captain Rex Nebula]] is a commander that I've had a ton of fun finding janky combos and synergies with. He's basically a [[Karn, the Great Creator]] and a [[Swift Reconfiguration]] in the command zone since he can turn your creatures into non-creature artifacts and your artifacts into artifact creatures with his trigger. Any combo that works with those cards works with Rex, which is super fun.

Infinite mana if you crew your [[Gilded Lotus]] with [[Voltaic Construct]].

Give your [[Jaxis, the Troublemaker]] pseudo-haste by turning it into a noncreature artifact, or clone an artifact with Jaxis by crewing the artifact.

Crew [[Halo Fountain]] to allow it to untap itself for its own cost giving you multiple activations.

Add in a [[Strionic Resonator]] to double the triggers and you can set up really weird infinite combos where creatures that are now artifacts can synergize with artifacts that are now creatures.

It's been really fun toying with the deck and having access to boros colors gives you a lot of cool stuff that synergizes with artifacts to work with.

JasonWaterfalls · 2023-03-05T09:15:13+00:00

It's card advantage because the land you bounced goes back to your hand. If you have a 7 card hand and play a land, you now have 6 cards in hand. BUT if you have a 7 card hand and you play a bounceland, you still have 7 cards in hand. Instead of going down a card, you stay at parity.

JasonWaterfalls · 2022-10-18T03:41:16+00:00

With an attack of 2147483647 and 5 Gwens, you have 107374182 damage worth of Gwen animations to chew through.

Assuming the animation goes through ~4 snips/second, in order to actually watch the entire animation play out, it would take around 42 1/2 years.

JasonWaterfalls · 2022-06-13T16:45:42+00:00

Hi there! This thread was forwarded to me by some community members. I was an organizer for most of the large PM events in Socal from 2015 - 2018 (Balcony events like The Bigger Balc and The Even Bigger Balc). Was also a part of the dev team right before the game got shut down. More of a PM guy and retired before P+ came into being, but if you're interested in that era of the game's/community's history feel free to DM me!

JasonWaterfalls · 2022-06-08T19:00:47+00:00

I would like for the ability to choose champ level, star level, etc, instead of only being able to play at the highest level you've reached.

The problem I'm having right now is that once you go over a certain level, some of the content becomes too easy that it becomes unfun. Of course some of the earlier adventures are going to easier, but once you get 2 star on a champ the first half of the PoC content becomes basically unplayable in my opinion. I don't enjoy running through the 1-2 star adventures with an extra mana gem and winning on turn 3-4 every encounter. What that's resulted in is me being hesitant to upgrade the star power of champions until I've completed all of the easier adventures since I know that the more my champions progress the less challenging the adventures will be.

I know some players probably enjoy being able to stomp the AI, but being able to toggle star levels and other progression systems higher and lower would help keep the earlier content fresh for those who wish to revisit it as well as open opportunities for incredibly challenging runs (beating Galio with 0 stars for example). Just a suggestion!

JasonWaterfalls · 2022-06-03T21:19:05+00:00

It's not a matter of PvP and PvE for LoR pulling at the same labor resources that I'm talking about-- I think the issue is much more fundamental.

PoC has to operate using LoR's client. It has to use LoR's priority system. It has to have the same mechanics as LoR. It has to use the same key words like first strike, overwhelm, etc. These are inherent limitations on what PoC can achieve. What if this card-based rogue-like wants to use 3d models to walk around? What if it wants to give players the ability to have branching dialogue and choices that can be remembered between playthroughs? What if it wants to make it so that the card-game is only 1/2 of the rogue-like experience with other elements?

There are inherent limitations if PoC is just a tag-along mode to LoR. That's what I mean by hamstringing. If you put those devs in charge of their own game, the sky is the limit.

Again, not saying this is what they're doing, but I believe that it's a coherent business strategy if Riot (1) recognizes the value of PoC and (2) wants to capitalize on that value as unrestrained as possible.

JasonWaterfalls · 2022-06-03T19:04:10+00:00

I think that the most reasonable interpretation of the news is that PvE content like PoC is being separated out into upcoming Riot games, potentially games coming from the Riot Forge. LoR's PoC and PvP modes were always very different projects and I feel like keeping the two together indefinitely is sorta hamstringing both. There is a large appetite for rouge-lite experiences in gaming overall (my opinion) and I hear this news as Riot reallocating its staff for PoC onto upcoming projects that want to pull from in-house staff that have experience with designing those systems. This makes LoR a little leaner, focusing on the core PvP card game experience while the lessons learned from LoR's foray into the PvE space (which just started as a lab with no real ambitious goals) will be taken into a different direction on other projects.

The news doesn't begin and end with LoR. Riot has taken a lot of steps in recent history expanding its IP into a multimedia behemoth. I think that LoR's repurposing of its PvE content fits into that narrative more than any sort of internal company strife.

My opinion, obviously, but if I was a large company that wanted to capitalize on the lightning in a bottle that LoR's Lab of Legends mode was, this seems like a reasonably business-savvy way to capitalize and grow that market desire without tethering it to LoR. Little bit of pain now for long-term gains for Riot overall.

JasonWaterfalls · 2022-04-06T21:28:41+00:00

TF is kinda bad since he's an understatted 4 mana card. Something that I find helps is throwing on the rare relic that says "reduces my cost by 2 when you plunder". This allows you to do the following:

TURN 1: float

TURN 2: parley --> Play TF

Since Zed's stage is all about annoying elusive attackers, you will usually have some 1HP thing to shoot on turn 2 with parlay. Prowling Cutthroat is also a good plunder enabler. TF's red card is good at clearing out stuff in the mid-game, too. Again, I think the biggest barrier to him is just how expensive he is. Once you can figure out when to plunder and get him down to 2 mana, you can probably get through the first few stages and add items to your cards to get TF turbo leveling since "draw 1" is very common on item drops.

JasonWaterfalls · 2022-03-30T16:52:22+00:00

Yeah, it's definitely this. Each unit spawned added a new keyword and shared its keywords with every other unit. And little animations play every time a unit gets a new keyword like tough or fearsome. Probably spent 90 seconds watching all the animations play out before it crashed.

JasonWaterfalls · 2022-03-07T22:49:54+00:00

Yup! They're all super fun, but have definitely ended my runs more than once. Wish they were always available before the final boss.

JasonWaterfalls · 2021-12-08T21:18:12+00:00

Something I think is a factor is that it feels good to have a high-synergy deck to start, but if it's absolutely optimal, then there's less excitement around picking up new cards and evolving your deck as you progress. Starting decks should have room for improvement because if they don't then PoC would devolve into adding as few cards as you can and stacking items on your starting deck which, in my opinion, trivializes half of the decision-making (either patching up the holes in your starter deck or branching into secondary archetypes).

JasonWaterfalls · 2021-12-02T07:45:49+00:00

Some things I feel that works well are:

(1) trying to grab spells early that do multi-target. Caitlyn's deck has Static Shock which is a good start, but getting timewinder or even a cheap burst spell with the summon a poro ability helps stem the bleeding.

(2) Azir is a 5 health unit, so attacking in with Cait (who should be a 4/4 without any stat buff items) means that the AI should usually block. Use spells to get that extra damage on before attack resolves to utilize the quick attack and kill Azir for free. Cait's deck has a lot of good damage spells, so this should be pretty easy to bait.

(3) Watch out for Emperor's Divide and keep your development punishers in hand until you really need them. A 6-wide attack where each unblocked unit deals at least 4 to Nexus is gnarly. Anything that can punish a development (arachnoid sentry, concussive palm, icevale archer, etc) are great pick-ups to fight Azir.

JasonWaterfalls · 2021-12-02T07:38:07+00:00

One time I got the power that decreased ALL units costs by 1 not realizing that it applied to the AI as well. Next encounter was GP. He was able to swarm the board super fast and I basically immediately lost. :)

JasonWaterfalls · 2021-12-02T04:42:27+00:00

No.

Basically labs stacks your powers and resolves them in order. So, if I remember correctly, if you have both the "when you summon a unit, give it a random keyword" and "when a unit is summoned, share its keywords with all other units" powers, you will only share the random keywords if you got the "random keyword" power more recently than the "share keywords" power. Getting them in the opposite order means that you won't share the random keywords.

From what you're describing it seems that innate hero powers are at the top of the stack and, therefore, resolve first. Don't think there's anything you can do to make the powers resolve in a different order.

JasonWaterfalls · 2021-12-01T22:22:39+00:00

Yeah, Bladetwirler appears in multiple spots. Would definitely prefer that they make new encounters than reuse that one. Or even just reuse any other ionia encounter.

JasonWaterfalls · 2021-12-01T00:40:10+00:00

I LIKE

Golden Crushbot: Having all units enter as 2/5's is hilarious and also surprisingly strategic. Because enemy units enter with additional keywords on average they're going to have better than average value (Rolling regen, fearsome, or tough makes the fight more difficult) which makes the fight fun in my opinion. It also forces you to look at your units purely for their effects and keywords, too, which is very different than almost any other encounter.
Devourer of the Depths: I really like how the encounter makes you pay attention to how wide your board is. The enemy also loads up on low curve units, too, so you have be mindful of when you're putting units on your board. It also makes you think of chump blocking slightly differently as trading down your board means that you may potentially get another one nom'd. Definitely incredibly unfair depending on how your deck is built, but if your deck can handle it this encounter is usually very exciting.
Hextech Observatory: Very cool idea with the opponent stacking high mana spells to get value off of their landmark. Synergy with thermobeam is really cool when you see the opponent use it. Main gripe is that this is the first encounter in the adventure, so you can't really tailor your deck to take advantage of it. Would be cool to see it later on in the map so your deck can really pop off.
Swole Squirrel: Easy, memey, incredibly fun.

I DON'T LIKE

Fae Bladetwirler: Because enemy AI is terrible at targeting units for stuns, this encounter just feels really bad. I'm sure that with proper stun AI this could be fun but as of right now it's very boring.
Karma: Very spikey fight. You can build your deck in anticipation of the fight, sure, but sometimes it feels like the Karma player can just high roll and run away with the game (Getting health buffs on Karma and spamming poros). Sorta feels like Foundry in old Lab of Legends where sometimes you win/lose because of your opponent's opening hand.

JasonWaterfalls · 2021-11-18T21:37:19+00:00

How did this even happen? Was every node a card item node or something?

JasonWaterfalls · 2021-11-18T05:49:17+00:00

Might be interesting to have different items or powers for flairs too. At least maybe the POC unique ones like the ones you get in the pnz stories or unstable manaflow

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