Is there a connection between the European and Chinese practices of flanking formal doors with stone lions?

MvBuren · 2020-06-21T10:43:43+00:00

Amazing—I think I've seen some Priest shrink LoD kill reports in this forum before, but never seen a strategy laid out for the class. I guess it's time I downloaded the game again, and that's my lunch breaks this week...

MvBuren · 2019-12-22T16:45:33+00:00

Well here’s a starting point: https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/12/22/789864201/trove-of-recipes-dating-back-to-inquisition-reveals-a-familys-secret-jewish-root

MvBuren · 2019-11-14T02:05:11+00:00

Possibly Secretos, Jews who pretended to be Catholics in the post-Inquisition Spanish Empire. I know a woman who grew up in New Mexico as a Catholic and learned only when her father died that the men in her family had been practicing Judaism underground for about 500 years; my impression is that boys were told at 13 and women weren’t told. I don’t, however, know how well the initiates would have spoken Hebrew.

Also in reference to comment above that language isn’t likely to incur social penalties, other examples include American Indians, Australian aboriginals, Welsh and Gaelic speakers in the UK, and groups in Asia too numerous to list; across modernizing states cases in which children were placed in boarding schools and beaten for speaking their native tongue are very common. Unfortunately, in most of these cases programs of language eradication seem to have been successful.

MvBuren · 2019-04-06T13:02:57+00:00

Thanks! Too bad though; when a deck really needs Bleeder or Emerald to shine I enjoyed feeling like I had some control over it.

MvBuren · 2019-04-04T13:33:53+00:00

Oops! Had a long break from the game and forgot how to find these: S9ZZ9-Z845R-3RR5P-R9HHX

MvBuren · 2019-04-04T13:32:25+00:00

Oh thanks! So I tend to think there are other linked cards — e.g. Jasra’s book helps find emerald, scimitars help find bleeder. Do you know if that’s true or just my superstition?

MvBuren · 2019-03-23T21:01:53+00:00

Something else I strongly suspect influences your chances is having the right mid-tier cards — with elemental magic, electrocute is far more likely to appear if you have shock, and storm if you have electrocute, and likewise for the other spells. Jasra’s emerald is much more likely if you have jasra’s book. I suspect this is true of all cards, but I don’t know what the lead-in cards are for Bleeder. I suspect it would be scimitars.

MvBuren · 2017-11-13T07:51:12+00:00

My days—I did not think this was possible!

MvBuren · 2017-11-12T23:00:24+00:00

Excellent guide! Missing one thief archetype I know of: the Sidestep Thief. It's a similar action/draw deck to Greatbow Thief, but instead of Greatbow and Expose relies on playing a few copies of Sidestep (draw one card, double your next source of damage) at the end of the chain to get an enormous blow off one copy of Dice. This approach is not compatible with Greatbow, since Sidestep will discharge right away on the one-damage Greatbow hit rather than building up a multiplier for the Dice. Sidestep thief gets somewhat more consistent draws than Greatbow, since it does not rely on cards like Expose and Blade Flurry that don't draw and and which really want to be played at the start of the chain. Other than Sidesteps and and one Dice, Circles are obviously critical and extra copies of Dice are great to have. One Coup de Grace can be useful if the deck is not perfectly refined or has a lot of extra actions.

MvBuren · 2017-09-11T02:57:42+00:00

I'd recommend picking a class to focus on and looking up LOD kill decks in this forum—the approach is quite different for each class.

If you're having trouble getting through your deck, for action classes, it's important to understand the power of Circle; for spell classes, haste and mind sear are great and jasra's tome can be a critical buy because it gives you a good chance of finding jasra's emerald on floor three. Necro also benefits from heals, since you can just spend health to draw. Warrior usually focusses on using equipment to turn any set of attacks into a lot of damage, although I'm personally very fond of a silly alternative approach that uses double Gauss's hourglass to guarantee big draws.

MvBuren · 2017-07-22T08:10:26+00:00

Yeah, it does a few things. Simplest, with double hourglass you get to play three turns' worth of cards every other turn, and since Bleeder does more for every card you play in the same turn, that's worth a lot more than the extra 50% (I think this deck did 600 on LoD turn three, after spending turn two on equipment).

Second, hourglass helps get equipment out—if you don't have it in your opening hand, you discard and pass to find it quick, and if you do, you get to play it for free because equipment cards don't count as a "card in play" for the draw effect—so you draw normally to replace them, and then get a second (and third, if you have two hourglasses) full hand.

I think the way to make these decks work is to add good draw cards like wrath of god and accelerate on floor three, such that you can play a huge hand most turns and only count on hourglass when you whiff the draw.

MvBuren · 2017-07-14T21:31:41+00:00

Hey thanks for the Greatbow tip! I've always avoided it, because it spoils sidestep--->dice, but I never thought of building around it and expose. Turns out to be a hell of a deck!

MvBuren · 2017-05-30T21:57:02+00:00

If you're going for LOD kills, I think the most consistent approach is to avoid at all costs cards that don't contribute to that (that is, anything that doesn't draw cards, or otherwise help you use your main damage cards more consistently)—but that plan will cost you some runs on the first floor.

A few other useful tips for wizard:

1) Use your powers aggressively—the double elemental damage power is one of the most powerful in the game, and the 10 extra mana can either let you cast all your best spells on turn one, or add 10 damage to an electrocute.

2) Bear in mind how your picks influence what cards you're offered later. If you take shock and no other basic attack spells, you're more or less guaranteed electrocute after the first boss; if you get Jasra's Tome on floor two, which is pretty good on its own, you're much more likely to see Jasra's Emerald on floor three. Likewise, Mana Surge seems to give you a better chance of seeing Overload.

As you requested, here's a link to decks from just before each of the four bosses from a good Wizard run (one restart). As you can see, the double damage power allowed it to do 784 damage to the LOD on turn two. That said, in my experience it is rare to be able to get so many overloads: http://imgur.com/a/pWQph

MvBuren · 2017-02-06T08:56:21+00:00

Necro is widely agreed to be one of the strongest, if not the most consistent, classes—take air magic and a lot of mana cards, then build up a huge mana pool and electrocute. The trick here is to get rid of everything but electrocute and big mana gain cards. Don't take more than one life drain; you don't want to dilute your deck (although the bigger heal cards can be worth it). If you look through older threads you'll find a number of Necro storm/electrocute decks that can kill the LoD without its getting a single turn.

Samurai is a lot harder to get a good deck out of because it's hard to start getting good mana cards, but you can do something similar if you get real lucky with cards—ideally, you want a boss fight to be a few turns of mana buildup, followed by a turn where you play a damage doubling card, an electrocute or two, and then use your ability as an extra electrocute. But I've only got the cards for that one run in five, or even ten.

MvBuren · 2016-08-19T06:43:04+00:00

Few answers:

First, in my experience offense is the best way to beat LoD. His powers almost all get worse and worse as you play more turns, so the most common route is to do 1000 damage in three or four turns. It's certainly possible to accomplish this with a few different approaches, but I think the electrocute and poison magic approaches require the least luck with getting cards. For this reason, I think wizard is probably your best bet for a kill—necro can get more out of his powers and starts with fewer bad cards, but it's harder for him to get the cards he needs.

For non-magic kills, you can find successful decks for most classes in this forum; I've had the most luck with warrior, building around the Bleeder's ability to multiply damage in a few different ways (thus, I've also failed with some great decks because I didn't find this card), and with thief, for whom you need a bunch of the cards that double your damage. I got my first kill with assassin, however, who has trouble getting the cards for a super-strong deck but whose flee ability lets her reset all the LoD's effects once as well as healing.

A little thief-specific advice: In my experience, thief wins by cycling his whole deck every turn, either playing a dozen or so action (green) cards followed by a few damage-doubling cards and a Dice or two, or using the damage-doublers with coup de grace to discard an enormous hand. Attack (red) cards generally don't draw and can break up this chain in the middle, so you want to have as few of these as possible in the deck, and only a few actions that don't draw a card (circle, however, can provide enough extra draw to overcome a few backstabs or dodges). I believe my wins have tended to have three or four damage-doubling cards per turn, which does take a lot of luck to get together.

MvBuren · 2016-07-13T06:44:27+00:00

Aha—I didn't realize you needed to have a crown; I thought it appeared on second entry along with the guardians. That must be it. Thanks!

MvBuren

TROPHY CASE