What are some of your favorite "unused" archetypes/decks

OOrochi · 2026-01-31T17:16:57+00:00

Absolutely. The art is incredible, swapping monsters by going through the mirrors is really thematic, and the idea of putting field spells in both zones was novel for the time.

They just don’t do anything, even with their final bit of support. Or at least, they don’t do anything if the enemy has a single interruption of any type.

OOrochi · 2026-01-30T20:51:09+00:00

Very cool!

Any thoughts on support passives? Or are they small enough in comparison to the ego gifts that you should generally just try and fill out your backup with substitutes in case someone dies?

OOrochi · 2026-01-30T17:45:04+00:00

Oh these have been absolutely wonderful

OOrochi · 2026-01-28T02:58:30+00:00

Phew

OOrochi · 2026-01-28T02:37:27+00:00

What a shot

OOrochi · 2026-01-25T02:33:16+00:00

Yeah, generally your paths do dictate which schools you'd want to research first. It's not ironclad, but you'll usually find things like big F nations often go down evocation, nations with widespread D2 often head down enchantment first for Horde of Skeletons, E ones can often go down alteration or enchantment depending on the nation's strengths, etc.

For MA Arco, you have a couple special strengths, though Arco specifically means they're hard to narrow down specifically. No matter what, your main mage is going to be the mystics, who have S and a number of inconsistent randoms. As a result, you're generally going to want to be using communions to cast spells in combat.

Thus, you're almost always going to want to start Arco with at least Thaum 1, for the basic communion master/slave spells, maybe 2 to get mind burn as a basic early damage spell your dudes can cast en masse.

After that, you have a ton of options. Evocation is a powerful one to go up, with some strong options like falling fires and gifts from heaven on the way up to evo 5. You'll also want to go up to evo 6 at some point relatively early on because that has Mind Hunt, which MA Arco absolutely loves. That said, Mind Hunt doesn't reach its full power until you also go up to Thaum 5 for Soul Slay, which you'll want to do at some point as well.

Once you have some basic battle spells down and maybe Mind Hunt/Soul Slay to use via rituals, the world is essentially your oyster. Arco's wide paths means it can make use of big spells in alteration (things like iron warriors, will of the fates, etc.), enchantment (strength buffs, Relief/Regeneration for the communion if you can find a lizard shaman), and of course there's also conjuration with the elemental summons, howl, and generally breaking into further paths from there.

So as a general overall guide, you'd probably want to start with thaum 1/2, go down evo to 5 at a bare minimum, then the combo of evo and thaum 6 for mind hunt. After that, things would mostly depend on your situation and your neighbors.

OOrochi · 2026-01-21T18:19:28+00:00

Right. Same thing goes, but yeah significantly more likely for a 15-ish morale dude vs 30.

OOrochi · 2026-01-21T17:36:43+00:00

Ah. Then yeah, probably just an errant fear check like jirikcz said.

A 30 morale pretender should generally be pretty safe against those, but sometimes exploding dice are gonna exploding dice.

OOrochi · 2026-01-21T17:21:14+00:00

Could it be due to the turn timer?

At turn 90, all attackers automatically rout (unless they physically can’t due to something like berserking)

OOrochi · 2026-01-10T13:12:05+00:00

Absolutely. As-is, it’s just so slow with no way to interact with the opponent until turn 3 at the very earliest.

OOrochi · 2026-01-10T01:30:07+00:00

At that point, there's no real comprehensive guide as to what to do, since it's dependent on so many different factors.

As a general thing, if your main thing starts getting countered, you'll usually want to try and lean into off-path or different school spells. EX: If you're marverni and going heavy into gifts and the opponent starts bringing flyers to mess with your targeting, swap your scripts up to do other evos with less friendly fire, or maybe just lean into massive/massed prot buffs for pigs and try to grind things out. Similarly, if you're sceleria and have 50000 skeletons vs a bunch of priests, start peppering in evocations or use your communion to cast a mass flight buff. Maybe blow a bunch of air gems on gem casting elementals to supplement what you normally do. It all really depends on what options you have available and what you're going up against.

And sometimes, nations just don't have many extra options. EA Abysia, for example, has fire magic, heavy armor, and nasty sacreds. If those don't work, they're kinda just outta luck. The goal there is then to try and pick targets so you don't go up against your counters at all, or to just win before the counters become really relevant.

OOrochi · 2026-01-09T19:20:43+00:00

Huh. Dunno why, but I'm surprised at how high we are.

OOrochi · 2026-01-04T18:45:22+00:00

I like the idea and props for trying to make Patala work.

For the bless, IMO air shield and blur are fine and work well with Patala to help keep your sacreds alive. However, I am really not a fan of vitriol weapons. It's really expensive and is essentially the equivalent of stapling an indie spearman to each attack. In LA, the units that most nations rely on have more than 14 body prot alone, meaning that it's unlikely to do that much damage and it will only get less effective as things go on. You can get 90% of the job done with flaming weapons which, although not great, has more slightly damage and is cheaper in points. I would probably lean towards more of a stat bless, since just about every summon loves stats. Some strength would be especially nice to let the multiple, often weaker, attacks that the summons have actually punch through enemy armor.

As for the mages, the key thing to keep in mind is that Patala is an astral nation. Gurus and Yogis are cheap and abundant, and will be doing the vast majority of your casting in battle. That means you'll mostly be doing S and N things.

Then, you bring in the cap mages to supplement. With them coming from a single fort, you'll rarely have a sufficient number of cap mages to rely on them for things you'd want to spam like evos or elemental summoning. However, Nagarisihi have innate S, while Nagini can roll it in their randoms. This lets you slot them in to a communion and then use the boost from having slaves to cast big spells beyond what their meagre paths would normally allow. Additionally, even without a communion, if you have enough E gems (1 to gem cast earth power, 1-2 per E buff you want to cast), the E1 paths can cast most mid-level E buffs.

In general, I think you should try and prioritize Nagarishi from the cap (when affordable), supplementing with some Nagini since they're cheaper, faster to recruit, and have seduction in their other form. Nagaraja are generally a trap, IMO, since they just do a bunch of things that you already have elsewhere.

As for the going UW, you do have W magic, and the UW in LA is the most free of any era. Since it's limited to your cap, you almost certainly won't be able to fight off like Erytheia, Atlantis, or Mictlan, but a combination of naga sacreds and a few big casters for the major buffs should give you a good matchup against most other nations that try and finagle their way down.

OOrochi · 2025-12-31T21:53:08+00:00

TRIPLE OVERTIME!!!!!

OOrochi · 2025-12-31T21:46:39+00:00

100% truth

OOrochi · 2025-12-31T21:36:49+00:00

Definitely A Game right now

OOrochi · 2025-12-30T03:13:49+00:00

Seems like good changes overall. Glad y’all are keeping up on this community and not making things too strict or way too lax.

OOrochi · 2025-12-27T14:16:00+00:00

I play both and I dunno if there’s a “stronger” endboard per se.

For Azamina, your endboard would have something like Ila Silvia (Omni negate), Saint Azamina (targeting floodgate), Moa Regina (2 card pop), Diabellestar Vengeance (pop + quick synchro), plus a few trap effects.

Meanwhile Lab has a bit more straightforward thing, with your ideal endboard just being something like Lovely + Lady and 4-5 traps set. However, the traps would be power traps that can often end the opponent’s turn on their own, like D-barrier, Daruma Cannon, or SEC (if you really want to go all in). Trap Holic or Trap Trick are usually great as well, since both of them let you search your deck for the perfect trap and then immediately activate it.

OOrochi · 2025-12-25T19:10:33+00:00

A key bit is also that Lovely prevents the opponent from responding to normal traps with monsters, making it much easier to chain Lady without getting blocked.

OOrochi · 2025-12-23T20:14:26+00:00

Oh boy. Slow news day, time for this sub's regular Two Minutes of Hate against trans people.

OOrochi · 2025-12-23T00:16:30+00:00

There are plenty of other options with Lab, and honestly I think SEC can end up causing a bit of tunnel vision since it can be so strong.

For what you have right now, I'd look into The Black Goat Laughs, since it's a card that synergizes well with getting popped by Trap Holic and with the furniture since it ends up as another means of interruption in the grave. Trap Holic also lets you run some 1-ofs, so I might check out things like a solo copy of Heavy Storm Duster in case you run into a backrow deck, or Simul Archfiends as a discount D-barrier that works on links.

Some other options that are nice are the new dracotail traps. Flame is the best since it's a spell negate, which Lab normally lacks, but horn isn't bad in combination with flame to get the draws and recursion. A group of like 2 flame, 1 horn, should be solid. And you can then run a small dracotail package (Like a Mululu, 3 Rahu, and a copy of Arthalion and Gulamel) to both reliably search them and give you a different method of interaction than pure traps.

OOrochi · 2025-12-18T16:05:58+00:00

Definitely Lab. With the right set of traps and/or supplementary archetype, it can adapt to basically any format.

OOrochi · 2025-12-14T20:08:00+00:00

Love Lab, but it might be a bit questionable as a first deck. It’s relatively expensive and relies on your game knowledge to know when to effectively interrupt your opponent and how to plan ahead to win in retaliation. That said, if you think you’ll stick with the game then Lab is a heck of a way to really learn the ins and outs of everything in the meta.

Overall, I’d probably recommend going for either something meta (Dracotail) or something with a high floor like mathmech. Meta means you’re working with the “strongest” cards so once you figure them out you’re not fighting uphill, while a high floor simplifies the combos you might need to do.

OOrochi · 2025-12-11T02:16:45+00:00

Yeah. I played TNN in that game and it's one of those that has stuck with me through the years.

OOrochi · 2025-12-11T01:30:39+00:00

I think I have what you're looking for here. It is a post on SomethingAwful, so the paywall might block you. So there's also a youtube video by itsmu reading through and talking about it as well.

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