In the early game you block only insofar as you didn’t get any damage, effectively trading HP for murder. Combined with a nice maximum health, this makes Ironclad a forgiving character. Ironclad’s bonus card is Bash, which provides two vulnerable and his artifact ( Burning Blood) is your healing (at 6 HP/combat). Barely serviceable cards that you should (in general) despise. The basic deck is 5x Strikes and 5x Defends. I’ll try to note problems and the counters. Sometimes you pick a card knowing that is often dead-weight, but that really helps out in specific fights. “X cost” cards also let you dump as much as desired into them (with the caveat that it has to be the last card played, mostly).Īlso - Something I didn’t mention in the prior article. Still, with an Iron Wave and two strikes and defends, you have some flexibility. Iron Wave gives you attack and defense, but poor ones. If you have one “attack two” and one “defend two” then its fine that you can’t necessarily play both, because you’ll play the one that matters (and then a one cost card to round it up). If you have only two cost cards, you can (with three mana) only spend two mana. (You may want to split it up, but if you want to go all the way with either, you can’t). As I mentioned, if you only have strikes or defends (and a five card hand) you will be able to spend three mana on either, but not both. It hurts that there are interrelated concepts, but one idea that a “dense” deck also has is the ability to dump all of its mana into Attack or Defend (as desired). Since this violates the “focus on the near term,” taking a card that is a dead load for the near future and potentially the game indicates that the card has tremendous upside.Īnd I realize I didn’t really talk about density as clearly as I could.
(Like taking a Limit Break which doubles your strength bonus, when you as of yet have no way to get a strength bonus). One more definition - A naked pick is picking a card that doesn’t do anything for you yet. For the most part I am not going to get into too many relics in this discussion. Also, while I discuss strategies and archetypes, these are intended as a “Discussion” or suggestions, not as a crutch or exhaustive list. This covers the basic thoughts for each character, it is not intended to be “card by card complete” or cover all possibilities.