Beach Club Set and Combo Newcomer and Animator

[LoreMike]

Don't you think the animator and novice combo is too strong? Especially now that new novices with a power of 2 have been added that can occupy the same spot as basic novices on the bench? Also, it seems to me that all the beach club set are much stronger than the others, or am I wrong?

[jiji_lal]

Exactly!!

[1000esqrtn1]

Personally, I don't think so. Of course if you get 3 Animateurs and 3 Power2 Newcomers is great, but any deck with 2 good synergy cards and 3 copies of each will be great.

The point is that Animateur is a variation of makeup artist. You get the +1 permanently (instead of the +2 during the attack), however it only affects one type of card, meaning that when you move out of deck A, no other card benefits from Animateur, while MUA still had ghost on B and other interesting choices on A. Besides that, MUA strategy focused on taking the flag on (almost) every card and win by having a larger deck. Here, you are going have slightly more cards (since there is no recursivity going on) but you are not guaranteed to take the flag with power 3/4 newcomers as you were with power 5/7, so the match is fair.

Overall with the beach deck, I don't think it is OP neither. If you play animateur, swimmer and icetruck then your deck is super reliant on card order and you haven't many spaces left for cards that can manipulate that. Kid is a fun card, great early on, but to be consistent afterwards requires a huge sacrifice.

[SonataKnight]

I think the Beach Club Set, Dwarf/Fairy/Thief combo, and Secret Base Thief/Zombie decks are the three best combo decks in this game, but I have seen Yodelers/University decks also get some surprising wins.

I'm curious if anyone has ventured more into drafting B-set cards instead of A-set cards to create more consistent B-set heavy strategies that can contend with those three or four though. I've almost always relied on drafting double A-set cards for consistency until Round 4, when one can start drafting double B-set cards.

[DoctorFianchetto]

Beach Club Set is incredibly strong. So many great synergies within A deck, further enhanced by Ice Cream Truck and Surf Teacher can help you get even more duplicates of A cards. Very hard to stop, especially if you have one or two Final Exams.

Fairy/Dwarfs seem strong on paper but in my limited experience they don't scale up very well and not supported by many B or C deck cards.

I've not tried a pure Secret Base deck yet but Thief/Zombie on paper seems like a more powerful version of Fairy/Dwarf.

[ahrnge]

I think the Beach Club Set, Dwarf/Fairy/Thief combo, and Secret Base Thief/Zombie decks are the three best combo decks in this game, but I have seen Yodelers/University decks also get some surprising wins.

I'm curious if anyone has ventured more into drafting B-set cards instead of A-set cards to create more consistent B-set heavy strategies that can contend with those three or four though. I've almost always relied on drafting double A-set cards for consistency until Round 4, when one can start drafting double B-set cards.

I draft single B cards in rounds 2 and 3 more often than not. I believe that wind up car is potentially the best card in the game, so I’m mostly fishing for that. I think people are sleeping on wind up cars + random junk as a top tier archetype. My current impression is that the players doing well in arena are mostly those drafting more from B early.

I’ll also give a shout out to troll-mirror as an archetype I like. It’s much better when you’re drafting B in rounds 2 and 3.

I do think the beach cup set is the strongest archetype, and I do draft it often.

I think that the fairy-dwarf-thief thing is mostly a trap. It goes so badly when it doesn’t go well. It has the highest ceiling for sure though, and is fun to chase. That said, I think thief is an incredibly strong early pick whether you’re going down that path.

I haven’t been super in love with the space base archetype, though it’s definitely fun. It has very hard decisions.

I’m also not huge on the university archetype right now. I see it get a lot of 2nd places.

Finally, does it count as an archetype to draft a bunch of sandstorms? the “All C’s” archetype is super fun. It’s a natural transition from wind up cars + trash, and is notably better when mountain set is out.

My opinions mostly come from 4-player arena, and will probably change from this. they’ve changed a lot so far.

[DoctorFianchetto]

Agreed. Wind Up Car is incredibly strong. Clears out your deck and gives you a huge bonus for doing so - what's not to love?

Thief is a great card too just to draft extra cards in the early rounds. They can be discarded later.

Troll is a nice card to pick up, especially if you find more than one. I'm not sure I've even seen Mirror. Is it a C card? What does it do?

[ahrnge]

Mirror is a “fairytale forest” B card. It has 1 power and when it doesn’t win the flag it puts a fairytale forest card from your bench on top of your deck. Its natural target is troll, but it scales well to the C deck with unicorn, cauldron, and even carriage if you’re living on the edge.

It also gets picked up a lot by fairy-dwarf players to try to recycle fairy to recycle dwarves, but again, that gameplan feels like much more of a trap (or at least overdrafted) to me than just trying to recycle 7’s.

Either way you want to try to have as many other big green things in your deck as you can too, because when mirror is just a 1 it’s really quite bad….

[Sealeta]

Beach is clearly the strongest set. Its problem is not the Animator + Newcomer combo, but the fact that literally everything there combos. Newcomer + Animator, Kid is very strong, especially with the Toy Train. In deck B, Newcomers combos well with Swimmer, and most importantly, you get one of the best card in the game — Ice Cream Truck. And as if all of the above weren’t enough, deck C has a very strong Diver — there are as many as 5 of them, and they stack very easily. I don’t know how or by whom the balance was tested before release, but they made a serious miscalculation. Without Beach set, the game immediately becomes more interesting.

P.S. I’d really like the next arena season to be played with coaches. They add a lot of additional tactics and interesting decks.

[DoctorFianchetto]

The meta has evolved into everyone competing for Wind Up Cars and whoever finds them wins. It's made the game a lot less interesting for me.