Also available on BGG https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/363225 ... plus-games
This post is a long time coming from me given the previous posts I made. Please understand, I had to just get a huge body of games to test my drafting theories before writing about this. As the title implies, I’ve played enough games I think. Second, what good is theorycrafting for this write up if I’m not observing some results ? Well, I’ve chased rank 1 on Boardgamearena in the process and acquired it. Third, you cannot dissociate drafting heuristics from covering character strengths and weaknesses. That’s just a lot to cover and write and I want this to be a really good resource in the long run. Let’s start with a quick overview of the drafting.
The competitive draft has you pick a character out of a random hand of 6 and ban another. Then you exchange hands and pick one out of the 4 your opponent left in play. Your decision making here relies on three very simple pillars:
There is one thing to add to the second point in that list. Currently, the draft is the most knowable it’ll ever be. Your opponent has the 6 characters you don’t have. But once you start adding the known future expansions, the character pool will expand past 12 and you won’t be able to make a read on their 1st pick. Right now, it is very much a consideration and something you can use on your opening hand. But once the next set becomes available, the most valuable thing to navigate is the opening 6 characters you get. Although that assumes we’ll be drafting with 12 random out of 18+ characters then.
Here’s what a successful draft should look like. You should identify which character has the best equity against 4 characters and ban the miscellaneous character. Then your 2nd pick should be a character that works against the 4 your passed to your opponents, offers synergy with your 1st pick and ideally you can predict it will be passed on by your opponent.
Time to go over every character. I’m loosely ordering this to match my estimated playrate during my climbing time on BGA to rank 1. So the further down you go, the more skeptical you should be as I simply don’t have an equal amount of time played across the cast. While this sounds like it could be my indirect tier list, I don’t think this is the case. I will let you know why in each character’s section. I recommend reading the top of the list first as I will introduce shared concepts that I will refer to later in the post.
Golem ( & drafting RPS )
Good ol’ reliable friend. This character has a lot of good things going for him. A huge health bar affords him to take risks and acquire power. The defensive mechanic he provides affords your partner comfort to also set up something bigger for themselves. It is likely the best damage prevention tool in the game. A very common pattern for Golem is to accrue power rather quickly by getting beat up and race the opponent in beatdown via his 3 attack cards. This could be risky as your own signature card can cost you the game, but so long as you pair up a partner that has great healing you will mitigate this. Not only that, but you will often bounce up and down on those health power nodes, often gaining 2+ power per round. This can easily be the quickest power growth in the game relative to how safe it is to raise your power. Sure, you don’t have blocks and must take the damage the opponent dishes out, but that becomes a win condition for you.
I have the most to say about Golem because he will also introduce the sorts of RPS that’s at play during the draft. Our biggest escalation comes from opponent attacks. Golem on his own has small power and if he doesn’t move the health tracker past 20 HP, he doesn’t have a meaningful way to gain power. His draws become worse if he doesn’t reliably gain power. 2x Transfer power, 3x attacks, 2x signature cards. Sure reanimation remains good, but his healing cards hold more value if he can earn a power for including one in the fight deck. This means he’s at his best when the opponent is more likely to attack. It doesn’t matter if they hit Golem directly, refreshing the protection token causes him to enable his own win condition by ticking down 3 health a round. If a character doesn’t attack often, usually they have some way of escalating the fight. Shango comes to mind with the incinerate, The Wild Bunch can outrace Golem on power gain, but even without winning the race a Mordred or Joan that refuses to attack will outrace the speed at which Golem becomes a menace.
The rock-paper-scissor dynamic I use asks two questions. Is the character/team attacking often and does the character/team gain value from being attacked. Frequent attacking teams lose to the high benefit defenders, defenders lose to an alternate form of escalation, alternate form of winning loses to aggressive early beatdown. Who do I enjoy playing against as Golem ? Brijit, Ching Shih, Mephisto, they all have to attack occasionally from the get go. I also enjoy seeing Joan simply because she has 4 attack draws out of 5. By that logic, Shango is also a lovely sight. But he has an alternate win condition, so he can skip all his attack draws. Milady is a terrible sight to see, she doesn’t want to attack and she will outheal us if we try to play the aggressor. You’re gonna see me borrow language from this paragraph for the rest of this post.
Who do I like with Golem ? Fey and Milady are probably my top 2, Joan and Wild bunch are next in line. My favorite is probably Fey, but I feel if too many of you read this post I’ll have to switch to Milady. Fey offers a way for Golem to start at 2 power and have a better baseline power should the opponent not attack you. Fey has the best healing in the game as it scales with them being attacked, a rare thing in this game. If they die early, Golem gets 3 power with zero work. The shield token makes your Fey very resilient, your Fey makes your Golem very resilient and before you know it Golem will have 8 power cubes. It’s such a durable team. But if I don’t get attacked, then I’ll give the edge to Milady for she will accrue schemes to escalate later into the fight. Wild Bunch and Joan are a bit more traditional, but they provide the healing and escalation needed to round off Golem’s inability to power up without getting attacked. You can also use Golem to protect various fragile characters so that they shine a bit more on their own. Bodvar comes to mind here.
That being said, Golem is not immortal. The opponent slipping past defenses a bit too much or tripling down on early aggression can win the race. But on average, I find he’s rarely outclassed if both teams are rushing to punch each other down. So keep in mind if I say one matchup is favored, two of those characters together can spell doom for the Golem.
Milady ( & Card Clusters)
We’ll put aside the unpredictable part of Milady and focus on what we can predictably rely on. This character is self-sustainable, durable because of the health stop at 1HP and also has great threats for being attacked/healed thanks to the scheme triggers on the health bar. With a tiny bit of power gained provided by her partner and some stalling, the average value from her schemes all gain value. If your partner gets hit a bit, you don’t waste that +6 heal. If your partner grants Milady power, she can cascade into the quickest of unexpected kills. If you don’t attack opponents much early on, your poison inflicts the most damage it can. If you hold your partner’s attack cards, you can wait and see if your early schemes will be power scaling and lower the value of your opponent’s blocks.
Aside from this serving as a how-to-play guide for Milady, it teaches you what checkboxes a partner can provide and what part of the character you should lean into. If Milady needs to be the tank, then you can prioritize her self-healing cards. If your other character is the tank, you can focus on picking the 1x specialty cards for her. Maybe you’re somewhere in the middle and play a balanced approach. The former looks pretty good for characters like Shango, play his blocks for power gain and play his healing card to help Milady tank more. The balanced approach favors someone like Wong-Fei and Joan as they grant Milady a ton of power in various ways. If someone’s tanking for Milady, Golem is a great pick. Milady isn’t the best at healing Golem right away. But if you transfer a ton of power to her, her heal will scale to infinity and rival the best in the game.
There are a few reasons why Milady is this high in my ranking. Reason #1 is simply that she pairs well with Golem who was my highest pick. I’d wager she might be his best partner, but if not she’s his 2nd best. Reason #2 is that she works with just about anyone who can give her power cubes one way or another. You’re practically never locking yourself into an awful 2nd pick for choosing Milady. Reason #3 is that the characters that act as Swiss army knives are popular picks and she does very well against them. I’m talking about Milady, Joan, Mordred and Golem here. They provide stability with strong defenses, huge health bars and very steady power growth for the late game. Poison against a Mordred will regularly be a 9 damage sweep catching up to any real work he's achieved. Oh he struck Milady for 6 against checkmate ? Boom, double poison and an attack for 15 damage. She’s a great counter-pick and I chose willingly to work with the idea that my opponent would pick Mordred if given the chance.
Now Milady can flounder, she does take a few turns to really set up so any team that really strikes aggressively early can get some low value schemes out of you at the wrong timing. She punishes the slower teams with how much punch she can pack in a single card reveal. She also does pretty poorly against cancel effects. There’s about 2-3 different things that need to progress at once to alleviate her scheme randomness. So ask yourself before you pick her if you are about to face characters that strike for 2+ very early on in the fight. Ching Shih, Mordred, Fey, Brijit, your opponent shouldn’t have a pick at those 4 and then some if you are gonna go Milady. But if you don’t have Mordred in your opening hand, Milady is a juicy option.
Last but not least, Milady lets me talk about Card Clusters. Whenever I would pair her up with Golem, there was a 3-card sequence that would often make me win the game because it accrued so much value. I call those Card Clusters, some interaction between a low amount of cards that does the heavy lifting for you. Milady’s only partner healing card scales with her Power and Golem needs some strong healing as mentioned previously. If you get to play Milady’s heal + Golem’s power transfer, you get a very valuable 3-card combo with Golem’s signature card. He loses HP for providing a shield, this allows Milady to safely accumulate schemes even more so since the protection lets her self-heal hit max HP more regularly. Once you transfer power to her, she will heal Golem back a ton giving him more power to feed to Milady. At some point, you will outheal your opponent’s damage and get 2+ power a turn. Even more so if you use reanimation on Milady’s healing. If your opponent is attacking and you get this online in the first half of the fight, your win % spikes dramatically. If you get it in the latter half, it’s a bit lower in value for you.
There’s these kinds of combinations all over the cast where 2-3 cards really spin out of control and they’re worth considering given how likely they are available. Some are stronger, some are more likely to happen since they rely on a starting card, some require less cards. Above I mentioned Milady can be a quasi-tank for your team. You really see that happen once you play her self-healing cards and pick her cards over your partners. Or you pair it up with some blocks to really make it hard to lose HP card-to-card.
Fey folk ( & Cancel traps )
These oddballs challenge a lot of the assumptions I made in the drafting RPS I described above. Their life bars in theory provide a ton of control against both attackers and power scalers. Excess damage gets wasted on them and if they are picked off early in the fight half of their cards become stronger. You also get some overtime between their death and the actual KO where shenanigans can happen. They are fragile, but even losing a character and getting attacked grants your team free power without drafting a card to do so. They even grant one at the start of the fight allowing for an early attacker to have a very small edge right off the bat. This often doubles their power or goes from 2 to 3, a considerable amount if your win condition is to play beatdown.
Your other character will have to work overtime to make up for Fey's fragility, but they’ll be backed by Fey excellent 2x draws. Arguably the best healing card in the game since it scales as the game progresses and also the Cancel card which is a rare effect and provides upsides compared to a block. While I don’t care much for the 2x attack cards, the single copy modal block cards are sometimes drawn at the perfect time to have a huge impact on some games. It’s good to have skippable draws if your other character is intended to have more cards in play anyway. If your character happens to have mild healing, you may even convert those healing cards into power gain for successfully healing the Fey early in the fight. But this is somewhat one of Fey’s weaknesses imo, their health bars are so small healing cards are more than likely wasted on them.
Before I talk about the partners, I want to talk about the importance of Cancel in the draft. Some starting cards are core to that character’s gameplan. Cancel gets the most value before the match starts when it can hit one such card early enough to force the opponent to move the card out of the Cancel. I’ve mentioned I allowed my opponent to draft Mordred and this is one of the reasons. If you don’t allow him to grow power, 5 of his draws become subpar conditional attacks. If the opponent wants to slide the card out of the Cancel, they have to “waste” a card by placing it in its slot while you can make an impact somewhere else in the deck. If they’re ok leaving the valuable card in Cancel territory this bites them in two ways. The first is the one we already covered, lost value. The second is a Cancel trap. Games of Tag Team often end with getting one decisive powered up attack past your opponents defense late game. The longer the game goes, the more info you get on gaps in their deck. There remains doubt though as your opponent is also aware of those gaps. If your Cancel is paired to a non-block card, it leaves you with a great gap to exploit later in the game. It’s a very cold spot for your opponent as none of their plays there offer value besides the card being slid out, but for you it’s actually a backdoor. It is particularly effective when placed at the very front or back of the deck since you don’t risk the card accidentally sliding out or becoming misaligned. One player has to play in that exact position to change the pairing.
With all that said, I like Fey against characters who will start at 1 power for 2 rounds. Joan, Mordred, Mephisto, etc. The characters with valuable starting cards worth cancelling include Milady, Bodvar, Mordred, Ching shih. But some of these still have a bunch of attack effects in spades or hit hard, that makes some aspects of the matchups a bit uneven, so they’ll never completely feel like a safe pick. But that creates a super interesting dynamic in the draft. You can sort of always assume the Fey are not getting picked or banned. Very few players feel confident taking the risk and playstyle for themselves. So if you have a good pairing in your opening hand with no Fey in sight, you can reliably complete the team.
That being said, Fey Golem is a RIDICULOUS team. If Milady isn’t Golem’s best partner, then I’m very confident it is Fey. The one flaw in the team is that it has no means of scaling in power unless the opponent chooses to attack. But the moment they do, Fey’s healing card and Golem’s signature card is in my opinion the most reliable 2-card cluster in the game. Golem’s protection lets you play more Fey cards in the hope to activate their block cards or to see them go to two spirits. If you heal Golem for 4 while he self damages for 3 every round, you will have an 8 power Golem in 3 turns. It’s an absurdly resilient team as the two cards offer two-way protection and power growth on their own. If you don’t get attacked, at least Golem has 2 power thanks to Fey’s starting bonus and can push some chip damage in. I highly recommend giving that team a whirl, it’s incredibly dynamic when a card becomes valuable or not. I love love love that one and farmed so many wins off them, super skill expressive and it feels busted when it goes off.
Aside from my favorite team in the game, I do like pairing Fey with Ching Shih, Joan and Mephisto. Granting one extra power at game start speeds up these characters and they are self durable. Unfortunately for Fey, The Wild Bunch is often a better candidate for this benefit as they also have their own form of durability and beatdown to fit that gameplan better. I can’t completely recommend Fey, they may be completely fine, but you gotta stomach seeing some games go up in the air as they offer nothing to the fight.
Maman Brijit ( & Scaffolding )
What an incredibly versatile fighter. Brijit starts with 2 power and an attack card right off the bat. There are very few characters who have an unconditional attack right away and 2 power is above average. Some characters will catch back up to that very quickly, but no one comes out the gate swinging like Brijit besides Ching Shih. Everyone else has this modal style of attack where one turn it’ll hit the other it’ll do something else. But Brijit also offers another win condition in two different ways. Having a deflect ability and her pseudo-immortality thanks to her health bar, she punishes power scalers… but only occasionally. 2 copies of cancel and some self sustainability let her flex into either a quick punch or a slow burn.
There are however many downsides. Brijit chips health from your own partner on 3 of her draws. Unless you are planning to skip these or pair her up with a character that can self sustain themselves too, you will have to be ok with games being decided off fewer decisions. An alternative way of protecting your partner is to play more Brijit cards and your partner’s blocks. That’s a risk in itself as Brijit’s reliable healing card is a single copy. Meaning you won’t know if you are seeing that card early or late. Having an attack upfront also makes the other Chili pepper rum draw a single copy, if you pass on it you are not seeing it again. It can be hard to protect and predict which of those effects you’ll need, which guesses will be correct and how the second half of the game will play out as a result. The good news is that Maman Brijit doesn’t really need Card Clusters, every single card pulls a decent amount of weight on its own. Instead she offers a sort of sibling effect to Card Clusters : Scaffolding.
I define Scaffolding as certain deck shapes that provide a sort of lose-lose outcome for your opponent if they happen. One I spent a ton of time doing with Brijit involved Shango’s Aflame at the back of the deck. The opponent usually puts an attack card into Aflame to put pressure on him, if they do so too early they will eventually have to slide their attack card because Aflame wins the race. Brijit’s deflect can be slotted right in front of Aflame for such a lose-lose, if they slide the attack card out it activates her deflect. If they keep the attack in front of Aflame, Shango can attempt to sneak an incineration on them. Neither outcome is great and you can constrict the fight deck for yourself as you likely won’t need to change that pattern for the rest of the fight (ideally). It lets you create other problems elsewhere and force your opponent into multiple small threats that they can’t handle all at once. If you manage to create a Cancel trap on an attack card, placing a deflect right after removes the incentive to slide that card out. Scaffolding isn’t unique to her, but she really shines at it for having those 2 cards in her draws. You have to be wary of the edge of the deck against here because there are a ton of checkmate situations that can emerge by placing 2 copies of the same effect or a favorable slide outcome.
I like Brijit with other characters who can beatdown early, can self-heal and can sustain the health drain effects from Brijit. Ching Shih comes to mind as the leading choice for having another 2-power attack early on that converts to a healing effect. She’s also a character that can pivot to an alternate win condition so the team remains somewhat flexible while being a fantastic pick if your opponent picked a character that’s weak versus early pressure. If your opening hand features both of these characters, you can instead pick a character that gains a lot of value for being attacked as half of your opponent’s choices involve round 1 attacks. Similar characters to Ching Shih involve Mephisto and Joan. I will try to avoid characters like Fey and Wild bunch because it really feels bad to draw your health drain effects and sometimes strongly limit your viable draws. But in theory, their free power gain at the start of the fight would compliment Brijit very well. You probably just have to accept that a lot of your games are going to come to a tense photo finish. I did play a bunch of Shango with her, and I can definitely say you have to be comfortable having a 4 HP Shango if you’re gonna dare these kinds of teams. Not great, but viable.
Unfortunately for Brijit, Joan and Mordred are such stable and common picks that are high in shield draws. It becomes a frequent risk for her. When you have so few attack effects, you’re constantly playing near that starting card just to attempt to offset it being trapped under a pile of blocks. At least Mordred can get looped by Brijit’s immortality. Joan meanwhile grows in power slowly enough to stay in the range where killing Brijit is always an option. If you see Brijit and these 2 in your opening hand, you may be able to ban one of them and make Brijit a good pick. I much prefer picking her when I know I’m very likely to have a double beatdown option or picking her as the 2nd choice after seeing some info on what my opponent is playing. If they picked the Wild Bunch for instance, their health bar works poorly against a larger number of attacks than raw power. They also happen to want to play a ton of healing effects which puts Eternal Youth online as a draw. Brijit does great there in those spots. Either way, she’s decently well rounded to address an unfavorable matchup and would hardly be a problem choice to go for. It just doesn’t help her that I’ve been regularly drafting teams that heavily exploit early attackers.
Joan
The Meat & Potatoes of Tag Team. She is THE perfect jack of all trades, master of none in every sense possible. Where some characters will offer you a trait in which they’re best in class, Joan will simply offer a reliable 8/10 at everything. Above par power growth, above par healing, above par defensive options, above par HP. This makes talking about her matchups and favored partners a little less useful than some characters as she isn’t looking to make up for something and complete a grand gameplan. Her gameplay speed is a little slower, she still has 4 attack draws and has to win via attacks. While she can do it all by herself, a good part of her kit is balancing the power she gains across your team and having reliable access to heal for your partner. The playstyle follows her potential draws. If she’s racing a solo beatdown character, she will likely outpace them as her ability to heal while attacking gets her to the finish line first when trading blows.
This is a very common pick in drafts simply because she will be flexible enough to complete any team. If you can’t solve your opening hand and Joan is in there, she’s always a solid pick. If you pass on picking her, you can almost always assume she will be a favorable 2nd pick on the part of your opponent. This is somewhat exploitable. I think characters that gain something from being attacked or accrue massive amounts of power if left unchecked do well facing Joan. Aside from her blocks, every card of hers is a 2x draw and there’s a merit to having 1 copy of each in play. 4 of those are attacks and the other is raw healing. You can expect Joan to pick an attack card either to trade blows or to accelerate the Divine vision growth. But she doesn’t strike hard right away, opting to chip bit by bit instead. Characters who gain from being damaged or attacked in some way are comfortable picks here. Golem, Fey, Milady, Bodvar, Mordred. All great picks. Alternate win conditions like Shango also get the luxury to attempt setting up for one extra round or two. These aren’t a free win or necessarily a favored matchup, Joan remains a very stable pick after all. But they are afforded more time to get the win condition enabled. Mild little advantage.
Ching Shih
Ching Shih is a sweet character. She’s probably positioned as one of the purer beatdown characters at the start of the fight. A signature card that attacks, 2 base power and 3 attack draws with one that has the potential to scale into a decisive blow. But Ching Shih’s appeal is being able to pivot out of that starting position and really be able to do anything. This is due to her having 5 unique draws that all achieve different goals. This brings a lot of variance to the table, but I thoroughly enjoy how skill expressive it makes the character. Notice how I don’t say strong, I don’t think Ching Shih is particularly better off for having too much variance in that way. But nonetheless, with 3 blocks in the draws and 3 attacks, there is some stability to be found. The ability to pivot is really only nice to have when your beatdown doesn’t appear to close the game in 3-4 rounds.
Since the initial climb, I’ve played a lot more Ching Shih and she is one of my go to for a beatdown gameplan. She’s also relatively unpopular, it feels like she’s often available to pick. I don’t know if it’s because people evaluate her based on her 20 boats ability or dislike how she feels with all the variance. Maybe they find her a bit selfish as she has one card to help gain cubes at low boats and 2 cards to heal/attack with her ally at 8-15. Maybe, people also recognize she is not ideal against the popular picks who play defense very well. That certainly was the case when I was playing to exploit Mordred. Personally I think she’s the best early pressure character providing ample chip damage and forcing some blocks or defensive measures to survive. In some cases, you can even have the opponent “waste” a block against her signature card that may stop attacking later in the fight.
While she’s flexible enough to have a card for every situation, she really wants to play a 5 round game more often than not. So picking another character that wants a shorter game is really good synergy. If you whiff on your draft picks, she’s still gonna offer something to just about anyone. If Joan is an 8/10 at everything, Ching Shih is a 6.5/10 and that’s value in itself. The beatdown champs to pair up with her include Joan, Brijit, Mephisto, The Wild Bunch and to some extent Fey. That extra cube for her to start at 3 power speeds her game up so well. I love Brijit too for signature cards with attacks are really what enable the consistency in that playstyle.
You don’t want to play her into Mordred if you can, Joan will outheal the chip damage fairly easily or anyone who has access to a healing card for 2+. Instead she wants to face up against the really slow burn and fragile characters like Bodvar or Shango. Even if they play some blocks, there’s no place to hide when you always draw an attack card. I also like her and beatdown broadly into The Wild Bunch, they lose not by damage but by frequency of damage more than anything. You do have to be wary of characters with a cancel-like card as it can inhibit your intended boat progression at times.
Mephisto
From here onwards, I have had a small to inexistant play rate for the characters as I was trying to aim for as much consistency as I could in my initial climbing effort. I suspect the quality of the post might be going down from here as I write some of these as theorycrafting and not applied experience with some proven results.
Mephisto is an oddball as it is hard to predict what your own cards will even do. Obviously, they attack and ramp up. That gives them some aspects of a beatdown character and I find that they generally do OK playing in that style especially since the ramp-up is more built in and immediate unlike Brijit or the other aggressive characters. Where there is some unpredictable upside in Mephisto is the sharp spike of their single copy cards. Risky picks for sure, but 4 unblockable damage from one card at the start of the game is best bang for buck. Their single block card is rather good. And while these cool cards are risky, Drag you to hell offers you an absolute out if you’re about to walk into a checkmate. There are inferences you can make based on the turn you draw or haven't drawn that card. It’s not controllable in every game, but sometimes you know you can take bigger risks because you’re likely to see it 2-3 turns from now. For instance, if your opening hand includes Drag you to hell, you know it will be drawn again on round 8.
Mephisto is also very comfortable playing more cards than their partner. Their gameplan will accelerate and they have enough healing draws to sustain themselves just enough to win the race. All of which also progresses the potential of Drag you to hell. Mephisto also offers an alternative way around the fixed deck structures. You have some control and can sometimes flip the location of where your attack card will strike. If you enjoyed the earlier paragraph explaining scaffolding, this is also how it feels like to plan your token to flip due to health loss into a targeted strike some different place in the deck. But good luck predicting those kinds of swings every game. That alone makes Mephisto a scary pick to draft. They’re not best in class at one thing, but the chaos, high risk plays and speed will win a certain number of games. The question is if that number is high enough to bother picking the character often. This is where I started culling some characters out of my climb entirely since such an endeavor favors stability. I don’t have as many successful reps with characters from here onwards not by win % but by sheer number of games played. Games with Mephisto or any beatdown character are played on the knife’s edge and frequently end with both your characters in lethal range.
In a weird way, Mephisto kinda fits the same niche as Joan with their ramp and healing instead being 100% selfish and a wee-bit quicker. Joan offers stability, Mephisto offers a burst but both are playing for a bit of a ramp up. This makes finding them a partner quite awkward since there is nothing gained from Mephisto. They can play this game like a solo character, but their small life bar is awkward and warrants some protection from their partner. Said partner has to be able to handle being on their own. For instance, Golem offers the last bit of protection needed but is put on a clock as it will never receive residual healing. To me the self dependent characters include : Milady, Brijit, Joan, Ching Shih, Mordred and Wild Bunch. Any of those are worthy picks for Mephisto, the others involve some risk tolerance. I did enjoy playing Fey with them as they offer free power ramp up to speed up Mephisto while providing stability for some of the spicier cards. A lot of those characters want to or start off playing beatdown and that leaves Mephisto a viable pick when you’re about to receive them from your opponent. If you can’t pick a preferred pair because they were in the same starting hand, then odds are Mephisto is still in play for this kind of aggressive team.
Characters that benefit from being attacked do love facing Mephisto because they don’t attack every round. That leaves a pause to heal, set the deck back up between coin flips. There’s some comfort rather than facing a Ching Shih that has 3 pure attack draws. Nonetheless, going against the potential of Mephisto remains a scary prospect and asks you to not attack them too obviously and instead favour a massive sneak attack to down them in one go.
Shango
Shangoat! I love Shango and he was initially the first character I wanted to really break apart. In my previous times playing fighting games, I’ve gravitated towards the “Checkmate” archetype when picking characters. This is where Shango starts every match, life bar interactions don’t matter when you can incinerate a character for the win. Checkmate conditions are rarely viable, if they were too reliable it would be toxic for the health of the game. Shango actually has 3 win conditions and you’ll discover which one is likely to happen as the game progresses. The first one is the incinerate, forcing you to read the motions of your opponent, which card they will pick & slide and sometimes go for an aggressive sprint via Breath of fire. Pushing for this usually makes you stake the game on being right 1-3 times in a row, but failing at it leaves you with a fight deck in shambles that’s achieving very little. The second win condition is to grant Shango a bunch of power and have him race with his lightning strike and basic attacks. He never hits SUPER hard, but being able to damage 2 opponents without needing to target is an ability unique to him. You will often see if it’s worth going for it halfway through a game as you do need to have your partner survive the onslaught. The last and most stable win condition for Shango is to not play any cards at all. By leaving your aflame at the start or back of the deck, you will actually force plays out of your opponent. If you can sustain Shango to survive stray hits, Aflame has a great chance to win the race. Therefore the opponent has to slide a card outside of it. This lets you set up some scaffolding as you know a card will go from slot 1 to slot 2 at some point. This lets you fix the problems somewhere else in the fight deck and keep the upper hand there. If the opponent reaches 2-3 flame tokens, they are now under threat of a breath of fire pivot and sometimes have to guess right next round for their life. The threat of this is better than this strategy actually is. None of these win conditions are particularly strong, but having 3 keeps your opponent on their toes.
So what does Shango look for in a partner ? Any healing is nice as you will often get smacked on Aflame, someone who can grant him power makes him play for more than just Aflame. Unfortunately, this list is rather short outside of Joan and Wong Fei-Hung. Sure everyone offers some healing, but Shango will probably need quite a bit. Shango himself has a single copy of a healing effect and it’s a good one, but you can’t rely on drawing it in time and you will often have a damaged Shango that can’t afford to play many more cards. To me this makes him favor characters that can hang on their own since he will have an impact on the match with a single card. I enjoyed leaning into the scaffolding playstyle of Brijit or having another character apply their own pressure concurrently. But you’re never afforded the luxury of healing Shango with those teams. It’s VERY risky. Thankfully, Shango enables this kind of dual pressure via his Wall of Flame. A mutual +1 power gain for you and your partner is the best rate in the game making this a high value block. But all of his other draws are very conditional and frequently worth skipping over lest you want to bet it all on red. You just know that you are likely to draw them 1-2 turns away from that big gamble when it’ll make more sense. Last but not least, you have the potential of anti-synergy with Shango as you don’t want Breath of fire to kill your partner. Shango starting at +1 power thanks to the Wild Bunch is probably the best example of this anti-synergy.
On the matchup side, I dislike facing someone who will often have 4 power in the mid game. Once the opponent switches which character is getting flamed, they often have a free target for an attack draw and are now better equipped to win that race vs. Aflame. The rate at which they can down Shango kinda forces one player to be pre-emptive. Mordred gives me this trouble unless you can manage to match Aflame to his starting card at the start of the fight. This way his hidden dagger will do upwards of 9 damage (2+3+4) before he’s forced to switch. If he switches Aflame targets with Hidden dagger later, you wouldn’t want to have to deal with 4+5+6 damage for the same number of turns. Shango doesn’t have enough block draws to also deal with characters that can perpetually stick attacks in tango. Any beatdown character does pretty well.
I wouldn’t suggest relying on Shango for stable games, he’s a spicy risky pick. I’ve had my shares of someone pushing Breath of fire in on round 2 and killing me the round after. I suspect that Shango will get much better when you have some meta-info to draw from on your opponent. You’re likely re-playing the same opponents every now and then and you can feel what their tendencies are prior to playing them with Shango. I’ll give you an example from me. Because I played the character, I love to immediately switch off the Aflame early in the round to give me a bit more wiggle room if I can or to start applying pressure. I don’t let that win condition build up as much. With enough experience, I won’t be surprised if people can start spotting unrelated cues that would let them infer how the opponent handles the Shango mixup. Instead, it feels like if you pick Shango it’s because you want to play him and take that risk more than him solving the matchup for you. It’s hard to find a reliable spot for the character in the draft and having 5 low-to-game winning attack draws with no in-betweens often will give you draws full of bad options and maximum commitment.
Mordred
I barely played Mordred. The character is good, the character is popular but I don’t particularly find him enjoyable to play. I think I might have alluded to this already but just to be sure, the entirety of my time climbing to rank 1 was spent assuming my opponent would pick Mordred if given the chance. If I could beat him, I let him open in the draft. If I couldn’t beat him, I’d ban him. If I didn’t have him in my opening hand, I’d assume I’d be facing him. But he is incredibly robust with 5 shield draws and a massive health bar. Even though everything he can achieve is conditional, being able to strike for 5 on round 5 is always going to be pretty good. His counter attack block is in my opinion the best in the game. Most blocks will set you up for future turns, but this one just skips the process and completely reverses the momentum instantly. With so many block draws, you can trap errand attack cards into a maze of endless shields while your signature card ramps you up for a swift kill later. He is so so so good.
Mordred’s major flaw when it comes to team building is that he offers no healing card or support, instead opting for pre-emptive defense mitigation via his block cards and massive durability. After all, not taking 3 damage is a great way to functionally do the same thing as healing 3 damage. It’s pretty common for Mordred games to have him at full HP while your partner is looming dangerously low. For this reason, characters that have their own form of self healing do fantastic with Mordred : Joan, The Wild Bunch, Ching Shih, Brijit, Milady. Much like Mordred himself, these characters are all jack of all trades that sort of benefit any team in some fashion. Mordred’s biggest difference is that he plays more for the late game than any of them. There are other more synergistic picks here like Wong Fei-Hung offering some incredible ramp up and power growth with his power transfer cards. But even outside of synergy, Mordred + any character is sound enough to me as he is competing with Joan for most stable character in the game that would fit any team. I still think Joan has the edge here.
That being said, there are still preferred spots for Mordred to be picked over others. Matchups where your opponent must take a beatdown character in the draft benefit him. Having so many blocks is already good, but only gets better when it likely devalues your opponent’s attack draws. You have to pick your spots when playing attacks vs. Mordred to avoid the blocks and target his hidden dagger. The characters that do well into him are instead those with win conditions that progress with no attacks. Bodvar, Shango, Wild Bunch probably fit the bill. But above all else, Milady punishes him in so many ways. Her poison can hit for 9 damage out of the blue and through the shields. If she gets struck by Mordred’s late game attacks, she will activate 1-2 schemes and sometimes trade with Mordred as a result. Her health bar stop plays well against a playstyle that wants to strike hard once and she even has the only attack in the game with upside against blocks. Wong Fei-Hung, Fey and Brijit do pretty well for being able to cancel his starting card, it is after all a huge part of what makes him scary.
Overall, you hardly can go wrong with Mordred. Very good pick. And if you didn’t pick him, your opponent probably will.
Wong Fei-Hung
This character feels pretty bad to play. Overall I think this game is quite balanced and that games are decided by so few key moments that it gives any character a fighting chance even in a disfavored matchup. But Wong is probably the one making me question this the most. A big part of his appeal hinges on donating his power away and possibly making it back later. Sometimes resulting in 5+ power gained in one go. He has a card cluster within his own package to achieve this loop himself. But every single step is either conditional or becomes a liability for yourself. You can transfer 2 power for sure, but then the card is blank of any ability until you gain new cubes. You can attack to progressively transfer 1, but the attack has to land and keeps on attacking even after you emptied your supply. Mordred’s riposte is so happy to see a 0 power attack fire off every round. You can block to regain all that power, but on whiff the chain is broken. Starting at 2 power, Wong often starts with more power and this block becomes a power loss if drawn in the wrong order. You do have a passive +1 power and healing card that is rather reliable, I can’t complain about that one. Finally, that signature card is meant to scale along your opponent’s damage. If Wong didn’t start with it in play, it might be a bit more valuable. But one attack every other round for the same damage as the opponent loses the race. Heck, you can even re-arrange the deck on the round you’ll only receive the token and address it the round after if you’re up against Wong. So you’re left with a character that conditionally will do something while asking you to play a 2-3 cards cluster that’s not spreading attacks and risk across your team. Thankfully he has a big health bar, but so many of my Wong games end up with him being the weak link that gets KO’d for playing too many cards.
Now still, in spite of these problems Wong is better than the measuring stick at getting your partner to have some power. Joan with 2 divine voices effects in play gives your partner 0.5 cubes per round. Wong can do 1 per round, sometimes 2. For the few characters that are expecting to receive power, he is quite nice. Milady, Golem, Mordred, Bodvar are all happy to be paired with Wong. I have not tried this as of typing this, but I suspect he might play quite well with other beatdown characters like Ching Shih since he functionally has 4 cards that attack and 2 starting power. I’ll probably have to experiment with it a bit since he’s rarely picked and always available.
The other reason to pick Wong is Crippling Touch. It works like a permanent Cancel effect and I find it slows down games quite well. But having a 33% chance to draw it in the opening hand against a character that heavily relies on their starting card is worth picking Wong for. It’s so much less scary to go into Mordred when you have a coinflip chance of keeping him stuck at 2 power for the fight. None of this is super guaranteed, but it is back breaking enough to give you a high win % when it does come to pass. To me this is what Wong does well, punishing slow ramp by preventing a played card to be repeated ad eternum. Arguably the Cancels do this better ? But your opponent can opt to try to bring a card back into play, Wong fully clears it out and forces them to interact in the remaining space. Unfortunately, the card has to go off once. Sometimes, you can’t afford that since Wong is usually taking a bit of a beating trying to achieve everything else he has to offer. Removing a 10 power attack isn’t as nice when you have to receive 10 damage in the process.
The Wild Bunch
While I limited my range of play in my initial climb by not playing the Wild bunch, I have since then been introducing them in my rotation quite often. Much like Mordred, I was playing around the fact that they would often be my ban pick, so I reduced their presence as much as possible. And it’s to some extent very warranted, these guys are good. They work a bit like Golem in that they offer massive durability against a single beatdown character while also negating power scalers by reducing their attacks to 1. But if the opponent plays too many attacks, you have to scale their presence back in the fight deck. Fortunately, they offer some of the best healing and choosing these cards heals you outside the fight in the best way they could ask for. Last but not least, they allow you to bypass the standard rule for attack targeting and instead attack the partners via 3 of their draws. This can focus down a single character incredibly well. And that’s not even describing their ability to generate 3 power a round, something that’s basically impossible to race against if it happens early enough. On their best days, they are quite toxic to play against and on their worst days they are slow but durable. Flexibility, independent, spicyness, very few compromises. The main one is that you as a player have to do a good job of recognizing what draw order you are getting next. You cannot play too many Wild Bunch cards until you see your healing effects, they may not scale in power in time to be able to make attacking worth it.
As far as partners go, anyone that needs durability or healing pairs up well with them. I quite like them with Bodvar or Milady here. Anybody that can play beatdown benefits from the free cube at the start of the fight. Ching Shih loves starting the fight at 3 power. Heck even Bodvar can win some races starting at 4 power and earning some via his life bar. Anybody that can offer some healing will help and that’s most of the cast, but 2 copies of partner healing really sky rockets the Wild Bunch to the stratosphere in terms of durability. Joan strikes again, but so does Bodvar here. Heck even Golem doubles down on the durability and makes the Wild bunch quasi immortal while receiving the healing that he expects. The only choices that actively work against Wild Bunch are those who damage their partner in some way.
Matchup wise, I would rather face characters that are least likely to pick attack cards from round 1-2 onwards. What can really kill the Wild Bunch is frequency of attacks. Facing Brijit or Ching Shih who start off attacking every turn can prevent you from playing your own cards until later in the fight. Or they can leave no safe spot for your self healing card which happens to be your best one to keep the Wild Bunch alive. Shango’s lightning strike can be a nightmare once he gets a single power to damage you. The other problem characters include those with great blocks. Your signature card works like Wong’s in that you attack every other round. You have ways to influence that, but not every game. Attacks that set themselves up this way are a bit more telegraphed and give the defender a pause to do something else or plan where to play a block with low urgency. And plus, you frequently hit for 1 or 2 so it’s not too scary if they let it go through. It’s still hard for me to say if my opponent receiving a power every other round causes me to lose fights ? It only affects your partner here, not really the Wild Bunch themselves. But it seems somewhat negligible from what I can tell. If it isn’t then I am oblivious to it.
I know it made sense to not pick these guys for climbing purposes just for repeatability’s sake, but it is the one omission that is the most jarring looking back. These guys are rather incredible in their ability to warp the core rules of the game in a way that isn’t just a risky gimmick.
Bödvar
My least played character. I’ve had games where I’d get mauled by him though so it warranted some exploration of the character once my climb was over. There are many flaws with Bodvar’s gameplan that are quite tough to overcome. You want to acquire power for his transformation to leave him a healthy big bear, you want to transform which takes surviving a few rounds and maybe a few activations of your Transformation Rune. You need protection to make it there and after all of that you need to account for the opponent having had time to pre-emptively place blocks into your modal cards that become attacks. So many games come down to needing just an extra inch of wiggle room for the Bodvar dream to happen, but instead he finds Valhalla and loses the game in the process. His kit screams defensive with 2 heals and 4 shields, but his puny life bar begs otherwise. It hasn’t gelled fully for me and so where I’m at currently on the character is that you are accepting a bumpy ride with an elevated heart rate. If he achieves it all, he MIGHT just win. You won’t be awarded forgiveness for missed guesses and it is just too punishing to be a reliable pick. For instance, I’ve seen incredibly dominant games where Spirit trance goes unchecked for one round too many and becomes a win condition on its own. Turns out 2 power cubes per round is a lot even if you don’t transform into a bear. But in some other games, you strike him twice and he will have achieved nothing.
So who do you pair here? The characters best in class for protection seem to make the most sense to me, so we’re looking at Golem and Wild Bunch. Last time in this post I will mention Joan as a viable partner I promise. Golem really helps to build scaffolding in which Bodvar is immune for most of the fight or even allows for cards like Spirit trance to have much reduced risk. Wild Bunch offers great healing and the starting power actually does a decent job of fixing up Bodvar draws. Berserk is a great attack card and is the only way to strike as a human, but he often has to skip on it to play defense. Skipping a card frequently means never seeing it again. But with 4 power, seeing it early is a viable pick to win beatdown races or apply pressure right away. It also lowers the pressure on Bodvar to gain power before the transformation sets him at 6 HP. Of course, the teaching game team of Wong/Bodvar is quite functional too as they complete each other’s flaws decently well. In theory, you could play a team of oops all blocks with Mordred and have two characters that ramp up in an oddly similar way. I’ll probably have to break my Mordred aversion to try that one, it sounds quite good. Of course, Golem’s protection alleviates the fragile human Bodvar or 6 health bear. This protection also allows for Spirit trance to be played with low risk and supercharge a single attack kill.
I’d like to believe Bodvar does well into beatdown characters thanks to the blocks and the damage immunity on transformation, but I never feel confident that what works on paper translates in-game for this character. I certainly only tried to play him with teams that are tanky, but I can’t say I’ve experienced much reliable success with the character. On the other hand, the character can sometimes easily accrue 10+ power and kill off anybody in two shots. This punishes the slow & steady characters like Joan, in theory. This one is really testing the limits of my theorycrafting in a way that I wish I could conclude wasn’t just him being bad. Hard to say, I’ll keep experimenting and I’ve had some convincing games. Bodevar would be a neat nickname and it’s just taunting me. But for now, he lives in the shadow of Mordred who has a similar game arc and is more reliably impactful. The biggest trade off being that Bodvar can heal his partner.
Closing thoughts
I want to open my closing thoughts on this post by reminding you the balance differences are really slim. There’s no team I feel is weak enough that they can’t guess right 4-5 times in a row to win a match. The closest it gets to that feeling is when I play a heavy beatdown team and “win the draft” so to speak. I have made my own mistakes where it felt like I lost in the draft or that sometimes you just don’t draw the cards that are needed for the situation, but those games feel like the exception and not the rule. That being said, you will certainly feel the difference in your win percentage over a large sum of games by understanding the draft and character dynamics very thoroughly. When I first started playing a ton on BGA, my early win rate wound up around 60% or maybe a smidge lower. That was with around 100-200 games if I recall. As of writing this post, my win rate sits closer to 65.8% with 712 games. That figure also includes the many lost games experimenting with the whole cast to make this post as thorough as it is currently. It’s hard to say what my recent winrate actually is at the moment, but I still try to play every character now and then.
Now while I have not really formatted this in the typical tier list format, I’m sure my vibes-based partner/matchup charts will foster conversation. I’d love to answer more specific questions or hear disagreements from the community.
If you read this far or looked at any of the other Theorycrafting posts, thank you so much. I’ve been sitting on this for a long while now and it took many days of procrastinating to make this post reach the finish line. Glad it’s now off my chest. I’m not sure what’s next, I feel like I’ve covered everything I want to cover for the time being.
This post is a long time coming from me given the previous posts I made. Please understand, I had to just get a huge body of games to test my drafting theories before writing about this. As the title implies, I’ve played enough games I think. Second, what good is theorycrafting for this write up if I’m not observing some results ? Well, I’ve chased rank 1 on Boardgamearena in the process and acquired it. Third, you cannot dissociate drafting heuristics from covering character strengths and weaknesses. That’s just a lot to cover and write and I want this to be a really good resource in the long run. Let’s start with a quick overview of the drafting.
The competitive draft has you pick a character out of a random hand of 6 and ban another. Then you exchange hands and pick one out of the 4 your opponent left in play. Your decision making here relies on three very simple pillars:
- Which character out of the 6 has a good matchup into the 4 characters your opponent must choose from
- Which 6 characters your opponent has and what’s the likely 4 you are getting
- Raw character strength/popularity
There is one thing to add to the second point in that list. Currently, the draft is the most knowable it’ll ever be. Your opponent has the 6 characters you don’t have. But once you start adding the known future expansions, the character pool will expand past 12 and you won’t be able to make a read on their 1st pick. Right now, it is very much a consideration and something you can use on your opening hand. But once the next set becomes available, the most valuable thing to navigate is the opening 6 characters you get. Although that assumes we’ll be drafting with 12 random out of 18+ characters then.
Here’s what a successful draft should look like. You should identify which character has the best equity against 4 characters and ban the miscellaneous character. Then your 2nd pick should be a character that works against the 4 your passed to your opponents, offers synergy with your 1st pick and ideally you can predict it will be passed on by your opponent.
Time to go over every character. I’m loosely ordering this to match my estimated playrate during my climbing time on BGA to rank 1. So the further down you go, the more skeptical you should be as I simply don’t have an equal amount of time played across the cast. While this sounds like it could be my indirect tier list, I don’t think this is the case. I will let you know why in each character’s section. I recommend reading the top of the list first as I will introduce shared concepts that I will refer to later in the post.
Golem ( & drafting RPS )
Good ol’ reliable friend. This character has a lot of good things going for him. A huge health bar affords him to take risks and acquire power. The defensive mechanic he provides affords your partner comfort to also set up something bigger for themselves. It is likely the best damage prevention tool in the game. A very common pattern for Golem is to accrue power rather quickly by getting beat up and race the opponent in beatdown via his 3 attack cards. This could be risky as your own signature card can cost you the game, but so long as you pair up a partner that has great healing you will mitigate this. Not only that, but you will often bounce up and down on those health power nodes, often gaining 2+ power per round. This can easily be the quickest power growth in the game relative to how safe it is to raise your power. Sure, you don’t have blocks and must take the damage the opponent dishes out, but that becomes a win condition for you.
I have the most to say about Golem because he will also introduce the sorts of RPS that’s at play during the draft. Our biggest escalation comes from opponent attacks. Golem on his own has small power and if he doesn’t move the health tracker past 20 HP, he doesn’t have a meaningful way to gain power. His draws become worse if he doesn’t reliably gain power. 2x Transfer power, 3x attacks, 2x signature cards. Sure reanimation remains good, but his healing cards hold more value if he can earn a power for including one in the fight deck. This means he’s at his best when the opponent is more likely to attack. It doesn’t matter if they hit Golem directly, refreshing the protection token causes him to enable his own win condition by ticking down 3 health a round. If a character doesn’t attack often, usually they have some way of escalating the fight. Shango comes to mind with the incinerate, The Wild Bunch can outrace Golem on power gain, but even without winning the race a Mordred or Joan that refuses to attack will outrace the speed at which Golem becomes a menace.
The rock-paper-scissor dynamic I use asks two questions. Is the character/team attacking often and does the character/team gain value from being attacked. Frequent attacking teams lose to the high benefit defenders, defenders lose to an alternate form of escalation, alternate form of winning loses to aggressive early beatdown. Who do I enjoy playing against as Golem ? Brijit, Ching Shih, Mephisto, they all have to attack occasionally from the get go. I also enjoy seeing Joan simply because she has 4 attack draws out of 5. By that logic, Shango is also a lovely sight. But he has an alternate win condition, so he can skip all his attack draws. Milady is a terrible sight to see, she doesn’t want to attack and she will outheal us if we try to play the aggressor. You’re gonna see me borrow language from this paragraph for the rest of this post.
Who do I like with Golem ? Fey and Milady are probably my top 2, Joan and Wild bunch are next in line. My favorite is probably Fey, but I feel if too many of you read this post I’ll have to switch to Milady. Fey offers a way for Golem to start at 2 power and have a better baseline power should the opponent not attack you. Fey has the best healing in the game as it scales with them being attacked, a rare thing in this game. If they die early, Golem gets 3 power with zero work. The shield token makes your Fey very resilient, your Fey makes your Golem very resilient and before you know it Golem will have 8 power cubes. It’s such a durable team. But if I don’t get attacked, then I’ll give the edge to Milady for she will accrue schemes to escalate later into the fight. Wild Bunch and Joan are a bit more traditional, but they provide the healing and escalation needed to round off Golem’s inability to power up without getting attacked. You can also use Golem to protect various fragile characters so that they shine a bit more on their own. Bodvar comes to mind here.
That being said, Golem is not immortal. The opponent slipping past defenses a bit too much or tripling down on early aggression can win the race. But on average, I find he’s rarely outclassed if both teams are rushing to punch each other down. So keep in mind if I say one matchup is favored, two of those characters together can spell doom for the Golem.
Milady ( & Card Clusters)
We’ll put aside the unpredictable part of Milady and focus on what we can predictably rely on. This character is self-sustainable, durable because of the health stop at 1HP and also has great threats for being attacked/healed thanks to the scheme triggers on the health bar. With a tiny bit of power gained provided by her partner and some stalling, the average value from her schemes all gain value. If your partner gets hit a bit, you don’t waste that +6 heal. If your partner grants Milady power, she can cascade into the quickest of unexpected kills. If you don’t attack opponents much early on, your poison inflicts the most damage it can. If you hold your partner’s attack cards, you can wait and see if your early schemes will be power scaling and lower the value of your opponent’s blocks.
Aside from this serving as a how-to-play guide for Milady, it teaches you what checkboxes a partner can provide and what part of the character you should lean into. If Milady needs to be the tank, then you can prioritize her self-healing cards. If your other character is the tank, you can focus on picking the 1x specialty cards for her. Maybe you’re somewhere in the middle and play a balanced approach. The former looks pretty good for characters like Shango, play his blocks for power gain and play his healing card to help Milady tank more. The balanced approach favors someone like Wong-Fei and Joan as they grant Milady a ton of power in various ways. If someone’s tanking for Milady, Golem is a great pick. Milady isn’t the best at healing Golem right away. But if you transfer a ton of power to her, her heal will scale to infinity and rival the best in the game.
There are a few reasons why Milady is this high in my ranking. Reason #1 is simply that she pairs well with Golem who was my highest pick. I’d wager she might be his best partner, but if not she’s his 2nd best. Reason #2 is that she works with just about anyone who can give her power cubes one way or another. You’re practically never locking yourself into an awful 2nd pick for choosing Milady. Reason #3 is that the characters that act as Swiss army knives are popular picks and she does very well against them. I’m talking about Milady, Joan, Mordred and Golem here. They provide stability with strong defenses, huge health bars and very steady power growth for the late game. Poison against a Mordred will regularly be a 9 damage sweep catching up to any real work he's achieved. Oh he struck Milady for 6 against checkmate ? Boom, double poison and an attack for 15 damage. She’s a great counter-pick and I chose willingly to work with the idea that my opponent would pick Mordred if given the chance.
Now Milady can flounder, she does take a few turns to really set up so any team that really strikes aggressively early can get some low value schemes out of you at the wrong timing. She punishes the slower teams with how much punch she can pack in a single card reveal. She also does pretty poorly against cancel effects. There’s about 2-3 different things that need to progress at once to alleviate her scheme randomness. So ask yourself before you pick her if you are about to face characters that strike for 2+ very early on in the fight. Ching Shih, Mordred, Fey, Brijit, your opponent shouldn’t have a pick at those 4 and then some if you are gonna go Milady. But if you don’t have Mordred in your opening hand, Milady is a juicy option.
Last but not least, Milady lets me talk about Card Clusters. Whenever I would pair her up with Golem, there was a 3-card sequence that would often make me win the game because it accrued so much value. I call those Card Clusters, some interaction between a low amount of cards that does the heavy lifting for you. Milady’s only partner healing card scales with her Power and Golem needs some strong healing as mentioned previously. If you get to play Milady’s heal + Golem’s power transfer, you get a very valuable 3-card combo with Golem’s signature card. He loses HP for providing a shield, this allows Milady to safely accumulate schemes even more so since the protection lets her self-heal hit max HP more regularly. Once you transfer power to her, she will heal Golem back a ton giving him more power to feed to Milady. At some point, you will outheal your opponent’s damage and get 2+ power a turn. Even more so if you use reanimation on Milady’s healing. If your opponent is attacking and you get this online in the first half of the fight, your win % spikes dramatically. If you get it in the latter half, it’s a bit lower in value for you.
There’s these kinds of combinations all over the cast where 2-3 cards really spin out of control and they’re worth considering given how likely they are available. Some are stronger, some are more likely to happen since they rely on a starting card, some require less cards. Above I mentioned Milady can be a quasi-tank for your team. You really see that happen once you play her self-healing cards and pick her cards over your partners. Or you pair it up with some blocks to really make it hard to lose HP card-to-card.
Fey folk ( & Cancel traps )
These oddballs challenge a lot of the assumptions I made in the drafting RPS I described above. Their life bars in theory provide a ton of control against both attackers and power scalers. Excess damage gets wasted on them and if they are picked off early in the fight half of their cards become stronger. You also get some overtime between their death and the actual KO where shenanigans can happen. They are fragile, but even losing a character and getting attacked grants your team free power without drafting a card to do so. They even grant one at the start of the fight allowing for an early attacker to have a very small edge right off the bat. This often doubles their power or goes from 2 to 3, a considerable amount if your win condition is to play beatdown.
Your other character will have to work overtime to make up for Fey's fragility, but they’ll be backed by Fey excellent 2x draws. Arguably the best healing card in the game since it scales as the game progresses and also the Cancel card which is a rare effect and provides upsides compared to a block. While I don’t care much for the 2x attack cards, the single copy modal block cards are sometimes drawn at the perfect time to have a huge impact on some games. It’s good to have skippable draws if your other character is intended to have more cards in play anyway. If your character happens to have mild healing, you may even convert those healing cards into power gain for successfully healing the Fey early in the fight. But this is somewhat one of Fey’s weaknesses imo, their health bars are so small healing cards are more than likely wasted on them.
Before I talk about the partners, I want to talk about the importance of Cancel in the draft. Some starting cards are core to that character’s gameplan. Cancel gets the most value before the match starts when it can hit one such card early enough to force the opponent to move the card out of the Cancel. I’ve mentioned I allowed my opponent to draft Mordred and this is one of the reasons. If you don’t allow him to grow power, 5 of his draws become subpar conditional attacks. If the opponent wants to slide the card out of the Cancel, they have to “waste” a card by placing it in its slot while you can make an impact somewhere else in the deck. If they’re ok leaving the valuable card in Cancel territory this bites them in two ways. The first is the one we already covered, lost value. The second is a Cancel trap. Games of Tag Team often end with getting one decisive powered up attack past your opponents defense late game. The longer the game goes, the more info you get on gaps in their deck. There remains doubt though as your opponent is also aware of those gaps. If your Cancel is paired to a non-block card, it leaves you with a great gap to exploit later in the game. It’s a very cold spot for your opponent as none of their plays there offer value besides the card being slid out, but for you it’s actually a backdoor. It is particularly effective when placed at the very front or back of the deck since you don’t risk the card accidentally sliding out or becoming misaligned. One player has to play in that exact position to change the pairing.
With all that said, I like Fey against characters who will start at 1 power for 2 rounds. Joan, Mordred, Mephisto, etc. The characters with valuable starting cards worth cancelling include Milady, Bodvar, Mordred, Ching shih. But some of these still have a bunch of attack effects in spades or hit hard, that makes some aspects of the matchups a bit uneven, so they’ll never completely feel like a safe pick. But that creates a super interesting dynamic in the draft. You can sort of always assume the Fey are not getting picked or banned. Very few players feel confident taking the risk and playstyle for themselves. So if you have a good pairing in your opening hand with no Fey in sight, you can reliably complete the team.
That being said, Fey Golem is a RIDICULOUS team. If Milady isn’t Golem’s best partner, then I’m very confident it is Fey. The one flaw in the team is that it has no means of scaling in power unless the opponent chooses to attack. But the moment they do, Fey’s healing card and Golem’s signature card is in my opinion the most reliable 2-card cluster in the game. Golem’s protection lets you play more Fey cards in the hope to activate their block cards or to see them go to two spirits. If you heal Golem for 4 while he self damages for 3 every round, you will have an 8 power Golem in 3 turns. It’s an absurdly resilient team as the two cards offer two-way protection and power growth on their own. If you don’t get attacked, at least Golem has 2 power thanks to Fey’s starting bonus and can push some chip damage in. I highly recommend giving that team a whirl, it’s incredibly dynamic when a card becomes valuable or not. I love love love that one and farmed so many wins off them, super skill expressive and it feels busted when it goes off.
Aside from my favorite team in the game, I do like pairing Fey with Ching Shih, Joan and Mephisto. Granting one extra power at game start speeds up these characters and they are self durable. Unfortunately for Fey, The Wild Bunch is often a better candidate for this benefit as they also have their own form of durability and beatdown to fit that gameplan better. I can’t completely recommend Fey, they may be completely fine, but you gotta stomach seeing some games go up in the air as they offer nothing to the fight.
Maman Brijit ( & Scaffolding )
What an incredibly versatile fighter. Brijit starts with 2 power and an attack card right off the bat. There are very few characters who have an unconditional attack right away and 2 power is above average. Some characters will catch back up to that very quickly, but no one comes out the gate swinging like Brijit besides Ching Shih. Everyone else has this modal style of attack where one turn it’ll hit the other it’ll do something else. But Brijit also offers another win condition in two different ways. Having a deflect ability and her pseudo-immortality thanks to her health bar, she punishes power scalers… but only occasionally. 2 copies of cancel and some self sustainability let her flex into either a quick punch or a slow burn.
There are however many downsides. Brijit chips health from your own partner on 3 of her draws. Unless you are planning to skip these or pair her up with a character that can self sustain themselves too, you will have to be ok with games being decided off fewer decisions. An alternative way of protecting your partner is to play more Brijit cards and your partner’s blocks. That’s a risk in itself as Brijit’s reliable healing card is a single copy. Meaning you won’t know if you are seeing that card early or late. Having an attack upfront also makes the other Chili pepper rum draw a single copy, if you pass on it you are not seeing it again. It can be hard to protect and predict which of those effects you’ll need, which guesses will be correct and how the second half of the game will play out as a result. The good news is that Maman Brijit doesn’t really need Card Clusters, every single card pulls a decent amount of weight on its own. Instead she offers a sort of sibling effect to Card Clusters : Scaffolding.
I define Scaffolding as certain deck shapes that provide a sort of lose-lose outcome for your opponent if they happen. One I spent a ton of time doing with Brijit involved Shango’s Aflame at the back of the deck. The opponent usually puts an attack card into Aflame to put pressure on him, if they do so too early they will eventually have to slide their attack card because Aflame wins the race. Brijit’s deflect can be slotted right in front of Aflame for such a lose-lose, if they slide the attack card out it activates her deflect. If they keep the attack in front of Aflame, Shango can attempt to sneak an incineration on them. Neither outcome is great and you can constrict the fight deck for yourself as you likely won’t need to change that pattern for the rest of the fight (ideally). It lets you create other problems elsewhere and force your opponent into multiple small threats that they can’t handle all at once. If you manage to create a Cancel trap on an attack card, placing a deflect right after removes the incentive to slide that card out. Scaffolding isn’t unique to her, but she really shines at it for having those 2 cards in her draws. You have to be wary of the edge of the deck against here because there are a ton of checkmate situations that can emerge by placing 2 copies of the same effect or a favorable slide outcome.
I like Brijit with other characters who can beatdown early, can self-heal and can sustain the health drain effects from Brijit. Ching Shih comes to mind as the leading choice for having another 2-power attack early on that converts to a healing effect. She’s also a character that can pivot to an alternate win condition so the team remains somewhat flexible while being a fantastic pick if your opponent picked a character that’s weak versus early pressure. If your opening hand features both of these characters, you can instead pick a character that gains a lot of value for being attacked as half of your opponent’s choices involve round 1 attacks. Similar characters to Ching Shih involve Mephisto and Joan. I will try to avoid characters like Fey and Wild bunch because it really feels bad to draw your health drain effects and sometimes strongly limit your viable draws. But in theory, their free power gain at the start of the fight would compliment Brijit very well. You probably just have to accept that a lot of your games are going to come to a tense photo finish. I did play a bunch of Shango with her, and I can definitely say you have to be comfortable having a 4 HP Shango if you’re gonna dare these kinds of teams. Not great, but viable.
Unfortunately for Brijit, Joan and Mordred are such stable and common picks that are high in shield draws. It becomes a frequent risk for her. When you have so few attack effects, you’re constantly playing near that starting card just to attempt to offset it being trapped under a pile of blocks. At least Mordred can get looped by Brijit’s immortality. Joan meanwhile grows in power slowly enough to stay in the range where killing Brijit is always an option. If you see Brijit and these 2 in your opening hand, you may be able to ban one of them and make Brijit a good pick. I much prefer picking her when I know I’m very likely to have a double beatdown option or picking her as the 2nd choice after seeing some info on what my opponent is playing. If they picked the Wild Bunch for instance, their health bar works poorly against a larger number of attacks than raw power. They also happen to want to play a ton of healing effects which puts Eternal Youth online as a draw. Brijit does great there in those spots. Either way, she’s decently well rounded to address an unfavorable matchup and would hardly be a problem choice to go for. It just doesn’t help her that I’ve been regularly drafting teams that heavily exploit early attackers.
Joan
The Meat & Potatoes of Tag Team. She is THE perfect jack of all trades, master of none in every sense possible. Where some characters will offer you a trait in which they’re best in class, Joan will simply offer a reliable 8/10 at everything. Above par power growth, above par healing, above par defensive options, above par HP. This makes talking about her matchups and favored partners a little less useful than some characters as she isn’t looking to make up for something and complete a grand gameplan. Her gameplay speed is a little slower, she still has 4 attack draws and has to win via attacks. While she can do it all by herself, a good part of her kit is balancing the power she gains across your team and having reliable access to heal for your partner. The playstyle follows her potential draws. If she’s racing a solo beatdown character, she will likely outpace them as her ability to heal while attacking gets her to the finish line first when trading blows.
This is a very common pick in drafts simply because she will be flexible enough to complete any team. If you can’t solve your opening hand and Joan is in there, she’s always a solid pick. If you pass on picking her, you can almost always assume she will be a favorable 2nd pick on the part of your opponent. This is somewhat exploitable. I think characters that gain something from being attacked or accrue massive amounts of power if left unchecked do well facing Joan. Aside from her blocks, every card of hers is a 2x draw and there’s a merit to having 1 copy of each in play. 4 of those are attacks and the other is raw healing. You can expect Joan to pick an attack card either to trade blows or to accelerate the Divine vision growth. But she doesn’t strike hard right away, opting to chip bit by bit instead. Characters who gain from being damaged or attacked in some way are comfortable picks here. Golem, Fey, Milady, Bodvar, Mordred. All great picks. Alternate win conditions like Shango also get the luxury to attempt setting up for one extra round or two. These aren’t a free win or necessarily a favored matchup, Joan remains a very stable pick after all. But they are afforded more time to get the win condition enabled. Mild little advantage.
Ching Shih
Ching Shih is a sweet character. She’s probably positioned as one of the purer beatdown characters at the start of the fight. A signature card that attacks, 2 base power and 3 attack draws with one that has the potential to scale into a decisive blow. But Ching Shih’s appeal is being able to pivot out of that starting position and really be able to do anything. This is due to her having 5 unique draws that all achieve different goals. This brings a lot of variance to the table, but I thoroughly enjoy how skill expressive it makes the character. Notice how I don’t say strong, I don’t think Ching Shih is particularly better off for having too much variance in that way. But nonetheless, with 3 blocks in the draws and 3 attacks, there is some stability to be found. The ability to pivot is really only nice to have when your beatdown doesn’t appear to close the game in 3-4 rounds.
Since the initial climb, I’ve played a lot more Ching Shih and she is one of my go to for a beatdown gameplan. She’s also relatively unpopular, it feels like she’s often available to pick. I don’t know if it’s because people evaluate her based on her 20 boats ability or dislike how she feels with all the variance. Maybe they find her a bit selfish as she has one card to help gain cubes at low boats and 2 cards to heal/attack with her ally at 8-15. Maybe, people also recognize she is not ideal against the popular picks who play defense very well. That certainly was the case when I was playing to exploit Mordred. Personally I think she’s the best early pressure character providing ample chip damage and forcing some blocks or defensive measures to survive. In some cases, you can even have the opponent “waste” a block against her signature card that may stop attacking later in the fight.
While she’s flexible enough to have a card for every situation, she really wants to play a 5 round game more often than not. So picking another character that wants a shorter game is really good synergy. If you whiff on your draft picks, she’s still gonna offer something to just about anyone. If Joan is an 8/10 at everything, Ching Shih is a 6.5/10 and that’s value in itself. The beatdown champs to pair up with her include Joan, Brijit, Mephisto, The Wild Bunch and to some extent Fey. That extra cube for her to start at 3 power speeds her game up so well. I love Brijit too for signature cards with attacks are really what enable the consistency in that playstyle.
You don’t want to play her into Mordred if you can, Joan will outheal the chip damage fairly easily or anyone who has access to a healing card for 2+. Instead she wants to face up against the really slow burn and fragile characters like Bodvar or Shango. Even if they play some blocks, there’s no place to hide when you always draw an attack card. I also like her and beatdown broadly into The Wild Bunch, they lose not by damage but by frequency of damage more than anything. You do have to be wary of characters with a cancel-like card as it can inhibit your intended boat progression at times.
Mephisto
From here onwards, I have had a small to inexistant play rate for the characters as I was trying to aim for as much consistency as I could in my initial climbing effort. I suspect the quality of the post might be going down from here as I write some of these as theorycrafting and not applied experience with some proven results.
Mephisto is an oddball as it is hard to predict what your own cards will even do. Obviously, they attack and ramp up. That gives them some aspects of a beatdown character and I find that they generally do OK playing in that style especially since the ramp-up is more built in and immediate unlike Brijit or the other aggressive characters. Where there is some unpredictable upside in Mephisto is the sharp spike of their single copy cards. Risky picks for sure, but 4 unblockable damage from one card at the start of the game is best bang for buck. Their single block card is rather good. And while these cool cards are risky, Drag you to hell offers you an absolute out if you’re about to walk into a checkmate. There are inferences you can make based on the turn you draw or haven't drawn that card. It’s not controllable in every game, but sometimes you know you can take bigger risks because you’re likely to see it 2-3 turns from now. For instance, if your opening hand includes Drag you to hell, you know it will be drawn again on round 8.
Mephisto is also very comfortable playing more cards than their partner. Their gameplan will accelerate and they have enough healing draws to sustain themselves just enough to win the race. All of which also progresses the potential of Drag you to hell. Mephisto also offers an alternative way around the fixed deck structures. You have some control and can sometimes flip the location of where your attack card will strike. If you enjoyed the earlier paragraph explaining scaffolding, this is also how it feels like to plan your token to flip due to health loss into a targeted strike some different place in the deck. But good luck predicting those kinds of swings every game. That alone makes Mephisto a scary pick to draft. They’re not best in class at one thing, but the chaos, high risk plays and speed will win a certain number of games. The question is if that number is high enough to bother picking the character often. This is where I started culling some characters out of my climb entirely since such an endeavor favors stability. I don’t have as many successful reps with characters from here onwards not by win % but by sheer number of games played. Games with Mephisto or any beatdown character are played on the knife’s edge and frequently end with both your characters in lethal range.
In a weird way, Mephisto kinda fits the same niche as Joan with their ramp and healing instead being 100% selfish and a wee-bit quicker. Joan offers stability, Mephisto offers a burst but both are playing for a bit of a ramp up. This makes finding them a partner quite awkward since there is nothing gained from Mephisto. They can play this game like a solo character, but their small life bar is awkward and warrants some protection from their partner. Said partner has to be able to handle being on their own. For instance, Golem offers the last bit of protection needed but is put on a clock as it will never receive residual healing. To me the self dependent characters include : Milady, Brijit, Joan, Ching Shih, Mordred and Wild Bunch. Any of those are worthy picks for Mephisto, the others involve some risk tolerance. I did enjoy playing Fey with them as they offer free power ramp up to speed up Mephisto while providing stability for some of the spicier cards. A lot of those characters want to or start off playing beatdown and that leaves Mephisto a viable pick when you’re about to receive them from your opponent. If you can’t pick a preferred pair because they were in the same starting hand, then odds are Mephisto is still in play for this kind of aggressive team.
Characters that benefit from being attacked do love facing Mephisto because they don’t attack every round. That leaves a pause to heal, set the deck back up between coin flips. There’s some comfort rather than facing a Ching Shih that has 3 pure attack draws. Nonetheless, going against the potential of Mephisto remains a scary prospect and asks you to not attack them too obviously and instead favour a massive sneak attack to down them in one go.
Shango
Shangoat! I love Shango and he was initially the first character I wanted to really break apart. In my previous times playing fighting games, I’ve gravitated towards the “Checkmate” archetype when picking characters. This is where Shango starts every match, life bar interactions don’t matter when you can incinerate a character for the win. Checkmate conditions are rarely viable, if they were too reliable it would be toxic for the health of the game. Shango actually has 3 win conditions and you’ll discover which one is likely to happen as the game progresses. The first one is the incinerate, forcing you to read the motions of your opponent, which card they will pick & slide and sometimes go for an aggressive sprint via Breath of fire. Pushing for this usually makes you stake the game on being right 1-3 times in a row, but failing at it leaves you with a fight deck in shambles that’s achieving very little. The second win condition is to grant Shango a bunch of power and have him race with his lightning strike and basic attacks. He never hits SUPER hard, but being able to damage 2 opponents without needing to target is an ability unique to him. You will often see if it’s worth going for it halfway through a game as you do need to have your partner survive the onslaught. The last and most stable win condition for Shango is to not play any cards at all. By leaving your aflame at the start or back of the deck, you will actually force plays out of your opponent. If you can sustain Shango to survive stray hits, Aflame has a great chance to win the race. Therefore the opponent has to slide a card outside of it. This lets you set up some scaffolding as you know a card will go from slot 1 to slot 2 at some point. This lets you fix the problems somewhere else in the fight deck and keep the upper hand there. If the opponent reaches 2-3 flame tokens, they are now under threat of a breath of fire pivot and sometimes have to guess right next round for their life. The threat of this is better than this strategy actually is. None of these win conditions are particularly strong, but having 3 keeps your opponent on their toes.
So what does Shango look for in a partner ? Any healing is nice as you will often get smacked on Aflame, someone who can grant him power makes him play for more than just Aflame. Unfortunately, this list is rather short outside of Joan and Wong Fei-Hung. Sure everyone offers some healing, but Shango will probably need quite a bit. Shango himself has a single copy of a healing effect and it’s a good one, but you can’t rely on drawing it in time and you will often have a damaged Shango that can’t afford to play many more cards. To me this makes him favor characters that can hang on their own since he will have an impact on the match with a single card. I enjoyed leaning into the scaffolding playstyle of Brijit or having another character apply their own pressure concurrently. But you’re never afforded the luxury of healing Shango with those teams. It’s VERY risky. Thankfully, Shango enables this kind of dual pressure via his Wall of Flame. A mutual +1 power gain for you and your partner is the best rate in the game making this a high value block. But all of his other draws are very conditional and frequently worth skipping over lest you want to bet it all on red. You just know that you are likely to draw them 1-2 turns away from that big gamble when it’ll make more sense. Last but not least, you have the potential of anti-synergy with Shango as you don’t want Breath of fire to kill your partner. Shango starting at +1 power thanks to the Wild Bunch is probably the best example of this anti-synergy.
On the matchup side, I dislike facing someone who will often have 4 power in the mid game. Once the opponent switches which character is getting flamed, they often have a free target for an attack draw and are now better equipped to win that race vs. Aflame. The rate at which they can down Shango kinda forces one player to be pre-emptive. Mordred gives me this trouble unless you can manage to match Aflame to his starting card at the start of the fight. This way his hidden dagger will do upwards of 9 damage (2+3+4) before he’s forced to switch. If he switches Aflame targets with Hidden dagger later, you wouldn’t want to have to deal with 4+5+6 damage for the same number of turns. Shango doesn’t have enough block draws to also deal with characters that can perpetually stick attacks in tango. Any beatdown character does pretty well.
I wouldn’t suggest relying on Shango for stable games, he’s a spicy risky pick. I’ve had my shares of someone pushing Breath of fire in on round 2 and killing me the round after. I suspect that Shango will get much better when you have some meta-info to draw from on your opponent. You’re likely re-playing the same opponents every now and then and you can feel what their tendencies are prior to playing them with Shango. I’ll give you an example from me. Because I played the character, I love to immediately switch off the Aflame early in the round to give me a bit more wiggle room if I can or to start applying pressure. I don’t let that win condition build up as much. With enough experience, I won’t be surprised if people can start spotting unrelated cues that would let them infer how the opponent handles the Shango mixup. Instead, it feels like if you pick Shango it’s because you want to play him and take that risk more than him solving the matchup for you. It’s hard to find a reliable spot for the character in the draft and having 5 low-to-game winning attack draws with no in-betweens often will give you draws full of bad options and maximum commitment.
Mordred
I barely played Mordred. The character is good, the character is popular but I don’t particularly find him enjoyable to play. I think I might have alluded to this already but just to be sure, the entirety of my time climbing to rank 1 was spent assuming my opponent would pick Mordred if given the chance. If I could beat him, I let him open in the draft. If I couldn’t beat him, I’d ban him. If I didn’t have him in my opening hand, I’d assume I’d be facing him. But he is incredibly robust with 5 shield draws and a massive health bar. Even though everything he can achieve is conditional, being able to strike for 5 on round 5 is always going to be pretty good. His counter attack block is in my opinion the best in the game. Most blocks will set you up for future turns, but this one just skips the process and completely reverses the momentum instantly. With so many block draws, you can trap errand attack cards into a maze of endless shields while your signature card ramps you up for a swift kill later. He is so so so good.
Mordred’s major flaw when it comes to team building is that he offers no healing card or support, instead opting for pre-emptive defense mitigation via his block cards and massive durability. After all, not taking 3 damage is a great way to functionally do the same thing as healing 3 damage. It’s pretty common for Mordred games to have him at full HP while your partner is looming dangerously low. For this reason, characters that have their own form of self healing do fantastic with Mordred : Joan, The Wild Bunch, Ching Shih, Brijit, Milady. Much like Mordred himself, these characters are all jack of all trades that sort of benefit any team in some fashion. Mordred’s biggest difference is that he plays more for the late game than any of them. There are other more synergistic picks here like Wong Fei-Hung offering some incredible ramp up and power growth with his power transfer cards. But even outside of synergy, Mordred + any character is sound enough to me as he is competing with Joan for most stable character in the game that would fit any team. I still think Joan has the edge here.
That being said, there are still preferred spots for Mordred to be picked over others. Matchups where your opponent must take a beatdown character in the draft benefit him. Having so many blocks is already good, but only gets better when it likely devalues your opponent’s attack draws. You have to pick your spots when playing attacks vs. Mordred to avoid the blocks and target his hidden dagger. The characters that do well into him are instead those with win conditions that progress with no attacks. Bodvar, Shango, Wild Bunch probably fit the bill. But above all else, Milady punishes him in so many ways. Her poison can hit for 9 damage out of the blue and through the shields. If she gets struck by Mordred’s late game attacks, she will activate 1-2 schemes and sometimes trade with Mordred as a result. Her health bar stop plays well against a playstyle that wants to strike hard once and she even has the only attack in the game with upside against blocks. Wong Fei-Hung, Fey and Brijit do pretty well for being able to cancel his starting card, it is after all a huge part of what makes him scary.
Overall, you hardly can go wrong with Mordred. Very good pick. And if you didn’t pick him, your opponent probably will.
Wong Fei-Hung
This character feels pretty bad to play. Overall I think this game is quite balanced and that games are decided by so few key moments that it gives any character a fighting chance even in a disfavored matchup. But Wong is probably the one making me question this the most. A big part of his appeal hinges on donating his power away and possibly making it back later. Sometimes resulting in 5+ power gained in one go. He has a card cluster within his own package to achieve this loop himself. But every single step is either conditional or becomes a liability for yourself. You can transfer 2 power for sure, but then the card is blank of any ability until you gain new cubes. You can attack to progressively transfer 1, but the attack has to land and keeps on attacking even after you emptied your supply. Mordred’s riposte is so happy to see a 0 power attack fire off every round. You can block to regain all that power, but on whiff the chain is broken. Starting at 2 power, Wong often starts with more power and this block becomes a power loss if drawn in the wrong order. You do have a passive +1 power and healing card that is rather reliable, I can’t complain about that one. Finally, that signature card is meant to scale along your opponent’s damage. If Wong didn’t start with it in play, it might be a bit more valuable. But one attack every other round for the same damage as the opponent loses the race. Heck, you can even re-arrange the deck on the round you’ll only receive the token and address it the round after if you’re up against Wong. So you’re left with a character that conditionally will do something while asking you to play a 2-3 cards cluster that’s not spreading attacks and risk across your team. Thankfully he has a big health bar, but so many of my Wong games end up with him being the weak link that gets KO’d for playing too many cards.
Now still, in spite of these problems Wong is better than the measuring stick at getting your partner to have some power. Joan with 2 divine voices effects in play gives your partner 0.5 cubes per round. Wong can do 1 per round, sometimes 2. For the few characters that are expecting to receive power, he is quite nice. Milady, Golem, Mordred, Bodvar are all happy to be paired with Wong. I have not tried this as of typing this, but I suspect he might play quite well with other beatdown characters like Ching Shih since he functionally has 4 cards that attack and 2 starting power. I’ll probably have to experiment with it a bit since he’s rarely picked and always available.
The other reason to pick Wong is Crippling Touch. It works like a permanent Cancel effect and I find it slows down games quite well. But having a 33% chance to draw it in the opening hand against a character that heavily relies on their starting card is worth picking Wong for. It’s so much less scary to go into Mordred when you have a coinflip chance of keeping him stuck at 2 power for the fight. None of this is super guaranteed, but it is back breaking enough to give you a high win % when it does come to pass. To me this is what Wong does well, punishing slow ramp by preventing a played card to be repeated ad eternum. Arguably the Cancels do this better ? But your opponent can opt to try to bring a card back into play, Wong fully clears it out and forces them to interact in the remaining space. Unfortunately, the card has to go off once. Sometimes, you can’t afford that since Wong is usually taking a bit of a beating trying to achieve everything else he has to offer. Removing a 10 power attack isn’t as nice when you have to receive 10 damage in the process.
The Wild Bunch
While I limited my range of play in my initial climb by not playing the Wild bunch, I have since then been introducing them in my rotation quite often. Much like Mordred, I was playing around the fact that they would often be my ban pick, so I reduced their presence as much as possible. And it’s to some extent very warranted, these guys are good. They work a bit like Golem in that they offer massive durability against a single beatdown character while also negating power scalers by reducing their attacks to 1. But if the opponent plays too many attacks, you have to scale their presence back in the fight deck. Fortunately, they offer some of the best healing and choosing these cards heals you outside the fight in the best way they could ask for. Last but not least, they allow you to bypass the standard rule for attack targeting and instead attack the partners via 3 of their draws. This can focus down a single character incredibly well. And that’s not even describing their ability to generate 3 power a round, something that’s basically impossible to race against if it happens early enough. On their best days, they are quite toxic to play against and on their worst days they are slow but durable. Flexibility, independent, spicyness, very few compromises. The main one is that you as a player have to do a good job of recognizing what draw order you are getting next. You cannot play too many Wild Bunch cards until you see your healing effects, they may not scale in power in time to be able to make attacking worth it.
As far as partners go, anyone that needs durability or healing pairs up well with them. I quite like them with Bodvar or Milady here. Anybody that can play beatdown benefits from the free cube at the start of the fight. Ching Shih loves starting the fight at 3 power. Heck even Bodvar can win some races starting at 4 power and earning some via his life bar. Anybody that can offer some healing will help and that’s most of the cast, but 2 copies of partner healing really sky rockets the Wild Bunch to the stratosphere in terms of durability. Joan strikes again, but so does Bodvar here. Heck even Golem doubles down on the durability and makes the Wild bunch quasi immortal while receiving the healing that he expects. The only choices that actively work against Wild Bunch are those who damage their partner in some way.
Matchup wise, I would rather face characters that are least likely to pick attack cards from round 1-2 onwards. What can really kill the Wild Bunch is frequency of attacks. Facing Brijit or Ching Shih who start off attacking every turn can prevent you from playing your own cards until later in the fight. Or they can leave no safe spot for your self healing card which happens to be your best one to keep the Wild Bunch alive. Shango’s lightning strike can be a nightmare once he gets a single power to damage you. The other problem characters include those with great blocks. Your signature card works like Wong’s in that you attack every other round. You have ways to influence that, but not every game. Attacks that set themselves up this way are a bit more telegraphed and give the defender a pause to do something else or plan where to play a block with low urgency. And plus, you frequently hit for 1 or 2 so it’s not too scary if they let it go through. It’s still hard for me to say if my opponent receiving a power every other round causes me to lose fights ? It only affects your partner here, not really the Wild Bunch themselves. But it seems somewhat negligible from what I can tell. If it isn’t then I am oblivious to it.
I know it made sense to not pick these guys for climbing purposes just for repeatability’s sake, but it is the one omission that is the most jarring looking back. These guys are rather incredible in their ability to warp the core rules of the game in a way that isn’t just a risky gimmick.
Bödvar
My least played character. I’ve had games where I’d get mauled by him though so it warranted some exploration of the character once my climb was over. There are many flaws with Bodvar’s gameplan that are quite tough to overcome. You want to acquire power for his transformation to leave him a healthy big bear, you want to transform which takes surviving a few rounds and maybe a few activations of your Transformation Rune. You need protection to make it there and after all of that you need to account for the opponent having had time to pre-emptively place blocks into your modal cards that become attacks. So many games come down to needing just an extra inch of wiggle room for the Bodvar dream to happen, but instead he finds Valhalla and loses the game in the process. His kit screams defensive with 2 heals and 4 shields, but his puny life bar begs otherwise. It hasn’t gelled fully for me and so where I’m at currently on the character is that you are accepting a bumpy ride with an elevated heart rate. If he achieves it all, he MIGHT just win. You won’t be awarded forgiveness for missed guesses and it is just too punishing to be a reliable pick. For instance, I’ve seen incredibly dominant games where Spirit trance goes unchecked for one round too many and becomes a win condition on its own. Turns out 2 power cubes per round is a lot even if you don’t transform into a bear. But in some other games, you strike him twice and he will have achieved nothing.
So who do you pair here? The characters best in class for protection seem to make the most sense to me, so we’re looking at Golem and Wild Bunch. Last time in this post I will mention Joan as a viable partner I promise. Golem really helps to build scaffolding in which Bodvar is immune for most of the fight or even allows for cards like Spirit trance to have much reduced risk. Wild Bunch offers great healing and the starting power actually does a decent job of fixing up Bodvar draws. Berserk is a great attack card and is the only way to strike as a human, but he often has to skip on it to play defense. Skipping a card frequently means never seeing it again. But with 4 power, seeing it early is a viable pick to win beatdown races or apply pressure right away. It also lowers the pressure on Bodvar to gain power before the transformation sets him at 6 HP. Of course, the teaching game team of Wong/Bodvar is quite functional too as they complete each other’s flaws decently well. In theory, you could play a team of oops all blocks with Mordred and have two characters that ramp up in an oddly similar way. I’ll probably have to break my Mordred aversion to try that one, it sounds quite good. Of course, Golem’s protection alleviates the fragile human Bodvar or 6 health bear. This protection also allows for Spirit trance to be played with low risk and supercharge a single attack kill.
I’d like to believe Bodvar does well into beatdown characters thanks to the blocks and the damage immunity on transformation, but I never feel confident that what works on paper translates in-game for this character. I certainly only tried to play him with teams that are tanky, but I can’t say I’ve experienced much reliable success with the character. On the other hand, the character can sometimes easily accrue 10+ power and kill off anybody in two shots. This punishes the slow & steady characters like Joan, in theory. This one is really testing the limits of my theorycrafting in a way that I wish I could conclude wasn’t just him being bad. Hard to say, I’ll keep experimenting and I’ve had some convincing games. Bodevar would be a neat nickname and it’s just taunting me. But for now, he lives in the shadow of Mordred who has a similar game arc and is more reliably impactful. The biggest trade off being that Bodvar can heal his partner.
Closing thoughts
I want to open my closing thoughts on this post by reminding you the balance differences are really slim. There’s no team I feel is weak enough that they can’t guess right 4-5 times in a row to win a match. The closest it gets to that feeling is when I play a heavy beatdown team and “win the draft” so to speak. I have made my own mistakes where it felt like I lost in the draft or that sometimes you just don’t draw the cards that are needed for the situation, but those games feel like the exception and not the rule. That being said, you will certainly feel the difference in your win percentage over a large sum of games by understanding the draft and character dynamics very thoroughly. When I first started playing a ton on BGA, my early win rate wound up around 60% or maybe a smidge lower. That was with around 100-200 games if I recall. As of writing this post, my win rate sits closer to 65.8% with 712 games. That figure also includes the many lost games experimenting with the whole cast to make this post as thorough as it is currently. It’s hard to say what my recent winrate actually is at the moment, but I still try to play every character now and then.
Now while I have not really formatted this in the typical tier list format, I’m sure my vibes-based partner/matchup charts will foster conversation. I’d love to answer more specific questions or hear disagreements from the community.
If you read this far or looked at any of the other Theorycrafting posts, thank you so much. I’ve been sitting on this for a long while now and it took many days of procrastinating to make this post reach the finish line. Glad it’s now off my chest. I’m not sure what’s next, I feel like I’ve covered everything I want to cover for the time being.
