I just made rank 1, so I wanted to make a “tier list” post like others have before me, but I decided to do it a bit differently. Since Tag Team is a “team” game, what actually matters is how good the teams are, not the individual fighters. So I compiled a list of all the teams that I played at least 10 times over my past ~300 games. There are 10 such teams with positive net ELO. For dramatic effect, I will count them down, giving some thoughts about each.
10. Maman Brijit + The Fey Folk (7-3 W/L, +11 ELO)
This is an aggressive lineup (5.6 turns avg compared to 6.2 overall). The idea is that Brijit can start with a 3-power attack, and if you can stick it on one fighter, the damage piles up quickly. You only have 1 other Brijit attack in the deck, but you have 5 cards which can cancel heals. With the short game time, there’s not a big risk of the Fey Folk dying, and a heal can help you win a race.
9. Maman Brijit + Milady (9-3, +18)
I don’t think there is a particular synergy here, it’s just 2 fighters with generally high card quality…
8. Milady + Joan (8-3, +19)
These are 2 of the most durable fighters. With heals from both Milady and Joan, it’s really hard to get through Milady’s health stop on 1, and some +power from schemes, Joan’s lifesteal on Sword of St. Michael can sustain her quite well. This lineup averages 7.1 turns per game, just avoiding death until you can get some power and a poison or 2.
7. The Golem + Bodvar (12-5, +20)
This is one of the first synergies I found when I first started playing — probably because I just find these to be 2 cool fighters. Golem’s Protect the Innocent deals with Bodvar’s squishiness and Bodvar’s heal keeps Golem healthy and can ramp his power. You have 3 win conditions: (1) Spirit trance (the only unconditional +2 power card in the game): once you get this card, the next round you have 7+ power on Bodvar or (2) Reanimate + heal: this combo can get Golem ramping at a similar rate (3) complete the Enrage, which gives you a suddenly large number of attacks.
6. The Golem + The Fey Folk (19-7-3, +30)
Compared to Golem + Bodvar, you only have one main win-condition: Golem damage. But the Fey Folk are more durable than Bodvar, and the cancels help to get this win condition quite often. The best way to play against this is to avoid attacking as long as possible and then kill Golem in ~2 hits. The Fey Folk is my favorite partner for Golem when my opponent opens Brijit, because they can’t avoid hitting Golem and letting the ramp get started.
5. Maman Brijit + Joan (19-6, +39)
This is the best aggressive team in the game. Brijit starts with a 2-power attack, which puts you at an immediate tempo advantage, and combined with Joan, there are 5 more attacks (for 2+ power) in the deck.
Maman Brijit + Ching Shih (10-5, -11) and Joan + Ching Shih (7-9, -71) also seems like they would be viable aggressive teams, but Ching Shih is a bit of a liability to get counter-killed, whereas Brijit and Joan are more durable and can more easily continue into a slightly longer game (though the preference is to still win by aggression — 5.5 turns on average).
4. The Golem + The Wild Bunch (21-8, +40)
This is a better version of the Golem + Bodvar combo. Keys to the Armory works like Spirit Trance, the Wild Bunch heals are bigger, so they can trigger power gains more often even without Reanimate, and the Wild Bunch are less likely to randomly die than Bodvar.
Worth noting here is that Golem + Milady (12-7, -23) performed much worse for me than the other Golem + heal combos. It’s a bigger setup, so it’s just more likely to get killed before you get going. Having the consistency of 2 heals I think is a big deal. That said, if my opponent picks a less aggressive pick like Mordred, I’d rather have Milady’s one big heal rather than 2 small heals of Bodvar. Of course there is another good way to punish non-aggressive openers vs the Golem, and that is…
3. The Golem + Shango (15-4, +48)
The interaction between Reanimate and Aflame is kind of ridiculous. Once you get Reanimate, you just need to play on the same side of Aflame as your opponent twice in a row to win. This means with just purely random play, you have a 25% chance to win on any given turn. If the game goes 6 rounds, you have a 50% chance to win purely based on incinerating your opponent! Then add in the ability to ramp up Golem with Wall of Flame or Cauterize, and you end up with a pretty good win rate, provided your opponent doesn’t kill you too fast. If my opponent first picks Mordred or Milady, this is my favorite Golem partner, because those fighters can’t pose an early threat.
2. Mordred + Joan (10-1, +49)
Like Milady + Joan, this team has high durability, and it comes with a more consistent win condition — 5- or 6-power hits from Mordred (and Execute to finish Brijit). Mordred + Milady (8-0, +44) performs similarly well (but is not on this list because it has under 10 samples). Mordred + The Fey Folk (7-5, -25) is notably worse, since Fey Folk is a potential liability to get killed if they get an attack on them early.
1. The Golem + Joan (16-2, +86)
This being #1 (and by this margin) surprised me. I think of Joan as being the 4th or 5th best Golem partner because her heals are similar to Bodvar, but she lacks the quick ramp win condition. But there is another win condition: pure aggression. If you count the second copy of Protect the Innocent, you have 8 attacks in the build deck, so you can keep up aggression quite well. And if they play defensively, you can get in the heals + natural ramp from Joan to get bigger attacks, and kill in fewer hits. The other thing this team has going for it is that it includes the best 2 fighters in the game, so that means your opponent can’t have either of them.
Individual Fighter Tier List
With that said, I’ll still make a tier list because people like that kind of thing:
S: The Golem
A: Joan
B: Maman Brijit, Mordred, Milady
C: The Fey Folk, The Wild Bunch
D: Shango, Ching Shih, Bodvar
F: Wong, Mephisto
The Golem is the best fighter, and it’s not even close. 5 of my top 10 teams are Golem, often with rarely-picked/banned fighters, so they are super easy to draft. The Golem is the hero with whom I gain the most ELO and against whom I lose the most ELO.
Joan is the most versatile fighter in the game. With 4 attacks, she can be part of an aggressive team with Brijit. With her high health, 3 blocks and 2 heals, she can play defensively with Mordred/Milady, and she can even team with Golem in a scaling team.
Brijit is the best aggressive fighter. Having tempo advantage, where your opponent has to deal with one of your cards while you can add another threat somewhere else in the deck is a huge advantage. So having a threatening attack to start with is big. And Brijit’s health reset + his block make her still a threat if you can’t close out with aggression. She’s not quite as versatile as Joan since she can't heal her partner, but she is pickable just almost as often.
When I first started playing, I thought Mordred was S-tier for his durability vs aggression, and his straightforward game play. But as I refined how and when to draft greed, I realized that Mordred struggles against it. I’m generally happy to see my opponent first pick Mordred. Sure he always has 5 power by round 5, but he also never has more than 5 power on round 5 — a time when Golem / Bodvar / Wild Bunch can easily have 7+. Still, Mordred is strong because greedy ramp is underplayed. You're more likely to end up vs Brijit than vs Golem, which is a favorable matchup.
Milady has a similar problem to Mordred that, while she’s good defensively, her scaling is capped. But holding up against aggression is still valuable, and she also has the advantage vs Mordred because if your opponent leaves you alone, you can stack schemes with Licking My Wounds, and burst out a lot of good stuff when they start attacking.
The Fey Folk are generally usable with multiple partners. They are not as squishy as they look at first glance. If your opponent doesn’t immediately get an attack on them, they are fairly hard to kill because they can’t get 1-shot or 2-shot since they have 3 health bars.
The Wild Bunch is a risky pick because they are very easy to counter. If your opponent gets 2 of Brijit, Joan, Ching Shih, Golem, or Shango, they can overwhelm you with attacks. But if you can survive the early game while being healthy enough to be able to afford to add Keys to the Armory to the deck (you can't do it if they are already beating you down as it just gives another card to take damage on), they scale better than anyone — +3 power per round, and health that effectively scales because even if your opponent has 8+ power, it still takes 5 hits to kill them (it’s like having 40 health).
Shango I mostly use in 2 situations: (1) with the Golem for Reanimate+Aflame, and (2) vs The Wild Bunch. The Wild Bunch are 50/50 to give you 1 power right away, and then you have 5 attacks in the build deck with which to aggro them down.
Ching Shih I think performs badly for me partly because I take her often as a last-resort pick. I think she’s still a decent aggressive pick, and if the meta shifts more toward people picking greedy ramp picks like Golem and Wild Bunch and less defensive picks like Mordred and Milady, her stock will go up.
Bodvar I treat as generally a weaker version of the Wild Bunch. I don’t pick him much without Golem because it’s too easy for him to just die in 2 hits out of nowhere.
Wong doesn’t show up at all in my top teams, but I do pick him a fair amount. I think I have some learning to do about how to play him. He has a few things going for him: (1) high health, so if you can heal him, he’s not a liability, (2) Crippling Touch and Ging Bridge can be powerful, and (3) your opponent has to play around Concentrate as they scale.
I almost never pick Mephisto. Theoretically, he seems weak to me because he’s a 1-dimensional aggressive fighter. The other fighters with aggressive potential (Brijit, Joan, Ching Shih, Wild Bunch) also have a real late game threat, allowing you to react to the draft or the way the draws go. Plus he just has high variance cards (if you guess wrong and the coin flips, your cards can ALL be wrong). But with that said, my opponents do reasonably well with him. His aggression is good vs Golem, so like Ching Shih, I think his stock would go up were the meta to shift.
10. Maman Brijit + The Fey Folk (7-3 W/L, +11 ELO)
This is an aggressive lineup (5.6 turns avg compared to 6.2 overall). The idea is that Brijit can start with a 3-power attack, and if you can stick it on one fighter, the damage piles up quickly. You only have 1 other Brijit attack in the deck, but you have 5 cards which can cancel heals. With the short game time, there’s not a big risk of the Fey Folk dying, and a heal can help you win a race.
9. Maman Brijit + Milady (9-3, +18)
I don’t think there is a particular synergy here, it’s just 2 fighters with generally high card quality…
8. Milady + Joan (8-3, +19)
These are 2 of the most durable fighters. With heals from both Milady and Joan, it’s really hard to get through Milady’s health stop on 1, and some +power from schemes, Joan’s lifesteal on Sword of St. Michael can sustain her quite well. This lineup averages 7.1 turns per game, just avoiding death until you can get some power and a poison or 2.
7. The Golem + Bodvar (12-5, +20)
This is one of the first synergies I found when I first started playing — probably because I just find these to be 2 cool fighters. Golem’s Protect the Innocent deals with Bodvar’s squishiness and Bodvar’s heal keeps Golem healthy and can ramp his power. You have 3 win conditions: (1) Spirit trance (the only unconditional +2 power card in the game): once you get this card, the next round you have 7+ power on Bodvar or (2) Reanimate + heal: this combo can get Golem ramping at a similar rate (3) complete the Enrage, which gives you a suddenly large number of attacks.
6. The Golem + The Fey Folk (19-7-3, +30)
Compared to Golem + Bodvar, you only have one main win-condition: Golem damage. But the Fey Folk are more durable than Bodvar, and the cancels help to get this win condition quite often. The best way to play against this is to avoid attacking as long as possible and then kill Golem in ~2 hits. The Fey Folk is my favorite partner for Golem when my opponent opens Brijit, because they can’t avoid hitting Golem and letting the ramp get started.
5. Maman Brijit + Joan (19-6, +39)
This is the best aggressive team in the game. Brijit starts with a 2-power attack, which puts you at an immediate tempo advantage, and combined with Joan, there are 5 more attacks (for 2+ power) in the deck.
Maman Brijit + Ching Shih (10-5, -11) and Joan + Ching Shih (7-9, -71) also seems like they would be viable aggressive teams, but Ching Shih is a bit of a liability to get counter-killed, whereas Brijit and Joan are more durable and can more easily continue into a slightly longer game (though the preference is to still win by aggression — 5.5 turns on average).
4. The Golem + The Wild Bunch (21-8, +40)
This is a better version of the Golem + Bodvar combo. Keys to the Armory works like Spirit Trance, the Wild Bunch heals are bigger, so they can trigger power gains more often even without Reanimate, and the Wild Bunch are less likely to randomly die than Bodvar.
Worth noting here is that Golem + Milady (12-7, -23) performed much worse for me than the other Golem + heal combos. It’s a bigger setup, so it’s just more likely to get killed before you get going. Having the consistency of 2 heals I think is a big deal. That said, if my opponent picks a less aggressive pick like Mordred, I’d rather have Milady’s one big heal rather than 2 small heals of Bodvar. Of course there is another good way to punish non-aggressive openers vs the Golem, and that is…
3. The Golem + Shango (15-4, +48)
The interaction between Reanimate and Aflame is kind of ridiculous. Once you get Reanimate, you just need to play on the same side of Aflame as your opponent twice in a row to win. This means with just purely random play, you have a 25% chance to win on any given turn. If the game goes 6 rounds, you have a 50% chance to win purely based on incinerating your opponent! Then add in the ability to ramp up Golem with Wall of Flame or Cauterize, and you end up with a pretty good win rate, provided your opponent doesn’t kill you too fast. If my opponent first picks Mordred or Milady, this is my favorite Golem partner, because those fighters can’t pose an early threat.
2. Mordred + Joan (10-1, +49)
Like Milady + Joan, this team has high durability, and it comes with a more consistent win condition — 5- or 6-power hits from Mordred (and Execute to finish Brijit). Mordred + Milady (8-0, +44) performs similarly well (but is not on this list because it has under 10 samples). Mordred + The Fey Folk (7-5, -25) is notably worse, since Fey Folk is a potential liability to get killed if they get an attack on them early.
1. The Golem + Joan (16-2, +86)
This being #1 (and by this margin) surprised me. I think of Joan as being the 4th or 5th best Golem partner because her heals are similar to Bodvar, but she lacks the quick ramp win condition. But there is another win condition: pure aggression. If you count the second copy of Protect the Innocent, you have 8 attacks in the build deck, so you can keep up aggression quite well. And if they play defensively, you can get in the heals + natural ramp from Joan to get bigger attacks, and kill in fewer hits. The other thing this team has going for it is that it includes the best 2 fighters in the game, so that means your opponent can’t have either of them.
Individual Fighter Tier List
With that said, I’ll still make a tier list because people like that kind of thing:
S: The Golem
A: Joan
B: Maman Brijit, Mordred, Milady
C: The Fey Folk, The Wild Bunch
D: Shango, Ching Shih, Bodvar
F: Wong, Mephisto
The Golem is the best fighter, and it’s not even close. 5 of my top 10 teams are Golem, often with rarely-picked/banned fighters, so they are super easy to draft. The Golem is the hero with whom I gain the most ELO and against whom I lose the most ELO.
Joan is the most versatile fighter in the game. With 4 attacks, she can be part of an aggressive team with Brijit. With her high health, 3 blocks and 2 heals, she can play defensively with Mordred/Milady, and she can even team with Golem in a scaling team.
Brijit is the best aggressive fighter. Having tempo advantage, where your opponent has to deal with one of your cards while you can add another threat somewhere else in the deck is a huge advantage. So having a threatening attack to start with is big. And Brijit’s health reset + his block make her still a threat if you can’t close out with aggression. She’s not quite as versatile as Joan since she can't heal her partner, but she is pickable just almost as often.
When I first started playing, I thought Mordred was S-tier for his durability vs aggression, and his straightforward game play. But as I refined how and when to draft greed, I realized that Mordred struggles against it. I’m generally happy to see my opponent first pick Mordred. Sure he always has 5 power by round 5, but he also never has more than 5 power on round 5 — a time when Golem / Bodvar / Wild Bunch can easily have 7+. Still, Mordred is strong because greedy ramp is underplayed. You're more likely to end up vs Brijit than vs Golem, which is a favorable matchup.
Milady has a similar problem to Mordred that, while she’s good defensively, her scaling is capped. But holding up against aggression is still valuable, and she also has the advantage vs Mordred because if your opponent leaves you alone, you can stack schemes with Licking My Wounds, and burst out a lot of good stuff when they start attacking.
The Fey Folk are generally usable with multiple partners. They are not as squishy as they look at first glance. If your opponent doesn’t immediately get an attack on them, they are fairly hard to kill because they can’t get 1-shot or 2-shot since they have 3 health bars.
The Wild Bunch is a risky pick because they are very easy to counter. If your opponent gets 2 of Brijit, Joan, Ching Shih, Golem, or Shango, they can overwhelm you with attacks. But if you can survive the early game while being healthy enough to be able to afford to add Keys to the Armory to the deck (you can't do it if they are already beating you down as it just gives another card to take damage on), they scale better than anyone — +3 power per round, and health that effectively scales because even if your opponent has 8+ power, it still takes 5 hits to kill them (it’s like having 40 health).
Shango I mostly use in 2 situations: (1) with the Golem for Reanimate+Aflame, and (2) vs The Wild Bunch. The Wild Bunch are 50/50 to give you 1 power right away, and then you have 5 attacks in the build deck with which to aggro them down.
Ching Shih I think performs badly for me partly because I take her often as a last-resort pick. I think she’s still a decent aggressive pick, and if the meta shifts more toward people picking greedy ramp picks like Golem and Wild Bunch and less defensive picks like Mordred and Milady, her stock will go up.
Bodvar I treat as generally a weaker version of the Wild Bunch. I don’t pick him much without Golem because it’s too easy for him to just die in 2 hits out of nowhere.
Wong doesn’t show up at all in my top teams, but I do pick him a fair amount. I think I have some learning to do about how to play him. He has a few things going for him: (1) high health, so if you can heal him, he’s not a liability, (2) Crippling Touch and Ging Bridge can be powerful, and (3) your opponent has to play around Concentrate as they scale.
I almost never pick Mephisto. Theoretically, he seems weak to me because he’s a 1-dimensional aggressive fighter. The other fighters with aggressive potential (Brijit, Joan, Ching Shih, Wild Bunch) also have a real late game threat, allowing you to react to the draft or the way the draws go. Plus he just has high variance cards (if you guess wrong and the coin flips, your cards can ALL be wrong). But with that said, my opponents do reasonably well with him. His aggression is good vs Golem, so like Ching Shih, I think his stock would go up were the meta to shift.
