1.I feel like this archetypes viabilty is dictated by the number of top meta deck board clears. But that said, I feel like this archetype is viable enough to get into gold/possibly diamond Although haven’t tried because off time limitations. What makes this archetype great IMO is the element of surprise it can make, while producing mere 1/1s. It can suddently kill you from 20 hp on like t4, it can buff its whole board by +2/2 or even +3/+3 in a single turn. It can wipe out your board and make your general a threat to humanity.
2. I do feel that this archetype is on the stronger side, but the amount of boardclears makes this archetype not rise to tier 1 ever, because it if does, we are probably expecting magmar getting more powerful. So answer to making it better is nerf board clears, mainly Plasma storm to 6.
3. I feel like if CPG overbuffs Swarm abyss, it may become toxic, but the only way it does is if they are given resistance to board clears. But they can always just print more board clears, to keep the deck down.
What swarm really needs is a second Soul Grimwar-type card, which could be a medium-power budgetish option that produces a single beefy target after a board clear.
Example:
Fierce Shadowkeeper
4 mana 2/3 rare
Dying wish: summon a 0/3 Soulcrusher Puppet on this spot which gains +1/+1 from each minion which was destroyed during the turn when Fierce Shadowkeeper was destroyed.
The only problem with swarm abyss is literally in other factions. The meta right now is dominated by board clear, being single target or AoE, but either way, playing swarm abyss is pretty weak unless you get godly draw and the other guy is just unlucky out of his mind.
I’d argue that rebuke is still much too powerful at four mana. The milage I’ve personally gotten out of that card is absurd. There are plenty of good, solid decks across all six factions where rebuke just ruins their day. Rather than changing its cost to five, I’d much rather see them rework the thing entirely.
And for EMP’s, I think changing them to eight-mana 6/8’s would be about right, or maybe seven-mana 4/8’s. The value they produce right now is just stupid.
I understand that discussion of costs of board clears MAY be considered relevant to the topic, but you went too far from the original Abyssian swarm discussion.
EMP is not that strong againnst swarm Abyssian on the other hand, so discussion of EMP nerfs is completely out of place here.
I’d say mass removal in general is too strong. Plasma storm to six mana for starters, that card ruins too many picnics to be five mana. And rework homeostatic rebuke from the ground up.
Ideally, it’d be viable without being out of control. In theory, every deck archetype should be brought to this point. In practice, nerfing mass removal would pave the way for swarm decks of more than just the Lilithe variety, but to avoid the game just turning into all swarm all the time, a lot of swarm support cards would have to be downgraded or sidegraded to be more stable, but less powerful in a best-case scenario. It’d frankly require reworking on a level that Counterplay probably doesn’t want to do, and if they did do it, such a change might make people mad anyway.
I predict swarm will stay about where it is, and mass removal will stay about where it is. But we’ll see.
Hyperswarm still sees a fair amount of players cruising into S as long as they don’t get cheesed by obvious tech, the deck is blindingly fast after all.
Even in a heavier removal meta there are some good tech options available for you as the swarm player. Bloodbound Mentor over Bloodtide Priestess for instance offers additional card draw and a body more immune to both Rebuke and Firebomb.
Swarm Lilthe is the worse the designed Swarm archetype in the game and is among the worse swarm decks I have played in any card game. So what is the key flaw with swarm abyss?
Swarm Abyss is the only swarm deck I have played where you are dependant on keeping 1/1s on the board for multiple turns for success. In CPG defense they create the perfect solution “Grandmaster Variax” which fix every single issue with deck/archetype.
Another win condition
It puts a big body on board
Make Wraithling survivable
What does Swarm Abys need? Just cards with decent bodies that create Wraithlings Cryptographer and Blood Boundmentor are actually good example of style of card needed when those cards are played properly you get a decent body and bunch of Wraithlings on the board. I would like to see a 3 drop and 5 drop that create wraithlings.Something like
Golem Vet and Brome Lyonar are also swarm decks and stuff like Skorn and T-horn don’t screw them as hard as Abyss because they can reload a board(Swarm Vet) or buff themselves pass everything dying(Brome).Abyss is only swarm deck that goes "OMG my 1/1s can’t stay on the board and die to Skorn"Lastly AuroraBoros should have been given to Abyss it is another card solves the big issue of survivability.
1)To be honest, I made a usual mistake while making this topic, since there’re several variations of Abyssian swarm, and the degree of viability of each is different.
Swarm variants discussion
a. First is hyperaggro swarm with most (if not all) cards being under 3 mana, which is totally viable and very strong. I play this deck every time I get pissed off by the meta, and my version of it unchaged since AB, I believe. And it’s one of two decks I got my only S-rank with, if I remember correctly. The main reason why it’s strong is - it’s aggro. You can reswarm even after several board wipes, and how many boardwipes before 5 mana will an average deck find? You usually kill an opponent before he even starts to follow his own gameplan, and Grimwar makes all desicions of your opponent difficult.
b. Now on the more midrangy side we have decks highly reliant on Bloodmoon Priestess, Shadowdancer and/or Black Solus and, finally, Variax. These ones are completely out of favor right now. Your swarm should be alive at the beginning of the 5 mana turn to use shadowdancer and even then, dancer is not a gamechanger. Bloodmoon priestess is a joke now, since Hai and Magmar can kill herself with all the swarm around using one card each, and the heavy presence of Thunderhorn doesn’t make things easier. And this is the version which needs much help.
To be honest though Stygian Observer slow swarm seems theoretically very good. I don’t own enough card copies to check, anyone confirm if possible.
c) There’s also another version, which existed some time ago (before Thunderhorn) that is trying to buff the hell out of wraithling with the help of Furiosa and Bastion, Locke, Mirkblood, Shiro and such, but it is now completely unplayable with Thunderhorn around (yeah, I hate this card, it should have never existed in any form). I’ll not speak of this variation, cause it was not that popular at any point of Duelyst history, though there were people claimed to reach S-rank with it.
d) Technically, infinite sarlacs is also a swarm deck, but it’s very special, memey and I won’t touch it.
TL;DR So, finally, I claim that aggro swarm is doing perfectly, while slower variations are unviable. As such, it’s a hard work to buff slower swarm variants, while leaving average powerlevel of faster ones as is, cause it is the faster variant that can easily warp the meta if becomes too strong.
I see several ways to buff midrange swarm: directly buff swarm persistence, add some boardwipe counters dangerous, add some strong lategame wraithling generators, and make more penalty-for-board-clear cards as @miguelosz suggested.
Directly buffing swarm persistence can be done in two ways: buffing the whole swarm (kinda Lyonar route) and adding more Sarlac-like cards (dangerous, unkillable cards are hard to evaluate)
Summary
a) Buffing the swarm, while not common in Abyssian, is present in the form of Furiosa. To make it unsimilar to Lyonar i propose to buff only wraithlings. Possible options include:
Forcefield to all wraithlings. Maybe for a turn only. If permanent - it will be great for wraithling buff deck. If for one turn - just a boardclear counter.
Auroraboros to all wraithlings (DW: Resummon on random space).
+X/+X to all wraithlings (just come up with an X adequate to mana cost and common sense). Kinda Lyonar approach
Resummon all the friendly tokens destroyed since the start of your previous turn.
I purposely don’t directly design a card here to avoid balancing discussions for it, but I should mention that all these choices should be fairly expensive (not less than 3 mana) to avoid aggro swarm spiraling out of control.
b) Another way of raising swarm persistence is printing some Sarlac-like cards. I’m not so sure if this is dangerous or not, but as an option:
2/1 4 mana DW: If at the end of your current turn you had at least 5 minions, resummon this minion on a random space until the end of your next turn.
1/1 5 mana backstab(2) DW: resummon this minion behind a random enemy.
This one was proposed during one of design contests, I’m not the author.
Hard boardwipe counter is, e.g. White Palm, who is going to be rotated soon. My forcefield suggestion can also be considered hard boardwipe counter. But I believe, in general we should avoid that, cause countering boardclears makes swarm hard to balance.
Strong lategame swarm generators could help slower builds to survive.
Summary
Gate of Corruption.
5(6?) mana Abyssian structure 0/6
Airdrop. OG: Summon 6 wraithlings nearby. Summon shadow creep under each wraithling summoned.
Just my thought.
Another way is to add some board clear punishers.
Summary
4(5) mana Artifact with a shadowdancer effect.
Soulcatcher
4 mana Abyssian minion 4/5
OG: Heal your general by 1 for each minion destroyed since the end(start) of your previous turn.
???
5 mana Abyssian minion3/3
Airdrop. OG: Deal 1 damage to all nearby enemies for each minion destroyed since the end(start) of your previous turn.
5 mana Abyssian minion 1/2
While in action bar, gets +1/+1 when a minions dies.
Something like that. And also make damned Thunderhorn 9 mana 1/1 with the same ability.
EDIT. Made it more readable.
EDIT2.
These words are golden. Never understood how it came to Vanar.
The archetype is good and Its one of the most supported in the game. I Like it because it force your opponent to choose between removing your Board or developing his own. Unfortunately cpg decides to print two bullsh*t cards called thunderhorn and homeostatic rebuke that counter swarm completely. The Point imho is not printing new cards, is nerfing Those two that are bad not only for swarm but for the entire game.
There is nothing wrong with AOE in this game, in particular Magmars. All of their stuff is quite balanced right now and they are supposed to be THE AOE faction. They are also often hardcountered by Grimwar.
Hyperswarm has far to much support and is an incredibly problematic archtype leading to polarized games as it suffers from the same issue most Swarm does of “AOE? Yes? I probably loose. No? I probably win. It’s very much S rank viable since you can just play the match up game and cheese in wins every time your matchup is AOE light and or does not draw their AOE. It’s ultimately fine as it’s just a counter or loose aggro deck and we have the tools to counter it.
Because of hyperswarms existence we need at least the amount of AOE we have right now to counter it. Now Midrange swarm on the other hand is a very healthy archtype, but it unfortunately suffers due to the amount of AOE floating around and the fact that it’s hard to give it tools without buffing hyper Swarm.
Midrange Swarm needs powerful midrange tools in stuff like sarlac to give your swarm resiliency, and because of thunderhorn gor is to much of a liability(and yes I think thunderhorn is healthy and perfect.). One mana 0/1 Sarlac, just reprint gor as a non battle pet, and of course Sarlac. Having a whole series of those would make Eternal Army a powerful and healthy midrange deck.
Priestess is a classic but there are just to many things that kill it but buffing it is pretty risky. Grimwar and chakram are great but they are just as great for hyperswarm, Auroraboros wouldn’t be good for Swarm since if you got your swarm to stick your going to win anyways, but they could use like a five mana minion: Summon all TOKEN minions destroyed since last turn. The complete opposite of the usual reanimation cards. (Yep, it would also serve as mechazor support, and that’s fine.)