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Disappointing meta

Is it just me or do all the main factions being played atm take little to no thought to actually play?

There has to be some thought into the building of the deck, though honestly for the most part you can net deck them. Once you do this it just seems to be drop x card on curve and get wins.

Im mainly referring to vetruvian and magmar with this. Games so far for me have mostly been against these factions and the games proceed like so.

Against Vetruvian player.

I summon one minon, Vetruvian player turns them into dervish.

I summon new minion. Vetruivan player returns them to my hand and creates exhuming sand OR Vetruvian player turns them into dervish. Pepper in a few “avoid damage on your turn plays for more cheese.”

Rinse and repeat until center column is turned into exhuming sand.

Scenario two.

Vetruvain player copies flight of cheap minion by turn two or three at the latest. Flies to other end of board and completes trial. Proceeds to fly back and forth across the map as needed to avoid damage and blast across map until victory

Scenarios Against magmar players.

I summon minion. Magmar drops a overly officiant champ (almost any grow/rebirth minion, special shout out to war pup) Then proceeds to natural selection/ plasma storm/ turn my minions into eggs. every round.

These two factions have some of the most efficient removal along with the most efficient minion drops/ artifacts as well. Lots of the cards that are becoming issues have been in the game a long time, if not since the very beginning. They were tolerable then because there were only a few and there were other weakness to the faction that balanced out these cards. I feel the power creep over the years though has significantly lowered this balance.

Granted, the factions i play as are lyonar/songhai/vanar. Aside from spellhai variations that still are somewhat viable the rest just seem pointless to try in this meta. There is no thought behind playing these popular decks that i keep running into. Yet if i don’t draw perfectly and play perfectly AND hope the opponent makes a mistake, its game over. Every game is just watching any and all minions i drop get instantly removed while the opponent also drops a minion of their own. Quickly creating an overwhelming board presence.

Lyonar: Marching orders may be an option, i need to try it out more. Other wise the amount of efficient removal these factions have shatter lyonar who has very situational removal to counter. Their damge spells are too costly as well. Luciant beam requires a previous heal, which is hard to pull off when every thing is removed in one turn. Sunstrike rarely hits more then one minion and for 4 cost it usually eats enough of your mana pool so as you cant play a minion after. Immolation requires a minion to be on the board, again very hard to do with all the removal. A combo immolation cant happen until turn 6, maybe 5 with a lucky cleric draw. Even so, by this point the opponent has greater/ overwhelming board presence. Im not saying these spells are “bad” by the way. Im comparing the efficiency of these cards compared to what im seeing played most often in ranked atm.

Songhai: Outside of spellhai that offers burst, and a good draw with a reva aggro deck, i get minced by the excess of removal on minions and efficient minion drops these factions have when playing songhai. Songhai minions feel really lack luster atm and offer little in board presence/ stickiness. Almost all songhai minions have low health pools and are only efficient when used in combo with spells/ other minions. This again has become exceedingly difficult in the meta with this excessive removal/dispels and opposing overly efficient champs.

Vanar: Do i really need to go into vanar? Wall may be be the only viable deck they have atm. Which is not only stupid expensive to make but is also countered with emp being in almost every deck as well as the need to ramp to get to your winters wake and embla. Even then, the decks i have run into tend to steam roll too fast for that to happen most of the time. Stun decks may be a valid option to counter. I have not had enough spirit to make them yet so cant really say about that.

I have not mentioned Abyssian as i dont play against them enough or with them enough. When i do play against them it usually feels like a more balanced match atm though. When ever i play against magmar/ Veturvian though its just a game of me watching my minions instantly get removed while they drop a minion of their own every turn. This type of play takes no thought. There is no need to look a board positioning or consider what your opponent may or may not have as these decks seems to constantly have an option for instant removal.

I’m really at a loss here of how to play a faction i enjoy/ invested and have fun with this game atm, which is really sad and frustrating.

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I can’t talk for everyone (i played only vanar).
There are some good not-meta-yet-still-kinda-cheap vanar deckd that does the work.

At the moment people who plays vanar needs to play on a very high level (not including burn faie) to actually make it into high diamond and s.
Take it as a challenge, if you like i can provide you with guidence regarding playing and deck building in vanar.

Enjoy your climb, this is a rough one.

Ohh yea rag wanderer/eggs - stupid broken and so is 5 mana vet thefuckwasitsname don’t feel bad.

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Although Lyonar is weak to most removal options, they are in a solid spot as of the moment. They have 3 perfectly competitively viable decks, those being Strategos Brome, Wanderer Brome, and Heal Zir’an. Songhai is a little worse off, but Wanderer Reva and Aggro Reva are still very solid. I agree with your point on Vanar though, the only strong Vanar deck in the meta right now is Wanderer Kara, and even that is edged out by other Wanderer archetypes.

Songhai also got no spell OX decks that are pretty playable. Mainly because they use lots of minion based removal (paragon, painter, emp who happen to be 5,6,7 mana). Same for Titan Lyo.

Also Strategos and classic swarm Brome are OK speaking of Lyo.

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Vetruvian is very efficient at removing single strong minions. Both Blood of Air and Sandswirl punish you severly for spending your whole turn on 1 big minion. So the deal here is simple, don’t do that. Unless you are in lead on the board you should refrain from casting single minions that are easily removed. When your in lead you can cast them as both BOA and Sandswirl are expensive themselves, Vet usually spends their whole turn casting them so they won’t get much tempo from them.

As far as Magmar goes, all their removal is conditional. Nat select is easy to play around, just keep an Azureherald or Celebrant or something like that in the back and out of the fight to absorb them. Against Rebuke/Plasma, make sure they can never kill your entire board with one of those. Shouldn’t be hard if the minions in your deck are any good. There isn’t much you can do about Makantor aside from diagonal positioning and yes that card is freakingly strong, but as whole Magmar is very beatable.

Removal in this game, and especially the removal from Vet and Magmar is only as efficient as you let them be. Vet is very costly but efficient against high cost minions while Magmar is conditional AOE. If you don’t play into them their usefulness is severely limited.

Oh and just as a sidenote, Songhai isn’t supposed to have strong and sticky minions. They are the burn/combo faction and they are crazy good at that, if you try to play them like Lyonar you will fail, but if you play them to their strengths they can easily fuck up Magmar and Vet. They don’t even care much about trial decks as they can ignore the board for the most part and have absurd levels of burst.

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Yeah, basically if you just stay in a corner crying, you can perfectly avoid all the hurr durr lolconditional magmar removal.

Vetruvian got reasonable removal imho, BoA, while sometimes can cause a 2 for 1, if it just remove one of your minion is fine, cause the opponent lost his turn just by doing that.

Fault can be frustrating to play against, but you basically need to pressure them before they get to 6 mana and try to finish them off and/or pack some lightbenders to remove at least 3 sands.

The only overtuned deck atm on lyo is healziran but remember that to do crazy things with the aoeminioncantrememberthenameatm they need at least 6 mana or so, you should try to lure them out of the heal tile and in general ziran has a hard time dealing with high health minions.

With songhai there is always a small chance they have a godhand and then you lose, but if they don’t, remember that they basically dont play minion so pressure them constantly.

The only problematic faction atm is magmar, they just do everything better.

They got minions overstatted/with too many abilities for their mana cost (i.e. ragebinder), that can clear your threat leaving a threat on board (lavaslasher, which i dunno why it’s never mentioned as op card, and makajesus).

They got extremely efficient removal (wont even talk how broken is lavalance cause is too obvious). They can basically let you play your thing on the first turns then plasmastorm (which shuts down completely the swarm archetype, be it lilithe or brome, and again i cant understand how is it fine) to have card advantage, then the next turn you’d better have 2 interesting minions to play, cause if you play just one they will natural select and then put a threat. But if you put 2 “medium” minion one will get lavaslashed (the other will die by the same lavaslasher the next turn dw).

And ofc they can burn you almost like a songhai, but with strong minions on board and better removal on top of that :+1:

Uh yeah sorry, i just feel i have to vent vs magmar from time to time, i just fucking hate those fucking lizards.

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Honestly, Magmar thrives at any and every point that something is overstatted since it thrives on “ME BIGGER, U SMOL. ME CROMSH SMOLS.” Wanderer just shows how it’s done firsthand by overstatting everything (5/5 Makantors and 5-Attack Lavaslashers, ugh).

This is a big part of the reason i love to explore non-NOSE artifact builds on everyone as going one-man army is terrifying on the usual removefest lizard of punch. But so far this has proven unpracticable as one can’t keep up that way with the tempo of Triangle-Stick Wizard.

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Yeah, vet is fine besides the fault-rae combo (rae should cost 1 mana). When it comes to lyo, i wish a gold vitriol nerf, it should not hit face. And Yes magmar has so many op cards that i Think it will always remain the best faction forever

You really should go and make a Magmar deck with all that overpowered removal. 3x Nat 3x Plasma 3x Rebuke. Then 3x Sphere since it’s op healing. And ofc 3x flash because it is so totally OP. Oh and Finality ofc, also completely busted. Maybe after playing a few games with a deck that’s full of conditional, reactive cards you will realize how onesided your view is.

Personally i’ve had more than enough games where my hand was full with above mentioned cards in situations where i had no use for them what so ever. Be it 3 x AOE against Artifact/Mantra Songhai or tons of healing against Xul decks or that lovely flash draw when all you have in hand is a Metalurgist or Cryptographer. Having only one replace each turn can feel really bad with so much situational shit in your deck.

I actually scraped enough motivation together this month to make the S-rank climb again after almost half a year, and in the Vaath deck i used for the climb you won’t find any Rebukes, Nat Selects or Finalitys. And i am just one step away of removing the 2 plasmas and one of the spheres as well. The performance improvement without all those cards is massive.

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Not to attack you by saying this or anything but I think when most people complain about the “unfair” tool kit magmar has, they are saying from a place of having lost consistently against it while playing “fair” decks. The experience you had during ladder going up against

And other Trail or meta decks are also complained about because of how unfair they can feel (though Trail Abyss is a bit more highrolly so it can fall flat many times). Once all these decks are toned down to feel more board based and interactive, what faction do you think will be most favored?

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Leaving the question of what a “fair” deck is aside, imo the “consistently lost to it” part is the problem. All the cards in question CAN be very powerful. Even game winning. I am the first to say that a Magmar who get’s a good draw (i.e draws the right card at the right time and in the right matchup) will roflstomp pretty much everything that comes his way. And that’s exactly the side of the medal all those people who lose to Magmar always remember. That’s also why all the arguments from these people revolve around the best case scenarios like they are the normal thing. The fact that they aren’t normal, not even the majority is something you only learn when you use all those cards yourself.

Who knows. If Wanderer get’s trashed then the most powerful “Magmar Deck” will seize to exist. If they also tune down rippers a nodge then all Magmar decks that are currently considered strong get weakened and i would be fine with both of those changes. I’d also like to stress the point that neither of those decks has a focus on Magmars removal kit. That’s why i am saying don’t touch Magmars removal kit, it’s perfectly fine as it is, same for it’s minions. Lavaslasher isn’t even a must play since it’s nerf and Makantor, well it’s still busted i guess but every faction has at least one busted card so i think it’s fair. Also it’s going to be really difficult to nerf Warbeast without killing it entirely. Just look at what happened to Spectral Revenant.

In terms of board presence and minion quality overall Lyonar is more than a match for Magmar and conveniently most of their minions don’t give a damn about rebuke and can easily dodge plasma as long as Argeon is around. Vet can also compete for board with all their tempoplays and their ability to create huge boards out of nowhere with the Golem package and or/fault. They also have a bunch of anti Magmar cards in their arsenal that can literally kill any sort of Magmar presence in a meta if Magmar ever happened to become too dominant.

Vanar is from my experience naturally good against Magmar, especially against Vaath mainly due to Luminous Charge. Magmar rarely plays Lightbender or even EMP because of their antisynergy and playing plasma to get out of a minefield will cost you 10 life which equates a loss, not even Magmar heal can compensate that. Not to mention that Vanar has access to stronger lategame options AND the ramp and removal to get there.

As far as your pet midrange Songhai goes, from my experience playing from both sides it’s a pretty even matchup against Magmar. Yeah Magmar minions are tougher, but Songhais mobility easily compensates for that. Also Songhai is pretty good at punishing Magmar for not having the perfect answer available when they need it. No nat select to remove that Bandit? Magmar is in trouble. No Plasma for that Zendo? Well expect to die next turn. No rebuke to remove the EMP in your face? Well another dead Magmar. If the Magmar doesn’t have all the perfect answers at the right time the match will go downhill really fast.

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I’d agree on magmar’s removal being fine, but with the exception of lava lance, that card is crazy strong

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Can you calm down first? I didn’t post with the intention of offending you but you are clearly unreasonably pissed at me.

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While his tone is unnecessarily aggressive he did not go after you but your argument which is reasonably kosher.

I can understand his frustration though as people frequently gloss over the amount of counterplay Magmar has and even when a person tries to explain this as well as how to counter them it generally gets ignored and the focus shifted to general balance disscussion and going after the non problematic sides of Magmar, and then turning around and defending Songhai as balanced (which they are) or other polarizing archetypes, despite their lack of counterplay, which further exasperates the situation.

Yes Magmar is amoung the top decks right now, yes Wanderer is a problem, yes deci Spikes is gross, and yes Rag is overturned. But none of that has to do with their removal, and none of that changes the fact that even if songhai is weaker at the moment they have far less counterplay.

People overreact to Magmar which, baring a few examples I mentioned, has a really healthy design, yet people will be ok with really unhealthy designs as long as they are not the top decks. Which frustrates Magmar players to no end, like they will be the first to agree there are some issues in the faction, yet they get bashed for all the wrong reasons and get unneeded nerf calls all the time despite that, again baring those few exceptions, there are more problematic things. Polarizing things, RNG, and a lack of counterplay tend to be bigger problems in general.

I’m not upset or trying to target you Phoenix I am just trying to mirror his sentiment without the aggression. I hope I succeeded.

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I don,t think people overreact…@zerounderscoreou put it quite well,infact so well that you choose to ignore it because you couldn,t properly argue with it

To summarize…magmar is technicly fair and does have counterplay but its so good at the ,fair, game that the only way for other factions to beat it is going for decks which you consider toxic.You aren,t going to win with a soley boarbased deck against magmars overstatted minions,high value BBs,strong healing and super efficient removal

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I write long and detailed arguments…and they get dismissed.

You absolutly can win with a soly board based deck if you acknowledge all the counterplay they have. Remember I am not a Magmar main, and I play almost exclusively board based decks on principal and do quite well versus Magmar.

That kind of thing is exactly why I am tired of this disscusion and why @baharoth got so aggressive. We write long and detailed explanations of how you can beat them efficiently with board based decks, and acknowledging issues while also trying to point out some elsewhere…and it gets completely disregaurded in favor of Nha that’s to hard, dissmising our points without actually coming up with good counterpoints, and then the things we point out as having issues are somehow fine? And in my balance patch I also suggested giving people even more tools to perform well.

As I got kinda summoned here, I’d like to point out one thing. What you suggest as a counterplay against Magmar to me looks like specifically teching against them, that’s how narrow resulting deck options are.

i Agree that Most of Lyonar Removal are kinda make to almost 100% destroy things instead of Helping i Suggest Reducing Holy Immolation Cost to 3 and damage to 3 as well because on its own it dont commit a Body on the Board and most of the Time if you dont play Golems the Heal of the spell are useless my way u have always an early Help and more option to summon minions as well.

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I am calm and i am not pissed at you. But i am also done playing mister nice guy here. I’ve done this long enough and got nothing but flak in return so i am done with that. I will make my point and i will make it crystal clear. If i think your opinion is baseless nonsense then i will tell you that. If you have a problem with that or my tune then that’s too bad but i am way past the point of caring. If you want to respond in kind, i don’t mind either. It’s not a coincidence that i avoided this forum like plague for half a year, i guess i should keep doing that but sometimes i just feel like writing something and just forcing myself not to isn’t something i want to do forever.

There is nothing “well put” in that post. It’s just a summary of the common excaggerations and preconceptions against Magmar that you can find all over the place.

Maybe because tempo and removal is a thing in this game? Playing 1 minion per turn gets punished heavily by a bunch of decks. Especially Vet excels at that. And Magmar doesn’t even have the best or even biggest minions. Sure, Young Silithar, Ragebinder and Lavaslasher are good minions, but if you take a look at Lyonars toolkit you will realize they are more than a match. There is also a whole bunch of neutral minions that can compete with Magmar quality.

Removing a minion while playing one yourself is the very concept of tempo and Magmar isn’t the only faction in the game that can play tempo builds, it’s not even the best. Vet is.

Removing 9 boards out of 10? That might be true if we get a meta where every non magmar deck consists entirely of 3/3 minions. Until then it’s just a blatant exaggeration. Most of the minions in this game that are considered “good” are imune to one or even both of Magmars AOEs. And before you bring that up, they aren’t considered good because of Magmar. 4/5 was a good statline long before rebuke became a thing and by now there are plenty of 4/5s available.

So now we’re blaming Magmar for the fact that your meme decks aren’t working? It’s not Magmars fault that Backstab is a lackluster concept, or that Vespyrs suck. Or that Abyssian doesn’t have a single good minion below 6 mana. Even if you remove Magmar from the game, you will still get screwed over by any sort of good deck that’s left when you try to focus on mostly bad faction themes. Oh and while we are talking about faction themes, when was the last time you saw a Grow deck do well? Never, huh? So even Magmar can’t play their faction theme even though they are the sole reason other factions can’t, well that’s odd.

Reactive, removal based playstyles are like the definition of control and as you pointed out, Magmar has a stronger focus on that than any other faction. If you can’t deal with removal based decks that’s a personal issue and nothing more.

That’s like the ultimate joke. DA is notorious for saying that uninteractive burst is bad and that board focused midrange builds are what he considers healthy. He is pretty clear on that. And he also says in literally any Magmar post he ever made that Decispikes is toxic and he also agrees that Rippers are problematic so he is entirely consequent here. If anyone were to complain about rippers or decimus i doubt DA would disagree, he will probably add that songhai is a far worse offender in that regard, which they are, but he will agree. Interestingly though, nobody seems to complain about that. It’s always just the removal kit that’s complained about.

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Perhaps people just disagree with you, or don’t think the argument is relevant? You can’t force someone to agree with you, or care about the same things you do. I, for one, think that both you and @baharoth regularly make great points on this subject but are coming from perspectives that differ significantly from that of (seemingly) most people active on this forum. I hate to pull the “it’s subjective” card here but I can’t see any way around this conclusion at this point because it seems like the arguments are coming from almost entirely different worlds (Ranks?) sometimes.

Illustration

I say “NatSel can remove any minion, regardless of its cost for two Mana”, you (not you in particular per se, it’s a hypothetical) might say “just play a second, cheap low-attack minion with your big bomb”, I say “I don’t think I should need to build my entire early game to beat a two-mana removal card, and Magmar has tons of staple alternatives to deal with that board state anyway”, you might say “that’s the way this game is, accept you’ll lose some match-ups and tech against them if they’re prominent enough” and I say “but teching into one Magmar card leaves me open to others!” and you might say “that’s why you need to watch streams and study Duelyst Central to figure out what you need to be teching against” and I might say “but I’m at Silver!” and on and on we go.

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