New to the game? Try out Battle Pets!

[tiburon]

I will preface this by noting that I have not been playing Duelyst too long, so this deck shouldn’t be expected to bring you to S-Rank or anything.

Since I intend this mostly for newer players who are struggling down in the low ranks, I’m going to be going into high detail. If you know the game well, this deck should seem pretty simplistic so no need to read most of the breakdown.

This deck focuses on aggressive tempo and value plays.

What does that mean?

An aggressive deck is one that focuses on trying to kill the opponent as fast as possible, often featuring many low cost cards with the intention of overwhelming the opponent before they can get a foothold in the game.

Tempo is a little more complicated but in it’s simplest definition, tempo refers to whether you are are the aggressor or the defender at any given time. A simple way to tell who “has tempo,” or is the aggressor, in the game is to look and try to determine who has the strongest minions on the board, usually that will mean that the opponent will need to play more defensively, possibly making low value plays in the interest of staying alive or setting up for a future turn.

Now to value, value is also a bit complicated sometimes, but again I will offer a simple definition: value is how much mana and how many cards you are spending versus how much your opponent is spending to counteract each other’s plays. Example: you have played Yun, a 3 mana 5/4. Your opponent has a Putrid Deadflayer, a flying 3 mana 2/4. Your Yun attacks and kills the Putrid Deadflayer. Your Yun has now killed a 3 mana card of your opponents and is still alive to take another card from them like a True Strike, a 1 mana spell that deals 2 damage to a minion. Your Yun, which was 1 card for 3 mana took 2 cards for 4 mana to kill. You have “out-valued” your opponent in that exchange.

Now to the deck list and the breakdown.

Deck List
x1 Starhorn the Seeker
x2 Greater Fortitude
x3 Koi
x3 Razor Skin
x3 Rex
x3 Amu
x3 Gro
x3 Natural Selection
x3 Sol
x3 Golden Mantella
x2 Repulsor Beast
x3 Saberspine Tiger
x3 Yun
x1 Nature’s Confluence
x2 Plasma Storm
x1 Rawr
x1 Zurael, the Lifegiver

Before we get into the full break down, I will note that there are some Battle Pets that cannot be put into a deck, but are rather acquired by playing other cards that will give them to you. These special Battle Pets are very powerful and only cost 1 mana each, making them high value, which is what we really want.

First up for the cards, Starhorn. This is an aggressive deck that focuses on getting value and tempo. That means often your cards will take at least one of your opponent’s and fairly often will take two due to their unusually high stats. This means you drawing a card is much more useful than your opponent drawing a card. As well, keep an eye on your opponent’s hand size. If their hand is full (6/6 cards), if you use your Bloodborn Spell, your opponent will not draw a card, instead the card that they would have drawn is discarded.

Next we have Greater Fortitude, +2/+2 to a minion is quite strong for 1 mana and can catch your opponent off guard by letting a minion survive when they otherwise would not have.

Koi, highly underrated in my experience. A 3/1 for 1 that can attack the enemy general without fear is quite threatening and often they will need to overcommit to killing it by using removal spells or throwing a higher cost minion at it.

Razor Skin. A star player for sure. Most of the minions in this deck already favor attack over health, and you will tend to have at least 2 on the board, so giving them +1 attack lets them kill very large minions and give you good value. Then on top of that, you are given a random battle pet. Couldn’t ask for a better 1 mana spell for this deck.

Rex. annoying for sure, not entirely convinced on it’s effectiveness in some matches but when he’s good, he is amazing. Having a 3/1 stat line and rebirth makes him very annoying to deal with since he will likely kill something and then his egg will still have to be killed after him. A reviving 3/1 isn’t a game-winner on it’s own, but forcing your opponent to use at least 2 attacks on him does give him good value.

Amu is solid. A 3/3 for 2 mana is good value, that’s about all. It’s good to note that it can be played turn one no matter which side your on and starting off the game with a 3/3 with something to follow it up the next turn can really help you snowball into a victory.

Gro. Oh Gro how I love thee, shall I count the ways? A threatening Battle Pet if i’ve ever seen one. 4 health is hard to kill off, especially if he is your turn 1 play. More often than not he will grow at least twice if you play him on turn 1. Excellent value every time.

Natural Selection is admittedly a somewhat odd choice to see in an aggressive deck, but since most of the minions here have high attack, or at least tend to have higher base attack than most minions of their mana cost, you will almost always have at least one enemy to target with this.

Sol, not strong on it’s own but the usefulness comes from being able to buff a battle pet, then immediately make it attack. Usually you would have to wait. Note the problem between Sol and Natural Selection however and be careful about what order you play your cards in. Sol will often make Natural Selection a dead card until they die.

Golden Mantella, aggressive stats as a 4/2 and gives you a Battle Pet to play with him. Good value all around even if he gets killed by a 1 mana card or something.

Repulsor Beast is just a good card to have in most aggressive decks. Provoke is very troublesome, so you play a Repulsor Beast and send the provoke minion off to the corner to think about what they’ve done.

Saberspine Tiger, more often than not used either as removal or a finisher on the enemy general. 3/2 isn’t too bad for stats, if he gets buffed, he can be quite a threat.

Yun, a 5/4 for 3 is great tempo and value. it’s rare that a 2 drop has 4 attack so will almost always at least trade evenly and because of it’s 5 attack, it can often kill higher cost minions easily.

Nature’s Confluence, the nail in the coffin most of the time or a way to scramble back into position. getting 4 battle pets for one card is crazy value. There is only one since 5 mana is really heavy for a deck like this, you almost certainly do not want this in your opening hand.

Plasma Storm. Strange that an aggressive deck has a card that could kill most of their own board, but a lot of the cards that are problematic for this deck do have 3 attack or less. In addition, it is a game winner against another aggro deck since you will have better control over your hand due to your Bloodborn Spell.

Rawr, another card that is a nail in the coffin for your opponent. Being a 3/7 makes him hard to kill without hitting him 2 or 3 times. Since he puts the Battle Pets right into play rather than into your hand, that usually means your opponent has a small army on top of them now.

Zurael, the Lifegiver. Honestly, I first put this in because it was my only legendary and I wanted to try it but it has won me a few games. If your opponent clears your board, you just say “that was nifty. mind trying it again? This time i’ll add a 4/7 though.”

The deck is simple, good for new players, doesn’t really take too much to make with just two legendaries and one epic. Not really for climbing too high in the ranks but it’s real good for getting up through bronze and pretty good for silver.

[ZyX]

Nice clean presentation.

You will probably find it feels better if you cut Koi and Sol - as you progress, Koi will often just run into an enemy minion, and at 3 attack doesn’t pose enough threat to bigger fish, while Sol is only useful on an established Gro or a Rawr, both of which happen fairly late in the game sequence. You’ve already noted the anti-synergy with Natural Selection.

I suggest looking at Shiro Puppydragon, since you seem to prefer the swarming style (and you can get the pets over the 3 attack threshold of Plasma Storm this way), Thumping Wave (you are low on true removal, and you mentioned buffs on Tiger - this fits both situations) and Mandrake, since you will summon enough minions to make his cost very manageable, and he can act as a finisher of sorts.

You might also find this tool helpful for displaying your decks in the future:

https://bagoum.herokuapp.com/deckbuilder

[BlankTrack]

Seconding the call for Puppydragon and definitely Thumping Wave as well. I think it is a Rare, so it isn’t too expensive to craft for newer players either.

[tiburon]

I can see Shiro Puppydragon being of use sometimes, but it feels too slow and vulnerable compared to other buffing options (i did try it out a couple times since i got a couple). a 1/4 on the frontlines never seems to last long since there’s little reason to not just kill it most of the time and almost every card in the deck needs to have impact on it’s own because you can’t rely on battle pets to have a good formation.

As for Thumping Wave, the problem I have with that is it’s not really of much use for removal in the deck. If the game has reached a point of your opponent playing something threatening enough that you want to spend 3 mana to turn it into a 3/3 rather than continue to push for damage, the game is probably already past the point where you will win unless the opponent is around 3 HP for a Tiger to get that last hit in. As for buffing the Tiger with it, 6 mana for 8 damage isn’t really that great since a lot of games will be decided before that point and holding onto two 3 mana cards like that is pretty horrific for this deck (especially since Thumping Wave is basically a dead card in top deck mode, which this deck frequently hits). I’d probably get that combo to work one out of every 20 games and I think for even fewer that it would be the deciding factor.

Mandrake is an interesting option, but does hurt the consistency of the deck I think because of basically forcing you to mulligan or replace it until it’s 4 mana or less. The deck relies extremely heavily on speed and playing as much as possible, most games i’m out of cards in hand by turn 4, so having a 6/6 for 5 in my hand at that point is not great and often i’m replacing cards frequently as it is to dig for other things that i need. Mandrake seems good versus other zoo decks where it might be 0-2 mana by turn 4 or 5 but this deck already trashes them pretty hard most of the time from the much higher statlines.

Again, I’m a noob to this still so maybe I’m not thinking things out well. Also good to note, the choices you’ve mentioned might make the deck better at higher levels but down in silver and bronze, decks tend to run things like Bloodshard Golem which are very poor value. In these ranks it seems to be better to have a consistent solo strategy that basically assumes your opponent will do nothing productive. Decks and skill levels vary so wildly there’s no reason to put in tech cards against specific strategies like in higher ranks where it’s probably reasonable to, for example, have one Crossbones for Mechaz0r decks.

Thank you for the deck tool! I was wondering how people made those images haha

[jkmaikhoi]

I had some fun in Diamond w a Karapet deck No Rawr yet, but I had two Calculator, and it is funny to play, imagine 5 mana for a 13/12, and of course when your opponent ran out of answer. Our own pets are cool too, Icy with Stun, and cute Bur with 2 ups. I also had 1 Zukong, which is fun too.

[Ryvirath]

Really interesting deck, primary battle pet lists we havent seen a ton of, gonna give this one a try myself

[tiburon]

Yeah, I thought about a Zukong but that just defeats half the fun of Battle Pets
Calculators seem good if you’re running a slower Battle Pet deck, but most of them are really low mana cost so that 13/12 seems hard to pull off without holding back a little.

[rebound]

Interesting idea. I tried the deck just now, though with some changes. I did not include Sol and only one Koi, cut almost all natural selections and added in a makantor warbeast and the new blood surge magmar minion that adds 1 power to every minion I have.
Noteworthy inclusion is also upping to three nature’s confluence. I also ran Zukong because I have two of them and when else would I ever play it than in a dedicated pet deck? Finally, on recommendation of tiburon, I also added in two Shiro Puppydragons.

This meant that I did need to cut the repulsor beast and the saberspine tiger.

The deck performed surprisingly well and was a lot of fun to play. The early battle pets are going to be better than what your opponent throws at you and you can build a potent advantage with the golden mantella. Also: Golden mantella must be one of the better plays to have access to when you are the player on the right, because you can get the mana tile and play whatever you got from the mantella very frequently.

The opponent got overwhelmed very quickly because I just play my cards faster than he/she can, and when they think they stabilized, the nature’s confluence is dropped on the board. The key to the deck seemed to be the pets you get from mantella, confluence and razor skin. These always seemed to overperform. as expected, the forcefield one was the most obnoxious of the bunch, though I also had a great turn with multiple Aces that were boosted to 4/5 against a mostly empty board.

For the record:

• Zukong performed admirably. He did not seem all too vital, but was still frustrating enough that he got killed on the spot one turn after the opponent saw how it changed the game.
• I did not need much removal, as my opponent was swarmed and struggling to not be surrounded entirely by pets.
• The blood surge unit, Thraex, was amazing as this deck really gets to flood the board. It combines really well with Nature’s confluence too when you get to 9 crystals.
• The one-off Makantor warbeast overperformed. The opponent became easily boxed in multiple times, despite nastiness like the naga that does 2 to all nearby characters. When she made a hole and tried to get a chain of units out of the box, makantor warbeast punished this kind of play very heavily.
• The Shiro puppydragon, together with Thraex and Razor Skin give a nice density of buffing the power of your units. These seem really good in a deck like this.
• I played this deck at rank 6 and it won easily.

[tiburon]

Well, first note is that I actually recommended against the Shiro Puppydragons haha

I can certainly see a lot of these choices being great additions to the deck. Especially cutting out the Sols. They are lackluster but in a deck where 90% of your minions are Battle Pets, she gives you the control you need to be little more tricky than opponents are expecting.

Zukong certainly is a powerful choice but does negate the feeling of actual Battle Pets, so I tried to avoid him. Additionally I didn’t want to include too many legendaries since this was designed for players who don’t have too many cards yet.

Thraex is a card that I actually hadn’t heard of until you mentioned it. Since you’ll be probably using the Bloodborn Spell every turn you can past like turn 4 or so, that would be a strong addition, especially if you can get it away from the main fighting for a couple turns to buff up for a while.

It is encouraging to hear that with just a few alterations that the deck works at high levels! Although I hope this won’t cause a new aggro meta to evolve haha

[fispan]

Could you post the whole deck please? I am on the phone and want to see which cards I dont have and what is the overall cost.