M.T.M.’s Deck Building 101 — Battle Skills

Welcome back to another edition of Deck Building 101! Alternatively, welcome to the first edition of Deck Building 101 if this is the first one of these you are reading ! I’m your host M.T.M., and in this article I’m going to cover Battle Skills and their little brothers (no, not Trevor) Passive Skills, and how you can use them to build your next deck in Legendary: Game of Heroes.

Back in “Deck Building 101 — The Basics” I covered how mono-affinity, mono-event decks, where all the heroes are covered by Leadership, tend to be the most common in current (i.e. “Legendary Generation 3”) decks. But Battle Skills (and Passive Skills) can be so powerful they can override all of that, making some pretty weird decks not only useable but incredibly strong.

Very weird, incredibly strong. Want to know how it works? Keep reading.

The Fun Part: Gems & Damage

This may surprise you to learn, but in a gem matching game, having gems to match is pretty important. I know! Who would have thought? Please take a moment to retrieve any popped monocles before we continue.

Gem matches are the main source of damage in most decks, and even in a deck where you deal damage directly with Battle Skills (“nuke decks”) you’ll need Gem matches to keep those Battle Skills charged. For this reason you’ll almost always want to include some Gem spawners (heroes that can make gems) in your deck. Nukes often have low cooldowns and so pair well with skills that make gems every turn, but for a normal attack you’ll want to maximize the number of gems and Power Gems on the board at one time (before you ask, more Power Gems > bigger Power Gems, generally).

When choosing which gem spawners to bring along it is also important to note that Power Gems always upgrade existing gems of their affinity before creating new ones. This can end up “cannibalizing” your normal gems, leaving you with less total gems on the board than if they spawned after the Power Gems.

Ethereal Drake is an example of a “Mummy” style hero. These heroes were a mainstay of Generation 2, and with enough intensity can create an entire board of Power Gems by themselves. The long cooldown would make it a poor choice for a rapid firing nuke deck, though.

To hit really high damage marks though, you don’t want to stop with a full board of Power Gems or a simple nuke. This is where buffs come in. Bonuses to attack (ATK) and damage (DMG) can be used to push damage far higher (they accomplish this in different ways, check out my article on the Commander Skill if you want all the details). While “Legendary Generation 2” got pretty extreme with these, with buffs regularly in the hundreds or thousands “Legendary Generation 3” has tended to limit heroes to 100% at most, so this is an area where combining these two generations of heroes has a lot of potential.

Volcanic Quilldrac’s ATK buff is technically capped, but a 5000% boost is more than enough to boost a Gen 2 hero to Gen 3 damage, or a Gen 3 hero to incredible heights.

The Boring Part: Healing & Utility

Bosses are jerks. You’ll go to all the trouble of setting up and awesome deck that can pull off some enormous, earth shattering (Korelis shattering?) attack, and they’ll have the audacity to try and stop you!

Now, the easiest way to deal with this problem is simply defeating the boss before it can do anything (simple, right? Be sure to check out my new book, “Get Out of Debt by Winning the Lottery”). Assuming that isn’t an option, you’ll want to bring along heroes that can provide healing, or prevent the need for it through buffs that reduce damage, turn delay, damage immunity, and so on. This also applies to dealing with a Defender Skill a boss may have, through the use of a Skill that can remove (aka “cleanse” or “dispel”) the buff or debuff or using turn delay to wait it out.

Just remember that surviving isn’t a goal in and of itself. You don’t need to live forever, you need to live long enough to do the most damage possible. Sometimes that means a slow deck with enough healing and utility to last the whole 20 seconds, sometimes that means charging headfirst into battle with all the damage you can muster and your finest war cry (I recommend “WAAAGH!”).

Embered Morsitans is a fantastic utility hero, combining damage immunity and healing with gems and intensity to boot. Also a freaky centipede-dragon-thing, which I’d managed to forget until now.

A Note on Internal Skill Chains

It is quite common for heroes to require another hero from their event deck to be present to reach their full effect, a so-called “internal skill chain.” Heroes that make heavy use of this mechanic are often considered poor choices for deckbuilding, since it means at least two of your five slots are being used up for the effect.

However, it is important to look not at what a hero can’t do on its own, but what it *can*. (Double negatives aren’t not fun, right?) It is very rare for a hero’s Battle Skill to be literally worthless outside of the chain, and depending on what you are looking for it might still be the right hero for the job. Getting hung up on bringing the entire chain to maximize the hero’s potential can end up limiting the effectiveness of your deck overall.

Kampos’ “Overflow” is the start of his deck’s internal skill chain, but he’s in the deck for the healing and the being-a-dragon.

Putting the Pieces Together

Let’s return to that first image, now with handy dandy numbering.

Volcanic Quilldrac (1) can give up to a 5000% ATK boost to Dragons, which Kampos (3) and Malacostra (4) happen to be. Ethereal Drake (5) is a Slayer and a Fable, not a Commander or a Dragon, but allows me to create a full board of water Power Gems with a single hero. In this fight I brought Blazing Argoli Polykeph (2) along because I was able to survive without Embered Morsitans, but depending on the situation I’ll swap him in.

This is an extreme case, but hopefully it shows you just how powerful the right combination of Battle Skills can be and why they are such an important part of building your deck.

Have any combinations of your own you’d like to share, or something you’d like to see covered by Deck Building 101? Let me know in the comments!