M.T.M.’s Deck Building 101 — GvG
Welcome back to Deck Building 101, the continuing series on basic deck building in Legendary: Game of Heroes. As always, I’m your host (author?) M.T.M., Legendary Database creator and writer of Mondary articles. As I promised during Deck Building 101 — Defender Skills, this edition will be dedicated to GvG, but many of the same techniques can be used to great success in other parts of Legendary.
GvG (technically “Guild Wars,” but nobody calls it that) is easily one of the most challenging game modes. At lower levels of competition you can get away with treating it as any other battle, but as you progress it becomes much more like a puzzle game that happens to use Legendary’s game mechanics. And not some fun, light puzzle, either. We’re talking an 80’s point-and-click adventure puzzle, that gleefully murders you for the slightest misstep (take your pick, my personal recurring nightmare was Shadowgate).
Thankfully there’s Practice Mode, and this article to help! As always Legendary is constantly evolving and changing, not to mention your fellow players constantly devising new and terrible tricks to stop you, so some aspects may have changed since October 2019 when this article was written.
Basic GvG — NO TOUCHING
While the GvG meta changes often, one thing tends to remain constant: winning is a lot easier if your opponent never, ever gets a turn.
Well, not *never* ever. But only when you want them to. The thing is, at higher levels, defenders (especially Wardens and Ascended Wardens) can get ridiculously high Attack, to the point they will simply one-hit-kill a normal attacking team. Worse, your fellow players will be picking the nastiest, most devastating Defender Skills in the nastiest, most devastating order to try and stop you. I sometimes compare the Crusade Challenges, Ultimate Challenges, and Bounty Bosses to GvG, but proper high end GvG is like all those rolled into one.
While the specifics change, this “never-let-your-opponent-get-a-turn approach” leads to GvG tending towards two common strategies: slowly, methodically dealing with every challenge presented…and smashing them before they can smash you. We’ll be covering both.
Death by Tedium — Slow GvG
Turn Delay has been the bane of GvG since before I started playing Legendary. Alacrity, Relentless, and Ironclad were all invented to stop it, but it continues to be a strong option. It is especially good for newer or less powerful players, since the tools for a basic Slow GvG deck are easily acquired.
The basic idea is to use Turn Delay to lock down the enemy defenders, preventing them from attacking. The go-to Turn Delay option is one of a series 2★/3★ Heroes the earliest days of Legendary, who can delay the enemy 2 turns with only 1 turn cooldown. You can use various combinations, though, so long as the charge/cooldown/delay timings works out in such a way you don’t get hit. In very specific cases the 4★ “Immunity Creatures” can be used instead, but this is rare and they haven’t been available since June 2018 anyway.
If you can get your Turn Delay going and are only facing normal defenders…congrats, you’ve won. Even if you need to build up thousands of Intensity on some old Generation 2 Hero to deal enough damage, as long as you can defeat each defender within 30 minutes they can’t stop you (if you “timeout,” and the boss escapes). Of course, this is why we have *abnormal* defenders.
Once you start facing Ascended Wardens, with their Relentless Defender Skills, “Slow GvG” gets much more complicated. For example, say you are using a Light deck against a Dark defense. You see they have Relentless Alacrity, so you bring Morte Thronos to Cleanse it. However. your opponent knows that Light has Morte Thronos, so they prepare by including Relentless Toxin, which silences Morte Thronos’ Battle Skill since it also Cleanses. So you bring some other trick to beat that, which requires Heroes that aren’t as dedicated to damage output, which can make Slow GvG slower and slower until the timeouts are a real danger. Or you just don’t have all the necessary options, and have to settle for defeating only part of a lineup.
Precision Engineered Berserker Rage — Fast GvG
Fast GvG takes the opposite approach, killing defenders before they can attack or use Defender Skills. This tends to come and go as an option, based on how strong attacking decks are compared to defending decks. At this moment they are becoming dominant, through a combination of more players getting Dragoons, Relics (particular Generation 2 Legend Relics and certain Ultimate Relics), and fast, powerful decks like Double Attack and Power Gem Flood.
The tricky part is, since you have to dedicate far more resources to damage output, you’ll have less space for tricks like Turn Delay, Damage Immunity, or Cleanses. A deck may include an option so it can take a turn to “breathe” (and let cooldowns…uh…cool down), but this means opening yourself up to a potentially game-ending Defender Skill. You have to watch out for Birthright Defender Skills in particular, which activate when the defender spawns instead of when they attack (or each turn, for Relentless).
Techniques of the First Turn
Since both Slow and Fast GvG can be so difficult to get going, defenses put a lot of emphasis on trying to stop attackers on the very first turn, before their Battle Skills are charged. To prevent this, attacking decks must either Survive, Revive, or Make-Not-Alive (that is, deal so much damage with their initial board that they kill the first defender before they do anything)..
Surviving is easier said than done, as I mentioned high level defenders can hit incredibly hard, but doable. Dragoon Leadership and various Relics help, though I’d strongly recommend using Practice Mode to be sure you can take the hit. There are a few Heroes with first turn damage reduction (like Thor), but they are mostly too old to be worthwhile (you’d lose too much Health including them). Also, if choosing “Survive,” be sure you can handle the Defender Skill. There is nothing more embarrassing than surviving the first hit then dying to Counterattack.
Reviving is quite straightforward, various Heroes and Relics will allow you to come back from 0 HP, so include one, Revive, then continue the battle. However, be aware that Revives do not stack (you can only revive 1/battle no matter how many you bring), and that the Flatline Defender Skill exists. It is a less common opening option these days since Counterattack is more dangerous since it can kill even after a Revive when the attacker next…uh…attacks (look, I’m not breaking out the Thesaurus, attackers attack and that is that!). Also, the Revive Relics (unlike Heroes) are immune to Flatline, which limits its value. Do note, though, that if you have both a Revive Hero and Relic you will again be vulnerable to it.
Last option is great if you can do it, and that is just outright killing the first defender with your initial gem board. The gems and power gems from normal Relics aren’t normally enough for this, but an important trick here (and for fast, first turn kills in other game modes) is that any Hero with a Passive Skill that triggers every X turns (not attacks, mind you) will also trigger on turn 1. Part of what has made the Double Attack and Power Gem Flood decks so strong in GvG are their PG spawning Passives.
The GvG Meta and You
The second-to-last thing I want to note is that, now that I’ve sufficiently pointed out all the terrifying difficulties of GvG, it is important to remember that your opponents are other players. Until the highest levels of play they won’t have every perfect option for defense, just like you don’t for attack. GvG matching can be swingy so you probably will see some ridiculous, top tier defenses during each season, but even then you’ll hopefully be able to use this advice to get at least a couple kills in.
Last-to-last thing, I want to thank everyone who has helped me with GvG, as this stuff all gets so complicated I’ve been known to throw up my hands in frustration and go spreadsheet something instead (or…ahem…“drop” my phone during particularly slow Slow GvG). So, to my guild and the various GvG chats on LINE and the N3TWORK app, thanks.
Please leave any questions in the comments, and comments in the questions (come on, it’ll be funny). Also let me know your favorite horribly unfair puzzle and or adventure game of yore, thinking about Shadowgate has got me all nostalgic.
