RBT is pretty much best used in combination with Gits and Flames.

Gifts any attack doing 4-6 damage, Flames in Phase 0 of your next turn removing all of their units, Bolter them with any remaining resources then do it again after you claim your resources during the Kingdom phase. Ideally you want to make sure that you can do at least 23 damage which will kill them unless they have developments or damage mitigation.

In my experience this works best in a ridiculously defensive HE deck splashed with dwarf for Master Rune and lots of support orientated resource generation. My current version is almost unitless, having only 3 Dragonmages for use with defend Tor Aedris as an extra method of defence. Essentially you have to try and slow down your opponent long enough to set up your kill.

Unfortunately in the current rush environment it is far from being sufficiently reliable enough.

Firstly i will admit that i do not have a lot of experience playing HE but i think that i have enough games of them to know how they work.

HE are actually a good deck and all, i have got several wins with them.

But i have noticed (i dont know if it is just me or what) but whenever i play them and no matter how the game is going, it seemed like i was always going to lose because i wasn't getting enough power to battlefield or not getting enough resources or whatever, but in the end, there (next to) limitless health held off until i got a specific card that let my take the game.

I guess hat i am trying to say is that they have i different 'feel' then the other races and definatly play a lot different, and yes a person probably would lose some games because of this reason alone.

This reminds me of when the core set came out and a lot of people were saying that Empire sucked because they didnt have the power to stand toe to toe with the likes of orcs. After a while though, people got an understanding of Empire and noticed there stradegies run a lot deeper and more complex then the orcs, so were able to utilize them better.

This is definately not the first thread about uneven cards/decks and unfortunatley, it wont be the last.

Dam said:

lol,

should've said

Alright, Hammer-time!

Dam said:

High Elves look to be a control faction, so counting up power on units doesn't really mean anything.

Bolt Throwers are lethal. You don't do a bit of damage each turn, you're looking to do 10+ each turn. You get enough economy and card draw going and in each of your turns you spend whatever remaining resources you have in phase zero then pass. You sit on all your resources into your opponent's turn, play some sort of stall card (Gifts, Flames, Vallaya etc) and then dump your remaining resources through the Bolt Thrower in you pahse zero. Repeat until one player loses. This is how High ELves work at the moment and as a control deck you need three of each card. If you don't have them then you will be at a severe disadvantage against aggro decks. Why? Aggro decks just want to make angry guys and attack you. If they don't have three of each card then threre's likely a weaker substitute that they can use (another unit that has a power icon and a low cost). Control decks don't have that luxury. There tend not to be weaker but similar versions of key control cards so you need own as many copies of the key cards as you're allowed to play. If you don't want to do that then don't play pure High Elves.

You want a stand-alone High Elf deck to work in the same way as an Orc aggro deck and it just doesn't. Play High Elves or play aggro. The High Elf deck is about where the power level should be in the game right now. The problem is that blitz aggro have had some frankly ridiculous cards printed for them which has distorted the environment. There are a few 2-4 cards that either need to be banned or some board-sweeping counters need to be printed.

Your idea for the Bolt Thrower would make for a broken combination. It would allow you to play two Gifts of Aenarion, shoot yourself for one damage and generate two resources. This allows you to create an infinite loop which would end with your opponent taking more indirect damage than he could possible handle in one turn. Don't feel bad though, it's not much worse than some of the stuff that's got through playtesting so far.

crowdedmind said:

Are you talking about Skaven, Spider Riders (what else)?

crowdedmind said:

See, now that's more of the coolness and power I'd expect from HElves .

Dam said:

Warpstone Excavation is the primary culprit. At the very least it should have been limited and really should have required you to corrupt one of units to generate the power as well. There is currenlty too great a disparity between the first turn or two of production that each deck has. Destruction (and probabaly Orcs in particular) have a massive production advantage. An average turn 1 for an Order deck is probably a 2C unit/support and a 1C unit/Contested Village. A poor start will be one 2-3C unit/support. You might be running Warpstone Excavation (although as a slower Order deck they hurt your more) and you might be running enough cheap cards to try to use Innovation on turn one. An avergae Orc start is probably a 2C unit/support and a 1C unit/Contested Village, plus an Innovation/ We's Bigga trick, plus the increased chance of a Warpstone Excavation. If that first unit is a Lobba Crew or they have a Pillage in hand the situation is even more ridiculous because you can significantly disrupt your opponent's first turn, thus effectively buying yourself a free turn.

We've been testing decks for the Sheffield Regional and played a lot of games against Orcs to see if we're better taking a different deck. If the Orc player goes first and has a Lobba Crew or Pillage in their opening hand it's a massive advantage. If they have both it's probably game. Common starts also include a We's Bigga/Innovation Squig Herders/Clan Moulder Elite or some 1C units. On top of all this you've got a good chance of seeing 1+ Warpstone Excations (assuming you mulligan) which distort the starts even more. Lobba Crew and Pillage both need an extra point of loyalty at least as you should not be able to hose your opponent's turn one and have resources left over to develop.

Ahem. Sorry. We were discussin the game's tempo issues last night so the rage is still strong.

What would I ban? Warpstone Excavation, Clan Moulder Elite (really, a 2P 5HP unit for 2C who's downside is they can't defend? Really?) and Deathmaster Sniktch. Whilst Orcs have too many cheap 2P units no single one is in itself a huge problem. I would add some extra loyalty symbols to the Orc stuff however. Compare the Orcs to the Dwarves. The Dwarves have several cheap units but a lot of them are dounle or triple loyal to stop you being able to thow out too many units too quickly.

The game's basic mechanics currenlty favour aggro (attack in the turn you're played and can pick your zone of attack to dodge early defenders). This is fine, but it's compunded by a lack of general cheap board sweepers to counter the blitz aggro builds ( and most cards like Judgement, Flames, Troll Vomit etc have to be played in your own turn). Each faction has a theme but the Skaven/Orc themes shouldn't have been 'burn two zones' and 'play efficient cards'.

As I said, I don't think that High Elves are underpowered, but blitz aggro with access to cheap and easy control elements are distorting the environment making it difficult for players to see past 'how much power do I get for my cost?'.

Hi,

I don't think that High Elves have any problem with their in-game power... the real problem is that you can't build a good HE deck which feels like a HE army, while even an Empire control build feels like an army with heavy magical/tactical support.

As somebody already sad : the Bolt Thower should not be the only real winning condition in a HE deck, but now it is going that far that even unitless Bolt Thower decks are possible and played.

Charge of the Silver Helms (and some "we don't know yet" cardshelps some in this regards hopefully.

Currently a competitive HE deck feels like as a couple of siege equipment would shot a whole forests quantity of bolts into it's enemies, behind a triple wall of protective magic... while a battalion of soldiers cutting wood with magical chainsaws in the background to support munition. This is sick.

Cain_hu said:

Awesome imagery, though I agree on the thematics suck.

Today, Dwarves vs HElves. HElves get perhaps the best starting hand they've ever had in the games so far: RBT, Temple of Vaul, Spearmen among them. Dwarves take a mulligan and still only get to play 1 2-cost Support to KZ (they went first). HElves draw another Spearmen, then their first two turns are T1: Temple of Vaul to KZ, T2: 2x Spearmen to KZ. This puts them at 10 resources starting turn 3, with RBT all ready to be deployed. Oh, and both Spearmen get Dragon Mage Wakening fairly early, +3HP each. Great, right? Wrong! Dwarves have two cheap units with Toughness 1 out there, so now HE need to have 3 developments (which they have) and spend 3 res to get 1 dmg past the toughness. Vaul's Unmaking zaps one Gromril Armour, only to see another GA played a turn later. All this time, Temple of Vaul is doing more dmg to the HElves than they are doing to the Ds (Dwarves only got 1 Keystone Forge into play in the game). After Swordmasters die to Lure Them Out against Gurni's Elite, the rest of the D BZ attacks and burns the HE BZ. Which then forces the HElves to defend their QZ, giving them the options of A) defend and lose all their draw (except of Contested Fortress which slowed down dmg from ToV) or B) not defend and see the zone burn, with HElves losing the game. Dwarves win 2-0 soon enough and they didn't even have Mountain Barracks out (or Demolition for RBT, how would the HElves get it back any time soon?).

HElves collected 3, then 6, then 10+ resources for the rest of the game. Dwarves? 3, then 4, 5 and finally 6 for the most part.

Dam said:

This is where you started to make mistakes. You know that you're playing Dwarves and so toughness is going to be an issue. You have cards in your deck to deal with this (I hope) and so your turn two should have been one Spearmen each to the Kingdom and Quest zones.

What cards deal with Toughness? There are no BTs or Mob Ups for Order. If you Flames of the Phoenix everything to hand, you're hurting yourself a lot more than the Dwarves, who just pay 1 to play their Mountain Legion back into play, voila, Toughness is back. Meanwhile, your units will set you back 3 or 4 resources per unit. In their previous meeting, Dwarves went unit-heavy and lost to FotP, this time they used Supports for most of their resources, thus immune to meddling by HElves. Also, since HElves have such low Power on their units, they barely managed to kill 1 Gurni's Elite while defending. To kill Trollslayers with 3HP, you're pretty much requiring 3 units all assigning against them, with the rest of the bearded cronies going right through. With Mountain Barracks, even Gurni's Elite become invincible deathdealers, Toughness 1 more than most HE units can overcome.

Dam - this is why a unit-based HE deck that plans to win with the Bolt Thrower is a bad idea. In the unitless plan, you don't care much if they have toughness since you are going to bounce all their units before you hit them with a zillion bolts anyway.

Try the Defending Tor Aendris deck that I posted. If you need it to be HE-only for theme reasons, here's your changes:

-1 Mountain Brigade
-1 Blessing of Valaya
-3 Dwarf/High Elf Alliance
-2 Keystone Forge
-1 Master Rune of Valaya
-2 Demolition
10

+2 Caradryan
+2 Steel's Bane
+1 Shrine of Asuryan
+1 The Glittering Tower
+1 Initiate of Saphery
+2 Armoury
+1 High Elf's Disdain
10

So either go unitless or forget about RBT? And seems aggro-HE isn't functional atm, given their piss-poor Power-level.

I do think against any other race that start would've probably put HElves in a decent position to win, 10 dmg per turn from turn 4 onwards, even indirect would force a lot of rushing or hope to get a Support-removal.

OT: Dark Elves kicked Chaos ass to claim top spot since adding AoU, now at 8-2, Chaos 7-3, Orcs 5-5, Dwarves and Empire 4-6, HElves 2-8.

Yep, RBT is not worth the huge resource engine you have to run unless you're actually going to win with it, and at that point you may as well be unitless. I guess you could run 1 or two copies if you really want but I think you'd be better off investing the resources in units and just hitting the opponent. Clearly against Dwarves you just develop it because you should know it's a bad idea - a single 1 toughness unit is a big problem and the dwarves have a bunch.

You don't have to be aggro - 2 swordmasters relentlessly hitting the weakest zone every turn does the job in the end. Similarly, the anti-unit Chaos control archetype isn't a rush deck, it just blows up all the opponents units and keeps attacking with a chaos knight or somesuch.

The HE unit deck may not be a good tournament choice but it is fun to play and it will win games.

Clamatius said:

That's been the optimal setup in most other games, get those SoHs to BZ and lay away. Sadly, they tend to go poof rather quickly, being the prime-time guys on both offense and defense (if not active on defense, then at least making opponent attack a zone other than BZ). On offense, they can get zapped by quite a bit of stuff, Counterstrike, Khaine's Wrath, Slayers (who pretty much nerf them entirely), Lure Them Out or just plain, good old damage outside combat. Lokhir especially loves to zap SoHs. On defense, if an opponent attacks your BZ with SoHs there, you can bet he's got something sneaky in his hand, but most of the time, you can't really afford to not defend, so will probably lose one SoH.

Should note that this doesn't make my any happier about them being an über-unit that can suck infinite amounts of cancellable damage in combat. Even though they can be dealt with, I think another route that would not have created these kinds of one unit blocking 20+ dmg by themselves situations would've been better.

Dam said:

Without BP #3 you're missing two big pieces of the High Elves engine: Gifts of Aenarion (feeder for the thrower, it can generate big amounts of resources) and Dragonmage (the best HE defender, can soak tons of damage on Defend Tor Aendris).

Gerson said:

I know. However, both of those come 1x in the BP, so not sure how huge a swing it would give them anyways (since I have 1x of the BP that I do have). Rest of the BP is just horrible IMO (especially the Empire contingent) that it's not worth the money for me even 1x, far less with 3x. No BP3 also means no worrying about Clan Moulder Elite, Rat Ogres, etc., so rushing doesn't have all the tools at its disposal either. Not that any of my decks are built toward rushing, if a rush chance comes from the draw (mainly with the Orcs), so be it, if not, aggro till the end.

Dam, just out of curiosity, since you're only building mono faction decks, are you using the Skaven ?

Gerson said:

They were in the DE deck initially, then swapped them to the Orcs to give them a boost. Ironically, DE deck then thrashed Chaos 2-0, making it the best race since AoU (when they had Skaven they lost 0-2 to the same Chaos). Adding in skaven was required to get the decks to even numbers (not enough neutrals otherwise), the skaven chars (than, sniktch, 3x clan rats, 1x globe and horde are in orcs), warplightning cannons are 1 in DE, 2 in Chaos (or vice versa, can't remember). Skaven are still neutrals, no loyalty icons on them. Would I prefer to toss them? Sure. But at this point the card pool isn't big enough.