Dwarven Control Wizards

Toughness is considered an armor card, which makes it vulnerable to Dissolve Armor, Boiling Armor, and Shredding Strike (no damage prevented, no card drawn).

 

Nice build.

And this build demonstrate how strong Robe Of Lightness and Electroporter Novice are And how strong traits are in general. And showing how Hover is better than Resistant Hide at avoiding Lava since it does not takes up a slot of yours

 

We are back to where we are at before the general public knew about the draw builds.

The discrimantor with this build versus other wizard builds is the amount of perplexing rays in the deck. Those are really hard to find so the OP has a leg up here. I have been farming for them since release and only found 1 card with 2 copies.

Good job and see you on the battlefield!

 

To be fair short perplexing ray is a very good card that give card advantage. Draw deck is better simply because they gain card advantage by drawing instead of discarding. And yes I have yet to see any 2x short perplexing ray item either Been camping Randimar with 5k gold since release/

 

Your next assignment.. create a super build that is super fun to lose to. Personally, I don't like playing against control, feels like I'm not really doing anything but waiting to see where my opponent wants to place my figs.

WoW is probably one of the more powerful cards in the game. You get to negate the position of two enemies for one card with the bonus of putting them on bad terrain or off of victory squares. Even without synergizing with PoK, fighting a team full of WoW sucks. Although, it's definitely better than waiting 5 minutes for someone to cycle their draw deck looking for that perfect hand... and then doing it again next round.

 

Add an Ironwood Staff Of The Magus to the mix and let the tanking begin.

I have only one copy of Gg boots. What are the other options?

EDIT: I also like the team comp because it can beat mom. Free rating ftw. I tend to run 0 wizards usually so matching up with mom isn't an option for me.

 

I run an almost identical copy (down to the boots!) of the standard control wizard for my war/war/wiz setup. The best thing about stacking tons of traits on a character is it immensely improves the consistency of that character's performance. I can think of better hands than 2x Winds of War, 1x Flame Jet or somesuch, but the control wizard will draw that kind of hand basically every game.

In terms of consistency, each additional trait in your build increases your chances of drawing the cards you want exponentially.

If you don't have enough greenguard boots I would suggest boots with good team movement on them (salazar's slippers).

 

Just a side note about Electroporter Novice that I don't think was given it's due respect here; Spark Generator and Spark Inductor are much, much more useful for their secondary effect instead of their primary effect, which is that all blocks made versus Arcane attacks gain a penalty to block rolls (-2 for Inductor, and -3 for Generator). When you realize that Winds of War has the Arcane subtype, drawing these traits means virtually unblockable field control. (Most blocks, triggering on a 4+, become impossible to succeed when up against Spark Generator's -3; Most other times it's a 1/6 chance, or worst case scenario 1/3 when using a 3+ roll against Inductor's -2)

 

I doubt anyone tries to design builds that are fun to lose to. What we care about is winning. What we hate is losing. It doesn't really matter what the build is, if it is overpowered and you cannot beat it, you will hate it. That's just human nature. Sure, having to click "pass" a hundred times against card draw build is annoying, but what we really hate is the fact that soon the opponent will rush in with a million cards and kill us. If card draw lost almost always, nobody would have a problem with it.

Same thing with this build. It's very powerful, it can make you feel hopeless, and you will very likely lose unless you have a specific counter. I think that it's this being at a disadvantage that people ultimately hate. What the actual build does, doesn't even matter. I don't think it is possible to design a build that is fun to lose to

Still a pretty good chance. I have looked in there for two days now, no luck. 5 days remaining.

Well, you could do like someone suggested and take something that has Team Run. Those are always useful. Or you could do like I did earlier and try something like Glimmer Boots which has Squemish. Other two cards are not awesome but it would thin your deck and let you use that free token on something else.

This is a very good point that I haven't even though about before. Making skills like WoW more difficult to block is very useful. My opponents usually tend to send a Warrior with Hard To Pin Down first to attack, and if my WoW (or whatever) is blocked that same warrior will run right next to me AND hit me with his biggest club. This has happened many times and can be devastating unless I have Toughness.

After I read this I looked at my build and realized that I gave my only Electroporter Novice to my Volcano wizard who has the LEAST amount of cards that can be blocked from all three. So it naturally makes much more sense to give the item to one of the other two. I now changed my build for the better because of your post so thank you for that.

 

I'm starting to hate this type of topics. Sure it's fun to discuss and all, but it sprawls so many copycats it's annoying.
I mean can't people come up with their own ideas anymore? First's the draw decks and now this...

 

I fully agree, although it's a typical 'evolution' in games like these. The triple control wiz is a sort of a 'rock' responce for the uber warrior draw deck / whirlwind 'scissors' scenario. With this particular build I'm quite happy to see this since I can revive my old smoke bomb build to see how that's gonna work

 

Some people just aren't any good at coming up with their own deck ideas. I'm a pretty bad deck builder, but I admit I haven't tried copying anyone's build yet. I did try building something unique, however. It succeeded in tanking my rating into the 900s.

 

Part of the beauty of deck building in games like these is the random drop mechanic, you just make what you can out of what you've got. Unfortunately the longer the game runs the bigger the item libraries of a typical players and you see copy&paste builds. To be honest I enjoyed he first weeks much more when people were coming up with interesting stuff out of a limited item pool of what they had at the time...

 

It's good to discuss this stuff, but already we're seeing copycats of this deck. Just as the drawspam is fixed, they'll be 100s (ok, 10s, it's not like many people play any more) of this deck instead. That's not as much of a problem because this deck isn't as overpowered but if >50% of the population at X ranking use the deck it means you are forced to run the same deck or a counter deck with no other options, which is something that the fixing of drawspam was meant to alleviate. My own deck certainly isn't as good because it tends to cap at 1450, but I'm fairly sure I can improve it on my own. That's part of the fun, isn't it? I don't see why anyone would post their good decks. It creates a saturated playing field and for what? Minimal kudos.

 

Nice build, I ran into it before I stopped playing recently. This was my old build (3 wiz) before the draw-deck nonsense, but you've incorporated much more geomancer/card cycling tactics than I ever did. Very nice. Once draw decks are gone, 3 dwarf wiz with toughness should really shine. A good way to counter it, at least one good way I used to use in mirror comps is to make sure your wiz team that runs up against this comp includes WWE/WW in its deck, because the strength of this deck is the moving as a group / map-control / turtle style play. That doesn't work well versus teams that can disrupt that and pick wizards off.

 

How does this play without a Volcano dwarf?

For all the complaining about copycats, this specific example seems to heavily rely on a number of legendaries and epics for key cards. Replacing the staff of magma or baffling bauble ( or other short perplexing ray items) seems difficult, or at least it would seem to reduce the effectiveness.

Negative traits aside this seems to otherwise be the standard encumber + lava strategy. 12 traits overall is impressive though.

Is there anything you'd potentially replace the trembling staff's with if you had access?

 

Eh, I saw people build around Winds of War before this post ever came out. I myself regularly use a build with two control wizards (not dwarves, though) and either a cleric or warrior and did since before this post. There's a relatively limited pool of powerful cards. I can definitely see Winds of War decks gaining popularity as draw decks die, though. It's very strong, especially on the current map set which all allow for one wizard to have line of sight on all the victory points at once.

 

Building decks and talking about them is a big part of CCG's. It would be silly to "ban" people from talking about their decks just because people take ideas from others. And I think it's pretty rare that people use a 100% exact copy. Usually they lack certain items or what to give their own twist to the build.

And it's not like this deck is some big secret that could be protected. Anyone could at any point go to observe matches and see how this, or any other build, was made. Just click the card and it tells you the item. By posting builds on the forums, everyone gets to see how they were built, not just the people who use observe. So in a way it levels the playing field.

If many people start using a specific build, like what happened with card draw, the problem is not that it was posted on a forum, the problem is that the build is overpowered and needs a nerf. I personally think that control wizards should be nerfed or counters to it should be added/buffed. This build is just way too powerful, consistent and versatile. I've had people build counters specifically against this build and still lose. That should not happen in a balanced game.

I see posting decks on a forum both as fun and maybe as a way to help devs balance the game, making it better.

My original goal was to make all 3 dwarves identical so I didn't use the volcano staff at all. I would say that it is almost as powerful without volcanoes, and more powerful in some cases. Volcanoes can be pretty situational and you can easily kill yourself with them. Also if the opponent manages to isolate the volcano wizard, you could be screwed because it lacks the encumber and dies pretty fast. Depends on the situation really, but I would still rather take the volcanoes than be without them.

I think that Trebling Staff is one of the most important items in this build. With 3 traits and 1 WoW it is both powerful and makes the deck more consistent. And the best part is of course that it costs nothing. I haven't tried anything to replace it and I highly doubt that any replacement could fully replace it without any loss of effectiveness. Only good thing about losing the staff would be that then you wouldn't have that annoying Combustible trait.

 

It's an interesting item, having those 3 traits. This and the runestones are shrinking your decks while keeping most of the usable cards quite good.

Most of the other classes don't seem able to build something like this. Warriors in particular don't seem to have any weapons that function in a similar fashion, rather than traits their low cost weapons are normally filled out with poor attacks or blocks. While they do have a weapon or two with a significant amount of negative traits it's often Raging Strike which doesn't replace itself.

The closest example I can find for Priests is something like the Vampire's Blade , but I'm not sure they have items similar to the runestones.

 

I ran into 3 as close to as possible copies of this deck today. It's not as annoying as drawspam because the counter is easier to deploy, depending on your deck, but I do find it I suppose amusing that people adopt these trends so quickly and avidly. Perhaps I'm a little slow but I struggle to see what they are gaining. As with drawspam it doesn't actually help them farm MP faster, there's no prestige involved with gaining rank and it's just embarrassing to have cookie cut a deck from the forum. I guess these things are highly subjective.