Game Reviews, Strategy Articles, and More

Recently WWG updated a few of their rules partially based on their experience with the app. These are fairly minor changes that help speed up the game, and I like them. You can check out their article on it here. Rob and Nathan also discussed the changes, took some questions, and played some Epic on a recent twitch stream.

Initiative Passing

The biggest changes have to deal with passing initiative in combat and at the end of turns.

Combat

Previously combat worked like this (AP = Attacking Player, DP = Defending Player):

1) AP Declares attacking champion(s)

2a) AP may play cards and activate abilities (“make plays”)
2b) DP may play cards and activate abilities (“make plays”)
2c) If DP made any plays, return to 2a. Otherwise, proceed to 3

3) DP Declares defending champion(s)

4a) AP may “make plays”
4b) DP may “make plays”
4c) If DP made any plays, return to 4a. Otherwise, proceed to 5

5) Assign damage

Essentially, the Defending Player would always be the last person to pass in order to advance to the next step.

Now combat works like this:

1) AP Declares attacking champion(s)

2a) AP may “make plays”
2b) DP may advance to 3 (declare blockers) or may “make plays.” If they make any plays, advance to 2c
2c) AP may advance to 3 (declare blockers) or may “make plays.” If they make any plays, advance to 2b

3) DP Declares defending champion(s)

4a) DP may “make plays”
4b) AP may advance to 5 (assign damage) or may “make plays.” If they make any plays, advance to 4c
4c) DP may advance to 5 (assign damage) or may “make plays.” If they make any plays, advance to 4b

5) Assign damage

Assuming no one makes any plays initiative passing/choice making looks like this:

1) AP

2a) AP
2b) DP

3) DP

4a) DP
4b) AP

5) –

After combat) AP

Implications

Now, the Defending Player has the first opportunity to “make plays” after blockers are declared. Not only does this reduce the number of times initiative is passed in combat by 1 (assuming no one plays anything), but it also slightly buffs the attacker in combat.

For example, I attack with Raging T-Rex while I have Rage in hand. My opponent blocks with Noble Unicorn while they have Hasty Retreat in hand. My opponent plans on using Hasty Retreat no matter what because they don’t want their Unicorn to die.

Previously

As the attacker, I don’t know my opponent plans on playing Hasty Retreat, so I play Rage on my T-Rex since, if my opponent doesn’t “make any plays” I’ll lose my opportunity to play it and lose 10 potential damage. When my opponent then gains the initiative, they play Hasty Retreat and not only save their Unicorn and return my T-Rex to hand, but they also get a free negation of my Rage in the process.

Now

The defender gets the first chance to play events. If they play Hasty Retreat now, they can protect their Unicorn; however, they will not be able to draw out my Rage. If, on the other hand, they know I have Rage because I revealed it for loyalty earlier, they could opt to pass initiative. If I play my Rage, my opponent may then Hasty Retreat my champion. But, I (as the attacker) now get the choice to either accept the current state of combat and break the Noble Unicorn, or I can play my Rage to try to get 10 damage through.

Due to this, the attacker gets a very slight advantage over the defender, or more precisely, the attacker loses a disadvantage they originally had.

End of Turn

Essentially, the non-current player was always the last player to pass before. Now, the turn can end after 2 consecutive passes.

Before, when the current player tried to end their turn and their opponent “made a play,” the current player was immediately thrust back into their main phase. From there, the current player could have either played more cards, made more attacks, or attempted to end their turn again. When the current player tried to end their turn again, their opponent could make another play and repeat this process.

Now, if the current player tries to end their turn and their opponent “makes a play,” the current player can either go back to their main phase in order to play cards/declare attacks, or the current player can immediately end the turn.

In other words, the non-current player no longer gets the last pass before the turn ends.

The main thing this eliminates (besides extra initiative passes in the app) is the ability to play a single card at the end of your opponent’s turn, see if they have a response, play another single card, see if they have a response, play another single card, etc. until you no longer want to play cards.

For example,
Opponent: “I try to end my turn”
You: “Okay, I play Muse, pass”
Opponent: *Sigh* “I try to end my turn again”
You: “No Wither? Okay, I play second Muse, pass”
Opponent: *Longer Sigh* “I try to end my turn again”
You: “Pass”

Now, if you pass after playing your first Muse, your opponent can end the turn before you get the chance to play your second Muse. You either need to risk playing both Muses (hoping your opponent has no Wither), or you can hedge against Wither, but risk only getting one Muse in play.

Conclusion

As I said, I am in favor of these changes. For the most part, they have almost no effect on gameplay (particularly the mulligan order change I didn’t bother discussing: second player mulligans first now), they make defender initiative passes less obvious, and they help attacking a tiny bit.

greylag is an Epic-loving goose who prowls the BGG forums and, now, the alpha app. She loves the weird stuff in Epic: pulling things from discard piles, odd little card combinations and, always, mass death via zombies. And somehow, she always seems to end up theorising the games she plays…

I’ve had a lot of fun with the puzzle contests run on Tom’s blog, in which we’re given a challenge: play as many champions as you can in one turn, or see how much total offense/defense you can get. The numbers possible in those challenges are ridiculous, but they’d be impossible to achieve without the puzzle rule which says you can decide exactly what card you’d get on every draw. Wouldn’t it be nice to have that ability in normal Epic? Good news: you can. Well, sort of.

I’m going to give a name to the 30-card deck you start your game with: Deck 1. (I won’t be talking about Constructed here, because I don’t think what I have to say really applies to 60-card decks. If you think it does – cool. Say how in the comments.) Deck 1 is shuffled before you start the game, you draw 5 cards out of it, you can mulligan if you want. Your next 20-25 draws (depending on how many cards you mulliganed) are your Deck 1, and are completely random – all you know is which cards were shuffled to form Deck 1 in the first place, or perhaps not even that in Random 30.

But if the game goes on long enough, probably something interesting will happen. You’ll hit a card you’ve seen before. In most cases, this will be one of the cards you mulliganed; otherwise it’ll be the first card you recycled or which was banished, usually from play or discard. This card is the first card of Deck 2. Deck 2 is fundamentally different from Deck 1: Deck 2 is ordered. You probably don’t know the exact order, but you can potentially know a lot.

Let’s limit it to the (alpha) app for now. Looking at the game log, you can see a complete list of what’s happened. From that, you can pretty much see what was recycled and banished and when. In the case of recycles, you get to choose the order of the two cards. In the case of 2+ cards being banished, they are shuffled before being put on the bottom of the deck, but you still know which cards were in each group of banished cards.

More formally, Deck 2 is an ordered list of card groups. If all those groups are just 1 card in size, it’s an ordered list which you can have perfect information about. If the groups are larger, you still have a huge amount of information.

Let’s call the first group in Deck 2 the marker group. Once you see a (or the) card in the marker group, you know from now on pretty much what you will draw, almost every time you draw. If you play Mist Guide Herald (not in the app yet), you can make a good guess at which champions might be revealed out of the 5 cards. If you Surprise Attack, you can guess what’s coming up, and same with Fairy Trickster.

What does this mean for play? My suggestions are:

1. Memorise the marker group. This is usually but not the same as: remember which card(s) you mulliganed. Once you see a card in the marker group, you can start checking the game log to see what might be coming up next.

2. Memorise your opponent’s effective marker group. Interestingly, this will usually be different to the cards they are memorising for their own marker group, because you don’t know what they mulliganed. But since you don’t know their hand or their mulliganed cards at the start of the game, it doesn’t matter. All 25 of the cards in their deck (however many they mulliganed) are unknown, and so practically for your purposes you’re interested in the first time they will draw a card you know.

3. If you want a rough guess at when your marker cards will be coming up, use the figure of “25 turns, less mulligans, less 1 per recycle”. If a player spends their gold every turn, to keep up on cards they will need to draw a card on average once every turn. (This often works out as 2 natural draws and one draw 2 every 2 turns.) This means 25 turns to draw through the deck. 0-cost recycles (practically all the recycles) accelerate the arrival of Deck 2 because they generally replace a card in hand with a fresh draw. For your opponent’s marker cards, use the same rule of thumb but discount mulligans (see point 2 above).

4. You can card count if you want to and know exactly when both players’ marker cards (yours, and your opponents’ effective markers) will be coming up. This is very laborious in the current state of the app, though it may get easier if/when WWG update the game log. Basically, just make a note every time there is a draw, and have your card totals in mind. 26 draws will put your opponent’s first effective marker in their hand, and 26 less mulligans will put your first marker card in yours.

5. Expansions make this even more interesting. Mist Guide Herald brings you 4 cards closer to Deck 2 when you play it. Play it twice, and you’re 1/3 of the way there already. However, it also makes your Deck 2 more unpredictable, since you’re banishing 4-card groups which are internally random. Only the last card of each group can be predicted perfectly. Arcane Research and to some extent Fairy Trickster also accelerate Deck 1 into Deck 2.

6. There’s a special note to Arcane Research, which is that if you know how many cards remain in Deck 1 and you’re looking for a particular card – say, Flame Strike – you know exactly how many you need to banish to be sure of seeing that card. And if you’re already in Deck 2, Arcane Research is in theory a precision tool. For this reason, if Arcane Research is in my opening hand, and I’m not running an aggressive deck, I almost always want to mulligan it, to ensure I will draw it when it is most useful.

What you do with the information above is up to you. There is more to be written about the strategy of how you compose your Deck 2, and what you want in it. There are also interesting points around the fact that both players’ Deck 2s are built collaboratively. Both you and your opponent will be acting to compose your Deck 2, and these choices can be in tension with what is best for the current board state. (Do you banish their good card from discard now, so they can’t get it back, but know it will come earlier in their Deck 2? Or do you banish a number of other cards first, betting they can’t recur it from discard right away, so that they won’t get that Flame Strike until late in Deck 2?)

But I hope I’ve at least made you think about the possibilities of what it means when a game of Epic becomes semi-deterministic in terms of drawn cards. You get the possibility to re-enact the opening moves of the game, but this time with all your questions answered. Do they have Lash, for their Kong or for your Thought Plucker? Now you know, and can play accordingly.

Forward

I honestly did not expect to be able to make 14 decks with only 120 unique cards, but here we are. (Only 110 cards once you ignore Dark Leader, Trihorror, Rally the People, Standard Bearer, Thundarus, Vital Mission, Bellowing Minotaur, Burrowing Wurm, Chomp!, and Wolf Companion). Bravo White Wizard Games, well played.

As a side note, I plan on streaming tomorrow once I get my new microphone to get rid of that annoying clicking sound. Probably around 3pm CST, but it will depend on when my package arrives. twitch.tv/tomsepicgaming

Core-Only Decks So Far

As of now, I have played and really liked Core Sky Force and Core Epic Humans.

I have played and not cared for Core Token Control, Core Evil Tokens and Core Big Butt Burn.

I have played and am neutral towards Core Wild Champion Overload and Core Coming Through!.

I have not played Core Feint, Tom’S Core Discard Deck, Tom’S Core Aggressive Burn List, Core Sage Army, Core Incremental Targeted Removal.

New decks in this article: Core Resurrection Evil and Core Rampaging Evil. (I really like Core Rampaging Evil.)

Core Resurrection Evil

After a brutal dark draft game where I played Thought Plucker on my opponent’s turn, played Corpse Taker to replay Plucker on my turn, and Resurrected Plucker on my opponent’s turn, I decided to make a constructed deck that could do the same thing.

The Deck

Essentially I just grabbed the most powerful champions in the game, added all of the ways to recur them, and added Surprise Attacks to help me cycle to get them.

Performance

The deck performed only okay.

Difficulty Dealing Damage to Opponent

The deck’s main weakness is that it struggles to push damage. I noticed after I played a couple test games that I had completely ignored on-turn gold-punishers! I had been so fixated on the most powerful, high-value champions that I hadn’t built the deck to compliment my midrange playstyle.

Pretty much the only way I was able to get damage through was when my opponent ran out of cards in hand, or by attacking with the zombies gained from multiple plays of Murderous Necromancer.

Reliance on Muse/Thought Plucker

Unanswered Muses and Thought Pluckers are some of the most powerful cards in the game. However, if your deck relies on drawing cards from them, and they are immediately answered (which isn’t hard when decks are built to answer them), they can perform quite poorly.

The main reason why this deck relies on these cards so much is the deck’s Evil core. Evil has the worst ability to draw in the game. Core set only includes no Evil “draw 2 and” cards and only 1 Evil Tribute/Loyalty -> draw a card champion. This is offset by the fact that they have some of the most powerful loyalty 2 effects in the game, all of which are included in this deck.

In addition, Palace Guard and Kong take up off-alignment slots that could have gone to card draw. Therefore, if my Muses/Thought Pluckers don’t draw me multiple cards, my hand eventually dries up, and I lose.

Low Impact 0-Cost Cards

Finally, my 0-cost cards in this deck aren’t able to do enough to help. They are largely removal effects to deal with Muse/Thought Plucker and chump blockers. Most of them won’t draw out my opponent’s gold to give my Kongs, Palace Guards, and Medusas effective targets. Overall, the deck just doesn’t function great as a whole. Instead of building my deck to win a game of Epic, I built it to gain as much value as possible.

Core Rampaging Evil

After playing the no on-turn gold punisher deck, Core Resurrection Evil above, I needed a palette cleanser. So I built a Rampaging Wurm deck.

Since Rampaging Wurm is an incredible on-turn gold-punisher, I wanted to give it a deck that could draw out my opponent’s gold before mine as often as possible.

The Deck

My first thought was that Medusa is one of the best off-turn cards in the game, and it can let you start your turn with a solid threat, while keeping you alive off-turn too. Then, I wanted 0-cost blitz champions that could provoke a 1-cost response from my opponent, hence Guilt Demon, Dark Knight, and Thrasher Demon. Army of the Apocalypse works great with them, as does Rampaging Wurm. From there I used the rest of my deck to include solid Sage card draw that works well with Army and Necromancer Lord. 9 break all board clears also give me the ability to consistently reset to begin a fresh assault again.

Performance

So much fun! Killing an opponent from 13 because they had the audacity to spend their gold before me on my turn is great.

Sage Package

I am loving the Sage cards in this deck. Winter Fairy is great to play on your turn, and Final Tasking it on-turn is pretty solid (draw 3 and deal 4 damage). Djinn continues to out perform my consistently growing expectations. Being able to draw twice with it and threaten a third draw is great. 8/8 airborne gold punisher is amazing, and if it survives until next turn I can always draw with it if I’m afraid of mass removal. Love this card. Army of the Apocalypse with Crystal Golem feels great. Get back multiple champions and draw 2, pretty nice, especially since my Amnesias and Guilt Demons do work keeping my opponent’s discard pile threatless.

0-Cost Blitzers

Guilt Demon is great. It breaks just as easily as Muse, which means many decks can answer it easily, but at minimum it takes 2 cards from your opponent’s discard pile and 1 card from your opponent’s hand with it (unless it breaks in combat). This removes recall cards, Soul Hunters, obstructs recycling, clears the way for your Army of the Apocalypses, and can severely hamper cards like Memory Spirit/Corpse Taker/Necromancer Lord/etc. There are many reasons why this is far and away my most included card in core only decks.

Thrasher Demon in a Raxxa’s Curseless environment has also been pretty nice. Mine haven’t grown very big yet, but 3 damage and the final nudge that draws the board clear against my 0’s is quite respectable. Forcemage Apprentice‘s direct damage can also be helpful when I don’t need it to break Muses.

Conclusion

Now I have Evil, Good, and Sage focused core-only decks I really enjoy: Core Rampaging Evil, Core Epic Humans, and Core Sky Force. Just need a Wild deck to complete my collection.

Foreword

I’ve been primarily playing my Core Epic Humans deck and my Core Sky Force deck on Epic digital. Currently, my Core Sky Force deck has been dramatically exceeding my expectations with only 1 loss. Core Epic Humans has also been performing well but has a few more losses prompting this update.

Interestingly enough, I’ve been doing better in constructed than limited overall, but this is partially due to Wasabi kicking my butt all up and down Dark Draft. (I’m going to need to update my Dark Draft article and Card Ratings…)

+ Board Clears

Foreword

I am updating this article as I may use it in my upcoming Bo7 Showmatch against World Champion John Tatain on Saturday, 5/20/17 at 2:00pm CDT (UTC -5).

Other decks in this core only digital alpha series include: Core Incremental Targeted Removal, Core Evil Tokens, Core Sage Army, Core Wild Champion Overload, Core Epic Humans, Core Resurrection Evil, and Core Rampaging Evil. They are all built following my Epic Constructed Process.

(Tom’S Core Aggressive Burn List, Tom’S Core Discard Deck, Core Feint, Core Coming Through!, and Core Big Butt Burn do not yet have articles devoted to them.)

Current Deck List

As I update the deck list, I’ll update this picture and written list (currently prototype deck list).

Evil (9)

Slow ()

Fast (6)
3x Apocalypse
3x Plague

0-Cost (3)
3x Guilt Demon

Good (18)

Slow (6)
3x Avenging Angel
3x Gold Dragon

Fast (6)
3x Angel of Light
3x Ceasefire

0-Cost (6)
3x Brave Squire
3x Watchful Gargoyle

Sage (33)

Slow (9)
3x Blue Dragon
3x Djinn of the Sands
3x Winter Fairy

Fast (13)
3x Erase
3x Ice Drake
3x Memory Spirit
3x Transform
1x Time Bender

0-Cost (11)
3x Forcemage Apprentice
3x Hasty Retreat
3x Muse
2x Spike Trap

Wild ()

Slow ()

Fast ()

0-Cost ()

Prototype Explanation

Conclusion

This is one of my favorite decks, and I stumbled across it just by experimenting with cards I had yet to use in Core-Only. I love experimenting with cards I don’t often use for this very reason.