Been playing a neat, cheap little auto-battler card game called Endgame of Devil. You choose monster cards, then they get placed on a 5x5 grid to fight successively harder waves of adventurers. You have to beat the adventurers before their cooldowns reach 0 (most of them have to be beaten in 5-7 turns), after which they steal your treasure. Lose three treasure, you lose the game.
Really simple, really fun. But the thing I love the most is despite RNG, there is a certain element of skill to being able to understand all the mechanics and chain them together to produce combos capable of lasting endless mode. The basic campaign is fairly easy to win with any kind of "theme." But as drops are random, it can be pretty hard to get the "theme" you want. But when you do - you really get the "feel" of creating a proper devil boss's lair. Like you can imagine in your head the toxic swamp when you successfully build a deck based off of toxic treants, toxic worm lairs and giant poison wyrms, with a bunch of murlocs going full mujahadeen in the mist.
Now I'm fairly good at reliably getting what I want. For example, one of the most frustrating decks to try and build is a vampire build. Manservants and vampire bats are fairly common minions. Manservants sacrifice themselves to buff vampires +3 attack, and vampire bats sacrifice themselves to give blood princes +3 attack. As the game progresses your likelihood of rolling legendary, mythic and epic monsters increases. The blood prince is an epic one, but the vampire is legendary. The vampire gains +1 attack every 4 turns, and sacrifices itself to give all of its attack to the blood prince. In theory you can build up a big court of manservants, move into vampires, then unlock your final form blood prince. In practice you end up with a whole bunch of manservants, never roll a vampire, then get a blood prince... If you don't lose in the early game, because manservants suck.
My most painful run, I made it 59 waves in with 5 vampires, each one at >200 attack. I end up losing on
the same wave I roll a blood prince, losing one round before the blood prince was about to absorb all the vampires and achieve apotheosis.
This was my best successful run at a vampire deck. I used a lot of magic items allowing for rerolls and free minions, + a gate that boosted my chance for legendary minions (but NOT mythic). This allowed me to get rid of a lot of the RNG and reliably build up loads of vampires. I got several magic items that gave more attack increases, and set up a sick magic item combo where killing adventurers gave my thunder & toxic, thunder and toxic gave me acceleration (which reduced my minion cooldowns), which caused them to gain attack every turn... Resulting in thick vampire attack buildup. In order to not die I grew some beefy dragons, then began sacrificing them to my four undead kings (unfortunately one of my undead kings got sacrificed by a necromancer... I got rid of the necromancer).
After sacrificing all of my "starter" minions, I ended up with a full blood prince romcom deck. I had the elder blood prince, who had eaten all of the vampires. His lesser gay partner, who was a younger blood prince, but still useful. The three undead kings, the blood princes' harem of succubi who gave +1 attack to all minions around them (including themselves), as well as three engines of woe which gave +3 attack to one random minion. The Undead Kings notably gained +5 attack every time a minion was sacrificed, so they scaled really well.
In the end my romcom blood prince deck made it to wave 76. The real prize turned out to be their four time hounds. Even if my blood prince was doing 3000 damage or my undead king was doing 1300 damage, the adventurers get exponentially higher in hit points whilst my guys were increasing linearly in attack points. Time hounds get to attack one more time for every 2 accelerate you have, meaning if you manage to stack up 99 accelerate, the time hounds are effectively doing their attack value x 48. In the end the undead kings and blood princes started struggling to deal with adventurers and I was near-totally dependent on the time hounds; when the time hounds couldn't clear the board in time, it was over.
There is a world where I get enough vampires & attack buffs and produce one giga blood prince who can make it to the end alone. Or a swarm of time hounds, going full hounds of tindalos.
But the real triumph came when I decided to go for a shub-niggurath build. Shub shub the black goat is an incredibly hard one to get running. Shub-niggurath is incredibly rare and spawns one tentacle every 2 rounds (every round if you stack accelerate). Tentacles temporarily gain +2 attack for every 3 tentacles on the board. Shubshub can make tentacles repeat their attack, and this is true if you stack shubs. I started with a balanced composition of toxic worms, undead kings, thunder elementals, thunder & fire dragons and a few werewolves. Aggressively banked my rerolls and then burned through them all until I got the GOATed relic which sacrifices one tentacle, giving its attack points to all other tentacles on the board. Using a bunch of mimic blob things and one orb, I managed to get FIVE SHUB SHUBS who rapidly began overwhelming my deck with tentacles, to the point where I nearly lost the game because I was running out of removals to delete the tentacles. As each tentacle started with 1 attack point, they were functionally useless against adventurers with >2000 HP.
I acquired two slimes, who began devouring my board of monsters. Slimes eat one of your monsters and gain their attack. Slimes are normally terrible as they wildly dislocate your combos, and your game-winning deck can just implode when a slime eats one of your key monsters. But as I had too many shub-nigguraths and tentacles this wasn't a problem. I intended to keep the slimes as any time I've tried to build a slime deck it's usually ended in failure, but after I cleared out the shubs down to one single shub... I realised I had achieved ultimate black goat deathcrawl total chaos blacksun victory
By trimming my deck down to 15 tentacles, one shub-shub and their elder lich caretaker, I could keep effectively doubling the attack of all fielded tentacles every 4 rounds. I soon found out there was a 9999 attack cap, but that was many thousands more than what I needed. I mulled over deleting shub-shub and getting rid of my orb that was sacrificing my tentacles every 4 turns, but for sentimental reasons I kept both, carefully tending to the tentacles so there was always a healthy population of max attack elder tentacles to give life to the baby tentacles.
And I actually managed to win "endless mode" as apparently it finishes on wave 100. To my regret I didn't take a scientific approach to this, as I didn't think endless mode had an end. Because if I did, I would've recorded the HP values of the final wave adventurers so I can figure out what "upper boundary" I need to get my werewolves or blood princes to in order to win 100 waves.
The final deck. The population of elder tentacles had reached a sort of equilibrium where it would alternate between peaks and troughs of baby tentacles to elder tentacles. All the while the elder lich tended carefully to the great garden of the black goat.
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Topic: How did you last *own*? (Read 1345031 times)