For many, deck building is a new concept. Here are a few tips to think about when putting together your first Shadespire deck.
With so many new people delving into the depths of Shadespire, deck building is a good topic for discussion.
Deck building refers to games where adding and removing cards to deck creates strategies or actions a player can use during a game or match. In the case of Shadespire, a deck has three things: objectives, ploys, and upgrades.
Deck Building 101: Card Types
Objectives, or Objective Cards, are a way of obtaining Glory points through strategy or accomplishment of the goal laid out on the Objective card.
Ploys are cards that each player can use during the Power Phase, which occurs between each alternating activation. Ploys are actions that can do any number of things, but more often than not allow players a chance to gain an instant action outside of the activation phase, which can give an advantage, or direct an action towards their opponent. An example of this is the card “Cruel Taunt”, which allows the player to target one of their opponent’s units, and with a dice roll, uninspire that unit, or keep them from inspiring for the duration of the game. A “de-buff” if you will.
Upgrades are cards that are just that, an upgrade to a single unit in your war band. Some are items that give enhancements or are kind of like instant Ploys that the unit can use as reactions once upgraded. These are a great way to “buff” the offensive and defensive capabilities of your war band. Some upgrades even make it easier to gain extra glory points, which is very powerful.
One last bit of important information before we get into the meat of deck building, the number of cards allowed in a single deck. This part is fairly simple, but many new players can slip up at this step of creating a deck. So let us simplify this a bit, think of your deck as actually two decks: one for objectives, and one for ploys and upgrades. Your objective deck must contain twelve cards, no more, no less. So these are very important choices. Your main deck must contain at least twenty cards, of which no more than half can be ploy cards. This also means that you may have MORE than twenty cards, as long as the rule about ploy cards is maintained. This can be a form of strategy in and of itself. Do you want as many ploys and upgrades as possible? Or, just the right amount so that no matter what you draw, it will be useful?
Deck Building 101: Assembling Your Objectives
OK, let us get into assembling a deck. For this discussion, I’m going to use the new war band The Chosen Axes, as an example. Because they are new, there is no set meta deck for them, so we can start fresh with the basic ideas of how to build a strong deck.
First, I like to look at the strengths and weaknesses of the war band are. Beyond normal stats, this also means the parameters for the war band’s Inspiration mechanic.
So what we see here, is that The Chosen Axes inspire by holding an objective at the end of an action phase. This means that each Chosen Axes unit must be on an objective after each player has had their four activations, going into a round’s end phase. This is important to understand because simply moving to an objective is not enough to inspire. You have to HOLD it.
Based on this information, we can think about what types of ploys and upgrades and objectives we want to add to our deck. For starters, let’s look at objectives. We will want a mix of cards focused on our strengths, and some easy objectives to gain us some glory for upgrades, assuming we will not be able to steamroll our opponents and earn glory through kills. All cards and their descriptions can be found here.
- 292 Supremacy
- 241 Brawl
- 294 Tactical Genius 1-3
- 270 Making A Statement
- 297 Tactical Supremacy 3-4
- 296 Tactical Supremacy 1-2
- 117 A Claim Retaken
- 119 Ferocious Charge
- 121 Fury of The Lodge
- 122 Hoarders
- 123 Oaths Still To Fulfil
- 124 Scion of Grimnir
- (optional choices to switch in/out) 235 Denial & 300 Total Annihilation
Each of these Objective cards should suit the Chosen Axes, I will say that these do focus on a bit more aggressive play because that is generally how I play. Feel free to explore your own path with building a deck for your Warbands. These are just examples to represent our talking points.
Deck Building 101: Assembling Your Ploys and Upgrades
Now let’s talk about Ploys and Upgrades. Like we discussed earlier, we want to have some ploys to help our beardy boys get to and hold those objectives and some upgrades to keep them in the fight to do so. I am not going to list every single card in my deck, but I can certainly suggest a few of each to give examples.
Ploys:
- 325 Fortify
- 359 Shifting Shards
- 366 Tantalising Prize
- 135 We Shall Not Be Moved
Upgrades:
- 142 Grimnir’s Fortitude
- 419 Solid Stance
- 426 The Dazzling Key
- 430 The Shadowed Key
- 425 The Blazing Key
Each of these cards plays into our basic strategy of playing towards our strengths and protecting our weaknesses. The key upgrades are perfect for the Chosen Axes, as they give us free glory points for holding a specific objective!
Hopefully, this helps new players get a grasp of how to put together a deck. This is a very basic way of deck building for Shadespire but should get you some fun games, and help you springboard into higher strategies. Remember that there are tons of ways to put together a deck, with so many cards to choose from, the sky is limit on how to put together synergies and tactics. Now go out there and gain some Glory!
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About the Author: Wyatt Turk
