Alex Rockwell
United States
Lynnwood
Washington
-
EDIT: This doesnt work as I thought because your snake doesnt grow when they kill off their blood puppet.
The following strategy seems very strong to me. What do people with more experience think?
*************
Play Maeoni for Snakes.
Play ceremonial dice for Blood Puppets.
Try to stall, spending dice to kill opponents creatures to pump your snakes, until your opponent runs out of dice. (Use Gilder or Butterfly Monk as defenders).
After attacking with your creatures and hopefully after your opponent is out of dice, fill up their board as much as you can with blood puppets. Each blood puppet costs you 1 mana and takes 2 mana of your opponent to kill.
When they kill the Blood Puppets, it pumps your snakes even more.
Play Hypnotize to make Snakes unblockable so they cannot block with Blood Puppets.
Something like Expand energy could help you to outlast your opponent so you can blood puppet them once they are out of mana.
If you begin a turn with your opponent having blood puppets in play, you can continue stalling simply passing your turn early on while they do things. (They cannot pass or else nothing will happen in the turn except for them taking blood puppet damage). This lets you conserve your actions until later in the round, so that you can again blood puppet them up after they have urn out of mana.
-
Zeb
United States
New Hampshire
You found me!
Hiss.
-
I see you've moved on from Race and Netrunner!
I think you're on the right track with Maeoni and Blood Puppets. The biggest downside of the Blood Puppets is that you are giving your opponent blockers. Like you pointed out, Hypnotize mitigates this downside, but I think this deck's viability will vary wildly with the meta. If the meta includes powerful cards which have the downside of damaging, killing, or exhausting your own units for gain (see Blood Transfer, Chant of Revenge, Small Sacrifice), the Blood Puppets only serve as fuel.
I've played against Maeoni and Blood Puppets and was able to win handily by playing 2 Seals on my opponent's Hypnotize.
-
Lluluien
United States
Missouri
-
Good to see you again, Alex
I do think if your strategy is to play with Snakes and Hypnotize, then that mitigates one of the biggest disadvantages of Blood Puppets, namely giving them blockers.
Keep in mind though that if you summon the Blood Puppet under your opponent's control and they kill it, you don't get the Snake status bonus, because the unit has to die because of some action that you controlled. Self-Inflict is an ability they control if you put the Blood Puppet on their Battlefield, not you.
I think is issue snowballs on you a little bit based on what you were saying about using Gilder or Butterfly Monk as a defender; when I've played Maeoni, Gilder seemed pretty important to the plan of getting the Snakes buffed, but your Battlefield is extremely small with Maeoni, so the odds are pretty good you're not going to be able to manage both Gilders and Butterfly Monks, only one or the other. If you're planning to ditch Gilders on the basis that the opponent has to kill their own units to empower your snakes, then realizing that this doesn't work due to Self-Inflict being under their control makes the thought of losing Gilders much less exciting to me and puts Butterfly Monk off the table.
I would also definitely want face-fixing of some sort in my deck if I did this, since you're talking about using cards that take 3 different class faces and 2 different power faces to make this work. I don't think having the dice split among 3 types will be a problem, but having quite a few less chances at favorable facings on each of the 3 types every turn might very well be.
-
Lluluien
United States
Missouri
-
Zebadiah wrote: If the meta includes powerful cards which have the downside of damaging, killing, or exhausting your own units for gain (see Blood Transfer, Chant of Revenge, Small Sacrifice), the Blood Puppets only serve as fuel.
For what it's worth, I think this is an extremely powerful strategy; the best deck I have put together so far does exactly this. As a further downside, this works very well in Noah because it's so explosive that his Phoenixborn power synergizes well with the all-in onslaught, and it wins (or loses by running out of steam) so fast that the downsides of that power (that it's really only useful for 1-2 rounds) is also mitigated.
The reason that's bad is because if Noah turns off your Hypnotize (like Seal as Zebadiah mentioned), then this strategy is up the creek.
-
-
-
lluluien wrote:
Keep in mind though that if you summon the Blood Puppet under your opponent's control and they kill it, you don't get the Snake status bonus, because the unit has to die because of some action that you controlled. Self-Inflict is an ability they control if you put the Blood Puppet on their Battlefield, not you.
I guess this is where the frogs' die power comes in. Your opponent spends one side action on their turn to get a Blood Puppet down to one life, you finish it off on your turn to pump your snakes and then replace the Blood Puppet. That does skew the tempo in favour your opponent though, since you're now spending one class symbol and one power symbol per Blood Puppet while your opponent is only spending one basic. That is not economically feasible in the long run.
-
Alex Rockwell
United States
Lynnwood
Washington
-
lluluien wrote: Good to see you again, Alex Keep in mind though that if you summon the Blood Puppet under your opponent's control and they kill it, you don't get the Snake status bonus, because the unit has to die because of some action that you controlled.
Ah, that does make the combo significantly worse.
Thanks, I'm pretty new to these cards.
I think the combo pretty much falls apart given that the blood puppets don't give you free snake pumps, so I do't think I would try this strategy.
Blood puppet still seems great in the correct deck however.
-
Andrew Barrett
United States
Schaumburg
IL
-
Still looking for a good blood puppets home myself. A problem I've had has been that there are so many ways to remove them while spending only 1 die, it seems to be something that you have to just time better.
Snakes on their own are plenty good, tremendous value for 2 dice.
-
Aaron Blumenthal
United States
Seattle
Washington
-
Chill84 wrote: A problem I've had has been that there are so many ways to remove them while spending only 1 die, it seems to be something that you have to just time better.
Examples? Also, I really think the stock Witch deck showcases the best usage of blood puppets: direct damage focus. If you can find a way to minimize the need for creatures to deal your damage, then Blood Puppets as blockers just don't become a problem. That's the best way to use them, in my opinion.
-
|
|
