Universal Card Crawl (by Arnold Rauers)

Any hints on making 20 gold coins now when the Midas is no working the same way as the old time?

 

Yeah midas touch is nerfed

20 gold coins
1.use mirror on fortify
2. Apply the 2 fortify that you got in step 1 to 10 coins

I've unlock the undead
But when i try to select him as the dealer it's always hoerni that showed up
I think it's a bug that needed to ne fix asap
Please dev....

 

I agree with both of you. Altough i enjoy a good card game every now and then, digital card games ussually aren't my thing. The solitaire thing didn't help either. But now that i picked it up i love it.

 

Thar be truth!

 

While I'm enjoying the game I'm totally confused. I understand winning is how many coins I end with and not being killed. I sort of get that win streaks are good. But that is all I understand.

I don't understand how to access daily challenges? Have 5/10 with the fist icon and 0/3 with the coin icon.

I'm confused on what quest means as all I see is my current base or starting avatar with the others appearing to be locked now probably until I open them up.

Please advise or let me know what guide I should read... Or is that all this game is a game of winning and losing with one avatar and one dealer.

I like the game but am lost!

 

Sorry for being the newbie with dumb questions but how do I know what are my 5/10 ability cards? So once I unlock 5 more ability cards I get to do the daily challenge?

I thought the update also discussed new dealers or avatars? How are these unlocked or when are they unlocked?

 

In Normal mode you can't know what you have until you get dealt the cards (wowow exciting!). In Constructed mode you pick what you want to play with. I'm not sure how many cards you need to unlock the daily challenge.

The new dealers/avatars are unlocked by doing certain things in-game. Click on the "Quests" button on the main menu. The quests are pretty difficult so I'd hold off on worrying about them until you've unlocked all of the cards.

 

Make sure to grab the mirror card first that gonna make your life easier #
Also there’s one of the quest to win 10 match without ability card

Hope they’ll add new GC achievement Soon

 

I've won a couple games without using any ability cards but the quest still shows 0/10. How does this work exactly? I guess I don't know how to actually trigger the quests. Help would be great!

 

My last post was well-received and was followed with a lot of awesome changes from the developer, so I’m going to write another strategy/review hybrid post about Card Crawl. In brief: this patch is fantastic. I’ve already gotten more enjoyment out of the game post-patch than pre-patch. In other words - it’s more than doubled the value of the game for me. Right now I’m #1 on the Infinity ladder with a (still ongoing) run of 3,281 points over 39 games. I’m also #12 on the ladder using the new Bounty combo. It’s been a fun weekend, haha.

Of course, the game isn’t perfect. There is always room for improvement, and I’ll be outlining places that could be changed for the better in this post. But overall, the game is in a pretty good spot. It’s very fun, and probably in my top 10 iOS games of all time post-patch. So I’m hoping for another awesome patch, but wouldn’t begrudge the developer for moving on to another game at this point. They’ve made an outstanding game!

Endless

This is my favorite mode at the moment. I enjoy playing with all of the cards, and as mentioned in my last post, I’m not particularly fond of the degenerate strategy that results from trying to get a top leaderboard score for one individual game (it’s a lot of restarting!). In this mode, every game matters, which I can really appreciate.

There are several strategical differences from high score chasing in individual games. The biggest difference is that you move from risk-maximizing strategies to risk minimizing ones. All of this is perfectly exemplified in new “Gravedigger” card. This is a classic example of a very high-risk, high reward card. Its maximum payoff is huge (technically, it’s infinite!), but it carries a big risk of killing you if you happen to shuffle a bunch of monsters into your deck. The result is that this is a very strong card in Constructed (part of the 2nd best deck). However, in endless mode this is one of the worst cards in the game! I feed it to Hoerni in almost all of my endless games, because it’s far better to score 70 points and have a 0% chance of dying than to score 100 points and have a 5% chance of dying.

This leads into the biggest flaw about Endless - past a certain skill level, it’s too easy to survive with a risk-minimizing strategy. I average just 84 points per game by playing cautiously. Here is a brief summary of the things you should be doing if you want to get a highscore in Endless. They net less points per run, but provide a lower risk of dying:

- Gravedigger is a Hoerni tip!
- Move excess swords/shields into hand slots rather than selling them.
- Don’t be afraid to tip gold to Hoerni if you don’t have inventory space to play them this turn.
- Don’t wait forever to get maximum payoff from your ability cards. In constructed, it’s better to play patiently and try to get an 18 point Swap, 15 point Midas, 18 point Blood Pact, etc. In Endless, you should be more willing to pull the trigger for a suboptimal result if the alternative is selling potions/swords/shields and potentially dying.
- If you have an empty inventory, try to stay at 6 life or more, so you have the emergency option of moving an unclearable wave of monsters to the bottom of your deck.

There are definitely unwinnable games, but they seem pretty rare - maybe 1%? They involve getting low-tier cards like Shield Bash and Suicide, and hitting two waves of monsters that you can’t kill (the first wave you can move to the bottom of your deck using your ability). In my current run, I’ve had a few close calls in my run where I had to use my -5 ability to move the current dungeon cards to the bottom of the deck and hope for the best, but so far I haven’t run into a second wave of unkillable monsters to end my run.

I predict that eventually the leaderboard for endless will be swarming with runs that last 50 games or longer. A 100 game run is not outside the realm of possibility. This seems like a flaw to me - it’ll just take a lot of grinding before you even have a shot at getting to the top. So the biggest improvement to this mode would be to find a way to cut back on this.

My suggestion is to make the game harder as your game count increases. Something like:

Games 1-10: Default deck
Games 11-15: Default deck, but with an extra 2-strength monster added
Games 16-20: Default deck, but with an extra 3-strength monster added
Games 21-25: Default deck, but with an extra 4-strength monster added
etc.

This would have two functions. The first would be to make sure games end in a reasonable amount of time. The second would be to make players play a bit riskier - when you have a finite cap on the number of games you can reasonably expect to play, it becomes more worth it to live a little and try to score more points now rather than later. With this change, for instance, I would probably use Gravedigger occasionally rather than discarding it without thinking.

Constructed

The theoretical maximum Constructed score is considerably easier to calculate now: it’s infinite! This is because Gravedigger can actually fetch itself. So, although vanishingly unlikely, Gravedigger infinitely self-recur for endless points.

In practice though, the best deck does not appear to use Gravedigger. This is because getting it to even recur twice is so unlikely that in practice it’s better to chase highscore using more reliable methods.

Slots 1-10 on the Constructed leaderboard are almost exclusively by the new “Fortify” combo deck:

Equalize
Fortify
Mirror
Bounty
Devour (this slot could be a lot of things and is not core to the combo, but Devour appears to be the highest value)

The combo is difficult to achieve, but has a crazy payoff:

As calculated in my last big post here, your highest possible score without using ability cards is 56.
Use Equalize on a 10 cost monster with Bounty on one side and a 2 value card on the other. You’ll have +8 points plus a 10 value Bounty now.
Use Fortify on Bounty.
Use Mirror on Bounty. Significantly, the new Bounty will be 15 strength and not 3 strength.
Devour a 9 power monster (you can’t Devour a 10 power without breaking your Bounty combo). +9
Kill all three 10 power monsters, then play both Bounty cards in your deck. +90!

This leaves a base score of 173, plus whatever the random ability from Devour gives you. Technically, the max points this deck could score is *also* infinite, because it could pull Gravedigger and then infinitely self-recur, haha.

I don’t believe there are any other viable builds in Constructed. The combo is just ridiculously strong and easily dominates former “good stuff” decks that were best pre-patch. But whatever! I honestly don’t have much hope that Constructed will ever stand up to high-level play, and with the other modes in the game, that’s fine. Constructed mode is pretty fun for Quest/Achievement chasing, at the very least. The presence of Devour will at least keep Constructed a little fresh - you’ll have to react to whatever ability card Devour happens to spit out.

Daily Dungeon

This mode is a fantastic idea, and is pretty fun. The primary issues I have with it are as follows:

- While everyone gets the same deck, the randomness of the ability cards is *not* fixed. For instance, today I played a near-perfect run that ended at 1 life and used all abilities at close to max efficiency. However, I happened to get a bad Gravedigger roll (two monsters), so I didn’t make top 100.
- It’s impossible to tell what your final standing at the end of the day was. This makes it kind of hard to gauge how well you’re doing overall.
- Does dying at Daily Dungeon also lose your Endless run? I think this happened to me, but maybe I imagined it.

Some of these are pretty tough to implement, but my dream version of the mode would:

- Have a record somewhere of your score and final standings per day for maybe the last month of play.
- Have a league that looked at your standings per week compared to everyone else.
Remove Gravedigger from the mode. It’s way too swingy, and determines your standings that day all by itself.
- Fixed randomness for the remaining cards. Morph and Devour would give the same card to everyone. Exchange would always give you the bottom ability card of your deck, provided you hadn’t drawn it yet. Lucky Shot and Lash would be preset to hit 1, 2 or 3 cards for everyone.
- It would give one run per Gamecenter ID to help cut back on the temptation to scout the day’s dungeon with a different iDevice.

 

Card specific feedback

I’m not going to do a full overview, but there are a few cards that I think have problematic gameplay. I’ll start with some praise, though: I really enjoy Devour and the unpredictability it adds to Constructed mode. Even though it’s one of the strongest cards, I hope it doesn’t get nerfed. It’s extremely fun and IMO should be a top tier card.

- Shield Bash was only minorly buffed, and is still very weak. Its highest payoff (without Fortify) is to play it on a 7 cost Shield. This gives you +2 worth of value (since attacking with the shield leaves behind a 2 value shield that you wouldn’t have gotten otherwise). Lame! Each attack should lower a shield’s durability by -3 or maybe even -2. At -3 your max payoff without Fortify 4+1 = 5. That’s below average but not embarrassing for an ability card. With Fortify your payoff is higher but pretty limited by the fact that monsters have at most 10 HP.

- Suicide is well named and almost completely unplayable. I autodiscard it whenever I see it. It either needs to be removed from the game or given a powerful secondary effect to tempt me to use it.

- Trade is pretty flat. When I originally wrote my first big post I didn’t know you could trade off used coins and potions. Knowing that makes playing the card pretty mindless - I just play a coin and trade the used coin away. It’s sort of the new Leech, in that it always gives you 10 points almost no matter what.

Conclusion

Alright, that’s the end of my review! Thanks again for making a great game.

 

That's what I've been doing but it's not crediting me on the quest. I know for certain that I wasn't using any ability cards.

 

Oh geez I died but in an amusing way. I cast Mirror on Reflect, and played both Reflects. Two icons appeared, making me think I had two stacks of Reflect. But I only had one! Noooooooooo!

 

Is reflect stackable?

 

No. But 2 icons will appear.

 

Is it right that cards like thirsty works on used cards?

 

So if i put the cards in the box where it says thank you ... What would be the difference if i take the money into the slots?
Tfta!