Hey everyone, Reygon here with another Alpha Clash article! Today we are going to be discussing “roles” when playing PVE.
What are Roles?
Well techincally there are no required or even defined roles for PVE. But when looking at the classic “triangle” of DPS, Tank and Support they can be applied to Alpha Clash as well. In my experience, you want at least one deck that is exclusively focused on doing the most damage possible aka the DPS role. Then you want at least one support, and one tank/mid range style deck. The main goal is to keep the boss in check until your DPS player can get enough cards in play to start winning!
DPS Role
The main goal of the DPS player is to be selfish as possible and getting game finishers into play to kill off The Portal and Lord Krung quickly. Typically these strategy leaves the DPS player exposed in the early game and will rely on their team to keep them alive and cards in their hand until the engine is online. My 3 favorite DPS decks include the follwing:
Cadavros: utilizes the discarded and Lord Krung, Rutheless warlord to build an army to swing buffed by lord krung. You can refer to my deck primer around Cadavaros for strategies to get 4x krungs into play ASAP. Be careful tho, the Boss has an event card that sends all clash cards to oblivion that can set you back to square 1. Also boss cards that reduce the attack of clash cards can slow this attack down as well. I do sometimes limit myself to not playing any lord krung cards versus the boss for flavor add which makes this deck not very good.
Magnate: One of the single best cards in PVE is Magnate, Destructive Adversary. The more players you have on your team, the more effective this card gets. It counts both your teammates, your’s, and the boss’s clash cards for his attack buff. It’s not uncommon for this card to be attacking for 20 each turn. The key is to bait out the abmush card by either attack with a less important clash cards or your contender first, giving mange free reign to attack unblocked.
Mean Streak: This deck focuses on getting a Mean Streak, Blink of an Eye into play asap and get it to 5 streak counters to buff your team with +2/+2. On top of that, superspeed is one of the best keywords in the game when facing off versus the boss. Mean streak can freely attack into most minions without of the free of trading or dying to nectrotic. Set 1 mean streak contender will allow you to move counters every turn to Blink of an Eye resulting in the fastest stacking strategy to get the buff.
Support Role
Support is pretty self explanatory. You are supporting your teammates to keep them alive and enable them to execute their game plan while exposed in the early game. There are different ways you can support. You can heal yourself or your teammates, you can provide team wide card draw, you can swarm the board with effective blockers to protect your teammates, or just be “useful” in any way. The support player has to be selfless and hold down the fort until your DPS can take over. You may not get the flashy game ending plays, but you are essential to enable your teammates being able to execute theirs. You have to be ok with using all your cards and resources early and even be ok with dying for your team to ensure a victory. A couple of my go to support decks are:
Paul: I believe paul is the best pure support deck out there currently. Paul the contender can provide a blocker every turn with your teammates with the abliity to mitigate up to 3 damage on each obtruction. This is super helpful agaisnt attackers with necrtrotic as well. With the black Paul 2 drop, he can provide healing to himself or teammates, this can stack with mutiple pauls and can really help recover a low health teammate. Also with access to the best 1 drop in PVE, Paul doing his best lets you and 1 other teammate draw a card while creating a chump blocker. Black also provides access to 2 different really good cards. The first one being harvest of souls, which lets your team banish as many clash cards as they can and every draw the total amount of clash cards banished this way. If the boss is not being piloted, this only helps your team and can easily draw 10+ cards for each player. Then it also gets access to clarity, from teh shadows for repeated send to oblivion effect to take care of elites.
haven and clarity’s ring: This deck utlizes the Contender Haven, Binding time as the new card Clarity’s ring. Ring allows us to have free life gain once per turn as well as allowign our rogues to utilzie the powerful alpha hunter weapons. The deck is looking to utliize low costed clash cards to act as effcient chump blockers that can be later used to equip with suit up and heavy power armor. Haven also has access to healing paul, clarity from the shadows, and harvest of souls. It also has access to some powerful blue cards such as the classh buff No More Fighting to give a big defense bonus and draw 2 and Linn, Nanite Assassign which can reanimate low costed clash cards each turn to ensure you have plenty of obstructers each turn. Haven can help provide some damage and offense with Suit Up and heavy power armor where Paul can struggle to provide any damage.
Pestilence or Torque: These 2 fill a similar role of keeping the enemy horde trimmed down by using non clash damage and pestilence defense reductions. Pestilence, the infectious one, crimson scales, here comes the boom, solar smash, and other removal cards will ensure threats are kept to a minimum when attacking your teammates.
Tank/Midrange Role
This role is a bit less defined than DPS or support. But typically this is a role that is a mix between support, control and damage or act as a deck that can Soak big attacks from the boss. You are looking to play cost effective cards and controlling big threats the boss has available. I have played this role the least so I don't have as good of suggestions as the previous two haha.
Genesis: You are trying to utilize Genesis’ second ability as soon as possible to utilize the cost reduction on your blue cards. Once you can get Genesis, the Opressor into play and any spare resources. You can leverage those resources into damage reduction for youreslf and your teammates. Genesis, Changing plans is an allstar blocker as whenever it dies, you can add it to your resource zone to ramp you or simply play it again to keep blocking for your team. Then later in teh game you can start playing Gensis, Steadfast Fighter which takes no clash damage once you have 6 resources in play letting you block those enraged Krung attacks with no risk. Alpha, Aster the Preeminent is also a 3 drop wtih great stats that can be used as early an blocker that wins most trades with minions.
Khagan: Shout out to Mike for showing me this deck at Protour Nashville. But Khagan combined with his contender weapon Dragon Scale Armor is very powerful. Each time he is attacked and takes damage his defense is increased by 1 which can result taking no damage from successive attacks from the boss. If you can setup a clash buff on to the contender before he gets attacked he can turn into a “cheese grater” by killing all the attack clash cards with his buffed attack, while taking no damage from his scaling defense from Dragon Scale armor. Your team can utilize their clash buffs to ensure Khagan is the focus of big attack turns so everyone survives those dangerous enraged turns.
Although you can play decks that are “jack of all trades” they tend to be less effective in team settings as they dont excel in any one aspect. There are a ton of other contenders and decks out there that can fill these roles that are yet to be explored specifically with set 6 cards now being released. You can also look to synergize with your teammates to give yourself the best chance. It is no easy feat to beat Krung with the red text on! Also on deck planet this is a new feature that allows you to tag your deck as PVE so you can share your ideas with the community. So get out there and get brewing and take down the horde!
Thanks for reading!
Reygon