zelda shares his magnum opus - an exceptionally thorough Gauntlet guide, aimed specifically at new players.

He starts with several guidelines for deck construction in Gauntlet, explaining how to choose a suitable spread of mana costs (or mana curve) and when you should prioritize completing your mana curve over simply choosing the most powerful cards. After providing a cheat-sheet of important rules for piloting your deck, he ranks the viability of all 12 generals and proceeds to evaluate every single card in Duelyst.

Each card is given a 0-100 rating and a short paragraph of justification - faction cards that work best with a particular general have two separate reviews, along with modifiers for each general to show how useful different Neutral minions are with that general. Although exclusively picking the highest-rated cards and ignoring your mana curve is a very bad idea, these ratings help new players to filter out the most relevant cards and provides a solid foundation for new players to learn about Gauntlet.

The guide embedded here will update automatically whenever zelda updates his original Google Document, which can be found here.

Watabou shares his widely-acclaimed disenchant guide, explaining which Epic and Legendary cards you should disenchant in return for crafting material (Spirit).

After summarizing the best generals and budget-friendly cards in each faction, he examine each Epic and Legendary card for every faction - not only explaining which ones are safe or unsafe to disenchant, but pointing out the best places to invest your Spirit once you're ready to upgrade your budget-friendly decks.

The guide embedded here will update automatically whenever Watabou updates his original Google Document, which can be found here.

After playing CCGs for over a decade, I’ve been searching endlessly for a good online CCG. I could never stomach the randomness of Hearthstone, which paired enormous slot machine effects with the roulette wheel involved in summoning your largest minion on-curve. Magic the Gathering is an amazing CCG on paper (in both respects), but the online client was awfully designed and I could never justify the amount of money needed to build a tournament-worthy deck.

For years, I’ve been waiting for the perfect CCG – a game that I could fit around my university schedule, without needing to ritually sacrifice my credit card or spend months earning in-game currency before I could afford a competitive deck. Hopefully a game without decades’ worth of articles written about it, so that I could get involved in the community and publish original content.

And after so many years, I eventually found Duelyst.

Duelyst has everything that I love about CCGs. Between the constant decisions created by the replace mechanic and by positioning your units on the board (both of which reward forward planning once you know what you need to plan around), Duelyst feels like a fencing tournament. It’s a fast-paced game that punishes you hard for your mistakes, but shows exactly when you messed up and how to improve in the future. It has enough randomness to offer unique puzzles in every game, but has enough consistency to let you solve those puzzles without relying on luck.

But since most of those puzzles require background knowledge to solve, Duelyst has a much steeper learning curve than most other CCGs. You need to learn a wide range of tactical concepts before you can really compete at the highest levels – none of them are complicated on their own (especially if you’ve played other CCGs before), but most of them aren’t spelled out in-game. And if Duelyst is your first CCG, then learning this library of little tricks as well as general CCG strategy can present an enormous amount of information for you to process at once.

It’s about time that we fixed that.