Monster Train or Deckbuilder: the ‘good parts’ version

Games
161

I am somehow getting worse at this game the more I play it. I have come really close to winning a few times, but always just fall short. Now, my last 3 games I can’t even make it to the final boss, with my lowest scores ever. My strategy is to buff up the demon guy hero and try to get a couple of strong support cards.

Love the game, but getting frustrated. Not sure where I am going wrong.

162

Try a different champ, maybe? Lots of great build ideas scattered through the thread.

163

I personally find the awoken and the two last classes to have much better heroes, so mix it up!

164

I’ve had the most success with the Stygian commander myself, but I’m only on Covenant 10 and my evidence is extremely anecdotal. Frostburn seems kinda busted.

165

You guys are definitely better than me at this. I’m 0-4, but this last time I got really close. One more turn and my pyre would have survived the final battle and killed Seraph the Temperant.

That’s OK, I’m having fun trying.

166

The fun parts of these games to me is stumbling into amazing synergies. I enjoy the progression aspect a bit, because it forces you to get better to accomplish the same thing, but I doubt I’ll ever grind this out through Covenant 25 because at that point you are just hoping for the synergies you know about to show up and the exploration part of the game is well over.

167

Woo woo, got my first win!. Lots of armor doubling.

168

Nicely done!

169

Gratz! As far as I can tell the best way to win is to stack a crazy amount of defense and take a commander who can kill bosses, which seems easiest with Hellhorned and Stygian. The Red and Purple. I feel like the best way to set up the red champ is 2x slay, 1x multistrike, and the Stygian commander either full frostburn or 2 frostburn and one of the others, they are both decent. If you take -1 spell cost you can easily skip energy and pick up more capacity or card draw, both of which can situationally be very good.

The defense can come in whatever form, hugely stacked armor, regen, lifesteal (on a unit with at least 30/31), or sap will all do it. Then the champ can just chew them up. Wasting a bunch of resources trying to fill out multiple lanes feels like a losing strategy to me. It seems better to play with a much smaller pool of cards, though you need to be aware if the last boss will be the consume boss so you don’t get to him with 3 spells, all crucial.

170

Finally won one myself. Stygian Guard/Awoken. My hero was actually pretty weak, but I got some decent relics and a couple of tanks with sweep and it was mostly pretty easy. Also heavy use of frostburn.

Didn’t think I could do it, because in the Seraph battle all my units got sapped. My middle floor was doing 0 damage by turn 3, but I was doing so much frostburn damage, that it wasn’t as bad as it looked.

Such a great game, thanks again for the detailed write up @Misguided. I would never have even noticed the game if it wasn’t for you.

Edit: Anyone want more friends to make your high score list more exciting? My code on Stream: 10703281 (Leeabe)

171

I think the Stygian champ is the best just because of Frostburn. It’s really, really good. Hit the Seraph 7 times and you’ve won. The sapping totem in Stygian is also clearly the most busted card in the game by a fair margin, I don’t think it’s actually possible to lose once you get it if you set up your champ and a totem on the top floor.

172

I just added a couple of you, you should see the same friendly cat in my profile picture.

Anyone playing feel welcome to add me on steam, my code is: 31518465 or https://s.team/p/cvb-vwbc/nbvgfhkj

173

Invites sent to @Tim_N and @cicobuff.

My code is 36623913

I can’t promise to be terrible, but I can promise to not be great.

174

Agreed very much with this. Your post straight up caused my awareness, interest, purchase, and enjoyment of this game, in roughly that order. Thanks!

175

I’m just happy others are enjoying it, too, both here and elsewhere. Over 3k reviews on steam with 97% Positive.

176

I would be interested in hearing some good strategies for using the umbra faction. I understand how morsels work but it seems to take so long to get things rolling with them.

177

Some notes on Umbra:

  • The champion isn’t great. The only one you can design the run around is the one doing Trample, but it also basically means you’re just taking space upgrades for the whole game.
  • The starter card is the worst one of any clan. 1 energy for something that probably just gives you one energy the next turn. Cull them out of the deck ASAP. IMO the best spell for getting morsels with spells is the one that does 3 damage with a slay effect of 2 morsels.
  • The buffs from Morsels are basically irrelevant, the scaling is too slow. The important part is triggering Gorge and Harvest effects. (In particular, if you’re playing Umbra+Remnant, you can get some great harvest effects going from your own morsels).
  • The best way to get a Gorge/Harvest factory going is with the Morselmaker. Pairing it up with a Morselmaster is crazy efficient both in floor space and actions.
  • The gorge effect you probably want to build around are the lifesteal/damage shield tanks. Multistriking enemies make the damage shield guy more fragile than it looks, while the lifestealer will usually recover as long as it survived to its own turn.
  • Don’t forget about using morsels as meat shields for blocking!
  • The most consistent strat I’ve found with the Umbra as the primary clan is with the Trample variant and based on recycling the emberdrain cards. Get holdover + maybe double stack on those cards, park the Penumbra in the top floor, and once your lower floors are set up, just start building up the emberdrain effects on the Penumbra. The boss is not going to make it through that. Make sure you have gotten your core spells to zero cost, since you’ll never play a card that costs ember again in that battle :)
178

To add to the tips given by @jsnell:

  • Combining the trample hero with morselmaker and morselmaster (assuming you have enough space) will generate 4 morsels a turn that will go into overflow space.
  • Retch is a great way to get many morsels for nothing in the mid to late part of each round.
  • If you happen to see the fossilized fangs artifact go for the crucible warden or collector to double the gorge ability.
  • I find that umbra rely more on their alliance faction than most others do. You need a cool combo from the other faction to really go places.

Here’s a recent successful run I did on covenant 7 (not sure if you’re already beyond that or not):
monstertrain://runresult/49b4b772-3f93-493d-ab1c-f7e29f0080ac

The idea was that in the bottom level I used Coldcaelias (the styrgian person who sweeps frostbite) to soften the enemies and dual lodestone totems to load every enemy with massive sap debuffs. Then in the middle floor was the morselmaker + morselmaster + trample penumbra to kill everything off. The few that made it to the top layer (which was rare) met a crucible warden and misc things.

One advantage of the above strategy was that it didn’t rely on any lucky artifact picks. It did rely on finding a lodestone totem early that I could upgrade and then copy, though.

179

Huh. I have had a lot of success using the gorge version along with Morsel Master in a Morsel heavy strategy. I use the Morsel Master to stack damage shield on the champion where possible, and am generally able to kill everything. Combine that with the unit that has gorge damage shield, and I rarely take too much damage. I use the 1-cost generate a morsel cards a lot at the beginning.

180

Don’t forget you can use ascend and descend cards to stuff huge units onto a packed
floor… And there’s a shield March card that will push the card to the front. Fun game!