Shards of Infinity

No, the armor value is the total in your hand. Since you play your entire hand each turn, it cannot last past that turn. You can see the armor value just looking at your hand. Since there are no interrupts, there isn’t anything you could do about it, anyway.

Ok, thanks. But I would swear there are times when the ai benefits from armor and I can’t see any on their cards…but I don’t know the cards well enough and it may just be that it isn’t displaying it on the AI turn.

When the AI has armor in it’s hand, a little shield icon will appear with the total armor value. It’s to the left of the icons shoiwng the number of heroes, how much focus, and health.

Also, armor only protects against direct attacks. If a champion is attacked, damage is not reduced by armor.

There is also at least 1 champion that has armor so if it seems the ai is benefitting every time than they might have that champion. They could also just have a deck with lot of guys with armor.

Loving the game, but I’d like an undo button for when a wrong card might be selected/discarded.

You can check easily by seeing what they have in their draw and discard piles.

I can beat the medium AI easily. I’m doing ok online, think I’m 3-2 and on my way to going 4-2. However, I can not beat the hard AI, 0-9 so far. The thing it’s not even close either. Am I just really bad at this game or do others have a difficult time against the hard AI?

I haven’t played online but same experience vs medium and hard .
I like the game enough I bought the physical version.
Have the devs commented on whether they plan to add the expansion?

If you click on the “more games” button or whatever it’s called they list the expansion as “coming soon”.

I have beaten the Hard AI a handful of times. It is challenging until you realize it like to use the Homodeus Champion strategy. Thorn Zealot is a great card to use against it. Don’t let it get the Wraethe Champion that doubles aground points.

Like Ascension, this game is really about the churn, being able to draw additional cards repeatedly until you get what you need. With the Mercenary mechanic, you can now go hunting for that extra card while you run your turn by Fast-Playing a Merc with that particular ability. @Dave_Perkins can probably elaborate.

I never play the AI in any game. Too many good flesh-based AIs to play!

And I’m not sure I quite grasp this game yet, which I love. Elaboration will come in about a year.

I didn’t think I’d like this game as much as Ascension as I didn’t really like Star Realms. However, so far I’m really enjoying it, I may have to go back and give Star Realms another try.

Shards of Infinity makes Star Realms redundant. It does everything Star Realms does, except better.

Great!

The hard AI is definitely a formidable opponent. I consider myself pretty good at this genre but I am only beating the AI about 50% of the time. For comparison I beat the Ascension hard AI something like 80% or more of the time. They’ve been using machine learning to turn it into a beast of an opponent, and it seems like it is working pretty well!

I’m still in the process of learning the game, but improving vs. the AI and am developing some general strategy ideas:
-Deck cycling is extremely good in this game. Cards that draw you a card and also do something else should have a high priority. Almost all of them are very good. Even if they do something mediocre like the Thorn Zealot (green card, +1 draw, +3 shield, unite to destroy a champion). Cards that banish from your deck are a bit slower to develop, but if you can grab them early and stay alive along enough they can also be great. Don’t be afraid to use banishers as mercs if you’re concern about them slowing down your deck.

-Second most important thing, generally speaking, is probably staying alive. This depends on how aggressive your opponent is in their strategy vs. how aggressive your game plan is, but if you can find ways to reduce the chip damage you take in the early parts of the game, you might develop a large enough life lead that you can push hard to out-race your opponent and finish them off. The best cards for this are the green cards that also draw you cards, or anything with shields that also draw you cards (less good, but generally fine cards). Champions are great as a “soft” shields since they will probably take the aggro until your opponent is ready to rush you down.

-For the first few turns, focus on getting the best cards available rather than going all-in on synergy. It can be tempting to grab every mediocre purple card you see after you get a nice banisher, but your opponent can easily counter your strategy. Get the best cards first and then somewhere around turn 4 you can start thinking about how you can leverage those cards to win vs. what you can do to prevent your opponent from winning.

-Cards that ONLY give you mastery are kind of bad to have in your deck unless you are going all-in rushing mastery (this strategy also probably requires triggering the Dominion ability on cards). Don’t take those +Mastery cards that don’t do anything until you have enough mastery to activate their secondary abilities. And generally don’t invest too heavily into cards that have mastery abilities until you are close to being able to activate them – most of them aren’t very good until then.

-Use mediocre center row cards as mercenaries. The green merc that gives +4 health is not a very good card to have in your deck, but it’s a great card to have available as a mercenary to cheaply unite another green card in your deck or quickly boost your health. Same with the +2 Mastery blue card, and probably a few others. If you’ve got some Dominion cards and a lot of money, you can buy out mercenaries of colors you haven’t drawn to trigger the ability more consistently.

-Money is lower priority for me since I like to have a less bloated deck, but it is also somewhat important since in addition to needing it to buy cards, you also need it to bump your mastery and hire mercs. I place high priority on cards that add money as well as do something else (the +1 money and +1 draw card, the +1 money champion). The AI seems to love getting a lot of buying power and then going on crazy shopping sprees and it does work out for them sometimes.

This is pretty cool! I didn’t get along with Ascension too well but this is really grabbing me. I’m also terrible at it.

The incredibly loud fart noise that plays every time a champion dies is either the best or worst sound effect I’ve experienced in a game. I haven’t stopped chuckling at it yet…

Sharts of Infinity?
Perhaps I do need to buy this.

I’ve played this a lot over the last month or so and I think it’s probably the tightest design I’ve ever seen on a deckbuilder. One of the most impressive things to me about Shards is that there are NO throwaway cards. As far as I’m concerned, every card in the game will improve your deck in the right situation.

There are weaker cards that have the mercenary option attached to them which you can burn for a one time damage/health boost or use them to help hit your synergies. There are weaker cards that have shields attached to them, which can be a godsend if you are pushing for a 30 Mastery victory or your opponent is rushing damage. There are weaker cards which have insanely good Mastery activation abilities at a high activation threshold if you can get there with that card in your deck.

They’ve done such a good job balancing all of these systems so that there are so many dimensions that can be tweaked to keep cards from getting too weak or too strong (cost, damage, health, money, shield, draw, +mastery, mastery ability, mercenary, champion, dominion, unite, banish).

We have a whole thread for this!