The best possible Vlox deck gives your Cloaks as many options as possible to either assassinate or outlast the opponent with the tricks you have at your disposal. This guide will be about how you can keep your viable options maximized so you can adapt to the draw or situation. It will not include a second summoner (none is out yet) or any mercenaries until I’ve got some experience with them. Do note that I’ll update this guide based on further experience. Summoner Wars is a game by Plaid Hat Games. It’s available on android / iOS / Vassal.
Strategy
To start this off: I feel the Cloaks are one of the weaker decks to play competitively. First of all their units have low health and relatively low attack values. Secondly a lot of their events and abilities can be countered by careful play when facing expert opponents. And finally you often need to combine multiple events or abilities to be effective; which can cause clogged up hands and can suffer from bad draws. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy the crazy stuff you can pull off with Vlox, I just generally feel that if the draw is bad or if your 2-3 card combo play doesn’t work out perfectly you can quickly get crushed.
At the start I’d recommend building magic towards a champion as they are pretty cheap and can be copied. Your units are weak so be careful not to give away magic unnecessarily. I generally kill off a few of my units. One of the gunners and the thief are probably best for that. The scrappers can do some offensive positioning and possibly get into position for a blindside. An early sniper can also be extremely powerful against some factions. Don’t be too afraid to take some risks or even leave Vlox in a slightly risky position as I feel you need to force your opponent in an uncomfortable position to have the best possible chance with him.
Next step is preparing for some combo’s based on the cards you’re dealt. To do this, you need to maneuver your units around, prepare in advance where possible and each turn ask yourself whether there’s some insane move you can go pull off that will not kill yourself too much. Be it a double raid on one thief or a scrapper attack followed by multiple blind sides or Vlox moving in with a raid and escaping with the gunners ability. For the raids: Try to get a second wall up somewhere where there’s room for a thief + raid combo. Also adapt depending on what champion shows up first. The Admiral in example will allow you to be more aggressive than if you pull out Hawk.
With all these, do weigh the risks and rewards or you’ll lose horribly in the resource war. Remember that Vlox has a lot of ranged options, so you can often get the first hit in. And not every combo has to be against their summoner; taking out a few commons or a key champion for free can have more impact. Anyway, if you don’t manage to assassinate your opponent and you didn’t accidentally suicide Vlox you’d better have such an advantage or you’ll be in trouble in the end game. One exception is Scam, who can win you most end games as long as you have the magic.
Tactics
– It can be useful to keep commons of a certain type on the board to maximize your options with Vlox. This is why I try to not kill of both Gunners immediately. Another thing which is useful is to pay attention to how many of each type of common you still have left on the board and in your draw pile. If you run out of one type, you’ll not be able to use that ability again.
– As with other factions with Magic Drain: Don’t be afraid to kill your own units. Keeping your unit count lower can be more important than the board position. Choosing to hold on to events like magic drain can seriously clog an opponent’s hand (while you can use yours).
– Open lines and assassination options tend to be important with the Cloaks so you generally want to place walls aggressively and not too close together. Wall killing can be quite hard, so work around walls or block them off with units.
Deck build (17 / 9 magic for the champions / commons)
– 1 Scam (against champions / for end game)
– 1 Hawk (against commons)
– 1 The Admiral (support champion)
– 3 Scrappers (2 initial)
– 2 Gunners (2 initial)
– 4 Thieves (1 initial)
– 5 Slashers
– 4 Snipers
This deck is about having as many options as possible. That means including a decent amount of pretty much every common type so Vlox has a lot of flexibility in choosing which ability to use in what situation. And picking a set of champions that’s flexible and that can deal with both a common rush and with heavy champion play. Add in a gunner or two for a slasher and / or sniper if you miss their ability.
Regarding the champions: These are in my opinion well-balanced as every champion has potential and there are only a few combinations I’d recommend against. The reason I ended with the three as above is that you can both win against most champions / in the endgame (Scam) as go common heavy (The Admiral) and deal with heavy common play (Hawk). Hawk could be exchanged for Sin-Sin and The Admiral or Scam for Violet and / Dagger. I generally wouldn’t exchange both.
Match up analysis (incomplete)
Tundra Orcs is a very tough match up due to their high hit points and dice. Another faction I’ve had experience with is against the Vanguards. That was also pretty hard as they have very high health champions and if they keep Sera safe against assassinations it’s quite difficult to get the champions killed.
First summoner specific cards
Generic cards
References
– All Cloaks cards (especially strategy section and comments are useful)
– A Doug’s Guide To Summoner Wars podcast (strategy discussion and community news)
– Mythacle Battleplan for Summoner Wars (deck builder and I got the images from there)
– Summoner Wars on iOS by Playdek (I played some test games here)
Really enjoy this series – well done! Personally I would pack some more Gunners since it’s a really useful ability to copy. And especially against low life Summoner they are good for assassination.
Looking forward to to the next SW article! 🙂
Thanks, good to hear! Regarding Gunners: Yeah, it was a tough choice. And I might still add them back in in an update if I start missing them.