[General Topics] Menneisyys:
Some tips, also showing (some of) the new cards & spells

(Note that this section is in NO way a full list of all the thirty new cards. I’ll update the official Strategy Guide after having played the expansion some weeks so that the new information I tell you can be as accurate as possible.)

If you can, get at least two (or even more – make extensive use of Fire / Daemon or Fire / Firelord, when available, to quickly bump up your fire elements) Fire / Diablos on the deck. They will be able to strengthen each other very easily. In the following screenshot, I’ve brought five of them to the deck and used their “Diabolic Path” spell to strengthen / heal them in a round-robin fashion:

For example, I’ve cast this spell six times on the third Diablo (just over Grim Reaper); this is why it has the strength of 18 (instead of the default 6) and still pretty high HP.

(Note that I’ve cheated a bit in order to make this screenshot: I’ve edited the “LEVEL” attribute in cards/diablo.inf so that it has the level 1 in order to be able to quickly take a screenshot).

If you don't have the necessary Fire elements to go for mass-Diablos, you may still want to use this ability with any other Fire creature. I recommend the now-healthier Cerberus to be concurrently used with the spell - you can quickly (in 4-5 turns) make it a REALLY powerful, deadly card because of its attacking three opposing cards at the same time.

If you plan to / can (for example, the enemy doesn’t have spells like Life / Gods Wrath or cards like Life / Paladin with both its quick Exorcizm spell and tripled damage to Undead (Death) cards to quickly get rid of your low-level Undeads if you use the abilities I’ll explain now to summon / create them) go the mass-Undead way.

One way to do this is Death / Black Mage’s “Extract Soul” spell to quickly transfer a non-Undead creature to a Death / Ghost with 15 health. This is, incidentally, a very commonly used strategy of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) of the game. Sometimes, I find, it's overdoing this because it transfers newly-placed, weaker cards (for example, Air / Nymph) to Ghosts even if it could still use the abilities of these cards for some 2-3 rounds at least.

Alternatively, with Death / Necromancer, using its “Dark summon” spell, you can populate the slots with Death / Zombies. This is a lot cheaper (costs only 2 Death elements as opposed to their original, 4 price) than summoning it from your cards (if they're available at all).

If you, in any way (for example, by using the above-explained abilities to summon / transfer cards or just go the traditional way), you can use the, with several Death cards in play, VERY useful and cheap Death / Undead Swarm spell to instruct your undeads to hit their targets twice in the same turn. Again, it's a very useful spell if you go mass-Undead!

Of course, going mass-Undead can be pretty risky if the enemy has spells like Life / Gods Wrath and, if you "only" use (low-level) Death / Zombies and/or Death / Ghosts, Earth / Quicksands. However, changing your cards to (pretty healthy) Ghosts can be a good idea when they, otherwise, would be killed in the next round OR they're very weak and you don't need their abilities any more. Just remember that all attacks on Ghosts will also do some damage to yourself - use them with care (for example, together with Water / Ice Guard to decrease the damage done to the owner by 50%)!

Earth / Python is also VERY-VERY useful, both its default, always-effective ability to quickly decrease the attack strength of the opposite card and its "Suffocate" ability, with which you can quickly kill any enemy card with health less than 6. This, as with Fire / Diablo's, as has already been seen, also VERY good Diabolic Path, doesn't require any elements to use. This card should be one of your most often used cards - particularly if your opponent makes extensive use of Earth / Forest Spirit (original HP: 3; that is, less than 6). You can get rid of the latter cards at once with Python.

Water / Scylla is useful, particularly if you play the AI and it extensively uses this card. Because of a bug? in the AI, it'll continuously be healing itself (even if you only damage it for, say, 2, in a turn, it will quickly re-heal itself for 5), which means it will very quickly increase your Water elements. In these cases, what I recommend is letting the card on the board (don't kill it quickly) so that you constantly receive a LOT of Water elements because the constant re-healing. Just put a card not taking (much) damage from the card in the opposing slot: Water / Ice Wizard (because it only takes 1 damage from Water creatures), Earth / Forest Spirit or the new Life / Etherial.

Water / Kraken is very-very useful – it delivers damage in the following way. If the card opposing it has empty slot on neither on the left nor on the right side, it’ll deliver 10 extra damage to the creature (that is, it'll receive 17 damage by default). If the opposing card has an empty slot on its right, it’ll be immediately be shifted in there (after having been hit by your card) and, therefore, if you have a card in the opposing slot (that is, on the right of your Kraken), it'll also attack the card (instead of the enemy owner) in the same round.

Water / Tython can be a good alternative to other means of healing your cards, particularly if you need a healing up to 15 HP's. Note that you MUST have at least one free slot on the board for this to work - as opposed to most alternative mass-healing means, which aren't card abilities but spells themselves.

The card itself costs 7 Water elements and the Disperse ability (which does the healing) costs another 2. That is, you can have at most four of your cards to be healed for 9 Water elements, which is quite a bargain if you take the price / performance ratio of other healing spells (Earth / Revie, Earth / Restructure (price: 6, +3 HP and 6 healing) or the new Life / Cure Wounds (price: 6; heals up to 6 HP's but not severely damaged cards, which receive no HP at all) and Life / Eternal Light (price: 8 Life + losing 3 Death elements; healing: 5 + causing 5 damage to enemy undead cards) into account. Of course, if you have all your slots filled (no place for an additional Tython) and/or don't need that much HP's and/or you have a Life / Chimera on the board (which, as is well known, halves the price of all spells), you may still want to prefer the latter spells.