MMDOC Raising Elo for Beginner’s Guide

MMDOC Raising Elo for Beginner’s Guide by arenoar

Hi my name is Arenoar and I got in to this game like 2-3 weeks ago. I have played MTG competitively and some shadow Era. I found out about this game when it was played at Dreamhack and wanted to try it out. When I started browsing the forums, I had a hard time finding a beginners guide so it was alot of trial and error. All the decks posted. I didn’t have any cards for and didn’t want to spend a fortune, since I was just testing the game to see if it was something for me. After some weeks now, I love the game, and have had alot of fun with it. Therefore I thought I would try to write a bit about how I approached it and how I raised my ELO. In 3 weeks I have went from 0 to 1200 ELO. I have used different decks at different stages in ELO.

This is NOT a bragging post about how awesome I am, and if you do like I have then you are golden. These are the things I have experienced in the last couple of weeks, and I’m sure that there are other people alot more experienced than me, but as wrote earlier I had a hard time finding good guides to raise ELO and what works on a low budget. Therefore i wanted to share the way I did it.

I started with the necropolis deck, it looked somewhat like black in Magic the Gathering and thought it would suit my playstyle well.
The decklist changed a bit after I got more cards but it looked something like this:

Hero:
Seria, Seeker of lost souls

Events:
a mix of:
Market of Shadow
Day of Fortune

Creatures:
4 wretched ghouls
4 Lingering Ghosts
4 Neophyte Lich
4 Lamasu
x Vampire knights ( Prioritized lamasu over Vampire knights)
4 Plauged Zombies
x Archlich (Put more in as I got them until I had 4)
2 Vengeful Spectres
4 Sea Elf Archer
x Fate Spinner (put them in as I got them)
x Putrid Lamasu (Went up to 2 after I got them but didn’t put in any more since I didn’t want to get to heavy on might and large cost creatures)
x Lesser Air elemental (Started with 4 and removed them as I got Lamasu and Vampire Knights)

Spells:
4 Refreshing Spring (Actually really liked this card since it’s a cheap Combat trick)
x Icy Weapon (Started with 3 and removed that as I opened more removal)
1 Geyser (As I was fortunate enough to open)
x Soul Reavers (Put more in as I got them and removed Icy Weapons for them)
x Shadow Images (Put them in as I was lucky to get multiple from boosters)

Fortunes:
4 Campfires
2 Arcane Academy (Later went down to 1 as I got more removal)
3 Stone of Enlightenment

I Tried out both “No Rest for the Wicked” and “Mass Grave” but non of them felt that strong and was removed quickly. I Also got a “Curse of the Netherworld”, but did not put it in due to it being too harsh on spellpower.
This is not an amazing deck by any means, but it got me alot of wins in the beginning. I used this deck until I was about lvl 10. the deck is pretty straight forward. Put down your dudes and try to run faster than your opponent. With 4 Refreshing Spring I tried to put 1 creature in every lane and use the combat trick to get a beneficial combat and save removal for the bigger threats. The hardest thing with the deck is managing when to lvl up might/spell or fortune. But normally I went up to 4 might fast, then went up to 3 spell and started drawing until I needed the 4 spellpower to remove something.

I kept buying reinforcement packs whenever I had the gold for it. I never bought the 2 card packs since I felt there was not much value in them and I still feel that they should not be bought. Saving up for a reinforcement pack seems to be the best choice.

After hitting lvl 10 I used my seals to buy a Heroic Box and spent some money to buy “the box” and “the serious box” After this I got a decent pool and was lucky enough to get Kat’s Grand Finale and Shaar.
This i when I changed my strategy a bit. I had been playing my old deck in tournaments wich was a really bad call since I could only get Tier 5 and the number of matches it took was no way near benneficial to what I would have gotten in gold for just playing in regular duals. I built a Shaar deck and started buy only heroic packs so that I could get the achivement for owning all the heroes.
My Shaar deck looked like this:

Hero:
Shaar, Invoker of the Skies

Events:
4 Week of Knowledge
1 Celebtrations

Creatures:
2 Enraged Cyclops

Spells:
3 fog Veil
3 Earthquake
4 Stone Shield
4 insect Swarm
4 cyclone
4 Armageddon (started out with 3 and 1 more earthquake wich worked fine, but got the last armageddon in the Infernal Pit and changed it)

Fortunes:
3 Blood-shaman hut
4 Goldpile
4 Arena
4 Altar of Shadows
4 Campfire
2 Observatory
4 Stone of Enlightenment
1 Kat’s Grand Finale

This is pretty much the list that Keadlash posted on the forums with some minor tweaks and it works amazing. I know alot of people HATE Shaar, OTK, but for raising ELO it is amazing. It’s a hard deck to play in the beginning, but once you get the hang of it it’s really good. I normally tried to draw as many cards as possible the first 3-4 turns and when I was around 6-10 life I started using my damage prevention spells and clear the board. Knowing when to used spells like Stone Shield and when to use Altar of Shadows is really key in this deck since alot of people atm play dispell. But I got alot of achievements with this deck including 10 match win streak. And started using it in tournaments where i would normally be able to hit around 150 elo and stop there.

I played this deck alot and pretty fast got up to around 1000 elo. I messed around with other decks, but always got back to Shaar after playing something else for like 2-3 Matches. I did not have Nergal, Lord of Pestillence nor did I have Siegfried, so I felt Shaar was the best way to go. The only other deck that I used, wich was kinda good, was a Kelthor deck, but aggro decks without at least 2-3 Dark Assassins is just kinda subpar imo. So therefore I want to play the deck that I could play with all the right cards.

After I played this deck for around 10 lvl’s I was stuck around 900-1050 Elo and it seemed to not work as well when I faced of against higher Elo players. They were more prepared for Shaar and had multiple dispells and the Xorm/Garant match-up was a nightmare since discard really hurts this deck. But then I opened Nergal and Switched over to it.

The deck I ended up playing, and are still playing is:

Hero:
Nergal, Lord of Pestillence

Events:
4 Week of Taxes
1 Market of Shadows

Creatures:
4 Wretched Ghoul
4 Lingering Ghost
4 Neophyte Lich
1 Dark Assassin
4 Lamasu
4 Vampire Knight
4 Plagued Zombie
3 Pao Deathseeker
2 Fate Spinner (still have only gotten 2)
4 Archlich
2 Putrid Lamasu (will change these when I get more Fate spinners, Pao, DA or Banshees)
1 Atropos, Weaver of the Dead
1 The Banshee
1 Ghost Dragon (Also want to remove this for Fate spinners, Pao, DA or Banshees)

Spells:
2 Dispell Magic
4 Earthquake
4 Insect Swarm
1 Mass Regeneration (Dunno what to do about this. It’s good in the mirror but 1 is too random so wouldn’t tell people to use it. And I can’t find room for more)

This deck is really strong and have taken me from 1000 Elo to 1200. It has 1 really bad match-up in Prison Siegfried and Orianna can be tough, but I feel that most other match-ups are in your favor. If someone wants I can write a more detailed guide on the deck and it’s match-ups, but it seems like there are alot of posts about Nergal.

A couple of key points that hopefully some will get from this is.
You can get to high Elo without spending a fortune as long as you always try to take a look at your collection and see what you can do with it.(I know that 50 Euro is alot for some people, but I feel I could have bought only “the Serious box” and still reached the same result if I had a bit more patience) This was just the route that was given to me by the cards I opened. Had I opened Siegfried early with some cards that might have been my choice or Xorm and 4 Ravagers that might have been better. There are many routes to high Elo as long as you figure out what you can do with your cards.
In the end a couple of things I have experienced after having played for a short while:

Never use more that 56 cards. You always want to draw your core cards and using more cards lowers your chance of drawing these them.

Always try to think ahead when you lvl your heroes stats(might, spellpower ect.) Drawing on turn 1 might seem fine because you will not benefit from that extra might atm, but on turn 3 when you need to use your heroes ability, instead of lvl’ing a resource, you might get a huge tempo loss for the small card advantage you got on turn 1.

Tempo is key. From my experience tempo advantage is key in the meta atm. Card advantage is important, but tempo seems even more important.

That’s all, and hopefully someone will gain something from this brick of text. And looking forward to playing with you in the future:-)

Arenoar

PS. English is not my first language so please let me know if there are any horrible mistakes:-)

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