Any tips on how to defeat monster faction opponents? I can defeat the other factions with more or less ease but monster guys seem impossible. They throw at you tons of matching cards or cards that draw more cards from their deck and then they have 4 or 5 special lvl 10 cards and scorch cards. It's just impossible to win with even a decent northern deck at the beginning.
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Well to be clear I'm not really at the beginning, I'm in Novigrad and level 10 already, have a good northern deck with a few tricks up my sleeve already but no hero cards, special cards, scorch or anything fancy like that. THat's what I meant.
As was said already, frost is your friend when fighting monsters. Commander's Horn can also be extremely useful to help make up for the - absurdly unfair seeming, at first - monster tactics.
But aside from that, most of the time when playing against a monster deck the key is to get them to over-commit in the first round and get them to burn a lot of resources while you build yours up for the later rounds. There are a couple of ways to do that:
1. Spy cards - The monster players usually go nuts in the first round anyway, hitting you with everything but the kitchen sink - if you're going to lose, then dump all the spy cards at them you can, and get your hand size up.
2. Medic cards + Decoys: Medics let you get cards back from your discard pile. That means that you can afford to play some big cards in the first round, forcing the monster player to match you - then, in the second round, you play your medics and get those cards back. If you have decoys, this gets even better - you can use the decoy to put the medic card back into your hand, the cards you recovered from the discard pile stay in play, and you get to play the medic card again. (obviously, this only works if you played a bunch of valuable cards in the 1st round - but you want to do that, to get the enemy to use up some of his good stuff)
I actually had a sequence last night where, in the 3rd round, I found myself with a medic and a decoy in my hand, and a second medic card in the discard pile from a previous round, along with some other strong cards. It went like this:
- Play a medic, recover a regular unit card from the discard pile.
- Use a decoy to get the medic back.
- Play the medic again, this time recovering the second medic card from the discard pile.
- Play the second medic, and recover one more regular unit card from the discard pile
In effect, what was one decoy and one strength 5 medic became something like 24 points worth of units.