Introduction:

Hello everyone! I am JazzTheHackWabbit (or that used to be my online username before I got here) and if you are reading this, it means you reached the Data Center. Now, talking with people, this depends heavily on how proactive the guide is with Showing us the place. If you got one of the slackers (Aldorf the Saint Bernard, Feedo Speedo the Greyhound, or Rizen the Riesenschnauzer, to provide some widely known examples) or the psychopaths (Fearulice the übermutt, Panzer the Cane Corso, or Sir Emperor the Toy Poodle) you may consider yourself lucky to be here, reading this. In which case, Kudos to you! You may have already beaten some levels of The Warden.

The Warden:

For the uninitiated, let’s talk about The Warden: he is the easiest path to new cards and food for anyone who isn’t willing to go straight into PvP and test his or her luck by insulting someone’s mother so bad they surrender. Your Guide is bound to take you to the Warden’s room if asked to.

Playing against The Warden is a constant climb where both difficulty and rewards go up. When you beat a stage, you earn Good Boy Points equal to the stage numbera and proceed to the next stage. This rule doesn’t apply to boss fights, that have a tenfold multiplier to their rewards. For getting food, it is generally better to push as far as you can go due to the milestones, nut surrendering at certain stages for easier currency farming is encouraged by some authors, (some of them irredeemable faggots, in my humble gamer opinion). Given this guide won’t address strategies that go into the kind of stages where every victory gives you half a booster pack worth of GBP, and we are racing against the clock so you, dear reader, don’t starve.

Let’s start with the facts: The Warden is a Dumb Computer with Dumb Computer play patterns. This robot will fold to some strategies that would never work against real players. These are the weaknesses we aim to exploit.

For example, he refuses to attack against units that have Maul amongst their keywords, in an attempt to preserve his units from permanent stat reduction. He also sometimes wastes single target spells in units with Charmproof Collar, or mis-manages his other control resources like board wipes and spell counters. This makes climbing the Warden Ladder, rather easy if you build your deck around abusing these facts and others you will notice. Another thing is that The Warden never plays around the cards in your deck, because, unlike real players, he doesn’t know them. Meanwhile your adversary in a tournament will make an effort to figure out what you are playing to try and avoid your most powerful cards or win before you drop them, the Warden plays roughly the same against all strategies. Sure, he goes on the defensive if your agro deck is pummeling him, but he won’t avoid overextending against control, or save deny cards for key combo pieces.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

However, this doesn’t mean farming the warden is easy: Your deck needs to withstand radically different, if not always optimized, decks and playstyles. For this purporse, we aim for a midrange playstyle, or a tempo deck with a solid plan and hard-to-interact-with units. We want for our deck to be a perpetual motion machine despite the wrenches the Warden may and will throw at us. Meanwhile some players have found success with control, combo or aggro gameplans at certain stage intervals, a new player will find it easier to succeed with a solid and cheap deck used to abuse The Warden until stage fifteen or twenty.

The following cards included in the base collection should prove useful for getting you past the first, or even the second, boss fight.

Recommended Cards:

World-trotting Pittie: Solid 3/3 for 3 with Maul 1, a single WtP can stall a board for several turns unless the Warden summons something with 3 health and at least 3 attack, in which case he will conduct an attack with that unit in the hopes you block with the Pittie. Never do this unless that would mean you lose or are left with a life total that particular Warden deck can easily burn through.

Past Thor’s Ale-Man: one of the most decent statlines in the base set, not much to say, just a decent curve-filler.

Peckish Ness: A solid 1 drop that doubles as a decent turn 2 play that allows us to invest. Investing without big tempo loses is a big deal when our starting hand isn’t the best.

Din din dingo gone!: this card allows us to kill big treats, and it’s worth running if we are using other wild dog cards.

[…]

Afterword:

And that would be all, folks! We covered over 20 cards, we talked about the strategies they were involved it, and got some useful tips to abuse The Warden’s AI! All that’s left to do is arming yourselves and kicking his robotic ass! For this, I have a couple of useful links you may follow:

Check out my decklists for new players here!

Check out a list of the boss encounters you may find up to stage 40!

Check out my dating profile on Yodeler! (Only if you are a woman. I have hot springs in my pocket dimension.)