Skeleton Fortress

[vlad3theimpaler]

With the Druid vs. Necromancer expansion finally in my hands, the card I'm most interested in building around is the Altar of Skulls.  2 direct poison damage to each living creature and finite life seems pretty awesome, but it will take a while to get the 8 skull tokens to get it active, while keeping it and the token-placing cleric in play long enough to take effect.

My solution?  Build a fortress!

The idea is to wall of a section of the arena (I'm thinking maybe the 2x2 area containing my starting corner), and use it to protect my cleric and altar while I'm powering it up.

That provides me with a little defense, but every proper fortress needs to have some offense, too, so I'll summon a couple Skeleton Archers, and steal a page from the Warlord's book to conjure up a pair of Archer's Watchtowers to let them shoot over my walls.

That would leave 1 space left in my 2x2 fort for another zone exclusive conjuration.  I could use it for a graveyard, perhaps, but I also like the idea of dropping an Idol of Pestilence in there to increase the amount of direct damage I'm dealing per round.

So the fort should look like this:
 _ _
l i w
l w a

(i=Idol of Pestilence, a=Altar of Skulls+Cleric, w=Archer's Watchtower+Skeleton Archer)

Once I have the walls up and start filling out the rest of the fort, the plan is to use Mort and the Reassemble spell (maybe even bound to a Mage Wand) to keep the walls (and archers if the other player has a way to hit them) intact as long as possible, while building up some more skellies inside the fort to be ready if/when the other player manages to break through.

So, I have two questions:
1) Does this strategy seem remotely viable?
2) What should I include in my spellbook to offset the weaknesses of my plan? (Golems/ other non-living creatures, mirror match against another necromancer, etc.)

[sdougla2]

I'm skeptical of the type of fortress style of play you describe. It's expensive and action intensive to setup, and for that expense you get very little comparative defensive or offensive ability. As soon as your opponent gets through 1 of the 4 walls you need to put up, they can get into your defended area and start killing you with way more stuff than you have, or wipe out your creatures. If you enclose a large area, it will be too expensive to place the walls, and you'll either have nothing else by the time your opponent starts bashing them down or your opponent will be way ahead on econ. If you enclose a small area, you give your opponent the entire board to fill with zone exclusives while you're trapped and have nowhere to expand. There may be a way to pull off this type of wall based fortress play, but I haven't seen it work out for anyone yet. Now, it may work better to cut the board in half with walls, as you'd only need 3 in that case, and that would be at least somewhat stronger than walling off a 2 by 2 region, but I still don't think it's generally a good idea for an opening.

Ranged creatures don't tend to be the best defensive creatures. Gorgon Archer and Stonegaze Basilisk can be summoned early in a defensive play because you can use Teleport to let them get attacks in, their attacks limit your opponent's ability to apply pressure to you, and their reasonably resilient for their cost. Other ranged creatures aren't as good defensively. They tend to be terrible guards, do less damage than equivalently costed melee creatures, and be less resilient than equivalently costed melee creatures. If you can get up all of those walls and Archer's Watchtowers fast enough, they could certainly help you in theory, but I don't see a way to get everything going fast enough.

Alter of Skulls is also fairly situational, and I've kind of dismissed it due to how slow it is. It's worthless in the mirror match, and it's certainly underwhelming against Nonliving based play (Iron Golems, Devouring Jellies, and Whirling Spirits come to mind in addition to undead). I also have trouble seeing it as a good idea against aggressive few big plays. They'll put you under a lot of pressure before your Alter of Skulls starts paying off, and if it looks like it might become an issue for them, they can probably kill your Alter of Skulls in pretty short order. 2 buffed Steelclaws can tear it down in a turn on average. I can see it being better against econ focused creature spawnpoint based play and swarm based play, but I would need to see how that played out. You're still investing a fair amount in something that does nothing for several turns at minimum, and will take 8-9 turns to pay off if you can't kill any of your opponent's creatures. That's just incredibly slow to start seeing any return.

I would probably use an Iron Golem for defense if I wanted to build up to activating Alter of Skulls.

[barriecritzer]

how do you plan on dealing with teleport?

[sIKE]

how do you plan on dealing with teleport?

The walls would block LOS so only flying familiars would be a threat if the Teleport spell was bound to it. Now Blue Gremlin and Grey Wraith could just teleport in.

The main weakness here is to flyers. A big flyer would wreak havoc during the build up time. Also once the Altar comes out, any opponent worth their salt will stop bringing out weenies that would speed up your process.

Once Gravikor is released the anti-flying tech will make this kind of strategy much more viable.

The funny thing is this strat will be real weak against a Warlord and Akiro's Hammer.

[Fentum]

Given the current card mix, I can't see a fortress style working. Too many ways to fly over or knock down the walls, and too many positional spells. But try it out and see how it goes.

[vlad3theimpaler]

Thanks for the responses, guys.

I got my first game with the new expansion in this weekend, with my friend and I playing the default spellbooks.
I ended up trying a mini-version of my fortress strategy with the default book, and it sort of worked, but the game was ridiculously long.

I brought out an Acolyte on turn 1, then a Libro Mortuos.  On turn 2 I cast the the Altar in the Acolyte's zone so that she could immediately start putting tokens on it, and brought out a Death Ring to speed up my casting.

I underestimated just how quickly the druid's vines could spread across the map, especially with the Vine Tree being used to put them out faster.  Fortunately for me, my opponent inadvertently helped me protect the Altar by putting out a Bloodspine Wall in the back right corner of my side of the map.  He used it to yank zombies through with his Thornlasher, and had a Vince Snapper waiting for the victims, too.  He did manage to take out a zombie or two that way, but the wall also kept his creatures from moving into my area, too.  I put up two Wall of Bones to cover the the spaces in the back left and back center, and used them to hold of an opposing Kralathor and Raptor Vine for several turns, chucking Reassembles at them when necessary.

I knew that Kralathor was going to come bursting in like the Kool-Aid man before long, so on my side of the walls, I brought out Shoggoth-Zora and fed him a crawler or two in preparation.  I had Shoggoth-Zora guard before Kralathor came through, so that the hit came on someone that could take it and hit back.  I then put the 3rd wall of bones up where the destroyed one had been to buy a couple turns before the raptor vine could follow him through, and hit the isolated Kralathor with everything I had.

The delaying action worked, and I got the Altar activated, which was the beginning of the end for the druid.  He made a final rush at me using Togorah and every other medium-large creature he could get out, but the accumulated damage from the Altar and my creatures worked to systematically destroy any threats, and a Zombie Frenzy gave me the last push I needed to end the game.

Observations:
The Altar was amazing once it was activated, but my inability to kill any opposing creatures early on meant that it took a looong time to get going.  I still think that a build around the Altar could be doable, but I need to speed it up significantly if I want to be able to finish games in a remotely reasonable amount of time.

Death Ring is great.  In addition to the obvious stuff like the actual creatures, it also applies to Reassembles and the spell from the Deathshroud Staff, since they're necro spells.  And with one or more spawnpoints, you make back the invest on it really quickly.

If I have a full 6 Wall of Bones in the spellbook, it might be more action-efficient to let the other guy knock them down and then replace them, instead of trying to keep them up using Reassemble.  On average, Reassemble will remove 6 damage, but a completely new wall will have 12 health for only 2 more mana.

Without the Archer's Watchtowers, I never tried bringing out any Skeleton Archers, since they don't work well with walls without the towers.  I'll definitely have to try that next time.

All game, I was really wishing I had more mana.  That was probably due to me being excited to play with my new toys and playing spells just because I could, but I'll definitely have to keep that in mind for future games.