Let's build a brand new Pixel Parties deck in a few steps!

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Step 1: Find your win condition!

That can be an alternative win condition like a special card effect or milling out your opponent's deck, but in most cases, it will be damage. Enough damage to defeat all your opponent's Heroes, that is. Find your preferred way to do so!

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Generally speaking, you have 3 big categories of options:

 

 Attacks  can pile on huge damage against single targets, allowing you to take out individual enemy Heroes as early as turn 2 to severely slow down the opponent. The downside however is that Attack-based decks usually consume a lot of resources to land that decisive killing blow. Damage boosting cards, Equipments, sometimes several Attack cards that get used in succession... Basically, you will need a strong draw engine to make Attack decks work, keep that in mind!

Heroes you can use for one-shot style Attack builds include Darge, who lets you discard a bunch of "Arrow" Artifacts when he attacks to increase his damage per Arrow, with no cap, Toras, who gains double bonuses from Equipment Artifacts and starts with Fighting 2, allowing you to go Fighting 3 on your first turn and start with a devastating Critical Strike that can easily reach 400+ damage, and Doq, who can double his own damage by guessing a card from your opponent's hand.

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Option 2: Destruction Magic focuses on dealing huge amounts of damage, but at a cost, or spread amongst your enemy's targets, making it much harder to pick off Heroes to slow your opponent down. There's 2 big "types" of Destruction decks, those being the spread damage and the recoil damage ones. Spread damage just deals massive amount of damage via cards like Flame Avalanche or Chain Lightning to multiple targets at once, but they are bad at actually killing individual Heroes. Ideally, you will win the game on your third or fourth turn - but until that point, all your opponent's Heroes will still be alive, meaning they can play relatively uninterrupted. Recoil damage-based decks use cards like Phoenix Tackle, Victory Phoenix Cannon and Fire Bolts to deal the highest amounts of damage of any deck type, outscaling even Attack-based builds and easily one-shotting individual Heroes. But in return, they also deal substantial damage to your own Heroes! If you plan on using a recoil-based strategy, you will need to either start with 2 Heroes having Destruction Magic, so the first one just dying doesn't stop you, or you'll have to play a vast amount of Destruction Magic in your deck to set up your other Heroes. Probably both. It's a very fast-paced play style, but also risky, as you can burn out half-way. Good Heroes for the recoil play style include Ida who starts with Destruction Magic at level 2, but can't hit multiple targets with the same Spell, and Bartas, who makes single-target Destruction Spells of a lower level than his Destruction Magic level hit a second target. You got a 300 damage nuke against a single Hero? Well now you nuke 2 Heroes! But the recoil is also applied twice...

The AoE build on the other hand is really easy to build around. Any Hero that start with Destruction Magic can be used as your dedicated spellcaster. For example, if you choose to run Tarleinn as your spellcaster, you get a free heal every turn. If you choose Dante, you get a built-in draw effect, or if you choose Thorad, you get the tankiest Destruction Magic Hero at 600 HP.

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Option 3 is by far the most diverse one: Creatures. There's a variety of Creature-based archetypes and strategies, so rather than go over all of them, pick an archetype and try to stick to it. Find the Creatures within the archetype that can deal damage and find ways to get them out and enable them. Generally speaking, most Creature decks will love to have Alice in their Hero lineup, as she can deal free damage every turn scaling with the number of your Creatures.  If your deck can spam Creatures out (like for example Loyals or Guardian Beasts), you might not even need an in-archetype damage source, Alice alone might already suffice!

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Additionally, there are some cards that enable unique win conditions (like Doom Clock) or let you set up a continuous damage source that will passively burn out your opponent's Heroes, allowing you to just stall. There's even an entire strategy around just healing yourself and dealing damage off that! These kinds of strategies can be built around with the same building blocks we'll look at in this guide.

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Once you have decided on your win condition, you should also immediately pick your first Hero to go along with it (use the examples listed above, or find your own picks in the Card Database!).

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Step 2: Your Hero Lineup

Now that you've decided on how you want to win, and you already have your main carry, you need to decide on your remaining 2 Heroes. For this guide, Heroes will be divided into 3 broad categories: Carries, Supporters and Utility.

Carries are Heroes that actively let you advance your game plan by being able to cast Spells, summon Creatures or deal damage inherently like Alice. Your main Hero from Step 1 falls into this category. They will often be your opponent's top priority to take out, as they are the biggest threat on the board. Thus, running multiple carries can be powerful in giving your opponent a lot of threats to deal with while providing you with backup spellcaster should one get taken out early. You should almost never run more than 2 carries though, as you need some kind of draw support Hero to not get completely out-resourced!

Supporters are the backbone of your deck. They allow you to draw cards, access your Potion Deck, gain extra Gold, search for combo pieces... anything to get your deck rolling! It is recommended to always run at least 1 Supporter, and decks with 2 will have extremely high consistency and access to resources. Prime examples include Nicolas for access to Potions, which are the strongest card type in the game, Semi or Güldefaber for passive and active Gold gain (Güldefaber is much tankier, but Semi's passive Gold gain is higher), Elana for card cycling, Kazena or Willy for raw draw power, or Madaga for card searches every single turn. Picking the right supporter for your deck is crucial, as it will allow you to get your game plan going in the first place.

I recommend taking the time to look through the Heroes with the Wealth, Leadership, Alchemy, Luck and Creativity Abilities and see if there's one there that fits your deck particularly well. For example, Ingo is a much stronger Gold supporter than Semi or Güldefaber - but only in decks that specialize in spamming Creatures.

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Utility Heroes are the "everything else" pile. Heroes that can heal you, have access to utility Spells via Support Magic or Magic Arts, boost the damage your other Heroes or Creatures deal, can lower the levels of Spells and so on and so forth.

Effects that either help you stay alive, disrupt your opponent with effects like status or hand destruction, or combo with/enable your strategy at large. Somewhat generic examples would include Nao, who can once per turn use a Support Spell for free and "overheal" allies to give them shields for durability, Arnold, who boosts the damage of your Creatures, and Beato, who, while she can be a carry in her own right, also has access to a wide variety of Reactions and Surprises to keep your opponent on their toes.

Utility Heroes are in general the least important/least common type in a deck, so unless you find a niche you definitely want filled (like free heals/shields to stay alive), you might want to just run a second Carry or Supporter instead.

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After choosing all your Heroes, also make sure to add their Starting Abilities to the "Starts in Play" section of your deck!

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Step 3: Your Action Cards

That means Attacks, Spells, Creatures - anything you spend your Actions on. These are usually your main way to deal any damage or advance the board state, so you want to be sure to have "enough" of them. You get 1 Action per turn usually, so you'll want to run enough Action Cards to have 1 ready each turn to use. Cards that are "additional Actions" obviously don't count towards that. Depending on your Supporters, the number of Action Cards you'll want to run differs a lot. If you have ways to recycle cards to reuse them, you won't need as many in your deck. If you have ways to search cards often, be it via Potions or Crestina as your Supporter, you also won't need as many, since you're guaranteed to find one every turn anyway. Make sure that you always run enough Action Cards to be able to deal at least 1800 damage total over the course of the game.

The average Hero will start with 400 HP, make that 3 Heroes and you're at 1200 damage minimum you'll need to deal. But there are also Heroes that are tankier, like Güldefaber or Thorad, there's times where you need to "waste" damage on killing Creatures, there's revival effects, healing... the list goes on. Decks with the ability to recycle cards from discard as well as decks centered around continuous damage sources (like Creature decks) don't have to worry about this, they have a theoretically infinite damage potential.

But if you run a Destruction Magic deck, and all your Spells combined can only deal 1000 damage because you figured Spells weren't important ... you'll get in trouble.

Note that most decks theoretically have tools that would allow them to deal nigh-infinite damage. Destruction decks can Burn enemy Heroes, which might deal infinite damage over time if the opponent has no way to heal it. Attack-based decks have damage scaling with the attacking Hero's Attack stat, which can be increased in many ways for not infinite damage potential, but a lot.

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If you build your deck around an archetype, look through the archetype-specific cards (you can filter in the database). Look through them and find the ones that best fit your intended strategy. Attacks and Destruction Spells are usually very stand-alone, they aren't dependent on other cards or combos. So you can choose them relatively freely.

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Step 4: Abilities

Be it additional copies of Fighting or Spell Schools to be able to use higher-level Attacks/Spells, or supporting Abilities like Leadership or Wealth - you'll want to add some Abilities to your main deck to allow yourself to strengthen your Heroes as the game goes on. Personally, I like to run ~8 copies of Leadership in my main deck (fewer if I start with Leadership on my Heroes). It's an incredible Ability in the early game for an extra shot to find important cards, in the mid-game for big mulligans, and in the late game for free extra draws, and unlike Wealth or Alchemy, it's always good, no matter if you have ways to spend your Gold or if you still have cards in your Potion Deck. For Fighting or Spell Schools, the number you want to run depends on the levels of your important Spells, what level your carry/carries start at, and whether or not you want to be able to set up a second/third Hero as a possible spellcaster in a pinch. Even a Supporter that has no Spell School Ability at all can be turned into a carry by attaching 3 Destruction Magics to it over the course of 3 turns!

Personally, for decks that use lv 3 Attacks/Spells, I like to run ~8-10 copies of my Fighting/Spell School. That's quite a lot, and you'll draw excess copies as bricks at times, but that's what Leadership (and your Supporters) are for - shuffling them back to draw new cards, or just drawing/finding better cards.

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One Ability I'd like to give a special spotlight is Performance. It costs you 50 HP to attach to a Hero, but it can level up any Ability the Hero already has! Whether you need a third Leadership to start drawing free cards every turn, or an extra copy of Destruction Magic to finally drop that big lv 3 nuke Spell, Performance can give it to you. It can never be the first level of an Ability though. If you have no Leadership in play yet, Performance can't become Leadership. I'd strongly recommend using it in decks that don't mind or even want to take chip damage, like decks revolving around Stellan, who triggers when taking damage, or decks running the aforementioned healer Hero Nao.

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Step 5: "Goodstuff"

This encompasses Artifacts, Potions, but also some Spells. Particularly worth mentioning are the Artifacts Golden Ankh (revive a Hero for 1 turn), Dark Gear (steal a Creature), Beer, Tea, Coffee and Juice (heal negative status effects), The Yeeting (inflict self-damage to remove any non-Hero card on the board, including an Ability), Snow Cannon (Freeze a target for a turn), Magnetic Glove (search any card from deck), and Wheels (draw 3, discard 1 or draw 4, delete 2). Not all of these will fit into your deck, so pick the ones you think work best, and that you can actually afford. If you have a strong Gold engine, like Semi, or Ingo in a Creature spam deck, you may be able to afford around 15-20 Artifacts in your deck. This ratio is really dependent on your lineup as a whole and how much space you have even left in your 60 card deck. If you feel like you draw too many Artifacts in testing and don't have the Gold to afford them, or if you find yourself with massive excess Gold and have no way to spend it, you should return to this step and adjust how many Artifacts you run, and how expensive the Artifacts you run are.

In Attack-based decks specifically, you might also want to run damage-boosting Artifacts, like Darge's Arrows or Equipments to boost the Attack stats of your Carry. Make sure you have the Gold generation necessary to afford these! Treasure Chest or Blood-Soaked Coin can help you if you don't find space in your Hero lineup for a dedicated Gold Supporter.

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After Artifacts, there's also Potions. There is never a reason to not have a Potion Deck. Even if you don't run Alchemy, your opponent might somehow give you cards or effects that will let you access the Potion Deck, so not having one would be a downside for no reason.

The Potion Deck always consists of 5-15 cards. Usually, you will draw exactly 1 card from this deck per turn, so the minimum of 5 is more than sufficient to last you a game in most cases (especially if you don't start with Alchemy and have to find the Ability in your main deck first). I'd recommend only going above 5 or maybe 6 if you have good ways to draw multiple Potions in one turn, like Potion of Greed or Alchemic Journal. All Potions are, as a baseline, powerful. They are the strongest card type in the game by a good margin. Highlights include Magnetic Potion (search any card from deck for free), Elixir of Quickness (draw 3 cards), Resuscitation Potion (revive one of your Heroes with 50 HP) and Acid Vial (150 damage that can't be reduced/negated), but in general, all Potions are good, either in general or in specific strategies, so looking through the Potions in the Card Database is definitely worth your time.

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Lastly in this section, we have utility Spells. That includes the Spells your Utility Hero (if you have any) will use, like healing Spells or status infliction, but also Reactions and Surprises. These are usually free to use and can be very powerful if used at the right moment, so looking through the Reactions and Surprises of a given Spell School might find you an ace in the hole. Worth mentioning are Divine Punishment (negates an opponent's activated Hero effect) and Booby Trap (free damage, potential Attack/Spell/Creature negation), Escape (prevents the user from dying) and Jump in the River (prevents the user from being targeted for a turn), and Chasing the Legend (returns a Creature to the hand when it's targeted).

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Step 6: Divine Gift

Lastly, there's a special subset of Attacks and Spells called Divine Gifts. These are exceptionally strong Spells with the caveat that you can only play one Divine Gift total per game. There's not very many of them, so you can look through them in the Card Database and try to find one that has an effect benefiting you and an associated Ability your deck can provide. Since you'll only ever be able to play a single copy of a Divine Gift, no matter what (even if it gets negated on activation), any copy past the first one you draw is completely dead. Personally, I usually only run 1 copy of my Divine Gift for that reason and use a search effect, like Magnetic Glove or Magnetic Potion, to find it if I don't draw into it. If the Gift is extremely powerful and brings your whole deck together, you can also opt to run up to the full 4 copies; effects like Leadership can always swap dead copies in your hand for new cards.

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Step 7: Finishing Touches

Now you have everything added to the deck. As a very last step, look over your whole list again. Maybe you find cards that are redundant now, after you found better cards in steps further down the line. Maybe you realized you need more, or less Gold, and want to swap out your Supporter accordingly.

After looking it through, you're now ready for a test game with the deck!

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But remember this: No deck will be perfect immediately. In Pixel Parties, even slight changes to your Hero lineup can drastically change how a deck should be built optimally, and it can take a lot of trial and error to find that perfect synergy between 3 Heroes and the cards to support them. Don't let that discourage you!

Should a game not go your way, should your win condition not come to fruition at all - try to analyze why. Had many dead Artifacts in hand? Maybe you need more Gold gain. Got a lot of unspent Gold? Maybe you need more/costlier Artifacts. Didn't deal much damage or summon many Creatures? Maybe you need more Action Cards. And so on and so forth.

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Good luck! May your decks be consistent and your draws lucky!