Pixel Parties
Stellan & Friends
Type: Creatures
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Play Style: Swarm
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Difficulty: Easy
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Consistency: 3/5
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Power: 2/5
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Recovery: 3/5
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Protection: 4/5
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Versatility: 5/5
Flood the board with masses of lv 0 Creatures to chip away at your opponent with annoying status effects, slow-running but massive damage effects, or just protect yourself from whatever they might throw at you to buy time!
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Sit behind a sheer endless wall of Creatures, with any damage your opponent throws at you potentially just letting you summon even more, until your opponent can no longer keep up with your overwhelming advantage!
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Your goal isn't to race your opponent to massive damages or other win conditions - it's to outgrind them over time, to have an answer for anything they might do in your big toolbox of utility lv 0 Creatures, and to eventually hammer the last nail in their coffin, when they've already all but given up...
How to use the Deck
The main Hero and center point of this deck is Stellan, the Calm Cat. He lets you summon up to 3 lv 0 Creatures from your hand once per turn when he is affected by an opponent's card/effect or takes any damage. This has the obvious application of flooding your board, but it goes a little further than that: Stellan is one of very few effects that reliable let you summon Creatures during your opponent's turn - something you can take advantage of with really annoying on-summon effects like Icy Slime to apply a Freeze in the middle of their turn and disrupt them potentially very hard!
The obvious weakness of this strategy is how reactive Stellan is; he needs to be hit or take damage to trigger, and if you want to go for the disruption play, that needs to happen during your opponent's turn. So what if your opponent just ignores him and goes for your other Heroes first?
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Well, one of your other Heroes, Lord Mithuru, who's here to allow the use of powerful Double Spells (Spells with 2 Spell Schools) with his effect, has the Stealth Ability, meaning he can't be targeted by lv 1 or lower Attacks/Spells while you have other possible Hero targets. That helps a bit, but isn't foolproof; it doesn't protect from Creatures most of all, and it also only protects from Attacks/Spells up to lv 1, so something like a Critical Strike could easily focus him and take him out.
Also, that's just one of your other Heroes; your last Hero, Elana, who's here for card draw and cycling, has no built-in protection at all!
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So how do you make sure Stellan gets hit first?
With Martyry! Martyry lets you redirect a single damage source to the user, and Stellan just so happens to be able to use it with the Support Magic 1 he starts with. Your opponent always has to be wary that their Attacks/Spells will get redirected to Stellan thanks to the threat of Martyry potentially being in your hand, and with Elana being able to mulligan your entire hand every turn and drawing you additional cards with her Creativity, chances are, you'll find a Martyry every turn!
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In addition to forcing your opponent to damage Stellan, you also run the Ability Performance, which can level up any other Ability for the cost of 50 damage to that Hero. You don't even care that much about the level-up, likely to Stellan's Leadership, but the 50 damage are the perfect enabler to get 3 free Creatures during your own turn!
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The deck has 2 big weaknesses: For one, if Stellan gets killed early, like being bursted by a high-damage deck specialized in single-target-damage, you are on the back foot. You don't automatically lose from that position, with your large variety of utility Creatures, you can always try to come back. But it's gonna be hard.
Luckily, it is possible to protect Stellan from being bursted by summoning Winged Haressassin before your opponent gets the chance to burst you. Unless the deck specialized in high single target damage can also clear the protective Creature first, Stellan will be safe!
The second weakness is the fact that Stellan, like all Heroes, only has 3 Support Zones. If these already have Creatures in them, he can't summon any new ones.
To deal with that, you run the Ability Occultism, allowing you to once per turn sacrifice a Creature to deal some damage to an enemy target - another case where the cost is actually a big benefit for the deck. And if you need to get all Zones cleared, there's also Mass Routing, clearing the board of all Creatures (thus also wiping enemy Creature decks) and giving out massive card draw per Creature removed.
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Lastly, about the Creatures you will summon. The most important one to apply pressure is Sentient Bomb Golems. It does nothing on its own, but at the end of each turn, it brings out a copy of itself, and once 3 are assembled, they explode and kill any one target. Bringing a copy of the Golems out can instantly apply a lot of pressure and force the opponent to prioritize dealing with it. However, the Golems can only bring out copies to the Support Zones of the same Hero, meaning if you summon one with Stellan, you'll have to clog up all his Zones if you want to make them explode. It's better to use one of your other Heroes and spend an Action to summon a Bomb Golems the "normal" way.
Stellan's main targets are Winged Haressassin, that can redirect damage to itself to prevent Stellan from getting bursted, Icy Slime, that Freezes a target on-summon and can slow down the opponent a lot, and especially Bomb Mite, which explodes at the start of your turn and deals AoE damage, but if it gets killed by the opponent, it will explode and hit all your Heroes instead. Normally, Bomb Mite is a very risky Creature, requiring a lot of effort to keep alive through the opponent's next turn. But Stellan can summon it during the opponent's turn, in reaction to getting hit (and thus potentially in reaction to your opponent already using all his damage sources for the turn). So it appears on the board when your opponent is already out of options to deal with it - and can easily survive until the start of your turn. A nasty little guy!