Poison Elemental x2
Upgrades: 53 hp, Lay Trap: Poison Cloud - 78 Nora

Toxic Anuran x2
Upgrades: 9 speed, 48 hp, Poison Cone 3, Ally: KF - 75 Nora

Boghopper Spitter x2
Upgrades: 11 speed, 36 hp, Poison 2 - 71 Nora

Tidemaster x2
Upgrades: 9 speed, 44 hp - 74 Nora

Massive Anuran x2
Upgrades: 9 speed, 57 hp, Ally: KF - 60 Nora

Sporegill x2
Upgrades: 9 speed, 36 hp, Poison Cloud 1 - 41 Nora

Garu Shaman x2
Upgrades: 9 speed, 52 hp, Heal Champion 3, Poison 2 - 74 Nora

Ranger Elite x2
Upgrades: 11 speed, 52 hp - 75 Nora

Elder Garu
Upgrades: 9 speed, 68 hp - 76 Nora

Poisonous Fumes x2
Marsh Song x2
Nature’s Wrath x2
Brambles x2
Thorn Collection
Herbal Antidote
Drown
Oaken Mace
Rejuventation Ring

(Note: All speeds listed include the KF half bonus)

This deck revolves around the inherent synergy of the KF and FS poison units. It gives you access to a ton of Ally units and a few very good targets for amplification, as well as a ton of map control. The main theme is obviously the poison synergy, and that can get pretty crazy - with 2 poison charges and all the amplification out a Poisonous Fumes spell can hit for 14 damage. Considering that you have 4 poison cloud champions as well as an excellent source of knockback in the Massive Anuran, you can do some incredible things on a major turn - Fumes + A cloud + 2x poison charge + massive leap will do about 44 damage to anything in the AOE 2, and only uses up 35 nora’s worth of expended resources. If you can stack clouds or Fumes on such a turn you can guarantee kills on multiple units at once. The biggest problem with this deck is poison resistance - it’s fairly plentiful. You have to be careful to keep some of your non-poison units out (you do have a good number), though you can usually still control Undead or Elementals with poison cloud abilities.

The Poison Elementals are your key champions, doing high poison damage with great stats and offering excellent AoE and board control from their clouds and traps. Their poison charge ability is also the best way to quickly boost the damage of your poisonous abilities and spells (it also adds 2 damage to the first tick of a DoT). The Toxic Anurans serve the role of your general all purpose champion - they hit pretty hard at range and up close with Ally: KF and their poison abilities, and aren’t too costly. They also do physical melee damage, making them very valuable against the many poison resistance champions you’ll face. The tidemasters are your prime amplification - they are fairly cheap and long ranged, so you don’t need to put them in harm’s way. They aren’t going to hit very hard (though you do have enough hoppers to get some surge), but the extra damage they give will add up. Tidal wave is also an excellent offensive AoE, and fuels your capability to drown.

The Boghopper Spitters and Garu Shamans are your main ranged attackers, both throwing down DoTs at range and hitting pretty hard with support out. The Spitters are fragile and have to be played cautiously - however, the Shamans are tanks, with solid defense (helped by the attack debuff) and the ability to heal they should be used on the front lines. The Sporegills are amazing for their cost, though they take a while to get into the fight. If you aren’t pressed, get them out immediately - they’re so cheap that they’re pretty much impossible to kill without them earning back their cost, and they amplify themselves and your other units as well. The final major component of the deck is the Massive Anurans, who provide knockback, which is super powerful when coupled with poison clouds and have incredibly cost efficiency with Ally (62 hp, 13 damage for 60 nora). The Ranger Elites and Elder Garu are essentially filler, and can be replaced by any solid champions that don’t do poison damage - their main role is helping out against resistance units and killing shrines.

Spellwise, Poisonous Fumes is your keystone, dealing potentially huge amounts of damage and controlling the battlefield excellently. K’thir Forest gives us access to a bunch of solid AoEs, which is very helpful when dealing with poison resistance and in general - also, with 2 Brambles and 2 Poisonous Fumes you have excellent board control. Herbal Antidote serves its normal purpose mostly - it can also give you poison immunity on demand, which can be very important if you’re blanketing the field in poison clouds. The Marsh Songs give us the nora generation to compete in long games. Drown is our final spell, and may seem a weird choice with no water generation - however, with Tidal Wave it is very efficient and you can deal with the dead slot if you cannot use your Tidemasters. Following up our spells are 2 equips, who are in for general utility - Oaken Mace also lets you do physical damage with a poison unit if necessary.

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Kaervas Assistant Game Designer

Hello, PoxNora! How is it going? Do you like those new runes? Find any good combinations?

I wanted to take a moment to talk about storytelling. We have been telling all kinds of stories for as long as we’ve been able to talk. Before then, we were drawing them in the dirt (apologies to any anthropologists for the inaccuracy). Sense then, we’ve found a way to tell stories in every imaginable way. Stories have been told on paper, on stage, in music, on film and through the television (which is kinda like film that’s broadcast over the airwaves and through cable, but that’s when things get complicated). Just recently, we’ve come across a medium that can tell a story in ways we never really could: a medium where the reader can actively participate and see their actions take immediate effect on the narrative. I just wanted talk about video game storytelling and where it fits in a massively multiplayer world.

Storytelling in games is nothing new. I’m sure there are many of you who have stood in front of a white house with boarded windows. And I’m sure there are many more who have looked for your princess in another castle. In these, we control the protagonist directly. All of the story’s action comes from what we do. It’s a single person’s experience. There are some instances, especially with recent games, where two players are advancing the story, but the game usually ignores the second player. Also, the narrative usually has restriction placed on it. There is a goal, a resolution of conflict, that you are compelled to complete. You have to save the world from aliens or else the game won’t progress. But, what if you had a world that thousands of other players were interacting with at the same time? What if you had a world where you could never truly resolve the main conflict?

In a massively multiplayer game, you can’t put an end to the world’s conflict. Well, you could, but you’d also have a thousand other players wondering why their game is over. Or you’d have a conflict that can be resolved continuously (how many times has Grimlic died?) MMOs have to tell a story in a different way. There have to be situations that require constant maintenance (gather 10 plagued rat tails) or they have to be vague in their resolution (the dragon has been slain, but not really…) In an MMO, a player is only one piece of a larger community. Therefore, there is less focus on creating situations and more focus on fleshing out the world that the community rests in. And when these situations are created, they don’t normally involve a specific player in the world. This allows the player to create his or her own narrative. In PoxNora, there is no story that dictates how all the champions in your battlegroup came together. There is nothing that explains why your army of the Forsaken Wastes is going up against an army of the Sundered Lands. All we give you is a world, a setting, where your experiences can happen. Some may not like this, and that is understandable. Personally, I think it’s better to let you have your own stories than to tell you your Draksar-Jakei union is completely wrong.

There are times, in PoxNora, where we go back to traditional storytelling; our campaigns follow a typical narrative style. However, the campaigns don’t dictate what happens in between encounters or after the campaign has ended. Also, our system was designed to fire dialogue at the beginning of turns, so the player would have time to read them. We understand you have champs to move and we don’t want to get in your way. Personally, I don’t think a story should ever get in the way of the player. But, that’s just my opinion, worth two cents.

As Sir Quimbel, I want to give you a piece of the world, a bit of flavor to keep you involved. With the stories and the Rune flavor (the text blurbs on the Preview tab), I want to give you enough to make the world a cool place, but to leave enough out to let you draw your own conclusions on certain things. Why can the Shattered Peaks and K`thir fight in the same battlegroup? That’s up to you!

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SirQuimbel Assistant Game Designer

Essence Devourer x2
Upgrades: 11 speed, 64 hp - 62 Nora

Collection of Souls x2
Upgrades:11 speed - 79 Nora

Death Harvester x2
Upgrades: 39 hp, Dead Eater, Detection 3 - 63 Nora

Executioner x2
Upgrades: 9 speed, 54 hp - 62 Nora

Tomb Lord x2
Upgrades: 43 hp, Boost: Skeleton 3, Summon Undead 1 - 79 Nora

Lich King x2
Upgrades: 11 speed, 11 damage, 45 hp, Teleport 1 - 100 Nora

Eternal Lich x2
Upgrades: 9 speed, 44 hp, Dark Favor - 85 Nora

Crossbone
Upgrades: 10 speed, 40 hp, Poison 3 - 69 Nora

Toll-Taker
Upgrades: 10 speed, 44 hp - 73 Nora

Domination
Essence Drain x2
Dark Rising
Hungry Dead
Chain Lightning
Mobilization x2
Unholy Tomb
Tome of Hate
Elsarin Vex
Graveyard x2
Cursed Blade

This deck revolves around fueling Essence Devourers. The most effective way to do that by far is to get out graveyards, as a graveyard keeps a Devourer going as long as they’re both out. Since we’re having the graveyards, we may as well use them to their fullest, so along with the Devourers we use Death Harvesters and Collections of Souls. The Harvesters grab the nora globes with dead eater and also produce 7 nora whenever a champion (including the graveyard spawns) dies, so once we get rolling the nora generation of the deck will be pretty significant. While your graveyard engine is going and you are using your Devourers to eat face and run interference you will hopefully be able to get out the Collections, who will get pumped by the dying spawns (and whatever else dies). Coupled with the cooldown bonus you have a very nasty late game deck.

The majority of the other champions are there for simple combat purposes. The Executioners fill an early game role and are not a huge loss if they get devoured during combat. The Eternal Liches are solid offensive units and will come back if they happen to get devoured, which is nice. Lich Kings are Lich Kings, and they’re invaluable in standoff situations and for dealing with enemy long ranged units. The Tomb Lords make the cut because their summons can provide a stopgap for the devourer before you can get out your graveyards - when you do get the yards out, however, be sure to keep the graveyard spawns away from the Tomb Lords and their summons nearby, so that the graveyard units will get devoured first. The Tomb Lords also make powerful combatants when tag teaming, and enable the use of our last two combat units, the Crossbone and the Toll-Taker. These two ranged units provide a little utility (DOT and nora denial) and are generally pretty solid while boosted.

The spell spread is a fairly generic Forsaken build for the most part, with good utility in a variety of situations and plenty of single target lethality in Domination and Essence Drain. Dark Rising is the one oddity, serving as an emergency measure for Devourers and a surge boost for a Tomb Lord duo. As far as relics go, we include the obligatory Unholy Tomb and our two Graveyards, along with a Tome of Hate to counteract the constant drain on your shrine in long games (going Avatar puts a hard cap on how many graveyard spawns you can create, which can be bad). The lone Cursed Blade is there mostly to delay enemy equipment and to be useful in small scale fights.

This deck relies heavily on setting up its engine, and thus can be kind of slow to play. Because of this it isn’t likely to take you to the very top, but it can certainly compete in the middle high rankings. It’s something different from the norm, and it can be pretty fun to try and manipulate what is killed by Devour in tight situations (for you and your opponent as well).

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Kaervas Associate Game Designer

Collection of Souls x2
Upgrades:11 speed - 79 Nora

Death Harvester x2
Upgrades: 39 hp, Dead Eater - 59 Nora

Executioner x2
Upgrades: 11 speed, 56 hp - 74 Nora

G’hern Tyrant x2
Upgrades: 11 speed, 59 hp, Surge: Moga 2 - 59 Nora

Lich King x2
Upgrades: 11 speed, 11 damage, 45 hp, Teleport 1 - 100 Nora

G’hern Taskmaster x2
Upgrades: 9 speed, 51 hp, Overseer Moga: 2 - 68 Nora

Moga Assault Team x2
Upgrades: 9 speed, 64 hp - 59 Nora

Moga Slinger x2
Upgrades: 31 hp - 39 Nora

Reckless Spellhack x2
Upgrades: 32 hp - 29 Nora

Cylcops Nemesis x2
Upgrades: 9 speed, 54 hp - 39 Nora

Cyclops Battlefiend
Upgrades: 7 speed, 60 hp, Unstoppable - 74 Nora

Domination
Essence Drain
Hungry Dead
Mobilization x2
Unholy Tomb
Totem of the Muses
Tribal Post
Cursed Blade

The main point of this deck is to get stronger as the game progresses and your champions die. Your main tools for doing this are the death harvesters. If you play one of your cheap SP units with the warbanner out and get the nora globe with a death harvester, you are looking at a total refund of 28% + 13 nora (+20 on nemesis champions). Between that and your unholy tomb generating nora off opposing units and any nemeses you play, you can literally be swimming in nora by the end of a long game, and any Collections of Souls you have out will likely be hitting for 20+. Of course, the difficulty lies in setting up safely.

The Death Harvesters are the keystones of the deck, and should be played ASAP to begin generating nora. Following them, the Collections of Souls and the Battlefiend are your most important bruisers in this deck. They can easily get up to massive damage numbers. It’s recommended to play them as early as you can (even if the enemy has only a few units for your Collection to link with, it will get enough hp from deaths to make up for it). If you are using an early Collection, use it as a curse platform until the damage is able to ramp up. Once you have some a Harvester and a Death Benefit attacker out (or before, if you’re getting rushed early) you want to spam your moga and Cyclops Nemeses. They should be tossed forward to get hits where able, and any losses they may suffer are for the most part ignorable - they cost very little for you. Don’t neglect the huge damage on the Cyclops though, it is worth firing a mobilization to get extra hits from them often times.

The Tyrants have two purposes in the deck. They can either come out in the endgame when totem has given them plenty of surge fodder to work with, or they can be cycled early to provide cheap overseer and a large nora kickback from their nemesis. Ideally you’ll get to do some of both, their cooldown is nice and low due to the half FW bonus. The taskmasters are there for a more permanent overseer and to add drive, which really helps get the most out of your disposable champions, who are all only 9 speed. The Executioners and Lich Kings are primarily there to give you more solid champions to spend your nora on later in the game (you can get to the point where you are recycling lich kings endlessly because of your nora advantage if a game goes really long).

The spells are mostly there to provide some general utility. Mobilization is the one key spell, allowing you to get the most out of your cheap units and later making it impossible to avoid your souped up Collection of Souls or Cyclops Battlefiend. Essence Drain lets you deal with otherwise very troublesome tanks like Euan. Hungry Dead lets you slow down the game and deals some direct damage. Domination is Domination, and is full of utility.

Unholy Tomb is important to this deck’s long term strategy. It also is somewhat under your control here, because you can deploy up to 4 nemesis champions to generate nora from. The Warbanner is used because we’re constantly cycling our cheap SP units, and the Totem is also used for the same reason - the Totem pups also power your Tyrants late game and can gum up the works in an early match. The single Cursed Blade is mostly an antirush tool, and you can expect it to draw enemy anti-equipment most of the time, but as long as it does its job of buying you time it is still worth it.

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Kaervas Associate Game Designer

Abomination x2
Upgrades: 9 speed, 51 hp, Berserker 3 - 76 Nora

Executioner x2
Upgrades: 11 speed, 56 hp - 74 Nora

Sheoul Demon x2
Upgrades: 11 speed, 62 hp, Horrific Aura, Vulnerability: Frost - 92 Nora

Soul Siren x2
Upgrades: 9 speed, 40 hp - 61 Nora

Nefari Dragon x2
Upgrades: 11 speed, 52 hp, Flamestrike 3, Vulnerability: Frost - 80 Nora

Bone Elemental x2
Upgrades: 9 speed, 62 hp - 74 Nora

Deep Elf Priestess
Upgrades: 9 speed, 44 hp, Beckon Demon, Poison 1 - 69 Nora

Nefari Messenger
Upgrades: 11 speed, 48 hp - 80 Nora

Scorched Dwarf x2
Upgrades: 24 hp, Nora Miner 2, Mason 2 - 29 Nora

Mobilization x2
Price of Victory x2
Essence Drain x2
Fireblast
Domination
Retribution
Cursed Blade x2
Widowmaker
Blade of the Snake
Mindslicer Obelisk

As you can see, this deck is an all melee deck, defined by only using champions with a minimum range of 1. Underdepths was chosen because, as the prime melee faction, it has strong close combat tools, especially the Sheoul and Nefari Dragon, various strong equipment, and Price of Victory. Forsaken Wastes makes up the rest of the deck because it offers a variety of very solid beater champions that work well on their own, as opposed to the more synergistic style of IS (and many IS melee champions have secondary ranged attacks, which is stretching the melee part of the deck even more than the Dragons). Forsaken Wastes also offers a couple great tools in making such a deck work, in the Soul Siren and Mobilization, which allow you to have a threat range approaching a ranged deck, albeit at higher cost.

Each of the champions brings something essential to the table. First is the Abomination, probably the strangest choice in the BG. They are run with berserker to acheive the highest damage at the lowest cost. Because of our 4 ap granting spells, berserker is much easier to deal with than it normally is, and Blood Rage is such a cheap ability that our threat range is still pretty high. Given a Widowmaker, its possible for us to do 68 damage for 9 ap, 51 for 4 ap or 34 for 1! ap. Similarily a Blade of the Snake lets us do 66-69 with 9 and 45~ with 4. After the Abomination the Executioners and Sheouls make up the core of our simple beaters, both serving excellently offensively and defensively and making good use of our equips - the Sheoul especially loves the Blade of the Snake, which magnifies his essence drain as well as damage, often dealing 23-24 a hit and getting 8 nora back. Bone Elementals are our defensive unit, providing delaying tactics for getting out more units. Their assault is also key in helping to mitigate enemy range.

The rest of the units are support. The Nefari Dragons act as our “ranged” units, giving us at least some way to fight back against the longest range foes without spending a spell. Soul Sirens provide relocate foe, which with our high damage numbers, means they can ensure kills on any mobilization turn. They themselves are also adequate combatants and nonphysical damage, though they are easily killed with only 40 hp. The Nefari Messenger is our only major source of magic damage, and provides drive, which is obviously great in a deck like this (Abominations in particular love drive). The Priestess is there mostly for shatter, however she is also effective enough as a combatant to justify playing her with a Sheoul for beckoning - the poison debuff and occasional ranged attack are still useful even without the full UD bonus. Finally the Scorched Dwarves are somewhat self explanatory. There are only 4 demons in the deck to stop their demonbound, but you will probably almost always have one out, and they can mason the shrine fast enough to keep you mostly safe even if you don’t for a while.

Spellwise Mobilization and Price of Victory are your bread and butter, and give you the threat needed to compete. Essence Drain is another key spell, allowing you to one round essentially anything you want, since most of the runes in the deck do around 15 damage. A Blade of the Snake on a champ that can make two hits and an Essence Drain will kill anything in the game but the absolute tankiest units with physical resistance. Fireblast gives us a bit of spell damage, of which we could use more, but slots are limited. Domination gives needed utility and can be used in helping to break standoffs along with mobilization. Retribution is great in a deck that uses a self-killing unit like the abomination, in addition to being generally an effective way to do massive damage at good range - once again we could use two here if slots permitted.

The Cursed Blades go on any ranged units that are causing problems, with special priority to obvious overupgraded elite blade targets. They’ll likely bring out shatter to counter, but it can still buy much needed time. With so many melee units, the Widowmaker and Blade of the Snake carry their weight easily. The Widowmaker especially is great for the Abomination, which has a high damage output but low AP. The Blade of the Snake can go excellently on anything, as it drastically increases killing power from two hits, though as mentioned earlier the Sheoul Demon is the most attractive bet.

Being something of a novelty deck this isn’t really super competitive. You can certainly play it at top 500 rank, but it can be pretty challenging to keep up with decks that don’t limit themselves on range. However, playing the deck is pretty fun. You’ll find yourself putting a lot of thought into elaborate attacks with spells/relocation/equipment tossed in that can have pretty spectacular results, and hitting someone 3 or 4 times with an Abomination is pretty satisfying when you can pull it off.

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Kaervas Associate Game Designer