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Master 1v1… Leaderboard Rank Style

No this isn’t a guide. Or maybe it is? Who knows, take it as you will. Anyway, I decided to start playing around with my master Balance wizard, who is at a very high rank as of now. He has some… “issues” when doing 1v1, which is why he has been abandoned for so long: I haven’t faced a wizard under level 70 on him for as long as I can remember. So, instead of silently doing 1v1 matches and winning as much as I lose, I decided to write about it! Unlike most of my wizards, this wizard is not rocking a critical block pet, so criticals are a pretty big problem (as with most players like me.) I’m going to show you my gear and deck and such, and maybe record some matches on him. Maybe you’ll pick up a few strategies for facing higher level wizards, maybe you won’t, or maybe you’ll just laugh at my deaths! I’m also going to keep an embarassing death count (stolen from Eric Stormbringer) to tally how many times I’ve lost via killshot critical. Yes, I’m going to try to make at least a few posts about this, so stay tuned!

I’ve done about 10 matches with this so far, and like you probably could expect, I’ve dropped lots of rank. After being inactive for so long, I seem to need to rediscover how to build my deck. One major difference between now and before this project is that I used to run a Death amulet, and now I run a Fire one. I’ve re-discovered (in a sense) how to go about setting up my deck in this type of scenario, but I’ll get to that later.

My gear is what you would expect of a level 40 wizard with over 2300 rank: full commander gear, duelist athame and ring, the Runwarden’s deck, mastery amulet (Fire, as I said before,) and all those shenanigans. Only two pieces of gear on him aren’t the “standard”.

The wand is one of these pieces of gear. I generally run the Order of High Glory Banner for level 40. Although I’m beginning to reconsider this, I have used it for two reasons: 1, because It doesn’t give fire wand hits (so I can use Elemental Blades as I please,) and 2, because of the 2 Manaburn item cards (take 4 pips) which are incredibly useful for getting out of tight situations (although it takes practice and often a bit of luck to use this card effectively).

The other non-typical piece of gear I use: my pet. I have lots of pets that I could use for this job, and I favor certain ones. I’ve been using my Tocador because of the Availing Hands cards it gives, but switch over to block pets from time to time.

Now, here is my deck at the beginning and now:

 The main difference is that in the before pictures, I had more minion killers than I needed. This is a specific issue that had to do with facing low ranking high levels: they can mess your deck up specifically by not knowing the effective strategy that is minions. To add on to it, you still DO need minion killers for that moment when you face a 1500ish rank grandmaster (or a magus Bird). Another problem was that I like to run complex decks, so while I had lots of options for killing opponents, I wasn’t using many of those options because the sheer threat of critical and armor piercing eliminated their viability. In short, I had to simplify my deck, and set up more for facing higher level opponents. I never like setting up to face one group of opponents because it puts me at a disadvantage when facing everyone else, but in this case I don’t have much of a choice.

And so, off to a rocky start (sorry I couldn’t get a video this time-expect them in the future) I think I’m beginning to regain my control of this wizard, even with the random criticals (especially on max wild bolts, those will sting even through a few shields). For now, I leave you with this:

Rank Loss: 2305 to 2145

Losses: 6 

(since I re-started this article, I know that number doesn’t add up to the rank)

Embarrassing Deaths: 5

Embarrassing Deaths by Kraken: 2

Happy Dueling!

 

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