The Discard Deck: By far the most fun combat style


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I just played one of the most fun and broken (if difficult to setup) decks I've had the pleasure of playing in Griftlands; a hybrid Discard / Wound deck!

The ideal graft combo is as follows:

  • Muscle Bank (Draw 3 cards at the start of your turn. Take 1 damage for every card above 3 at the end of your turn) - Mandatory. Super effective synergy with the Adapt card by allowing more Discard-synergy cards to be played at once.
  • Wounding Barbs (Your first attack each combat applies 2 Wound). Effective synergy with...
  • Serrated Edge (Wound is twice as effective). Probably brokenly good, I take this on almost any run.

Side with Spree. You want to get the card that lets all attacks for the remainder of the round apply 1 Wound.

Stuff as many of the following cards in your deck, while removing all Feints and other starter attacks:

  • Adapt (Discard your hand. Draw 5 cards.), upgrade ASAP to Enduring Adapt so it no longer has Exhaust.
  • Readiness (Draw 3 cards. Gain 2 Counter.), upgrade to Boosted Readiness to draw 4 cards.
  • Blades (Unplayable. If this card is discarded, insert 1 Blade Flash into your hand.), always upgrade them to Boosted Blades for 2 Blade Flashes.

In terms of upgrade priority of the essential cards, I'd say Adapt (at least until you get your first Enduring Adapt, but additional copies make the deck much more reliable), then Blades, then Readiness.

Take at least one of:

  • Exertion (Gain 2 actions. Lose 1 action next turn.), upgrade to whatever you feel is best.
  • Efficient Disposal (Deal 2 damage whenever you discard a card), upgrade to Pale version since I'm not sure if Destroyed cards count as Exhausted.
  • Either Defense card that applies its benefits when discarded (the heal or counter one), upgrade to increase defense/counter/heal effects instead of reducing cost.

If you are lucky enough to get the Aerostat Coilgun, expect massive final-damage shots thanks to all the Blade Flash cards you play.

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It's kinda weird in that in most similar games the Discard meta is limited by your draw and thus often need costly draw cards to function, but here it's easy to stockpile some item cards and just have a bloated hand each turn.

 

The flip side is cards like "draw 1/2 make it free" significant loses its usefulness since you don't really want to use those cards/some of them cost 0 already.

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I agree that a discard deck is fun and effective, but 90% of the reason is that Muscle Bank is too good right now. It would already be very good if it only gave two extra cards. Its penalty is also a non-issue in pretty much any deck that isn't stuffed with expensive cards.

A discard deck fueled by "replenish" items instead seems about fine. Replenish items are sort of rare or expensive, assuming you don't go around murdering everyone (if you do, say hello to all the tinctures in the world). And if you get too many, you start hitting the handsize limit quickly.

 

...speaking of which, @Kevin, could we get a counter that tells the number of cards in hand? It's currently a bit annoying to not know how many more cards we can draw without manually counting them.

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I find [Footwork] and the upgraded version useful as well for the discard deck (which also doubles as a cycling/engine deck) as it helps with the "action economy" although [Blades] and [Blade Flash] is a solid alternative to action stacking. Replenish items as pacovf mentioned also help cycling.

A problem with getting cards inserted into your deck and eating snacks + drinking too much beer is essentially negated with discard decks (should always have 2-3 discards regardless of deck to handle card inserts/drunk cards.

A side benefit of discard decks is that they support some of the few heals available for combat. A cycling deck with heals is one of the few that can increase your uptime in combat and discards are essential to get it to proc consistently as the only other heals I can think of are the Spree Card [Terrorize] which is expended after use and the +heal on bleeds card. The bleed combat deck also has 2 heals that make it another alternative to regain health and increase sustainability. [Seeker] and the upgraded [Pale Seeker] is the heal card for discard decks. Edit: I just found 2 more heal cards that are upgrades on the starter Feint, [Feint of the Healer] and [Kra'Deshi Feint]. [Hemophage] is the card that gives you +1 heal whenever you apply bleed.

I still need to do some more playtesting to see what other fun things are hidden in the cards as there are some cards that I still haven't encountered in my many playthroughs.

I have never gone full discard/wounds but will consider it if the opportunity arises and all the stars align in heaven.

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4 hours ago, pacovf said:

A discard deck fueled by "replenish" items instead seems about fine. Replenish items are sort of rare or expensive, assuming you don't go around murdering everyone (if you do, say hello to all the tinctures in the world). And if you get too many, you start hitting the handsize limit quickly.

 

Fssh sells them and you can refresh the stock many times each day. Due to her relationship with you the discount makes them pretty cheap.

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I just finished a run through with a discard-lite deck (RNG gods were not kind) and a handful of the cards mentioned above. I only got to discard [Blades] twice in the entire current campaign (Prestige 7 - Experimental build). My end card count was 39 combat cards because I had to chop and change when I didn't get any of the core discard deck cards. It still shows that experimenting can still work at the highest levels =D

My negotiation deck was also a mix'n'mash as one of the key cards I was waiting on didn't make an appearance and I had to fumble my way through with the few cards I did have. It didn't help things that I had killed 10 odd peeps who gave me massive debuffs to my resolve.

I still don't know how peeps manage to trim their combat decks to ~20 cards. All bar 2 of the starter cards I upgraded were failures but I could only get rid of 3 by end-game and I was considerate when choosing whether to accept a new card.

The key cards I ended up with were [Boosted Footwork], [Stone Readiness], [Boosted Exertion], [Exertion] and [Stringer].

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And I am not sure how you manage to get so many cards! :p

You start with 12 cards, of which you can likely destroy 3 if you prioritise the “destroy” upgrades for the attack cards. You can easily remove 2 more from quest rewards, and 2 more from the night market (even more if you have the coin). So by endgame, you can have as few as 5 starter cards left in your deck.

Then, in a given combat-focused play through, you will likely have 20 combats, tops, with the option to pick one card per combat. If you pick a card roughly half the time, and only buy the cards you really need, you should easily be in the low 20s by the end of the game.

If you pick one every single time and never remove any starter card, you end up just barely breaching 30 cards in your deck. You would need to spend a lot of money buying cards to get close to 40. Or kill a bunch of people for their items, but I wouldn’t count those in (effective) deck size, since they replenish. Which, from your last post, might be what happened?

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Haha!

To be fair, I usually end up with 1-2x [Silent Steel] which are expended on the first round and are not part of the rest of the combat rotation, there are usually 1-2x items ([Aerostat Coilgun]) that I can't get rid of and then I end up with at least 1-2x [Tipsy] and [Bloated] because I try to max health and resolve for the lead up to the boss fight. For the starter cards, I only destroy the useless ones after upgrades and then I have to be lucky to get the destroy option at all.

I will actually try to actively destroy some superfluous cards at the final market before the final boss run to see how that works out and only keep 70 $hills for 1 beer to ply one of the bouncers to join my crusade.

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I keep using this deck as a fighting deck. It's damn fun, and there are a lot of cards that synergies well with it!

The 0 cost discard-3-cards and the "discard the entire hand, get 2 def + 2 counter per discarded card", in combo with "draw 4 cards + 2 counter", and efficient disposal, you can make funny turns where you get like 30 defense, 20 counter AND if you have 3 upgraded blades, you get back 6 cards.

With a small deck, I was able to keep playing a lot of 0-actions cards and do very long turns.
Love it.

I never manage to make it work with wounds (I never draw find the cards necessary for it. I don't think the Spree card exists anymore either?), but with bleed I'm able to make 10-13 aoe bleed which is amazing.

I just defeated Prestige 7 on a non-experimental build

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4 hours ago, Fire-Dragon-DoL said:

I never manage to make it work with wounds

Don’t found Discard works well with Wounds, there not so much cards for that. Maybe the one making Wound for Counter...

Wounds work well with Combo, the “Spend as 3 Combo make Wound” is a killer. Have made 28 dmg in one turn with Wounds stacking.

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