Deck Building

Decks - What Heroes to chose?
Make sure you know about the different roles and classes that exists in ChainZ Arena.

Now, which heroes should you use to build your deck? Well, that depends on the cards you have available, on your ambitions and general playing style. As long as you consider some basic rules, there is no straight right or wrong.

Formation Grid
Before a battle you have to place your heroes into the formation grid. You assign a position to each hero.

The grid consists of six positions and looks like this:



The positions are important. Remember that position 1 is at the front left, from your point of view.

Battlefield
There are different kinds of battlefields:

Hero Moves
Each move has an attacker and defender. The attacker is active, he moves when it's his turn in a battle round. The defender is the victim (target) of the attacker.

Standard Move
In a standard move, the attacker attacks the enemy at the lowest available position in the formation grid. At at the first round this is always position 1. It would be the enemy at position 2, if enemy at position 1 has been killed already.

Active Skill Move
Examples of an active skill are Attack a random enemy at the back row or Heal the two heroes with the lowest health.

In an active skill move, the attacker might attack (or heal or do something else). If he attacks, the target position depends on the hero's active skill.

It might be a random single position in the back row or front row, it might be the complete back row or front row, or it might be not bound to a position at all (i.e. the enemy with the lowest health is targeted, regardless of its position).

Formation
The formation is the result of assigning a position to each of your heroes. Please check the roles section for related information.

This section features some general hints. Please be aware that there might be situations where this is not the best choice (at at least, it should be good enough for a start).

Hint 1: Place the tank at position 1



Hint 2: Position 3 is the safest place

Position 3 is considered the safest position by many players. So use it for your hero with the lowest max health (or weakest defense), or with the best/most important attack (i.e. an Assassin or Ranger).



Example Formations
Balanced Deck 1



Balanced Deck 2



Offensive Deck



Defensive Deck



Battle

 * a PvE battle goes for 20 rounds
 * if the attacker kills all heroes of the defender before round 20 ends, the attacker wins. Else defender wins.
 * within a round, your heroes and the enemy's heroes make their moves in a fixed order
 * the order depends on the speed of each hero. The hero with highest speed value starts, then comes the hero with second highest speed and so on.
 * if speed is same for two heroes, the one with the lower position number moves first

The Importance of Speed


As explained above, the speed values of all heroes at the battlefield determine the order in which your heroes and the enemy's heroes move.

Why is the order of moves important? Imagine, it does make a difference, if


 * inside your team
 * your tank weakens the enemy's defense before your DDs strike
 * your assassin reduces HP of a back row enemy before your sniper attacks the enemy with the lowest HP
 * your Fire Iris cures all of your heroes' burn damage before they move (thus taking the burn and potentially die)


 * among your team and the enemy
 * your assassin kills the enemy's top DD before it can kill one of yours
 * your tank stuns three enemies before they can do you harm
 * your priest makes your tank invulnerable before the enemy attacks

How to influence speed
Speed raises with every level your hero gains. So there are two options to make sure that your hero A moves before your hero B:


 * level A and B accordingly (i.e. that A is level 100 and B is level 90)
 * equip A with an artifact that raises speed. It is called Key of Hatred



Example 1
See an example here, comparing the speed of your heroes with the speed of a weak enemy. The numbers are imaginary speed values.



Example 2
See an example here, comparing the speed of your heroes with the speed of a strong enemy. The numbers are imaginary speed values.



Element Bonus
When you build your formation with six heroes, you gain powerful attribute bonuses if you meet one of the formation conditions shown in the table.



Although strong decks are possible without an element bonus, most players use it to boost those attributes.

Element bonus is a great option to underline your preferred style of playing and to boost the strengths of your strongest heroes.