7 Tier VIIs and 150 Hoard - only made it to the boss room once. Not going to waste time on GoW anymore this weekend.
What about “Mirrored Halls” (coming in November)? There will be “Yellow & Blue” limitation, what would you use there (apart from pure faction)? Qilin + Divine Ishbaala?
Mountain Crusher/ Apocathepy/High King Irongut/ The Possessed King
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Earth’s Fury, Apothecary, Irongut, TPK.
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Mountain Crusher, Apothecary, High King Irongut, Vash’ Dagon
I don’t have to mess with transformation. Vash’s curse makes all targets available to be devoured.
IF Mirrored Halls is a gimmick based on reflect, Curse should be extremely valuable in removing reflect.
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Everyone has been using Mountain Crusher, but I really have to recommend Essence of Evil (http://gowdb.com/weapons/1220) instead (Don’t level it to +10, stop at +9).
You can still cast it when there is no brown, its green so it doesn’t conflict with High King Irongut, it will completely neutralize whatever you cast it on and will curse undigestible enemies to allow Irongut to work.
I used Mushroom Banner with Champion of Anu (Not to cast his spell, just to take a hit and passively pump Irongut), High King Irongut, Essense of Evil, TPK to 500 on City of Thieves.
Same team should work for Mirrored Halls.
Mirrored Halls will be easy with a non-faction loop spam team 
Essence of Evil is good, so you’re more than welcome to use it, but Mountain Crusher is typically a turn faster than EoE and more importantly creates a Brown storm which allows a good amount of overflow of Brown mana to the point that filling High King Irongut is never a problem. It also has synergies with Stone tree’s Rock Solid allowing for a nearly permanent barrier, allowing it to act as the immovable front-line troop.
Essence of Evil is just harder to consistently re-loop (and +10 is rather annoying as well and can’t be undone)
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I concede that if you went to +10 Essence of Evil would probably be too annoying for delves.
In my experience the ability to neuter the first enemy has been superior to barrier, I’ve had plenty of enemy turns where they got more than one lucky skull drop, which would’ve wrecked me through barrier, but the entangle nullifies it. Additionally being able to target a rear troop to prevent them from casting altogether has its strategic moments
Given Mountain Crusher’s speed, has anybody considered not getting the brown storm affix on it? You lose the self-looping, but gain the ability to loop around other colors with the fastest hero exploder weapon.
If you want explosions but not dust storms, check out Jar of Eyes next time an All-Seeing Eye faction event rolls around (or just get to level 100 in the faction, IIRC).
That’s a good point, but JoE has 14 mana cost, significantly slower than Mountain Crusher (11).
I have it on upgraded +5 on two accounts, +9 on two accounts (storm is at +6). Prior to the explode nerf, and storms being everywhere, I’d consider it like maybe a 70/30 in favor of upgrading, because I could use it as the only troop covering brown and another exploder could just combo back into it without having to cascade brown specifically. Now you might need two or three additional explodes to hit enough brown gems to fill back mountain crusher without any storm (or worse, a different color storm). Now I’d consider it like a 90/10 in favor of upgrading. It still loses the ability to be used in some combos effectively, but those combos aren’t really overall “the best” in terms of effectiveness anyways because of the added weaknesses. And having the upgrade allows for some ridiculous things (consider how freely it self-loops and that the barrier-on-match color is also brown).
Jar of Eyes is too much of a trade off for me to take it to +9 (create an icestorm) as it is a fantastic versatile generating weapon that you can build around other storms depending on your team, but there are a few having an icestorm from it are strongly beneficial. Still 50/50 (okay, maybe 55/45) for me for taking the storm upgrade, so I won’t do it, considering you can’t ever take it back. I like it in too many combos using other storms, because I can still chain back into it with one other cast.
Before their storm upgrades, JoE is, on average, significantly faster and generates overall better. Because it uses two colors. It generally fills better initially, because you have more options to match on your initial board, and fills in the same amount of matches (your target is 1, 2 if unlucky). If you are in a situation where JoE takes 3+ matches, then a similar situation with MC would take at least two, and you need to have another brown gen to make this even close to consistent (and your first explode with MC would suck otherwise). So, if, for example, you wanted to generate “not brown” consistently with MC, you’d probably use Gimlet and MC. At that point you are using a brown generator and a brown exploder to generate “not brown”, which is not exactly efficient use of team slots. JoE also explodes a color it doesn’t use, so taking a match of that color doesn’t reduce the total amount of explosions (which influences both the amount of mana you gain and your chance at cascades). As a first cast generator, JoE works in far more situations usually faster.
The thing that sets MC apart from JoE as a generator is that the storm upgrade is for the color it uses, which generally means it can chain… basically indefinitely, only sometimes dropping the turn. At least until you silence, web, or kill the user. One of the upgrades after +6 also generates an additional 2 brown mana, which is huge for a weapon 11 cost that uses only one color. A JoE does kinda requires another board clear troop to maintain a consistent level of generation because if you have a blue storm, you get less and less brown gems to explode, and if you have no storm (or a different storm), then you are less likely to self-fill… but still more likely than MC with a not-brown storm, because, again, it has uses colors. Even when it doesn’t, you are usually one or two casts from another board clear puts you back where you need to be, and you can chain them like that (eg., JoE/Infernus, or JoE/TDS, where you definitely want a storm on the color of your damaging exploding, not the jar, which is a kickstart/backup/emergency summon/emergency mana drain on the first troop).
So yeah, I’d recommend upgrading MC to +9 (even if it kinda pigeonholes using it in brown focused teams, and therefore using it in the front slot because otherwise it can’t fill if something in front of it uses brown, and therefore kinda pigeonholes using a stone tree class at level 40+ otherwise it is hard to survive), because the things that does allow strongly outweigh the combos that you lose, but keep JoE at +8 so you can use it in combination with other storms (I can’t think of any “must have” combo where I’d want the +9 that outweighs a combo I’d make worse having it at +8, even if +9 would get you out of some losing situations that +8 wouldn’t)
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The best part of the brown storm is the turn back potential and self-fill potential to relaunch. All other mana gained is bonus at that point. I don’t think MC would be all that great without that storm; I would rather just use a different troop with a multiple color identity for open ended exploding. You’ll run out of Browns to explode without the storm.
See: Leprechaun
(Mountain Crusher: 5/11) 6 mana to fill
(Jar of Eyes: 7/14) 7 mana to fill, but on two colors
(Essence of Evil: 7/15) 8 mana to fill
I’d actually say Jar of Eyes is easier to use since you have two options to fill it in one turn (via mana surge + banner) at 50% mana.
Mountain Crusher also needs a mana surge, but doesn’t care about banner choice on its first explosion. (unless you’re using a Brown link: it no longer needs a mana surge). It can also fill nicely with 4 match and +2 banner.
Without 50% mana start, its tough to say which is slower. On a good board, Mountain Crusher is way faster. On a bad board, Jar of Eyes is much easier to fill, making it faster to use.
They’re both about the same-ish, and I guess what I’m trying to say is that I wouldn’t call either one “significantly” slower than the other (in my opinion).
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Jar of Eyes multi-tasks though. You also drain the first troop (with upgrades) and you get a summon. Naturally the main exploding part of the weapon won’t be quite as strong as a result.
Mountain Crusher, on the other hand, is pure exploding power. The main reason to go with Mountain Crusher, I find, is that you can reliably field a Stone hero class with the barrier-on-brown trait and effectively never take damage.
Good points on why the duststorm is uniquely well-suited to Mountain Crusher, thanks.
Thinking aloud, MC with a non-brown storm could work with troops that convert to brown, if the storm feeds them (basically Apothecary or Wrath; ironically, the JoE colors would be needed for the storm). While that’s not terribly useful at present, we could get a good red/yellow/purple to brown converter that could change things. Probably not worth giving up the benefits of the duststorm-MC synergy, but something to think about.
Brown storm makes apothecary better and easier to make extra turns. I cant think of any reason to not use the brown storm.
I used Jar + Wrath before, it actually works very well. Jar detonates browns for Wrath and makes an Icestorm, Wrath gets to use all the blue on the board to go nuts and make more brown. If eventually Jar ends up charging again, the board will predominantly be brown because of Wrath.
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Re-watched this again and still can’t believe that last fight. First three casts from Bladewing, all three successful insta-kills. Redonkulous. 
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Beat Wild Courts at Delve 200, Hoard 100 with no potions on my 2nd try. Could have beat it on my 1st try if I was just quicker on realizing one thing…
Wild Knight is just so much stronger than the other 3 troops combined that there’s almost no point on using those other 3 troops. That includes their Wild Knight being a huge menace after casting a few times.
I used:
Wild Knight
Red Cap
The Wendigo
The Wendigo
Rat Banner (+2 Brown, +1 Green, -1 Blue)
Red Cap is nice when you can fill it, but it does baby damage compared to Wild Knight + Hunter’s Mark. Its also reliant on Hunter’s Mark.
Wendigo I don’t even bother using, but need that Hunter’s Mark so I’m forced to use it.
Could probably get away with
Wild Knight
Wild Knight
Red Cap
The Wendigo
Rat Banner
or other Wild Knight friendly teams.
Its not a terrible faction, but its mostly a one troop faction.
Edit: One last note, after thinking about it, I don’t think I’d suggest using Puka because I don’t want to give the last room any red mana when possible, as you don’t really need that red mana either.
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