I’ve been playing casually for a long time and not sure what I really should be using for a good Explorer team to knock them out quicker. I’ve read many of the same threads but I always seem to be missing one or two of the monsters listed in good teams so finally broke down and decided to ask. I’m part of a guild but they are unresponsive unfortunately.
I’ve synced with GOWDB and here is my profile:
https://gowdb.com/collection/2ad57cdc2e9d163cfb69ce7ce09ebb07
I appreciate any help!
I use sunbird, rowanne, firebomb, firebomb.
Bear in mind I only do explore for traitstones so I play on normal to get the enemy out fast so I can get the rewards.
This team is great, but replacing Rowanne with the Hero (I use FireRuby Staff or Bronzelock Pistol) can make it so that OP will get Hero XP as well. 
It’s funny that you mention sunbird. I have seen many threads that recommend an explorer team build that includes that. The very reason I broke down and signed up for GOWDB, this site, and made this thread was to get a recommendation based on the cards/monsters that I had and to avoid a recommendation of sunbird lol.
All kidding aside, is sunbird something that you can get through completing a certain kingdom or is it just random chance? If random chance then I am hoping to get a recommendation based on what I have or what is easily obtainable by beating a certain kingdom quest line.
Sunbird is a Suncrest Ultra-Rare, all you can do is open chests and hope. If you’re in a decently active guild, you’ll get to open more chests. You can also watch the Soulforge: the red or purple summoning stones might have Sunbird inside and you might have enough jewels to make an attempt. You’re level 61. That sounds impressive, but it’s SUPER early in this game. You’ll probably have a Sunbird by level 400 or so, and you’re going to be surprised how quickly that happens. I see you say you’ve been playing casually for a long time, though… this is a very, VERY slow game. How long is “a long time”?
First, here’s why the Sunbird teams are so fast: they do MASSIVE damage to all opponents. My Sunbird, pre-bonuses, is doing 96 damage to the entire enemy team. Since that happens after 2 Fire Bomb blasts, that’s the end of the match. Explore opponents only tend to have about 120 total stat points, and each Fire Bomb blast takes ~25 of those away. So how can we simulate that without Sunbird, using troops you have?
You don’t have Sunbird or Rowanne. I think Rowanne is a quest reward? Definitely look into that. If you haven’t finished all kingdom quests, it’s too early to worry about traitstone farming. I didn’t have Sunbird for a long time, but Hero / Rowanne / Fire Bomb / Fire Bomb was plenty adequate until then. Look in to Rowanne.
You have 23 Fire Bombs. That’s a good start. You really need to trait them. If you get the third trait (Empowered), they start with full mana so you can explode them immediately. You’re going to be slow until that happens, so just plod your way through it. This is a good start.
What makes Rowanne and Sunbird great is they do a lot of damage to the entire enemy party, so it’s possible to kill all 4 troops at once. So what you want to look for in the troops you have are things that can do damage to multiple enemies. I see a good one: Ranger. Your Spooky Imp might work, but you’ll have to make some matches for it to be a winner.
Ranger is what I want to lean on though. One of my first PvP teams was just Hero and 3 Rangers. Even at a low level, it hits kind of hard. The damage calculation goes about like this:
At level 15-16, its base magic is 4. So it hits one enemy for 8 damage. Then, if there are 4 enemies alive, it gets 16 bonus damage to the 8 it will scatter. That means it hits for 8, then scatters 24 damage. The opponents will have ~120 vitality points and you just knocked out about 20% of them in one go. Yeah, that’s not super impressive. It’s still going to take time. But you’re level 61. It’s really early to be worried about this right now!
One gets Rowanne after completing Forest of Thorn questline.
Also, another good option for early level AOE damage dealer is Rock Spirit and it can also be used to create extra turns.
And the best hint you didn’t ask for!
While exploring, even if you don’t use the hero as one of your four troops,you can assign the hero to the team. That way you can earn towards the 250 wins to unlock class weapon.
Have you ever tried
Banner: Kraken or the one from see of sorrows
Strategy: rush forest troll then cast when there is enough green filling both apothecary and willow, then cast apothecary to fill forest troll again, willow, and khorvash, then cast willow with the extra brown gems on the board it should be enough damage to team wipe. (this would work also for PvP
That team is ok, but when farming you want speed.
Generally,
Sunbird, 2xfirebomb, hero with a class you want to improve, while using one of the banners with red and purple
Princess Elspeth, bombotx2, mechanist hero with all brown weapon —> cast PE on mech hero at start
A good team?
That is something that changes with the opponents you get. For instance when fighting a team of Goblins it is very handy to have the Gob Chomper in your team. When playing against dragons it’s good to have Dragon Cruncher and so on.
So if you ask me there is no such thing as a universal “good” team.
Furthermore if your guildmates are non-responsive I would change Guild. 
Thanks Slypenslyde for the advice. And honestly I misspoke (mistyped?) when I made my post about wanting an “Explore” team. I really meant a team to clear the Kingdom quests lines as quickly as possible. Sorry about that. I’ve been at Gems of War for only about a year and a half with 90% that just logging into gather the daily. Even most of that was with a guild that did almost zero tasks. I’m finally part of a guild that does at least the first 4 of each task so things are moving faster (hence this post).
I appreciate you taking the time to give me some tips and looking over what I had. I will check out the Ranger build and the Willow build that JLUONG recommended and see how it goes.
I welcome any other suggestions from anyone else as long as you please check to see if I have the troops as multiple others now have not taken the time to do. Regardless I appreciate them throwing out ideas as something is better than nothing, unless its leprosy.
Hey! 
Good on you for reaching out for advice, and hopefully I can chime in with some non-leprotic content.
Apothecary + Willow seems like it should be able to get you through the quests fairly easily, although they’ll be a slog regardless. I guess I’m also not sure what Willow’s damage is without kingdom bonuses, etc., so maybe it’s not quite enough, although it does have an okay brown gem boost ratio.
Rock Spirit is another great suggestion, as per @Dust_Angel. Apothecary + Rock Spirit, and you’re good to go. You could even chuck Rock Spirit at the end after Willow to catch extra browns, and finish off anything that didn’t get killed by Willow.
Use the Merlantis/Trident banner (+2 
, +1 
, -1 
) to fill up Apothecary as quickly as possible - and if you don’t have it, unlocking Merlantis should be easy.
I’d also recommend using your Hero up the front with a non-mana blocking weapon (does this make sense to you?) to act as a tank and earn class exp. Upgrading one of the common/rare weapons will give you some bonus stats (e.g. Sword of Heroes +5).
And I think it probably is worth beelining the Forest of Thorns quest line to gain a copy of Rowanne, the troop several have mentioned - she can be a bit of a powerhouse in the right setup, early game.
You have a lot of good troops for your level! Which I guess comes from playing for a long time and just logging on daily for most of it 
.
@JLUONG’s suggested team was a good one, although perhaps better suited for stronger opponents, rather than pure speed. If you wanted to include the Hero, I’d probably substitute out Emperor Khorvash (with great sadness).
There are a couple of troop combinations that work as effective loopers (troops that can generate mana for each other without giving up the turn) for just about any situation, and you have most of them. Alchemist + Moneylender/Hellcat is one, and Green Seer + Diviner/Giant Spider is the other (Giant Spider being the only troop you don’t have, there). If you get stuck, see if you can make something around them.
There are also a few troops (from the ones you have) I’d recommend levelling up to level 5 so that you can sort by Level and keep an eye on them, as either useful mana generators for any team or just decently powerful troops early on. As follows:
Alchemist, Apothecary, Banshee, Clockwork Sphinx (
), Dark Maiden, Diviner, Forest Troll, Green Seer, Moneylender, Ranger, Rock Spirit, Templar, Valkyrie.
To a lesser extent:
Cockatrice, Deck Hand, Deep Borer, Dryad, Dwarven Gate, Dwarven Zombie, Fire Bomb, Fire Giant, Fire Lizard, Ice Worm, Midge Swarm, Paladin, Orc, Rock Worm, Snowy Owl, Wall of Bones.
I could do a third tier… Suffice to say, there will be other useful troops, depending on the situation. When making a team, I often find it useful to Filter by Spell Effect > Convert Gems, and/or then > Create/Destroy(/Remove) Gems.
I’d also recommend trying out the Warpriest class that you’ve unlocked - its level 10/third rank Talent, Brilliant Aura, can be very useful early on with looping-type teams (gives +2 to life on 4/5 matches), and it still has decent attack due to the War Talent Tree.
I’m going to just list a bunch of potential team combos to play around with or get ideas from, to finish off, as well as a link to this thread: What is the most OP Rowanne deck?. Hopefully you’ll find some of them useful.
I forgot one more thing.
This (next, coming) week, you can get 2 x Arcane Venom traitstones in the Glory Rewards section of the Shop with the Wall of Tentacles troop (400 glory). If you can, it might be worth buying this a couple of times and traiting out that Leprechaun you’ve levelled for a fast start, similar to Fire Bomb (and potentially useful for gold-based teams, later) 
.