Valk/Valk/Row/Mercy is a speed clear team. Rowanne needs to be strong enough or the difficulty needs to be set low enough to clear the opposing team in two casts of Rowanne for maximum efficiency. Use the yellow/yellow banner. Typically its cast Mercy, fill second valk (if not already filled), convert for extra turn using first valk(color doesnt matter, since two casts of rowanne will end it, and 1 match 5 fills her with two water links), clear any extra turns so enemy doesn’t, cast rowanne, enemy takes skulls (probably) convert with second valk, cast rowanne and win. Valk/Valk/Mab/Mercy works the same way for challenges/explores, except you dont need to clear extra turns if you have 13 blue gems on deck, or if you froze their blue mana, but you do have to watch out for mana shield and impervious. Both were purposed for maxing out souls with two valk casts without losing much speed, but with beefier enemy lineups like WL4 or PvP, they can take a bit.
My last used explore speed team is Valk/Mab/Rowanne/Mercy. Uses yellow/blue banner (though I suppose Leonis banner works too, now). Cast mercy for valk, valk fills mab and hopefully rowanne. Cast mab, cast rowanne, gg. The hybrid damage is more resistant to random impervious, since mab can clear out most everything else and you have a heavy nuke from rowanne to finish the last troop, though depending on how many legendaries or mythics are in the fight, you may need another cast or a couple skulls to end it, but its still very fast. Typically only gets one cast of valk, but balances out by being a bit faster (at the time I was using this, valk + kills still earned over half the soul cap with a single cast, so requiring a that needs two valk casts was slowing it down overall even in terms of souls).
Pre-2.01, I would use double valk mab for high difficulty challenge stars since it could kill any team without dropping a turn. Though I was using the Treant/Valk/Mercy/Terraxsis team before mab existing when getting stars, and switching to double valk rowanne for subsequent farming.
I don’t have Mercy or Trraxis by the way; I agree they look like they’d be good for this.
Something I’ve realised is that i don’t really want to use Valkyrie, but she earns about $0.25 per game in souls: Assuming 4 min per game = $3.75 per hour.
That’s pretty damn good so will be sticking with the lady for now.
I’ve been trying suggested teams out, particularly the Rowanne-based teams.
I found these a bit brittle as if Rowanne gets targeted your damage potential goes down fast. Possibly I just need to level her up more though: How do you guys find maintaining her armour?
Although I love netdecking for ideas, I do like to put my own spin on them so I eventually settled on:
Hero (with a brown or brown weapon, as dodgy as it sounds)
Valkyrie
Carnex
Druid
Then earlier today I got found Gorgotha
So the current team I’m trying is:
Valkyrie
Gorgotha
Druid
Carnex
On both teams the last two spots could possibly be swapped around.
The idea is for Druid to use his spell whenever possible, but to prioritise feeding Valkyrie to get two to three casts off before she croaks in order to gain souls.
Then use Gorgotha and Carnex to feed Druid. It’s designed that even without Valkyrie the team still uses all six colours.
I used this last team to beat a hardest-difficulty challenge on Warlord 3 difficulty at the first try, so it seems pretty good.
This team probably isn’t as strong as some of the others above but I’ll keep refining it and return to your ideas to try out as I get some of those troops such as Mercy.
I do have alchemist, but found constantly filling him to fill valkyrie to fill druid a bit dull because I had to search the board for the best colour to match and confirm there was a good match every move.
I am going to check out a couple of Tacets videos on how to play this kind of feeder-team though to see if he’s playing it differently.
