You didn’t really establish “no problem”. All of your suggestions will fall flat more often than not. Let’s talk about what goes wrong with each plan, with the lens “If I can kill all three other troops I’ve already won”:
- Rope Dart + Godslayer: You have to have two troops completely filled for this to work. Odds are the crown’s engine is already running by the time you do this, then you’re fighting uphill.
- Night Hag is weak AF and has at best a 1/3 chance of doing what you describe.
- Dragon’s Eye is formidable but again, only works 100% if you’ve eliminated the rest of the team. So you propose a 25% solution, or at least one that is long and tedious.
- Why are you bothering with the frog when GC pulls itself to the front?
- Bulette only works 50% of the time if and only if enough brown gems are present.
- GC gains life and armor,
2*Magic + 1. With no bonuses that means mine gains 42 life per proc. Spirit Fox deals Magic + 1 true damage, boosted by yellow gems. Being very generous with 18 yellow gems in place, for me that is 18 + 9 = 27 damage. Your Spirit Fox does less damage than GC gains per proc. You have to hit GC 2:1 to win.
All of these ideas are decent last resorts, but not a great approach. Most of the troops you listed don’t even let you select a target, and are likely to have succumbed by the time the enemy has been pared down enough to make GC a likely target. Some of them don’t even do enough damage per proc to overcome GC itself.
I can’t remember the exact team I faced, but the GC team that’s caused me the most trouble can boost the hero’s magic, which is catastrophic when the hero’s ability is scaling multiplicatively. +10 magic means +20 armor and life per turn. That gives it more time to boost its magic further. It doesn’t take much before you don’t have a solution unless you’re packing something like Megavore that both doesn’t give a snot about scaling armor heal and can multplicatively scale its damage too.
Play the game smarter:
Given the real behavior of GC teams, we’ve got two solutions:
- Kill GC before it gets out of hand.
- Kill what is boosting GC’s magic before it gets out of hand.
Either way works, a GC doesn’t have much offense on its own. If you can just prevent its tank from becoming impossible to overcome, you can pick off the rest of the team before whittling it down to nothing. It’s still ideal to kill it first.
So we need targeted alpha strikers like Ketras, Pharos-Ra, and Megavore. Or we need scaling damage. Suna and Yao Guai come to mind. But all of these have problems. They’re expensive. The scaling ones can’t specifically target GC, though that might help us if they manage to disable the magic generator. I’m personally having an OK time with a Flammifer-fueled Yao Guai team. That’s why I can’t remember exactly the GC team that’s a problem: this works well enough I lose at about the same rate as any other meta team.
That’s a problem. You need an endgame meta team to present the “solution”. There are cute alternatives that will work sometimes, but they fail so much more often they aren’t worthy of a team slot. You really only have two choices:
- Use one of the endgame meta teams that chews up and spits out every other “cute” team.
- Devote a team slot or time to arranging a specialized solution to a rare but annoying meta team.
- Skip the fights entirely.
The second bullet is a dumb choice. Every time I change teams, I lose about 20% of the time it takes me to win a match. So I make more trophies, overall, if I just duck into 2t or 1t battles instead of risking a GC team if I don’t like it. Even if I fight it with my meta team, it usually takes longer to beat it than average so I lose rewards by fighting it. That’s a problem. Even if I win, I lose.
There are two ends of a continuum on which players tend to fall: “I want slow, strategic play” and “I want fast, chaotic play”. The game right now tilts much towards “chaotic”. A lot of people are unhappy with that. The idea of “I need to devote team slots to individual matchups” is more compatible with slow, strategic play. Right now, that’s a problem to at least some people, because they don’t want GoW to be that kind of game.
But also: the people who want slower, strategic play don’t want to play vs. an opponent they obviously can’t beat. What’s the point? Nobody likes a 30-turn game where you obviously lost on turn 10. In the 5% or fewer GC games where it actually gets its way, that’s how you lose. It’s miserable. That’s a problem.
Those are all problems GC implies. But this is a case where I don’t think there’s an actionable solution. It’s a “troll team” like Goblins. For most endgame players, it’s going to fall on its face 95% of the time and lose. But when it wins, it does so in a demoralizing and frustrating way that feels unfair. People like it better when “unfair” works in their favor.
So even though I think I just laid out there are very strong reasons to argue GC is not a successful defense, I also tend to choose “skip that match” because I hate the rare cases where it’s lucky.
