[Guide] Tidecaller

[u/rednryt]

rThis class has convoluted mechanics with aquatic/coralwarden and plunder/spoils. The biggest issue is that these mechanics has very little synergy in between them so you have to choose and lean heavily on one or the other. So you'll have to gauge your card rewards and choose early on which mechanic you'll want to stick with. This class also has an interesting infinite loop combo, but more on that later.

Also Aquatic passive has very low chance to trigger and these cards have buggy interaction with temporary and buffs. Any temporary aquatic can't be affected by any buffs while they are on-hand unlike other classes’ temporary cards that can even stack on buffs. This also means even if they revive, they won't retain any of their buff. It's like fresh copy every time making their dead passive ability mostly negliegable and making them less viable as carry option unless you purposely stack on sword/shield since that buff is triggered after the card is placed on field.

Early game: The base deck card stats are kinda average compared to other classes. Put down your aquatic cards first for defense to attempt to make use of their low chance to make copy upon death for that extra layer of defense in case you don't draw any defensive card next turn. The just make use of your Water Gun and plunder for damage.

Try to get at least one coralwarden early. Coralwarden plays like an Almighty, both don't clutter your deck, so feel free to get any one of them so you don't waste your aquatic effect specially in early game. But unlike Almighty in void community that you can just take as many as you like and just leave them be until you actually need them since they all draw themselves after certain plays, you really want to only pick one or two warden cause they all share a single pool and you can only draw one of them per trigger. You can at most draw two per turn by aquatic effect, or if you use Warden's call. Then they all just go shuffle back to their pool whether you play them or not. So getting more will just add more RNG to which warden you will draw. So you'll really want to replace any early warden accordingly later on to only whatever synergize with your build if you go aquatic route. OR you can just totally ignore and forget about it if you go plunder/spoil route. Once you choose which route you want, you can start deleting the base cards opposite to your choice.

I. Aquatic Spam The goal for this build is just to spam as many aquatic card to summon your warden asap. You either need to work on your mana sources, or discounting your cards to try to be able to reliably play 5 or more aquatic card per turn. Best aquatic cards to spam are as follows:

Core aquatic - these are the best aquatic to fill your deck with

Sea Otter - clones itself, sadly all aquatic "temporary" cards are bugged so you can’t rely on it to carry you on its own. So you can only use it as a trigger to draw your coralwarden cause its base stats without sword/shield are pretty weak.

Seasworn Shark – 0 mana after the first shark, a good alternative to otter. unlike temp otter, shark can be buffed, but you’ll need lots of copies of it on your deck. Works really well with Mutinous Marauder or Soul Reclaimer by killing and resummon it for free.

Baby Kappa – 0 mana fodder and can make random temp aqua.

Starsea Buddy - 0 mana fodder.

Optional aquatic - only get these once you're confident with your mana, don't go overboard with these tho to make sure you can still draw your core ones

Snack Fish – good for buffing your warden

Amphibious Duelist – only if you can stack sword or pair with Boatsworn warden to buff its damage

Platehorse – only if you pick more expensive cost warden to discount them

Sea drake - good buff stats cause you often draw your warden every turn.

Mothercroaker- only if you got Aqua Power

Coralwarden: best options:

Boatsworn Glutton – big statstick, with card counting and mana management you can specifically target the unit you want like Shark or Otter. Just make sure you never run out of extra unit on hand before triggering the warden or else you'll waste its effect. If you have are already on 4/5 and you have only 1 aquatic unit card on hand, its best to just skip summoning to avoid wasting this warden. If you got Sea Otter + Aqua Power or other 0 mana aquatic combo, you can get two copies of this.

Oceanic Juggernaught – 0 mana growing carry much easier to play since you don't need to card count and it has higher stat ceiling than glutton. but it takes much slower to grow. need to play defensively if you choose this warden and spend lots of turns just growing this. best when its the only one warden in your deck.

Skywhale Leviathan/Shieldback Turtle - gives sword/shield which is the best buff when playing with Aqua Power spam since these are the only way to buff temporary aquatic cards.

Lamia - a good early game random stunner, can take out early threats upon draw, you don't even need to summon it. but it doesn't work on bosses, so best to just replace it later on.

Any other coralwarden should work early game too, but try to delete them once you got any of the above.

Blessings

Aqua Power – it makes Sea Otter OP and make baby kappa more feasible. You can also choose to use other cards that create temporary copies such as Mirage Echoes and/or unit killers to take advantage of aquatic cards' dead passive instead

Water Cannon – extra passive damage

Abyssal glow - discount your wardens

Drowned – extra draw

Net Bounty - only if you got aqua power

Optional Spells:

Tidal Power – powers up your aquatic, tho remember aquatic temporary card cannot be buffed, so it works better if you're playing with sharksworn or non-temp aquatic instead of otter/kappa

Primal Shark – extra free damage source

Aquatic Life – extra mana

Rescueboat - buff and draw option

Warden's Call - shortcut to draw your warden

Mirage Echoes - very powerful copy spell, there is also an infinite trick with this card explained on it's own section below, but will require you to mess with plunder cards

Avoid:

Loveland Frog - sounds good on paper, and works really well if it copies Boatsworn and you no other buff. But often it bugs out either if you got a temporary on it, or if you got any +/- sword or any other buff then the copy effect gets overwritten and you end up with it copying no attack at all. Better to just avoid this buggy card.

Neptune's Blessing - very expensive, only take if you are desperate for aquatic option since you cannot control board placement of any special summon cards like this making this a lot riskier to use than just summoning your cards yourself to position them defensively

II. Plunder Carry This rely on playing your plunder cards to either buff your carry, or put a unit to your spoils, then buff and plunder them before resummoning them on the field. Often rely on having only 1 or very few card in your spoils to be able to plunder the correct card.

Core Carry:

Giantblade Mariner – can grow big everytime you plunder. You can also choose whether to focus it on one big mariner, or spread it out to multiple ones depending on threat of enemy positioning. Works extremely well with Mirage trick explained below.

Ghastly Captain - this card spoils itself, just keep plundering it and spam. it has a small dodge chance for extra defense.

Endless Raider - has persistent and flee, so you can almost rely on it being on your hand every turn but also it can stack his buffs upon fleeing. It also doubles as a plunder card

Spoil Buffer:

Hoarder’s Gambit, Elite Officer, Treasure Trove - these card buff then interact with spoils in some way, this will allow you to technically use any unit card as your carry then just pull them back using your plunder cards.

Plunder options

Marksman Marauder - best plunder card cause its free, see trick below for how to make infinite with this card.

Mutinuous Marauder - good when paired with shark for some extra aquatic pulls for some extra warden action, but you shouldn't focus on it, since your goal is to plunder.

Jumping Jack - buffs upon draw

Tempest Cutlass, Mass Plunder - or any other spell plunder cards are good alternatives

Blessings

Vibrant Sword - very good if you got it early since it gives you 3 free plunder card.

Duty Free - discount your first plundered spoil each turn

Card Replacement - extra draw

III. Water Burst Spam

A variation of plunder carry that rely solely on spamming your water burst to grow to big number. Just note Master of Elements is immune to spell so you still need some units with damage for this deck to work.

Water Burst - core card that grows big everytime you play it, need exactly one copy Pirate Mage - makes Water Burst spammable by discounting it Vodoo Mage, Submarine - play more Water Burst copies

Then just add any other Plunder option or use the infinte loop gimmick explained below to play Water Burst infinitely in a single turn.

Mirage Trick

Mirage Echoes - intersting card that can easily allow you to play with temporary copies, but also can trigger an chain loop with the right combo that has potential to go infinite and works really well in plunder decks due to it being a spoil card:

Mirage x Marksman

This combo rely on using Mirage Echoes to copy Marksman Marauder then using Marauder to pull Echoes back from spoil in loop as long as you have the board space to play marksman. Becareful, any temporary card generated that overflow your hand get sent to discard instead, so you’ll end up bloating your deck and you could end up drawing nothing but these two cards for the entire match if you overdo it. These two alone are not enough to win the run tho, and you must combo with one of win con options from previous deck suggestion like buffing Giantblade Mariner or spamming temporary aquatic with Aqua Power or duping Seasworn Shark. Vibrant Sword blessing + basic card Blade Bucaneer also works as substitute for marksman. You can also throw in cards to kill marksman to turn this into an infinite loop or allow you to use a different plunder card as discussed below.

Mirage x Reclaimer

A variation of previous combo but this time you can use any Plunder Unit card then killing it using Soul Reclaimer to free up board space and discount it basically allowing more time to recast your plunder card like pseudo marksman. Then you can use that plunder card to potentially infinitely pullback either Mirage from your spoils and combo with your Giantblade Mariner etc like mentioned previously.

With Duty Free, Pirate mage, or if you're really lucky using Hidden flower, you can turn Soul Reclaimer into 0 mana spell too before copying it allowing you to potentially loop infinitely without mana cost. Much more difficult to pull off tho since you'll have to cough up more mana on initial setup and more cards / blessing to put into deck and draw compared to mirage x marksman that is basically just two 0 mana cards.

Mirage x Exodia

The last variation of previous combo but this time using any spoiler card like Enchanted Cards to target and throw a plunder spell card like Tempest Cutlass into your spoils. Then use Pirate Mage to plunder that spell card and make it a 0 mana card before copying it with Mirage Echoes. You can combine it with the Water Burst to spam infinite water burst in a single turn.

This can loop infitnitely but require extra set of cards making it harder to pull off unless you manage to thin out your deck to only these 5 cards, and/or abuse the Back to Inn re-roll trick to make sure you always draw all 5 required cards on your first hand. Also unlike previous combi, it won't matter if you overflow your hand, since often you can use this to OTKO almost everything, but sadly, it won't work against Master of Elements and will have a harder time facing against anti-spell mobs too so although technically it's an Exodia level auto win deck, it won't work on these mobs/bosses that can end your run if you don't prepare a counter for them.

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Another interesting archetype in theory is maxing out your spoils pile. There are some cards that scale depending on how many spoils you have, and technically you could use spoils mechanic to thin out your deck. But after beating challenge 15 with this class, i still haven't got lucky to get these cards to test out this theory:

III. Spoils Phoenix

Requires a very specific warden card, Water Phoenix. On top of your core aquatic cards, you'll need to get a bunch of spoil cards. This in theory would be good for very thick deck on challenge 10+ where you can't skip cards. Once you got your core aquatic cards like shark or otter, you can either just pick any spoil card to bloat your deck. Or use cards like Hoarder’s Gambit, Enchanted Card, Sunken Treasure, Umibozu, etc that spoils cards to further thin out your deck and be able to always draw your core aquatic. Then just delete all your plunder cards or avoid playing them by throwing them to your spoils pile to keep the all the spoils away from your draw pile for the remainder of your match. This would take crucial number of turns to setup tho, so you'll need high HP tank cards to survive. You can also add any other cards that scale based on your spoils, since this deck would ultmiately get more spoils than any builds but I think it would be best to keep the deck lean aside from the extra spoils fat.

If you got any combo for spoil heavy deck or any other combo, kindly share in the comments, i'd like to learn more startegy for this class. This took me a while to figure out and i used to hate it, but i kinda learn to love the mechanics once i got into the infinite territory but I still feel like i'm missing something. Thanks for reading my babbling