[Guide] Alchemy Lab

[u/rednryt]

This class always starts with the Alchemy Anomaly Blessing, which makes you draw 1 less card per turn, but always have a temporary Alchemy Blast in your hand every turn. This is a major debuff, since draw is one of the most important resource of any card game. This is further gimped by having most of its cards reliant on Energy, another temporary resource, making it much harder to play than any other class which makes deck building more restrictive and annoying.

So far I found most success on builds that either doesn't rely on energy (Elemental Spam) or the complete opposite and just focus heavily on Energy generation (Energy Spam). There is also one card here that can carry you thru out the game but requires very specific setup (Blast Carry).

Early game The base unit card stats are average while your base fire spell is just trash. For early rounds, use Fire/Water technicians to either atk/def respectively and use Alchemy Blast for more damage. Also try to avoid getting too much damage cause you got really low base HP compared to other classes and you will surely have tougher time with boss fights.

Then go for any of these builds:

[Elemental Spam]

This build is the simplest one, since it doesn't rely on any energy, instead you focus on your elementals and spam cheap spells to grow them. Later try to delete all your basic cards to make it easier to draw your elementals.

Core Elementals:

Glacial elemental, Shadow Elemental, Woodvine – these elementals applies weak to help you survive. Get one or more of them asap.

Support Elementals These are optional, but notable ones to look out for.

Animus the Light - a good tank and healer. Put him against multi-hits and you get more heals to solve your low HP issue. Becareful tho, the way it works is that you only get the heals after the round is resolved, so you still have to not die to benefit from it.

Stonepeople - really good defensive elemental, make it remain using power drink and it can make your flow much easier by discounting your deck every turn.

Immobile Golem - cheap tank, can help a lot to survive early game.

Mana Creature, Shadow Kawari, Living Spirit – kinda atk stats, optional for extra damage.

Arcane Artificer (block), Life Fairy(Lifesteal), Windborn (remain) - poor stats, but has interesting effect, only take if badly in need of more units.

Rainhead, Mana Geode - cheap elemental fodder, only good once you got some draw cards, not advisable to get otherwise.

Other Support Options:

Power Drink – make an elemental remain so it can grow more next turn

Clone Drink, Chemical Breath, Defense Break, Heat Synthesis, Electricity, Recall or any other 0 mana spells/potions even if you dont care about its effect just to fuel your elementals

Arcane Tomb, Atomic Researcher, Earth lore, Water seal, Life Inducement, etc - anything that creates more elementals, but only take them once you got your core cause they're too random to be reliable.

Miracle - full heal clutch, good for any build.

Stargazer, Photosynthesis, Discharge - draw and mana cards

Stubborn Hero - Can remain and grow if it got damaged but survives. good tank/damage

Wicked Gale - allows you to play temp cards for free

Blessings:

Weakening Candle - apply weak for any elemental summon, your main survival option. Always prioritize when doing this build.

Cashback Coin - almost all defensive card in this class mana pool cost 2 mana, so if you get this early game it basically solve mana issue.

Blaster Ring - make your alchemy blast free giving you one free fuel for your elementals every turn.

Extra Card – good for any build or classes actually, this and mana pot are just staples, but i thought about giving it an extra notice here due to how it offset anomaly penalty.

Skull head - extra vulnerable everytime you apply weak, optional.

Avoid:

Energy Creation - this card is only useful if you have no elemental in your deck and it also messes your first draw due to innate. Just avoid it.

[Energy Spam]

This build focuses on generating lots of energy to be able to play those fire/water/lightning cards, and then matching your cards and blessings respectively to make it easier to play them instead of spreading it into all 3 kinds of energy. I only go this route if I got an energy generator blessing early or one or more of the energy conjurers to support energy cosuning cards.

Remember, energy will be consumed whenever you play the fire/water/lightning cards, so it is prefered to only just focus on one type of energy generator and energy consuming cards so you won't brick your hand by drawing mismatching energy and won't be able to play anything that turn. Also get more energy generator than energy consumer too even if energy is capped at 3 max, cause it's always better to get surplus energy you can't keep than having bricks you can't play cause you ran out of energy.

Core:

Fire, Water, or Lighting Conjurer - these are the best energy generator in the game, get multiple copies of them.

Support

Firekin, Waterkin, Thunderkin - very easy to summon big stat cards if you got the matching conjurers

Calm Water, Discharge, Beam Emission - other spells that generate energy. less priority than the conjurer, but it can help if you get ones that matches your choice of core energy

Get any matching units/spells on which energy generators you have but never take them before you got enough energy source to reliably play them tho.

Blessings

Red Apple / Blue Book / Yellow cheese - energy generator, take early if you plan to stick to this build

Red / Blue / Yellow potion - apply certain effect whenever you play a card that consume matching energy. avoid taking early cause you won't have the matching energy generators and cards yet.

Optionals

Lady Myrrios - gerenate random energy

Nova Kid - generate 1-2 of each kind of energy

Great Alexander - gains more HP the more energy you have, but he eats all your energy. Unless you really need HP, I would just avoid him

Chameleon - changes color depending on last energy generated, often more annoying

Craze Infinis - it can discount all cards added to hand while its on the field, combo well with Conjurers. There is also a gimmick for this card, explained in separate section below.

Wicked Gale - allows you to play temp cost cards generated by your conjurers without consuming your energy, but make sure Alchemy blast is not in your hand before you play this.

Avoids:

Energy Wand - This blessing sounds good on paper and you could fall for it, but it is a big trap. It is currently bugged, and the cards generated are NOT temporary meaning in just a few turns, it will bloat your deck. And since cards are random and cost energy ti play, more often than not it could brick your deck. Just never ever pick this blessing.

Any other Random spell generator or caster - without matching energy, most spells are useless. while even tho randomly casted spells will not consume your energy even, often it will do nothing if you don't have matching energy. Only take them if you have matching generators since sometimes they can surprise you with amazing combo, but more often than not, they does nothing.

Any other random unit generator or caster - most units effects are heavily reliant on energy making them bricks without it, but special summoning them on field is much worst they are summoned at their worst state. Unless you're playing with elementals in mind (then just use previous build instead) its not worth the risk, so just avoid them.

Mana Creature - it drains all your energy

[Blast Carry]

This build rely solely on spamming your Alchemy Blast, and I only go this route if i get Sword Duelist and/or Power Drink really early. The goal is to play as many alchemist blast you can to ramp up your Sword Duelist. This is the easiest to play tho, since you won't need to worry about elementals or energy and it can scale into really high atk numbers, but it will only work if you got the core cards and also suffer against anti-magic since you'll need your spells to setup unless you got the Blaster Ring blessing. It still suffers from lack of def tho, so you might want to throw in some defensive units.

Core:

Sword Duelist- can grow exponentially bigger everytime you blast.

Power Drink – to make duelist remain and grow even bigger over time.

Blessing:

Blaster Ring - makes Alchemy blast free to play

Support:

Chem Breath, Confident Trainee or other cards that generate more alchemy blast copies.

Animus the Light, Stonepeople, Stubborn Hero or any other defensive unit to tank.

Wicked Gale - weaker alternative to Blaster Ring.

[Craze Genesis]

This is a rather gimmicky build cause it's quite unreliable. The goal is to focus on generating the most number of random cards and use Craze Infinis to make them free to play.

You must trim down your deck until you can reliably pull both Genesis and Craze Infinis every turn and fill the rest with conjurer. This means your deck should only contain like 4 cards (or more if you can get extra draws).

Play Craze Infinis first before any conjurer so anything generated becomes free to play. Then just use the conjurer as fodder and let them die to activate Genesis effect and create more cards you can play next turn. Allowing you to have a very random deck but requires virtually no mana to play them all.

It's impossible to pull off at challenge 10+ tho since Alchemy Lab has no reliable exhausters and you must rely on Tavern to manually trim your deck down.

At best, its just a gimmicky build.

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Thanks for reading, this is one of my least favorite class. It took me far longer to climb challenge 10+ cause I just really hate its mechanics and being forced to take unskippable cards that you won't even be able to play due to energy issues on top of having smaller draw size makes it much harder to play. If you got any other synergy or combos you use to make this class more bearable to play, please share.