Make Creep Great Again!

[tsevech]

You raise an interesting point here. Is it fine that Creep changes with each rotation?

I would expect faction-defining mechanics like Creep to be stable over time, with selected cards which make them more or less viable, depending on the meta. Point is, we cannot really tell whether Abyssal Crawler or Shadow Nova are too weak or not, because the effect of Creep is going to change over time, which voids the purpose of the present topic.

I think the developers should REALLY consider including a few of the Shimzar cards into Core, which would help defining the identify of Creep and give foundations for the next cards which interact with it.

[lambertsimnel]

Yeah I would love this - obviously I’m biased but sphere of darkness is not exactly finality; and obliterate should be in too…I can understand dropping klaxon if they replace him with something new but…

[whyb0t]

Personally I believe that CPG decided they didn’t want current creep tools to define creep, so whatever support they give it in the next expansion will be Creep 3.0 essentially.

Perhaps future creep support will be made permanent if CPG is happy with how it plays out, or perhaps creep outside of expansion support will simply be a sort of tech tool Cassyva and certain Abyss cards have, such as how Sphere of Darkness and Cassyva’s bbs are used now.

[oranos]

it could become like artifacts in songhai where they primarily support spell archetypes, but pure artifacthai isnt nearly as viable.

creep could become a support tool to swarm or ramp as opposed to being its own archetype. like the way lyonars tiles synergize with the old healyonar archetype.
“summon a wraithling on all friendly creep tiles”
“minions summoned on creep tiles cost 1 less”
“minions on creep tiles can no longer move”

[whalewhiskers]

Creep decks are - and always have been - slow late game control decks. The archetype needs late game sustainability and Abyssian lost their best tool for this when Kelaino got nerfed.

Abyssian has all the set up tools for Shadow Creep to viable. They just don’t have the means to survive long enough to see the pay off.

[oranos]

we need a neutral minion that turns friendly tiles into random tiles. like shadow creep to primal ground and back

[halcyon98]

My personal idea for decent creep support is a cheap minion that enables creeps to create another creep tile in a nearby space every start of a turn; hence the name, “creep.”

[1pancakess]

the only way creep has ever functioned is with a deck running 3 X spectral revenant. in beta it ran 3 X shadow nova, after the rework shadow nova became a joke and was replaced by a 1-of obliterate as the archetype became even more reliant on spectral revenant. since spectral revenant was nerfed the archetype is considered competitively unplayable which at tournament level may well be true but cassyva still has all the tools she needs to stall to win with obliterate or a second spectral revenant against most decks you’ll run into in ladder.
abyssal crawler generating a creep tile each turn means another point of health and attack on an abyssal juggernaut and another point of damage obliterate does. if it generated a creep tile whenever you played a card that would make basically no difference. you won’t get a creep tile playing it by itself turn 1. your opponent can potentially clear it before you get a single tile from it. at best you break even with 2 tiles generated if it sticks and you play 2 cards next turn. then you have to play another 2 card turn to get ahead in value from the way it works now.

The suggestion I have is to make Creep deal 0 damage but have the following effect: “Whenever you play a card, deal 1 damage to enemies standing on this tile…The Abyssian player now has the option of … burning through his cards/deck to deal burst damage”

running an extremely low curve and hand dumping to do 5 or 6 face damage with sphere of darkness would be an instant game over for you. the idea of this being a strong play is laughable not to mention having anti-synergy with playing 2 cards per turn to get more creep from crawler.

[rebound]

I think creep isn’t about killing your opponent as much as it is about zoning your opponent. You are essentially putting barriers down where the opponent cannot exist without taking damage.

Unfortunately, this just isn’t as impactful as building a deck that burns down the opponent with combinations of phoenix fire, firebomb and the 3/1 that deals 3 damage to each general as its opening gambit. It is painfully slow by comparison.

I think the pay-offs that we have are fine, but it is hurt by that the units attached to this effect just are below the curve. Too much so. Night fiend’s effect is good, but the body for that cost is just not good enough. The other pay-off cards are either really expensive like Variax and obliterate, or they are relatively fragile like the guy that gets a boost for each shadow creep on the board. The darkspine elemental is fun to play with, but again it has a relatively bad statline at 1/4.

What creep needs is another unit that gets a power/toughness boost from shadow creep or some other pay-off card that has a good body attached to it. Or something that extends the game, like an abyssian unit that grants health equal to the amount of shadow creep on the map.

[terrarius]

If only it would be threatening to end your turn on creep…too bad that 1 damage are pretty insignificant and thus the creep will never zone you off.

[rebound]

The 1 damage matters more to units than it does to generals. Ironically, it is at its best against abyssian when they dabble in wraithlings.

I had a deck with darkspine elementals in there that could amp up the damage to 2, 4 or 8 damage, but that was just not good enough. If only darkspine elementals just gave your general a permanent enhancement that said “creep damage +1” per each darkspine elemental that you played that game.

[baharoth]

Well they either had to restrict the amount of damage or design all creep cards in such a way that they can’t spawn tiles below an opponent. Just imagine Sphere of darkness doing 3+ damage.

[terrarius]

I know…but all these cards that spawn creep right under you are going to disspear with the next expansion so that would be a possible change

[baharoth]

Shadow Nova won’t disappear and i think nobody want’s old creep back where that card did 10+ damage at times. I do hope for a rework of core creepcards though, both Nova and Crawler are lackluster as of now.

[alplod]

As argued already, crawler isn’t inherently bad, it’s actually rather good at creating creep. The problem is that creep support is not good enough and will become even worse with rotation.

I personally had some success (in diamond) with a nethermeld creep deck. Thunderhorn, Tar, Deceptibot, Juggernaut played safely behind suddenly teleport in to make the opponent’s life miserable. One may also consider pairing them with chakrams (redundant with tahr though). I topped the deck with Variax just for fun. And it kinda worked.

[unreason]

Don’t forget, everyone, that when rotation hits they could throw us a fat stack of high-quality shadow creep cards and supporting neutrals and make shadow creep tier zero. Or they could just give Lilithe and Maehv a bunch of cards and leave poor Cassy in the dust. There’s no telling at this point what the meta’s going to look like post-rotation. If they ruin everything, then we can complain until they nerf things (which seems to be how it works when they break something). Let’s just wait and see.

[oranos]

so your saying creep can be good as a budget songhai deck

also ive brainstormed a bunch of cool creep cards