Magus Death PvP Guide

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First we did it with life wizards. Now it’s time to turn magus Deaths to warlord. Our plan is the same as it was the first time around. We’ll start without commander gear, lore spells or mastery amulets/crowns gear. And just to add some extra challenge, we’ll skip Bone Dragon as well.

However, if you’ve read my past articles you probably already know in what direction we’re heading today. You’ll need to grind tournaments for arena tickets in order to get the full duelist gear.

I used monstrous enchants and deadly minotaurs due to their easy accessibility. Both cards can be bought at The Archivist in Celestia. Deadly Minotaur has one catch though. You’ll need to wait for a free training point buy-back event. You’ll pre-enchant a nice amount of cards, buy back your training points and train other useful things.

Keep in mind one thing, if you have any stuff that could help you in battle – use them! I’ve written this guide for players who can’t get any luxury help. Feel free to use this guide as a base for your strategy or straight copy everything you’ll see here.

Rank & Gear

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I’ve reached around 1,1k rank with my Magus Death before it started to ping-pong in 4th age. It kept going up and down without any progression, so I’ve decided to downrank back to 500. That way I was able to write this guide and help people who struggle with Magus Death PvP.

You’re going to start with full duelist gear and switch to commander hat, robe and boots once you reach 800 rank. You can replace the Amulet if you find another one that suits you better. Personally, I never used the Monstrous card from the Duelist’s Virtuoso Talisman, since it’s sole purpose was an extra 150 health and I didn’t really find any other amulet being as useful for my needs.

Fill your tear sockets with extra health jewels, circle with damage jewels, and square with resist jewels. While these 3 are pretty much straight forward, we have a slightly different story with triangle sockets. I used an extra power pip chance jewel on both sockets, but you can also fill them with accuracy or additional blades (if you have any). Extra accuracy can be really beneficial when rocking full duelist gear, since you won’t reach 100% only by gear. And I can tell you from experience, losing a match because of fizzles is really painful.

 

Stats & Deck

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The first thing you probably noticed is that I severely trimmed down my main deck and placed every single hit in my side deck. The meta is really fast and aggressive and you don’t really need that many cards. The side deck is enough to kill your opponent even if it happens that you fail to do so on the first attempt.

Main point as to why I separated my deck like this is to have control over utility and attacking cards. It’s much easier to set up and then unleash the attack if you split your deck in half rather then having cards mixed together. Of course this may vary, so be careful if you try to apply the same thing in other levels/schools/strategies.

An important thing to keep in mind is discarding. Having a small deck doesn’t mean you should discard less. On the contrary, try to discard a lot. I often discarded 6 cards and used the remaining one. That way it’s really easy and efficient to play the right cards at the right moment. For example, it became standard for me to have triple stacked blades or double/triple set shield up in the first 3 rounds of the fight.

I slightly changed up my deck once reaching commander. I replaced mantles with single stuns (never used any of those spells though) and replaced both skeletal pirates with Minotaurs. You can probably do this change right away if you don’t have gargantuan enchants. Monstrous pirate’s high end does slightly more damage then Deadly Minotaur so there really isn’t much point to having it in your deck.

 

Training points

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• Ice to Tower shield + stun blocks
• Storm to Thermic shield
• Balance to Weakness + Spirit blade + Reshuffle

If you don’t have Deadly Minotaurs treasure cards yet just invest everything in the Myth school and start enchanting. Other than that it’s pretty straight forward. You have shields and weaknesses to protect yourself and Reshuffle for cases when you run out of cards.

 

The Pet

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This time I wasn’t holding myself back with a pet. Hatchmaking is a thing and so are double pet xp/gardening rewards. Couch potatoes are also easily obtainable in Grizzleheim and various other locations around the spiral so you don’t have any excuse not to have a good pet. You can find Don Gigi or other great pets in the Hatchmaking kiosk.

It’s not necessary to have a perfect max stat pet, but it does have to be offensive. For example, another good alternative would be triple double + another offensive talent (pierce, damage, mc infallible, …). Bad choice would be full ward pet, since it would clash with our strategy and gear. We’re playing to kill fast so taking away more damage isn’t the way to go.

 

Stitch to win, not to look nice

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We’re going to revise what we’ve already learned in the Magus Life PvP guide. Stitching is equally important as setting up your deck and gearing up. Stitching up commander gear isn’t really necessary, but changing the look of the Duelist gear is! Without stitching it, people will quickly realize what kind of stats you have and play accordingly.

And I must admit – I’ve seen more people with offensive, high health/damage and low resist set-ups then I did the last time. And even lost a fight due to thinking I’m fighting a defensive grand while in reality it was offensive magus. So I’ve got myself a little help and I highly suggest that you do the same.

Log in with your second account and simply check the level of your opponent. All you need is 80 crowns, so you can get past the first window. And don’t worry, you won’t get charged for that – you only get charged when you actually step in the battle circle in the arena. Once you know your opponent’s level, school and health you can roughly estimate what stats they have and what strategy they’re going to use. Higher health on magus wizards means lower resist and more damage, while lower health means the opposite: more resist with lower damage.

 

The Strategy

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Our Magus Death PvP strategy is pretty straight forward. Blade up and kill them before they manage to set up. Which will be a little tricky at times when you face other aggressive players. The reason behind this is mainly our spell limitation. We’re basically limited to Poison, Pirate and Deadly Minotaur while others will have a vast array of lore spells and high pip treasure cards.

You will lose some fights simply because of available tools, but make sure that you don’t get discouraged. Take this as an opportunity to learn more about predicting and timing. Could you play a set shield one turn earlier? Could you play the fight differently and make them waste all their pips before you attack?

Anyway there are two main routes you should take: Shields -> Blades -> Attack or Blades -> Attack. It’s hard to say which one is the right one, since this varies from a battle to battle. But generally you want to start with some shields when going first because you need to build up your pips. When going second you can attack quite fast. Extra power pip can make a big difference in fast paced fights.

Attack fast especially if you’re fighting another aggressive player and you don’t need to use Infallible. My main combo was Poison -> Myth Banshee -> Pirate at the beginning. It’s a really effective combo and you can even perform it with 4 failed pips! Another fun combo is Deadly Minotaur into Deadly Minotaur or Myth Banshee into Pirate/Minotaur. Try to experiment a little and soon you’ll find out how much damage each attack does to different types of opponents.

Will you try Magus Death PvP?
Which one is your favorite school to PvP with at low levels?

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