It’s about time we had a new spin on the deckbuilder, and Wildfrost delivers. The roguelike card battler sees you fighting numerous tactical battles across a cartoon winter-pocalypse landscape. Fight mutant acorns, toxic mushrooms, goats who practice martial arts, and evil snowmen. Don’t let the cartoonish aesthetic and beautiful music fool you. Wildfrost is every bit as grueling, relentless, and tactical as games like Slay The Spire or Monster Train. Keeping that in mind, here’s a few things you should know before you write that first name in the journal.
Prepare To Die
Wildfrost is a modern roguelike. What that means is that it’s a game where your heroes will die a lot to progress. What this also means is that it’s harder than a brick wall and about as yielding. The game rolls hard, and you will die a lot. Often for cheap reasons. The game is hard and the number of crossed-out names in your journal is a constant reminder of that. Don’t worry too much about it. You’ll get there eventually. The more you play, the more you’ll learn.
Mouse Over Everything
Always mouse over a card if you don’t know what it does. Tooltips in Wildfrost are informative, from telling you how effects work to what all those symbols on a card mean. It’s intuitive. If you read up on a symbol or effect once, then you can usually work it into your deck. It also means you can figure out how to best play your deck. Shadow decks, for example, rely a lot on summons and danage stacks. Snowdwellers are your standard debuff build. Gnomes have a very bizarre deck that involves a constant draw-discard economy. Learning how everything works is crucial to winning those fights.
Zero For Heroes
When Wildfrost tells you that a hero’s power activates, it’s important to know they’re talking about when the character attacks. No abilities trigger on playing cards from your hands. You have to actually let the counter on your hero hit zero for the power to activate. This can get frustrating, especially when heroes have to wait approximately four turns to respond. Think of it more like this: You’re playing cards to weaken and debuff the monsters. Your heroes are there as finishing moves that take a couple of turns to wind up. Control the tempo, watch your debuff stacks, and wait for the right moment to get your hits in
Heroes Are Polite
One of the earliest things you learn in Wildfrost, and one of the most important, is attack order. Since heroes attack after monsters, it’s important to defend properly. After all, your hero might not have the chance to hit back if they’re taken out. Keep a close eye on the countdowns each enemy has. These will tell you how close it is to attacking. A freeze or some kind of block might be the difference between life and death. This is also important for keeping allies alive. Delaying an enemy countdown means they can get one more hit in. Remember: The less enemies act, the less incoming damage, and the sooner you can activate those awesome hero powers.
All Hands On The Bad One
Once one of Wildfrost‘s boss monsters enters the field, killing it ends combat immediately. While your heroes can only target monsters in the lane in front of them, actions and items can target anyone. Play cards that’ll damage the boss monsters and cause them status effects. That will maintain the tempo of the fight and leave the monsters as fodder for your heroes. It’ll also keep you out of the way of the major effects that put your allies in danger. If you need to end a run quick, hit the boss with everything you have. After all, even with bad luck, sometimes time is on your side.
Never Stay In Your Lane
Moving your heroes around is a free action, so do it as often as possible. Are you one huge attack away from death? Move your hero to a different lane. Need to swap around the order of heroes or recall someone? Do it. Repositioning your heroes has a huge effect on the board, and it gets you out of a number of jams. Enemies attack whatever lane has heroes in it. You can avoid getting hit by spreading out so they hit whoever’s in front of them. It makes some of the nastier damage combos hurt a lot less. You can also recall heroes, which heal five HP and allow them to be deployed to the board again.
Up For A Scrap
Finally, we should discuss Scrap. Scrap is much like HP or Shell in that it shields you from damage. Scrap is unlike those things as it will absorb all of one hit. As most enemies (at least in the early game) only do you one hit, scrap is incredibly OP. While Gnomes get these cards automatically, scrap totems pop up all the time in chests. It’ll even block that massive attack while the boss you accidentally buffed with a mouse-slip winds up again. If everything else fails, hope you have some scrap to fall back on.
In the interest of full disclosure, the writer of this article rarely got past the boss of the first stage, and usually ended up dying somewhere in the second to a pack of acorns. Those jerks.
