RWBY: Amity Arena is collectible card game with real-time battles that utilizes elements found in MOBAs. It has lanes, towers, heroes with special abilities and minions/creeps that help during combat. In other words, just getting the best cards isn’t enough.
You’ll need to know how to make use of every card in your hand to thrive in this game, regardless of their strength, during the game’s fast paced matches. Thankfully, we’ve come up with a few beginner strategies to get you started on the right foot.
I’ve always been a fan of card games. The combination of skill and luck, having to “deal” with the cards that were dealt, developing successful strategies – win or lose, these aspects always intrigued me and they are present here in Amity Arena. You’ll need to build strategies independent of the cards so you can adapt to a variety of situations.
Note: This guide assumes you’ve at least played through the tutorial. It doesn’t detail the basics of play, just how one can win after grasping the game’s concepts.
Building a Proper Deck
Like most collectible card games, summoning characters usually requires some sort of currency. The amount needed it to deploy someone in battle is dependent upon their base level as a card. This in turn affects how soon each card/character can be used.
In RWBY: Amity Arena’s case, there is a segmented energy bar that slowly fills over time, allowing you to summon cards as it hits certain points. For instance, in order to summon Ruby, you’ll need four bars of energy.
Once she is summoned to the field of play, the amount of energy will drop in amount corresponding with that character’s level. Meaning, you’ll have wait till it fills up again before summoning another level four card.
Because of this, it’s important to make a deck that has a mix of low and high-level cards.
The last thing you want to do is summon a really high card/character for a lane and have nothing available for a long period thereafter; because it’ll take a while to summon another high-level card, the other player could exploit this by attacking the other lane while you’re defenseless.
At the same time, you don’t want a hand full of low-level cards as they won’t be able to handle everything that’s thrown at them.
A full deck consists of eight cards. I recommend balancing your hand with the following level combination to start:
- Two level five cards
- Four level threes
- One four
- One level two
Of course, you can mix and match to your liking – you might want to swap some of those level threes for level two cards, based on their type (more on that later). As long as you have more lower leveled cards than high, you should be alright.
Divide and Conquer
Amity Arena’s battlefields seem like large open spaces. In reality, they are broken into two lanes with an underappreciated middle portion. The idea is to get to and destroy the two smaller towers (in either lane) before attacking the other player’s main tower.
The basic idea is to use lower leveled cards in conjunction with the higher-level ones, with the weaker characters acting as a shield to absorb a tower’s blasts. Again, like a MOBA.
Most of the battles come down to controlling the battlefield. This can be done by keeping your opponents attention divided.
Take a moment at the beginning of a match to let your energy build up. As long as the other player doesn’t attack immediately, you should be able to send out a level five and a level two or three character in short time.
I recommend picking a beefy character for this initial onslaught, if you’ve got one, and sending it down an uncontested lane. Wait for your opponent to react before sending your level two or three down the other lane.
Sending a level five character with a ton of health down a lane by themselves might seem foolish at first. Your opponent will certainly counter with their own characters, defeating your hero before they can reach the tower.
The idea isn’t to really attack that tower though. It’s to go for the other one with your lower leveled characters.
Because your hero had a lot of health, most players will react by either throwing their strongest characters at them or summoning multiple low-level minions. This gives you an opportunity to divide their forces and attention; once they realize you’re moving towards the second tower, they’ll be forced to react to your moves in that lane. At that point, you can send another strong character down the first lane.
Controlling the Flow of the Match
Now you may be thinking, “Aren’t I also dividing my own forces by using this tactic?” The short answer is yes.
There is an inherent risk that’s comes from splitting one’s own forces. This doesn’t make it a bad thing, though. You see, Amity Arena is akin to something like chess, where it’s possible to dictate the flow of the game with skilled play.
Smart players will always want to be the person applying pressure. Never the person on the receiving end, forced to only reacting to what’s going on at any given moment.
Controlling the flow of the match makes it easy to see gaps in the other person’s defenses. It also allows you to control where enemies are. By pretending to target a tower, you can make your opponent send their strongest to a place you aren’t actually going to attack. This is basically a win for you.
If they don’t take the bluff, then they’ll still have to deal with those weaker characters eventually. They might do the unexpected and take down a tower or, at the very least, weaken it. If they do send their forces to the “wrong” lane, you can then capitalize on this error and destroy your primary target.
Let Some Enemies Go
The first two parts of this guide work well in conjunction with one another. To really make this strategy sing, though, you have to know when to let some things go.
Say you’ve sent out two waves of minions, one to either lane. One side is completely obliterated but not before severely wounding your opponent’s character(s). The other side is weakened but still marching on. Instead of dividing your forces again, it may be time to go all on one side, leaving your turret exposed to your opponent’s wounded character.
You’ll have to have played a bit to make this work. Being able to eyeball a character’s life gauge and understand their abilities to determine if they’re currently a threat or not is a skill that only comes with practice.
There is some risk at play here, of course.
Depending on the type of cards your opponent has, they might be able to pull a fast one. For instance, Blake Belladonna can use her Variant Ballistic Chain Scythe to pull herself down the entire length of a lane. If your opponent has this card and is able to use it, you may have to respond in a defensive manner. There are other characters that will cause you trouble this sort of trouble, you just have to figure out how you best want to deal with them.
The cards do matter
Matches in RWBY: Amity Arena move really fast. It’s possible to be doing well and then have the tables turned with little warning. Now you’re on the receiving end of an attack and forced to defend.
At this point, you’ll have to rely on your knowledge of the game’s mechanics and how each individual card in your deck works. Some of the basics are:
- You’ll want to put beefy heroes in the front, followed by weaker ranged characters in the back.
- Be mindful of the differences in speed; fast moving characters will need to be deployed after a slow moving one, to help them all stay in range/help out one another.
- Don’t drop weak characters right on top of stronger ones.
- Putting ranged attackers behind the turret might work out better than dropping them in front of a strong hero, only to be killed before they can fire off a shot.
- Flying enemies can’t be hit by melee based characters unless they have an AoE attack or a ranged special ability.
Learning about the cards and how they work takes longer.
Ruby Rose, for instance, uses a large scythe that can attack enemies in a circle around her. She also can dash forward to land heavy circular attacks. Waiting to use her when your opponent has summoned a group of weak minions is a strong strategy. She can just dash in and kill an entire group of Spider Droids in one attack.
All of this information, plus that which you figure out on your own, will help when going head to head with a skilled opponent. Knowing how to counter card abilities and when to deploy your own is half the battle. Controlling the flow of the fight and keeping rivals off-balanced is the other half, which comes with familiarity and practice.
There are other things to consider, like leveling up your cards – not to be confused with the cards base level, pertaining to its ability to be summoned – to make them stronger. These things are secondary to in-match tactics, which are easy to learn but hard to master. To get good at Amity Arena, you’ve got to practice and pay attention to both your and your opponents’ strategies.
Published: Nov 21, 2018 01:16 pm