Dev Download: More Than Human

Learn how to play the new heroes from Bright Lights in both Booster Draft and Classic Constructed with hot tips and tricks straight from the game development team at Legend Story Studios! Today on Dev Download, we learn how to build a mechanized Evo suit to stomp the competition with Teklovossen, Esteemed Magnate...

It was a peaceful day in the East Rise until the attack.

A throng of delinquents wielding looping gauntlets, boom grenades, and illegally acquired steam-propelled hammers emerged from the bustling crowds, bee-lining for one particularly esteemed magnate.

“Sir, get behind me!” yelled Teklovossen’s security detail, as if it would have made the slightest difference.

Teklovossen sighed. This was exactly why he never bothered going outdoors anymore.

As the shockwave from a boom grenade tossed the guard aside like a rag doll and the park emptied of frantic bystanders, Teklovossen calmly tapped his wrist, staring down his attackers with cold indifference.

“Wrong turn, old man.” hissed a pink-haired troublemaker as the gang surrounded him.

“Five…” he replied softly, holding out his hand.

They frowned at each other in confusion. “Five what?”

“Four…”

Puzzle quickly dissolved into concern.

“Three…”

“Hey uh,” stammered the pink-haired one. “What are you doing?”

“Two…”

They were seriously freaked out now. Fair enough too, they were only young.

“One…”

A swarm of metal fragments whistled through the air from seemingly nowhere, latching onto Teklovossen’s extended arm, obediently locking themselves into place. He clenched his fist, releasing a concussive wave that knocked the living daylights out of the would-be kidnappers.

Teklovossen stepped over an unconscious pink-haired body, and raised a finger to his temple.

“Quality assurance test successful. Please notify distribution that Face Breaker v2 is ready for deployment.”

Envision this. You are the head of the greatest technological empire ever known to Rathe. A master of machines. An astute aristocrat with a tendency towards progress at any cost. More machine than man. The most eclectic of erudites. With the single most powerful weapon in the world. You. That's the kind of power that Teklovossen has. It's time for the man of singular purpose and vision to bring about great change. Get ready for the Singularity.

Draft

It's not the endpoint that should intrigue us here but the journey. Every mech suit starts with a single Evo and every great game starts with your deck. So let's first talk about how to build a Teklovossen deck. Bright Lights will differ greatly from your previous experiences with Flesh and Blood draft. It's a single class set with no additional talents in the playable card-pool, which means you can switch up the pace at the table whenever you wish. It's very easy to switch strategies mid-draft without trainwrecking your deck. While the other heroes in Bright Lights focus on applying constant pressure, our man Teklovossen takes a much more thoughtful and thorough approach to draft. Like the others he has a recipe for success, but it starts in a very different place.

Boost attacks still operate well in Teklovossen but they are secondary to building a suite of Evo equipment. To have a supremely powerful Teklovossen draft deck we need to make sure we have a nice mix of Evo equipment cards and powerful Evo Upgrade payoffs. Without any Evos we have nothing.

Evo Sentry Base cards are the key here. They provide 3 defense worth of value while in play and 2 when blocked with from hand. But most importantly, they are Bases. This means they can be continually built upon, providing good payoffs for our final suit. We want as many of these in our deck as possible. If we somehow managed to get four of each Evo Sentry Base piece, we would play all of them. They are just that good, that versatile, and that important.

Playing them from hand is fine and dandy but we can just as easily defend with them early to maximize our scrap cards to set up for big late game plays. In the mirror match a cheeky Scrap Hopper Quicken token into multiple Evo Upgrade attacks for a future turn can really close a match in quick fashion. Ideally at the end of a draft we want 1-3 Evo Sentry Base pieces for each equipment zone and 0-2 ‘toppers’. I define ‘toppers’ as Evo equipment pieces without the Base typing. We don’t want too many of these as they can clunk up our draws real quick, but they provide nice utility and power in some scenarios. Shoot for about 2-3 Evos for each equipment zone. It's very important to pay attention during the draft to make sure you get your zones covered as otherwise you could be missing a lot of late game power potential.

Once we have established ourselves as an engineer capable of putting together a suit we can start thinking about what comes after. Teklovossen loves 2-3 cost boost attacks and Evo Upgrades. Before committing to a Teklovossen deck it can be smart to take the 2 cost boost attacks as they synergize very well with all three heroes. Then when you see a third pick Evo Sentry Base you know you’ve got a bit of a green light that this is the seat for Teklovossen. Typically the deeper you go into the draft the more you will value the Evo Upgrades and the less you will value boost. Boosting can be nice for finding Evos to play from your banished zone, but there is better value to be found elsewhere!

Sometimes an extraordinary engineer finds himself with a bit of a parts shortage and has to dig down deep into the trash to find that last critical component. Teklovossen makes great use of blue scrap cards especially as they can be used to generate small advantages while salvaging Evos to play from your banished zone, all while doubling as your resource cards. If we are taking a blue we should be prioritizing scrap to make it that little bit easier to assemble our suit.

While Teklovossen does not get the most value from items he can make good use out of the defensive ones. Cards like Mini Forcefield and Dissolving Shield can work in tandem with Teklo Leveler pretty well with at least three Evos in play.

Classic Constructed

Defend. Get your suit online. Get paid.

Having access to the powerful effects of Majestic Evo and Evo Upgrades brings Teklovossen to another level. There is certainly a lot of nuance though. It can be risky to play Teklo Base over Proto Base or Cogwerx Base - what if your opponent T-Bones you? Do you play Fyendal’s Spring Tunic? You can always block with it after getting value and use Fabricate to slot in a Base! Everyone has different ideas and you’ll have to play a lot to work out what feels right to you.

Despite the several different ways to approach this deck, let's talk about its heart and soul - Singularity.

Resolving Singularity with a set of four Evo Steel Souls is the most powerful thing you can do in the game. But these things are very cost intensive and require time to assemble properly, which leads us to the discussion of playing other Evos. There are plenty of cheap alternatives to Evo Steel Souls but they have some downsides:

• They are ‘toppers’, which means once built they can't be built upon. This can often lead to us losing defense/attack value once we have transformed into the Mechropotent.
• They reduce the impact of our transformation. Do not underestimate how powerful the pivot from a fully juiced transformation can be. I have seen games that look like complete slaughters completely swung around in one fell swoop from a well-juiced Singularity.

Any piece that is replaced has ongoing repercussions that are not easily seen from the surface. So take care. Of course, we could go the complete opposite direction and fully commit to getting a cheap Evo suit online as fast as possible in much more aggressive fashion. We lose access to the defense value and Singularity bombshell, but we gain very powerful attacks very quickly. Terminator Tanks and War Machines can put a tonne of pressure on our opponents while shoveling damage down their gullets till they can't take any more. High risk, but high reward.

Teklovossen may take a while to grasp, but has some very dynamic features to take on several matchups in Classic Constructed. Figuring out what you want your deck to do and the best way of getting there is the journey every aspiring tech mogul must embark on. Don't be afraid to strike out and break the mold.

With so much to explore under Teklovossen’s mechanically monstrous hood, I wouldn’t be surprised to see you deep in your lab surrounded on all sides with guides galore. So take your newly developed deadly deck to a local game store near you and level the competition. It's Show Time!