Dev Download: Olympia

I have stood the test of time.

With every battle I taste blood, I adorn new scars, I win wagers.

Outside the arena, I am nothing. Inside the arena, I am everything.

I am no more a blunt tool than the Prized Fighter who wields me.

Grasping me in his seasoned hand, we cut down the weak, the slow, the meagre, as the crowd chants our name.

We are Eternal.

Welcome to Dev Download, where we share red hot tips and tricks fresh from the game devs at Legend Story Studios so you can pick up a deck and play like a pro! Over the next three weeks we’ll be covering how to play each of the heroes in Heavy Hitters, focusing on Booster Draft and Classic Constructed!

This week, we are raising the stakes with Olympia, Prized Fighter!

Booster Draft

Heavy Hitters has a very dynamic limited style, featuring both multiple heroes of the same class and hybrid cards that are shared amongst them.

Olympia is the Warrior that focuses on wagering. His playstyle revolves around sending out lots of wager attacks to win a big stack of Gold. Once you have a pile of three or more Gold, you can destroy all of them to draw extra cards and play out a massive turn! This works best when paired with an Agility token in order to make the most of your whole hand.

Key signals that Olympia is open are 1-cost wagering pumps like Edge Ahead and Hold ‘em, as well as his specialization headpiece Prized Galea. Be on the lookout for Warrior-playable cards that generate Agility tokens, as seeing multiples of these could indicate Warrior is a strong choice. These cards are the bread and butter of Olympia’s strategy, as he stands to gain much more from wagering than Kassai.

You may want to consider playing Olympia if you have a large number of wager cards, as well as a high blue count to pay for them. Olympia works well with more blues, since he doesn’t get free weapon swings like Kassai, who typically favours red and yellow cards. Don’t worry too much about the damage output of these blues, as you’ll be able to pitch them to use your Gold in order to draw your higher impact cards. Make sure to pack a few attack reactions in your deck as well, as they are useful both offensively and defensively, whether that’s forcing your wagers to hit, or dodging overpower.

Classic Constructed

Olympia can’t be summed up as just a control deck or just an aggro deck - you can’t force the champion of the Deathmatch Arena into a box! Olympia’s Gold generation allows him to make great use of blue cards, which is why he can succeed as both an aggressive wager deck featuring Cintari Sabers, or a defensive deck featuring the all-powerful Decimator Great Axe!

Let’s kick things off with the Cintari Sabers. This version of Olympia uses the same 1-cost wager pumps used in draft, along with his incredible specialization Up the Ante. Wager as often as you can and back it up with nine copies of Take the Upper Hand! The goal is to force through wagers every turn, stacking a mountain of Gold for you to pop in a single spike turn to close out the game! Since you’re playing a heavy blue count, you’ll also want to include tall attack reactions like Overpower and Rout to shellshock your opponent into submission. Be mindful of what you’re pitching, as you’ll want to have some good targets to draw into from your Gold!

Now it’s time to embrace our inner lumberjack! Decimator Great Axe is a potent control tool for Warriors, able to nullify the value from single defense reactions, and demand more cards from those who want to uphold their life total. This version of Olympia defends heavily, relying on Vigor tokens to pay for 1-cost pumps. Don’t have a Vigor token? No worries, just pitch two cards and if the opponent doesn’t cover it up, use your floating resources to pay for Grains of Bloodspill! Having an axe also unlocks fearsome cards like Felling Swing - just make sure to pack in upwards of 24 blues in order to reliably pay for your turns. Decimator Great Axe wears the opponent down over time, so in order to survive a long grind game, include defense reactions like Sink Below, life gain cards like Sigil of Solace, or even some of the new block cards from Heavy Hitters.

So what’s the payoff for earning all this Gold? Simple - it’s literally the Gold! Replacing a blue in your hand with a possible threat while generating a spare resource adds some delicious flexibility to Olympia’s arena tactics. And if you have enough of it, you can pitch away your late game blues to draw your stacked reds, ending up with 5 cards in hand to overpower the competition and cement yourself as the one true Deathmatch Arena Champion!