So, I'm trying to play with Huntmaster and Charm to spam super Hippos - utilising creativity from Jellyhead. Anything jump out as being useful?
Depending on your enemy you might want to either create more hippos or stronger hippos. Ritual of Destruction -> More hippos; Disbelief/Shatter Summons -> fat hippos. All in all I've found them too vulnerable and too easily countered to really rely on them to carry you, but they make great front-line summons. Btw, I still got your investigator. Holler when you need it, with Salaman being the way they are right now I won't need him anymore.
Not a good idea, your killing the champ efficiency with that... even tho the nora to hp ratio is decent, it's still a summon w/o spell presence, that can't contest and pretty easy to get rid off, not worth the 25 nora every cast. Some summon abilities are about the same nora cost and will give you a summon every 5-6 turns.
I put something like this together a while ago (granted, it was in a split). Here's a re-post from the split forums. This is a somewhat silly deck that grew out of an older idea I had about using Chronomancer to spam Marsh Song: https://poxbase.com/deck/c28CwDcqUCozc24Cgjc6iCujCimCvWs19s1fs7bS4YS1gs8HS1Zr1_r2urNrW Like most of the split decks I make these days, the key rune here is Chronomancer. Only this time, she shares the spotlight with a rune that has fallen into disuse of late: the Boghopper Huntmaster. The basic premise is to use Chronomancer's Spell Shift ability to spam Marsh Songs in order to generate nora. And just how does she get the charges to continually use Spell Shift? Well, Boghopper Huntmaster comes with a pet whenever he is deployed from the runedock. That means Chronomancer gets double the number of charges when you deploy a Huntmaster, which lets you reuse Spell Shift twice as fast. But the combos don't stop there. FS also packs a nifty little spell called Huntmaster's Charm, which massively increases the stats of any target Pygmy Hippo, along with removing Huntmaster Bound. Alternatively, when cast on a Huntmaster, another Pygmy Hippo is deployed adjacent to him. This brings us to the meat-and-potatoes combo of the deck. Retreat allows you to return a target champion to your runedock with a cooldown of 1 and refund half its cost. Huntmaster drops a Hippo whenever he is deployed. And Huntmaster's Charm boosts your Hippos to incredible heights. By using Chronomancer to cycle these spells off cooldown, you get a never-ending stream of Pygmy Hippos whose stats usually lie around 60 HP, 7 speed, and 14 damage. Of course, all this spell casting is going to end up costing a lot of nora...............but wait, we've had Marsh Songs running for at least 10 turns now! With Chronomancer eliminating their cooldown, Marsh Song can be spammed indefinitely for a huge end of turn nora spike. Even with just 4 Songs running (the usual minimum for this deck) that's an extra 40 nora PER ROUND you're getting, which more than covers the cost of your spells. If that wasn't enough, we also have Noraweave thrown into the mix, so whenever the opponent attempts to chunk away your precious Hippo army, you get even more nora for reinforcements. The rest of the runes are facilitators for your Hippos. Turtle, Mentor, and Beast Tamer further raise their stats and provide some additional AP. A single Phoenix (with Immortality) is enough to keep your Hippos healthy and happy. The Painters are great early game champions; upgraded with Augment Creation, your Hippos will have even more damage, plus Psychic Compulsion keeps your backline safe from assaults. The Portal Mages come with their own brand of summon, and also boast some decent healing when the need arises. The Rooks bring in more nora, while the Heretics are your artillery. With all the spamming of Retreat you will be doing, their damage grows quite quickly to threatening levels. The downside of this deck is undoubtedly the early tempo hits. You will have to take a lot of them if you want the big returns later, but if you can weather the storm (done easier with Rooks tying up the opponent in font battles) the opponent won't be able to match your mid/late game board presence. It's not uncommon to have over 100 nora to work with every single turn using this deck. Run at 74 nora, Boghopper Huntmaster returns 37 nora when used with Retreat, meaning you recover the full cost of the spell itself, plus a bit extra. Always be sure to prioritize Hippos that have not yet been affected by Huntmaster's Charm when you have the spell available. If you use Retreat on your only deployed Huntmaster when you have a few unaffected Hippos out, they will turn on you at the start of the enemy's turn. And yes, the buff from Huntmaster's Charm DOES STACK if used on a Hippo more than once. If you so desired, you could forgo the Hippo army strategy altogether and just make a single super-Hippo...........but that would likely be a terrible idea due to the prevalence of anti-summon tech. This is another downside to the deck, but luckily the majority of anti-summon runes only deal flat damage to summons, not kill them outright. This means your behemoth Hippos are (generally) safe from destruction. As always, comments and criticisms are welcome. Keep in mind this deck is not to be taken too seriously, and is mainly just for having fun.
But you summon it at the front lines, and it hits pretty hard. They also engage ranged champs and drop relics in fonts. You pay 25 nora for getting it next to your combat dude, not bound to some crappy summoning champion.
They are spawned with 0 AP, so if you do it at the front line you risk loosing it or they can just position accordingly. If they gained Fleet or something, then the spell would be so much better
You know, they just helped me win two games, mostly by being in action almost immediately. Don't underestimate them.
I just started messing around with this build today and it's probably not competitive but it's pretty fun. Added 2x swamp doombringer, the new darkmarsh warsong, pool of dreams, and the intensify equip + that newish equipment lonx (those 2 are made to be together).
If council stacked Pool of Dreams would be amazing, but as is ... meh. Very meh. You know what's fun? Nora Seep + Forage. Sadly Nora Seep is so random that it might just decide to lose you the game ...
