I dont suggest blood exchange but like i said, UD healing is sparse. A better use of those low hp regen units is *cough* Sacrifice *cough*
No sacrifice isnt a real option for minotaurs, or any meek build in UD, its for those big powerhouses, not sure really where the noracost limit changes from bad,maybe,decent,ok,great, heck yeah
I would imagine the combo of high value staples, the fact that many of them would not play well in a meta, and the idea that most of us thought dimension door would be nerfed by now (if not now, just when you finish your collection) is why more people are not playing with them. One of the cool things about UD is many of their champs are demons, like many fw champs are undead. UD being mostly demon means runes can hop in and out themes seamlessly. Most mino do not really benefit other themes outside of mino. (Stoker, and that is almost it.) Mino do not play well with other races currently and some of their best champs are exo or leg. I have wanted a good mino bg for 2 years now and I still do not have all the mino I want to use. (UD is not a main faction to me so I do not go out of way to forge them. )
It took me like two weeks of farming skirmish games to get 2x all minos, except for Prince malandur (who i regret i did waste 800 shards to get) atleast there are just 14 champs so it was just 29 to forge really. I do like minotaur thunderaxe, but never seen him used by other minos, maybe because he is the other legendary, but that glorious leap is so powerful. Legendary required 0 shards, nice to have 800shards. 3 exotics are probably the base of all mino decks ive tried, so here you want to spend atleast 1500 shards, but probably 3000 to have combos to test. 2 rare are awesome, def worth 320 shards to get them to try out and see if they are fitting your playstyle. 3 uncommon, only 1 that is worth making ASAP, Stoker, so its 32shards 4 commons, 3 are really useful but just make all 4. think you could make a good mino deck for less then 2000 shards, but thats like 120 skirmish games, i play to many skirmish games and hiding the gold for later use. @MogaBait posted a deck earlier, that one uses 5 exotics so you would need probably 3500shards for it
I still stand by my earlier statement about sac being universally good, although I have to defer at least somewhat to mogabaits experience with minos... But in terms of when is sac good? (ignoring minos for a moment and purely talking nora cost) there is no point at which it's bad exactly. Obviously the higher cost the unit, the better it feels, but the main reason why sac is strong is that unlike other nora gen there is no tempo hit. If you play marsh song, you're -30, -20, -10 nora - so in the hole for 3 rounds. Eventually you come out +20, so it's costing you tempo in return for 4 nora per round. If you play sac on a 60 nora champ, you come out with +21n immediately, making it generate the same as marsh song does over 5 rounds, it's actually a tempo gain, not loss - this is why it's so powerful. That's looking at pretty much the worst case situation - an 80 nora champ giving you a +38n boost. Marsh song is great value, sac is amazing tempo. Obviously the skill to using it well is equating when giving up a low hp champ is actually worth that tempo swing. Sometimes just by letting it live one more turn you can get the equivalent nora value out of it (if it continues to contest, that's +12 nora, if it makes them cast a spell to kill it... well that's where it starts getting complicating). Even still, the answer is normally "pretty damn often" Edit: someone might need to check my maths as i'm ill and brain no work gud
This is the good/fun part of the game, if it was just about math then yes sacrifice should be run alot. but most of the time i think UD players lose because they use that spell, instead of forcing me to use AP/nora to kill of their unit i can get combat momentum, sure they can deploy something in their own zone. but if thats far from the actually combat they are in trouble. on sidefonts, sacrifice is very useful. except that minotaurs are very mobile, i can probably just move that unit into another part of the game, have it do something with its AP when its my turn instead of leaving it dead. hmm atm iam in the phase if i have to use a rune in my deck, i remove it, better to lose and trying other things then being depending on certain "op runes" Heck i did even run FF IS barbarians without Bastion and didnt miss him for a full day until i noticed i didnt get the daily hero deployment quest
