Beginners guide

Why this guide?
'' If you are new and wondering how to progress in this game called ‘Smutstone’? ''

'' Or if you have been playing for a while and want to start a new game, while progressing faster? ''

 ->In this manual we will give you some nice tips and ways to get started and progress through the first few weeks. I say 'we' since all progress I ever made was a team effort. There are much nice and smart people helping in making the game easier to comprehend and better playable.

Where are we going to?
 We give you hints how to play smart and avoid disappointment. How to invest your time (and if you want your money). This guide aims at getting your Temptress Mythic card up to level 2 at least within your first month of play. The Temptress card is the second Mythic card the game provides, after you get your first one (Bone Talker) up to 5-star. Every win in the daily tournament will get you duplicates to seduce a card one star up. The next card will only be available after you got the previous one to 5-star, which means winning the tournament 5 times, and invest your resources to seduce the cards at the right time. The game provides a total of 3 Mythics from daily wins, hence after 15 times winning you finished the first stage of Smutstone. The 3rd one is called ‘Lady Butterfly’. These cards have special abilities (called artefacts) that make them and the other cards you draw together with them stronger against the opposing cards.

 The first 3 Mythics stay important till you reach the stage the game is into right now, so getting them is the most important goal and to get them fast will seriously help you progressing fast. As stated before, we aim to get you to 2-star Temptress in your first month, it can be done faster, but we leave some room for errors and misfortune. This because it’s human to make errors and winning daily tournaments depends heavily on who is with you in the same group and you can be either lucky or unlucky in that. Also, the cards you get from opening boxes and chest is partly a matter of luck. Finally, the developers of this game also read here and change the game based upon our findings. So, you don’t need to be the most skilled and fortunate player to advance fast.

 Take it easy and don’t forget to enjoy the game!

Gameplay
 While you start your game, there is an automatic tutorial that guides you through the first (City) map. Some menus become available after you progress through this map. You can read all about it in the rest of this Wiki, we only aim here at the actual gameplay. For now, it’s important to keep your resources as much as possible till the time you really need them. And this is when you are planning to win your daily tournament. So, don’t level, seduce any card yet, don’t open any boxes, don’t use any rubies until you are ready to play in the tournament. Not keeping your resources tight is going to set you back weeks if not months.

Before you start
 Some of these hints might seem a little too obvious, but don’t forget to follow them! 
 *  1.         Pick a name you like to keep for a long time. This name will be visible for others in the tournaments and you’ll use it contacting Customer Support (CS) Contacting CS, as you will learn playing this game for a while, is something that we really need and comes in handy on several occasions.
 *  2.         Use an e-mail address you keep and don’t forget both the mail address  , login name, and password. This is all necessary to keep playing in the long term and contact Customer Support.
 *  3.          Be patient! Long term planning is the way to be fast. Read the manual. All points are important. Don’t worry: there is a lot of waiting time so you have time to read all and not miss anything in the game. The most important rule to follow is: Patience!

Beginners bonus:
 If you play on the Hooligapps server, registering your account with a valid mail address will give you 50 rubies. Rubies you need (together with the 100 that the game provides you freely) to buy your first extra slot for the Duels, or just have some extra rubies when needed.

 When playing on the Nutaku server, you only get 100 credits and you need a bit more to get some extra credits. You can get extra credits by making up to 5 friends also play the game and give their email addresses. So, any noob will understand that when you have 5 mail accounts or get them now, it’s good enough. And don’t feel like you are cheating or something, Smutstone likes to brag about how many million registered users play this game, so you are actually helping their egos. That’s at least worth a bit of coins!

 With the 500 coins you can buy the first cheap promotion pack for 99 credits (The Archeress card, that is really strong in the beginning so helping a lot) and the rest you exchange for rubies. Wait for the special promotion of 2x rubies that will be given in the beginning. You can choose to get 2x 40 rubies and the Archeress or just 1x 120 rubies. Choose as you like. In the beginning you need duel chests, so getting an extra slot makes that faster.

First week:
 Progress till you have duels (Archeress helps) without too much levelling up cards. Then sit and wait, only investing your energy in chapters on the City map that you already did (preferably the ones that you have won full (triple star victory) so you can keep the extra point for when you play your first tournament. Unless you need the items (fire elixir or earth elixir) to later upgrade your cards, in that case you can repeat the city chapter for that item even if you didn’t win that 3-star yet. You need to open one silver box in the tutorial. Let that be your last one. Open every bronze box to get energy, gold and items.

Keep the map for your first daily tournament!
<p class="MsoNormal"> The map has fights along the storyline that gives you a certain amount of points (called ‘mojo’) depending on how strong your win is. You get a 1-star win if only one card of yours survives. 2-star with 2 cards remaining, triple star when all 3 cards remain. If you just repeat after a triple star win, it’s always 5 points you get. If you do a new chapter and win triple star you get 30 points, if you already won it 1- or 2-star, it’s respectively 10 and 20 points. To win a daily tournament you need around 1200-1400 points. Don’t worry, you also get points from upgrading your cards, so don’t do that yet.

Duels is the way to success
<p class="MsoNormal"> Once you got to the duel’s menu, get new chests a much as possible. Whenever you win a duel (1-, 2- or 3-star victory) you get a duel chest as long as you have a slot open. In the beginning you get 4 slots for free. The rest cost rubies (first one 150, then 250, 450, 800, 1500, 2500 and 4000). If you don’t have a slot open, you need to wait (45 minutes for a common chest, 3 hours for a silver chest, 12 hours for an epic chest and 48 hours for a legendary chest).

<p class="MsoNormal"> The chests contain cards! Cards you can use in your deck. The higher the chest, the more cards it contains and the higher the cards are. The strong cards are the legendary and epic cards. Those you want in your deck in the beginning. If you have repeated drops of the same cards, that will give you the duplicates to seduce cards to the next star level (5 star is the maximum, and you need a load of duplicates to get that last level). An exception are the first 3 Mythics, which require just one duplicate – one extra daily tournament win – for the next star level. Yet you need to invest a lot of gold to upgrade them.

<p class="MsoNormal"> You want to legendary chests and the epic chests. Now the good part: you can choose your chest using the fixed chest table, first discovered by Kyle. The chests always drop in a fixed order, so if you keep track of the order and skip the chests you don’t want, you will have the chests you actually want. To skip a chest means you do a fight while you don’t have a slot open. If you lose a fight there is no problem at all. Yet a 3-star win will give you 9 points, 2- and 1- star wins give respectively 8 and 7 points. The points you have in the duels determine the league you are in. To keep track of the total points you have is a big aid in determining your point in the table! Losing will add minus 4 to your total, and retreating (retreat button in the right corner before clicking ‘ready’ button) gives your total minus 10.

<p class="MsoNormal"> This can be used to manipulate your score, keeping you in the desired league and when a league is too strong you can get the chest you want while you enter the next league. If a league is too strong for you, but you want to have a (f.i. legendary) chest from that league, you make sure you are 1 victory away from this league and do your last fight with a slot open. Beware: if you lose a fight that makes you drop to a lower league, the amount of points lost is significant bigger (-4 will be around -40/-60 and -10 will be -100+, all depending on the league).

<p class="MsoNormal"> Important: you don’t need to watch the whole fight. Just refresh your browser. This has 3 disadvantages: firstly, you won’t see whether you did win, and with how many stars. If you lost it’s easy to lose track. Secondly, there was a time that ppl got 2 hours ban for refreshing, so it seems the devs are not particularly happy with ppl refreshing a lot. Thirdly and this is also the big advantage: it can take more time to reload the game, but mostly it diminishes the waiting time significantly. Then it becomes a big advantage. So refreshing can save some years of your life!

There are 3 ways to keep track of your place in Kyle’s table:
<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="text-indent: -18pt; margin-left: 24px;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family:Calibri;mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-ansi-language:EN-GB" lang="EN-GB"> 1           Use the very beautiful and comprehensive online tool that LukyMe made in this Wiki.

<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="text-indent: -18pt; margin-left: 24px;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family:Calibri;mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-ansi-language:EN-GB" lang="EN-GB"> 2           Use a printed version of the list. On a rainy Sunday afternoon, I made this excel sheet with little squares that I uploaded in the ‘guidelines of future events’. It turned out a bit small, but you can use it. Preferably put the number of your score (last 2 digits) in the list as an extra way to check your spot). Keep in mind that you lose points when you lose a fight, even if you only win 1- or 2-star.

<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="text-indent: -18pt; margin-left: 24px;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family:Calibri;mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-ansi-language:EN-GB" lang="EN-GB"> 3           Make your own version. Like BlackXjack did: a bigger paper with bigger squares where you can put a coin in. Every time you win, move the coin. This will prevent you from printing a lot. The drawback is that this penny can get lost, or be moved without your notice. The spouse, girlfriend, wife could be ‘cleaning’ your desk. There could be any pet or small child (who believes this coin is something the tooth fairy forgot to hand over) taking it out without any sense of guilt and leave you devastated. And so there goes your good intention to never lose a penny over this game. We have all been children, so don’t believe in the ‘just universe’ to take care of it. The Smutstone Universe is not ‘just’ at all, as we will go deeper into this point later on.

Keeping track of your spot:
<p class="MsoNormal"> The biggest annoyance in the beginning (and also later on) is losing track of your position. Depending on the speed of your internet connection, your computer, your finger and your mind (not necessary in that order) you could take a long time to go from one legendary chest to the other one. The process to get there is not only time consuming, it’s also brain killing and one gets easily distracted. The outcome could be that you invest a few hours getting there and having a fail (too early) or epic fail (one spot too many). This is to help you

<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="text-indent: -18pt; margin-left: 48px;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family:Calibri;mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-ansi-language:EN-GB" lang="EN-GB"> 1. Use the tool of LukyMe or Prolli to determine your spot in the table.

<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="text-indent: -18pt; margin-left: 48px;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family:Calibri;mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-ansi-language:EN-GB" lang="EN-GB"> 2. Use any method for progressing and keep track of your score, since that is one extra check.

<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="text-indent: -18pt; margin-left: 48px;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family:Calibri;mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-ansi-language:EN-GB" lang="EN-GB"> 3. Always use the exact same sequence: write down the score, do the fight, refresh, check the score, write it down etc. If you start to do things many ways, that is the fastest way to get lost. Many times, you have a score of let’s say 15. Then you do a fight and you are sure you won it. But then it says 25, but 10 is not a possible score. So, either you made a mistake on the previous score (it should have been 16 maybe) OR you missed a few scores and it’s not the first time, it was actually 15+7+7 -4 = 25. Sometimes you can retrack your steps, but sometimes you can’t. And it can happen you think you should have a Legendary chest, but you get a common chest (ouch!).

<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="text-indent: -18pt; margin-left: 48px;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family:Calibri;mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-ansi-language:EN-GB" lang="EN-GB"> 4.  Take insurance . This is what I do: When progressing to spot 84 (legendary), you take 79 (rare) first. If it’s not rare you are fucked, but then at least you know it. Or take 83 (common) as 45 minutes waiting is nothing compared to going all the way to the next Legendary.

<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="text-indent: -18pt; margin-left: 48px;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family:Calibri;mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-ansi-language:EN-GB" lang="EN-GB"> 5. If anything goes wrong anyhow,''' Blame Hooligapps/Nutaku. '''Life is difficult enough already; you shouldn’t have to deal with failure by yourself.

<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="text-indent: -18pt; margin-left: 24px;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family:Calibri;mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-ansi-language:EN-GB" lang="EN-GB">

<p class="MsoNormal"> While you wait for participating in your first daily tournament, you collect dupes and more dupes. The best chests are both legendary and epics. You need to have a deck of either epics and/or legendries. It seems to me that you get more duplicates of cards that are into your deck. You keep the duplicates, because you can seduce the cards that have enough duplicates. Any seduction gives you 30 mojo points. At some point I had 20 common cards ready to seduce and 14 rare cards. Common cards cost 3000 gold only for first seduction, rare cards 4500 gold. It’s a very cheap way to get a lot of mojo fast.

Getting gold
<p class="MsoNormal"> If you want to seduce/level many cards in a row, you need a lot of gold. Next to getting dupes from duels chests, getting gold is your second aim. You can get gold a lot winning more chapters (1-star victory gives loads of gold) yet you want to keep those chapters till the time you make a run for winning a daily tournament.

<p class="MsoNormal"> Gold is farmed using energy. You get energy from 4 sources:

<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="text-indent: -18pt; margin-left: 24px;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family:Calibri;mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-ansi-language:EN-GB" lang="EN-GB"> 1. Waiting…. Every 5 minutes you get one energy! In one hour that is 12 energy; in a days’ time that is 288 energy. That’s a lot of free energy!

<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="text-indent: -18pt; margin-left: 24px;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family:Calibri;mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-ansi-language:EN-GB" lang="EN-GB"> 2. Opening boxes. For the beginner that is the Bronze box, that becomes available every 8 hours. Also, it’s for free. I get most energy when my energy is totally empty. Many times, that is 50, sometimes 25, sometimes nothing, but then still you get duplicates, items and gold. The maximum amount of gold you get in one box is 8000, this happens only after you completed the Forest (second) map completely. Before that point the amount of gold in a box maybe only 2000, or something in between. That is a second reason I urge you all to keep your boxes till you are in the Sands map, if that is possible. It’s possible to get 1 time gold in a Bronze box, and 2 times in a Silver or Gold box.

<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="text-indent: -18pt; margin-left: 24px;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family:Calibri;mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-ansi-language:EN-GB" lang="EN-GB"> 3. You also get energy (10-25) after you got a 3-star victory in a chapter. Sometimes you get that, and sometimes you get a Silver box. Both are very good, especially when you want to win a tournament.

<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="text-indent: -18pt; margin-left: 24px;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family:Calibri;mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-ansi-language:EN-GB" lang="EN-GB"> 4. You can convert rubies into energy. I see this as a last resort. In the beginning you want to keep the rubies for either getting more slots or just a failsafe when you progress in the tournament.

Where to farm gold?
<p class="MsoNormal"> To get the full benefit of repeatedly winning chapters, you need to advance to the furthest point where you can win 100%. So, if you can win chapter City 9 100% its better then going to City 10 where you win 90%. Fortunately, this very smart player called @GuardianDragon made a fantastic excel tool, to calculate it for you. You only have to fill in your deck and the tool can tell you if you can win a chapter and if not, which cards are not strong enough. That’s a real big help. It can also help you to plan where to go to in the next days, collecting items and gold to get there.

Full sets
<p class="MsoNormal"> The endgame of how Smutstone is now, is all about sets . Passion set, Nature set and Fairy set. Those are the sets you need to invest to. I chose the Passion set, because I believe that is the best set to progress fast in the beginning. Even though Nature set can get you to Island 10 winning 100% slightly better. I started to collect duplicates for this set, which seems impossible because duplicates are random. Yet in the first weeks I only upgraded those cards and it seemed that made them drop more. It could be that I was very lucky to get duplicates for this P-deck fast, or it happened because I put those cards in my deck. Anyway, I got a lot of dupes for Undead Queen, Inquisitor, Savage, Bone Walker and Barbarian. Those 5 cards are in your Passion set, together with Temptress and Owl (Owl comes together with 3rd Mythic Lady Butterfly). The more cards you have together, the higher the bonus all cards of the same set get. 4 cards together: 5%, 5 cards give 10%, 6 cards 25% and all 7 cards 75%. That 75% is bigger than any bunch of 7 Mythic cards together.

<p class="MsoNormal"> In the beginning you won’t have a full set, just fill the deck with the highest cards you have (Smutstone selects the strongest cards automatically. When you select ‘edit deck’ you see them in the lower part of your page. Yet this selection doesn’t take into account the set bonus nor the effects of the artefacts on the cards.

Card bonus
<p class="MsoNormal"> Sometimes you need to design your deck against the opponent’s deck. Some cards get 50% bonus against others depending on the colour. The further you progress, the more important this aspect becomes. In the beginning you mostly just play your strongest cards.

First week summary:
<p class="MsoNormal"> Make a plan of what deck you aim at. Go collect gold as much as possible without getting too far on the City map (far enough to get to the tournament – City 10) so don’t repeat chapters where you didn’t have a triple star win yet. Keep resources and progress of the City Map for later. Don’t seduce cards, don’t level cards, don’t open Silver/gold boxes. Don’t progress through the map. After you collected many cards you calculate how many you can seduce/level with the gold you have collected. Use all energy to get gold and more gold.

Your virgin win in the tournament
<p class="MsoNormal"> The first one is the most important. Make sure you are able to win, make sure you have some extra. You have collected your cards. You can seduce a load of them, especially the ones in your deck. You can level some, do only the ones that you have in your deck. Use the stronger deck to progress through the map, finish the earlier fights to a 3-star victory and get enough points for the win. About 1300-1500 should be enough. If you are luck you can win with 1100, if you have bad luck it goes to 2000. What you don’t want is lose your first try. That will set you back and it would be faster to start all over.

Late login
<p class="MsoNormal"> There are groups of up to 100 contesters in one daily tournament. But that are not only people. There are a lot of bots (automatic scores). It’s okay because you would not stand a chance against 100 real players, so don’t make a big fuss of it. You actually only need to deal with the real ppl.

<p class="MsoNormal"> The bots are there to make your life more difficult though. A win (end as nr 1, 2 or 3 gives a win) is hardly under 1000 mojo points, but could go to 6000 points. The thing is that a group gets a higher score the longer real ppl are into that group. So when you start at reset in the early morning, the bots get higher and higher and probably the players go higher too. There are 3 places in the list where the bots are sort of fixed. Near to reset you will find out that place 50 is almost always more then 300 points. Place 20 hardly is under 600 points and place 1-3 is hardly under 1200. It’s just life, nothing to do about it.

<p class="MsoNormal"> Is that true? Well maybe not. You can make sure not too many bots are in your group as you arrive late. When a group is full (I’m not really sure but when 15-20 real ppl are into a group its full) it closes, and then new ppl get into a new group. In this new group there are some bots that might be even on 1100 points, but there are no real player with that score yet.

<p class="MsoNormal"> So if you login at 13 pm you have an easier group. If you plan your first win, I recommend you login shortly (1 hour) before reset. Make sure you have enough time to get your score up, but you will have a good chance. '''This might be the best tip you ever get in this game. This is it: collect your daily energy and bronze boxes as much as possible to login early on days you don’t want to win your tournament. But when you go for it, make sure it’s late.'''

When go for it?
<p class="MsoNormal"> The earliest time to start would be on your third day, yet that is risky. I did it on my 5th day (I started a new account just to test things). And make sure, again, you have >2000 possible mojo points to make. Then the 2nd win could be still in your first week. After that you have a 2 star Bone Walker that really helps in your deck. IF you are planning the P deck, it will stay with you till you get your Owl (11th win) or even till your Owl is 2 star (12th win). I had 3 wins before I used my Silver boxes, so keep the Silver Boxes and Gold Boxes closed and don’t use too much the rubies. The longer you wait, the more gold they generate.

<p class="MsoNormal">

<p class="MsoNormal"> This concludes the manual for the first week. When I have time, I write more for the next weeks. Including:

<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="text-indent:-18.0pt;mso-list:l1 level1 lfo5"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri;mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri;mso-bidi-font-family:Calibri;mso-ansi-language: EN-GB" lang="EN-GB"> -            Early event strategies

<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="text-indent:-18.0pt;mso-list:l1 level1 lfo5"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri;mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri;mso-bidi-font-family:Calibri;mso-ansi-language: EN-GB" lang="EN-GB"> -            The low-cost common cards level-up, combined with ‘Soulbind’

<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="text-indent:-18.0pt;mso-list:l1 level1 lfo5"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri;mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri;mso-bidi-font-family:Calibri;mso-ansi-language: EN-GB" lang="EN-GB"> -            ‘Renew’ strategy for beginners.

<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="text-indent:-18.0pt;mso-list:l1 level1 lfo5"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri;mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri;mso-bidi-font-family:Calibri;mso-ansi-language: EN-GB" lang="EN-GB"> -            Get the Items you want

<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="text-indent:-18.0pt;mso-list:l1 level1 lfo5"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri;mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri;mso-bidi-font-family:Calibri;mso-ansi-language: EN-GB" lang="EN-GB"> -            ‘double clicking’ strategy

<p class="MsoNormal"> These things are not that important for the first week. Just get your gold and duplicates. And get accustomed to the game.

<span style="mso-comment-author: "René Paul Hageman";mso-comment-providerid:"Windows Live";mso-comment-userid: ee4a9b887c5a6a33"> <p class="MsoCommentText">