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, and progress faster?''

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

edit: It's been a while since I've updated this manual, and the Dev team changed the game a lot since. Probably because they read here too. So that makes the project of writing a manual a bit doubtful. Do I write all insights for the devs to change it, making the game more difficult, or don't I write everything? I've edited 3 sections. Firstly about the WoF that is actually a very cool feature for beginners, secondly about the nerf of boxes (making Gold boxes nearly useless), thirdly about legal actions that you might want to start against this company, as for now you may not know as most veterans do know: this game is not fair and designed to get the money out of your pocket. And if you are innocently paying a lot for 'upgrades' and 'resources' that you think will help to progress, you will find out it's only sucking you into more investments.This manual's main goal is to give you progress without paying. As paying is not necessary. (if you cannot find the editted sections yet, that is because I am still writing....)

Where are we going to?
We give you many hints of how to play smart and avoid disappointment. How to invest your time (and if you want your money, but using money is not required). 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 Walker) up to 5-star. Every win in the daily tournament will get you duplicates to seduce a Mythic card one star up. The next card will only become 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 Mythic cards from daily wins, hence after 15 times winning you finished the beginners' part of Smutstone. The 3rd Mythic card is called ‘Lady Butterfly’. These three Mythic cards have special abilities (called artifacts) that make them (and the other cards you draw together with them) stronger against the opposing cards.

The first 3 Mythic cards stay important till you reach the stage the game is into right now, so getting The Mythics is the most important goal and to get them fast will seriously help you to advance fast. Moreover, there are three special sets of cards, and the Mythics are part of those sets. And together with a specific Mythic card, you also get a strong Legendary card wich is also part of one of the 3 special sets. Those sets are the strongest in the game, and there are no other cards or combination of cards yet, that are stronger in 100% of the cases. So it's really important to get those Mythic cards. We will write more about the sets later on.

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 respect. 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, we use the relaxed approach: 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

Dislaimer
Yes there it is (thanks Dark Xoko): this manual is not the only and best way to play the game. It's just a description of how it can be done with a lot of information from people that have been playing for a while. The game changes over time. We can be wrong about matters. New data can be discovered. New tools, new techniques could become available in time.

Did you find something new?? Thank you very much for sharing!

Gameplay
After you start your game, there is an automatic tutorial that guides you through the first (City & Forest) maps whenever something new comes into play. It's there helping you to understand the game as you progress and it pops up automatically when you arrive at a new feature. Some menus of the game become available after you progress through the City map others after you progress in the Forest 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. You don't spend them till the time you really need them. You only start to spend your resources when you are making your go to win a 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 people will see this as your real name. Sometimes you see names in the tournament that make you question if the person realized this in the beginning. Also you’ll use it contacting Customer Support (CS). As you will learn playing this game for a while, contacting CS 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 CS.
 * 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 still 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 to 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 resources or a special card. 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 email 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 can help 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. Further on in the game you need rubies, so don't spend all for extra slots in the beginners' stage.

First Phase, getting started for your first tournament
Progress till the duels menu becomes available (Archeress helps) without levelling up too much 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 points for when you play your first tournament. Unless you need the items(fire elixir or earth elixir) to upgrade your cards later on. In that case you can repeat the city chapter for that item even if you didn’t win it 3-star yet. You can read all about levelling up cards and the items you need in other sections of this Wiki. For now it's good to have a bit of gold, some items (preferably the ones you need to upgrade your P-deck, see below) and some boxes, that you also get from triple star victories. You need to open one silver box in the tutorial. Let that be your last one for now. Open every bronze box to get energy, gold and items

Keep the map for your first daily tournament!
The map has fights along the storyline that give 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 a chapter 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. After you finish one map, you get to another (there are 5 till now: City, Forest, Sands, Rivers and Island). This manual will bring you to the final chapters of the Rivers Map.

To win a daily tournament you need around 1200-1400 mojo points. Don’t worry, you also get points from upgrading your cards, so don’t do that yet.

Full sets
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 (nobody in this game can win Island 11 for 100%, not without using Devine stones, so that is the end point right now). I started to collect duplicates for this set, which seems difficult 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, Blind Warrior 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. '''(which also means that the Mythics you can get in Events are not primary goal.)

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.)

Very important note: You can select your deck!

Like I wrote above: after you start to build a specific deck (seducing the cards, levelling the cards, putting them in your deck) the cards that you are working on will drop more! This is a very important discovery! It only got clear to me after I started again. It means you can activily select your future deck already in the beginning. It's a jolly good feature of this game!

Look at the card duplicates I got after 21 days farming (Event included):

From the very first beginning I got dupes from all cards, yet I immediately put Undead Queen, Inquisitor and Blind Warrior in my deck. Seduced them and thought I was lucky to get even more dupes from those cards. I also upgraded some others like Geomancer, that was pretty strong in the beginning together with the 'free' promotion card Archeress. It turned out the cards I used dropped much more, so I could progress in build my deck. I have to add that I was lucky to get an event in the early weeks, so I could get a lot of dupes from all Legendaries (Cultist, Undead Queen, Witch Docter, Amazon, Red Riding Hood) and Epics (that drop insanely from the biggest Event coffers).

If you compare this to someone who's building the N deck, you see the differences: This deck was not built with a lot of Event coffers, yet you see the big difference in droprate from N-deck related cards compared to P-deck related cards.

One could easily argue that the drops you get determine the deck you will build. And it's too early to make any defenitive conclusions, yet I found this pattern during all my accounts.

For now it's best that you determine what deck you want, and just upgrade the cards that belong to that deck. I would further advise not to upgrade any cards that don't belong to the deck you will have in the future. Except maybe if you upgrade some cards for points to win the tournament, but we will adress that issue later on.

Card bonus
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.

Duels are the way to success
Once you got to the duel’s menu, get new chests as 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).

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.)

In the first beginning you want to get legendary chests and 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. Any win (1-, 2- or 3-star) will give you a chest, and so you move up one place in the table.

The points you have in the duels determine the league you are in. To keep track of your total of points is a big aid in keeping track of your point in the table! Losing will add minus 4 to your total, and retreating (retreat button in the right upper corner before clicking ‘ready’ button, showing a red exit door) gives your total minus 10.

How many points you get:

There is a more specific table in the Duels section.

So in a special case, if the next fight gives you a total that is less then the minimum of your current league: you lose much more points to set you back further. Supposing you have 301 points and you are in Master League 2, then you loose a fight and you loose about 40 points, but if you retreat you will loose 140 points. (The idea is correct, the numbers maybe not; does anybody have a table for this?).

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. This is also interesting for the 'Renew' button, we explain in section 8. 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. Like in the image on the right: you have a deck that can beat opponents from Master League 1 but not from Mastar League 2. You can still get your Legendary chests from ML2 when you get to the place before you get a Legendary chest and manipulate the score, in this case 298. After a chest is ready and you open it, the spot becomes available. You fight and you get the next chest of ML 2. If you lose the fight your total will be 294 and the next one will still get you a chest of ML 2. Doesn't work always, since you can lose 2 times in a row, but mostly you can succeed.

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 -36/-100 and -10 will be -90/-250, all depending on the league). This can easily get you confused about where in the duels table you are.

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 a 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:


1 Use the very beautiful and comprehensive online tool that LukyMe made in this Wiki.

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.

In the discord app, you can find a copy of this table in Word (find it in the pinned messages). Here is the invitation for discord: ☀https://discord.gg/GfVWky

3 Make your own version. Like BlackXjack did: a bigger paper with bigger squares where you can put a coin on. 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 cent 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:
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 necessarily 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 (one spot too early) or epic fail (one spot too far). This is to help you:

1. Use the tool of LukyMe or Prolli to determine your spot in the table.

2. Use any method for progressing and keep track of your score, since that is one extra check.

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've 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!).

4. Get insurance. Insurance is someting that costs a little but can prevent high costs from disasters.This is what I do: When progressing to spot 84 (legendary), you take 79 (rare) first. If it’s not rare you are fu**ed, 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 (hence the insurance).

5. If anything goes wrong anyhow,''' Blame Hooligapps/Nutaku. '''Life is difficult enough already; you shouldn’t have to deal with failure by yourself. This game it's just ill-designed!

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 ready to seduce. 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. We will adress this later on.

For the beginner, this is a way to get more legendary and epic cards for your first deck. When the game progresses you are more interested in dupes from your current deck or specific dupes (like common) if you like to seduce a load of common cards to get more mojo.

Getting gold
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 a lot of gold from 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.

Gold is farmed using energy, which you get from 4 sources:

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!

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 maybe 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 gold in a Silver box or Gold box.

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.

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?
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, very smart players called @GuardianDragon and @Prolli made fantastic tools, 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.

First week summary:
Make a plan of what deck you aim at (that woulde be either the P-deck or the N-deck, F-deck seems not the strongest one ATM but this could changed). 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 unless you want those cards to drop more in you future full deck! Don’t open Silver/gold boxes, don't use your rubies unless you buy one extra slot or the Archeress card. 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. Make sure you have enough possible mojo points when you play your tournament (earliest time to engage to play in the daily tournament would be day 3-5, I started at day 5 to be sure).

Your virgin win in the tournament
The first win 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 (keep the seduction of the non deck related cards for later). 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 lucky 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
There are groups of up to 100 contesters in one daily tournament. But that are not just flesh and blood 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.

The bots are there to make your life more difficult though. A win (finishing 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.

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 it seems 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 players with that group yet.

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.'''

Disclaimer (Dark Xoko edit): ''You may have varying success with this strategy. Losing 100+ energy as a beginner can be a significant loss, so use this strategy at your own peril. Some players report vigorous bot activity and difficulty winning the daily tournament despite late log-in.''

So decide for yourself. On a day you don't play the tournament, you can wake up 8 hours after your last time of play, open the free Bronze box and invest your 8 hours x 12 energy (96 energy) to get some gold, and wait for 8 hours again, repeat and maybe repeat again before you go to sleep. And when you go for the win and are not sure yet, you start at least 8.25 hours before reset, so you have 2 Bronze boxes and about 200 energy. Or you just open your account 1 hour before reset, lose 2 bronze boxes and 176 energy.It's a trade off. Mostly at 13 pm the groups are doable. Between that and starting 1 am, you loose 100 energy and a bronze box. Depending on your place on the map that could be 30k gold or more, and that could be (seducing commom cards 1->2 star) 300 mojo. It's a big difference, yet when you start earlier it could be that the amount of mojo you need surpasses that. Make your own decision. The image on the righ is a tournament that was opened at reset (logging in just after reset). Half of the day still needs to come and there is a crazy score. Definately not a day to go for it. Those ppl could log in late too, so there is no guarantee you won't see them, yet most ppl with a score that high don't mind to spend and don't bother to login late.

When to go for it?
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.

First win
The first win I did mostly with the unfinished City Map. It got me 450 mojo. First I levelled and seduced my cards for my P-deck. When you use your gold to seduce your current deck to be stronger, you can also progress further on the map. So with that stronger deck I could progress on the 2nd (Forest) map and I got 1300 mojo to finish in place 1 (place 3 is enough). I didn't seduce any non deck related common/rare cards yet. There are around 20 common cards that you can seduce. That's 30 mojo for 3000 gold each. 600 mojo costing only 60k. Really a bargain! It's good to have them in case you need then (on a high tournament score).

There is a lot of points in that. Yet I was saving them for future use. Why? Seducing non deck related cards is only mojo, it will not help you advance on the maps and win higher fights. Also opening boxes while you didn't finish the Forest Map is wasting some good gold. When the gold drop of the boxes is maxed out, you get 8000 gold per drop (sometimes you get no gold sometimes you get 1 drop of gold sometimes 2 drops (In a Bronze box the maximum amount of drops is one, in the Silver and Gold box this is 2). Furthermore instead of a drop of gold, you can have a drop of Energy (25 or 50) also 1 time in a Bronze box and 2 times in a Silver box (so maximum is 100 energy from one Silver box). The Energy drop from a Golden Box is 75 or 125. Yet it's also possible neither gold nor energy drops from any box. In that case you get a higher item (we go deeper into that matter later), so instead of a normal drop of 1* item, you will get a drop of a 2* item (special drop is always one star higher than the drop you could expect based on your deckstrenght). These drops is something we discovered a long time ago. Pana133 put all data together on this matter.

Second win
Also for my second win, I seduced and levelled my deck first, got a bit further on the Forest map and did not upgrade any non deck related cars. It was the 7th day and I used the 6th day to gather more gold. And also for the second win I did not use any box (Except the normal daily Bronze boxes).

Second phase
You used your progress on the City and Forest maps to get your 2 tournament wins and advance to a chapter in the map that you can harvest for the maximum gold. You now enter a new phase.

Why aim at the full P deck?
Why do we want the full P deck including the Owl card (and not Lady Butterfly)? It has everything to do with the Deck bonus of 75%. After you go from a 6 cards P deck to a 7 cards P deck, the bonus strength of the whole deck goes up from 25% to 75%. That is a very big progress! It will give you strength beyond leveling a bunch of unrelated cards up to level 15, and investing a lot of gold that will be wasted since you won't use those cards anymore beyond a certain point. That is why we don't want to level the non P-deck related cards in the beginning!

Get your Bone Walker up to 5 star
Seducing your Bone Walker is the first step in getting your Temptress (Tier 2) and Owl (Tier 3) cards. You won't get Temptress from a tournament win, untill you seduce Bone Walker to 5 star. That is pretty costly:

So at least you need 680k gold untill you can have your Owl card and to get to Legendary League 3 from duels, you need to have the Owl card up to 2 stars at least. So that is 688k gold you will be needing. Fortunately there is a lot of gold in the maps and also in other resources (as your daily free energy) so eventually you will get there. Yet we mean to do it sooner rather than later. You might even want to get your Owl up to 3 or 4 star, since at that time it will be equally strong as the other cards. (To get Owl up one star, you don't need a tournament win, you can get a place 4-20 and still get an Owl duplicate. Yet it's more lucrative to get a 1-3 win, since you get also Lady Butterfly for your future N-deck and a lot of resouces). Later we will get to adress the issue of having an even deck. For now this is just the future. Getting your Temptress card is what we aim at.

Along the process of getting Temptress and Owl you will have a strong Bone Walker. This card is not going to have a bonus of 25% that the other 6 cards of the P deck together do have. Yet Bone Walker, especially if it's up to 5 star, is the best possible fill-up card on the way to a 7 card P-deck. You can even level it to level 4 or 5 (You need 2 Life Dildo's to get to level 5, but you won't need too much Life Dildo's in the beginning anyway. In the P-deck you can reasonably use 2+4+6 LD's for a level 19 Temptress or 8 more for a level 24 Temptress. And those 20 LD's you get for your first 10 wins, including 1 or 2 wins for Owl will give you 22-24 LD's so you can spare 2 at least.).

New phase: seduce non deck related cards
You got your first 2 wins from doing the fights on the City Map and Forest map, together with levelling and seducing your actual deck. In the beginning you should not upgrade any card beyond level 6 (you can make an exception to level 8 at most if that is really needed to get an even deck). At this point let's assume you have a 2 star Bone Walker (and one more duplicate after your second win, but you are waiting for the next tournament to seduce BW to 3 star and get that 30 mojo then). Together with Bone Walker you could have a 2 star Undead Queen (if you collected a lot of Legendary Chests in Duels that should be possible), a 2 star Blind Warrior, maybe the Archeress and Geomancer and 2 epic cards all 2 star deck. Let's assume you have levelled the cards you are going to use later on till level 3-5, maybe seduced them to 3 or even 4 star. Then you have a deck of about 1600-1900 strength. You should be able to get to Forest 8 for instance and win 100%. Aim at a chapter where you can win 100%, your friends from Smutstone always select your weakest cards much more often, so unless you have an even deck, you should aim at a 100% win chance to be sure.

''Farming Forest 8 will get you around 2000 gold, yet you will see that from City 15 up till half way Forest, all fights won will give you around 2000 gold. The difference is that firstly: the City fights cost less energy, hence they yield more gold (!) per energy. Secondly you get a different Item.'' You pick the Items you need to upgrade your deck!

An Even Deck
An even deck means that all your cards have an equal strenght. If you got one card that is significantly stronger, it's not a problem yet your real deck strength is actually the individual strength of your 3 weakest cards. So if you got one card or even 3 cards that are significantly weaker, that is a big problem.

Like written before: this game selects your weakest cards much more often than chance. So like in real life, the team is as strong as the weakest link! So the weak card will make you lose the match, therefore it needs more training! If that's impossible go to the transfermarket and buy a better player!

Use one of the tools to find your deckstrength and '''individual card strength. '''Whenever you upgrade a card, upgrade your weakest card. In this deck (see picture on the right, its a printscreen from @GuardianDragons excel file) the weak cards are Geomancer and Blind Warrior. Those cards you can upgrade a little more (put stones on it or even soulbind to level 1 if that is available)

To get a stronger deck: use stones. As soon as stones are available, put them on all your cards. I used Chipped stones on the cars that I will not use in the future. I used shard stones (3000 gold each upgrade from 4 chipped) for cards that I will continue to use. Those stones will give your deck a nice boost. You can also use Soulbind, but for now it's not really possible yet to use that.

Your third win
At this point you didn't use your Rubies, you didn't use your gold boxes and silver boxes, and you will continue not using them! You collect items for upgrading your deck (only the cards that you will keep). Collect the 1 star and 2 star items (if all went naturally you have already all the 1 star items you need for your P-related cards to get to level 5).

At this point you pick a day to win (late login) and you go for it. If you find your group already at 1400 mojo or more, that's bad luck, try another day. You cannot afford to lose all your resouces over one win (or worse a failed attempt to win).

This is the way of getting Mojo points and get your 1-3 place in the tournament: This should be enough to get your 3rd win and maybe even a 4th one. This is the amount of cards I had after 6 days, so before my second win, yet I kept them for later together with all boxes.
 * 1) You got enough gold based on the other 2 points we adress below. You can be safe with a little extra. It's possible to use silver boxes and gold boxes only for emergency (if you are overtaken in the last minutes), but try not to use them.
 * 2) You level your cards first. You are smart and have checked how many extra chapters of the Forest map you can do with your newly updated deck. So part of the Mojo points you get for this third tournament win, is from doing extra chapters (it's good to not lose any fights, since losing fights gives you one mojo only. While other wins give you 5. As soon as I see a player with a score that cannot be devided by 5, I know this player is either a bot or weak, meaning not having a very strong deck nor a load of resources. While mostly I feel compassion for these kind of players, remembering my own struggle at the time, don't count on other players to go soft on you!).
 * 3) Seduce your 1 star cards to 2 stars. From opening a zillion duels chests you will have a lot of 1 star cards: common, rare, epic and even legendary cards (and also Bone Walker). Getting those cards up from 1 star to 2 star is cheap. You can have about 20 common cards. Seducing to 2 star costs 3000 gold and gives 30 mojo. That is 600 mojo (half you need) already for only 60k gold (one day farming). Then there is rare cards (4500 gold) and epic ones (6000 gold). It's really cheap like I wrote before.

Third Phase
After you have gotten your third or even fourth win by upgrading your deck and seducing all cards to level 2 (never go to level 3, you had better buy silver boxes), you can enter the next phase. In the ideal situation you have finished the Forest map. By finishing the forest map, the boxes will give 8000 gold now, as written before. You will want to wait till that point: 8000 gold is a lot. It's even more than 25 energy, since 25 energy will only give you around 3500 gold (yet also 10 mojo and some items). For relatively new accounts, this 8000 gold really helps, so it's worth waiting for. I had about 20 Silver boxes collected from the chapters in City and Forest, so that is a lot of extra gold you can have. We will now adopt a new strategy to progress and get our Bone Walker up to 5 star. I started using boxes only after I got Bone Walker up to 5 star, but that had everyting to do with an Event popping up in my second week. I will adress that later. First the strategy:

Level-up the cards in your deck's ‘Soulbind’ groups
If you are aiming for the P-deck, than your most important Soulbind group is group 2 (Blind Warrior, Barbarian, Inquisitor and Savage) those cards belong to that group and also levelling them up helps to soulbind those cards mutually. It means that if you get the cards from Soulbind group 2 up, you can soulbind those 4 cards. That is +25 AT/HP for only 10k gold each and +50 AT/HP for an extra 20k each. Next to group 2, there is group 5 (Temptress, Undead Queen, but also Bone Walker) and group 4 (Owl).

Here is the thing: there are 3 common cards that you have to upgrade to level 6 to be able to Soulbind the 4 red cards. The cards to upgrade are:

Thief (common) needs (1 star) 10 Earth Elixir, 22 Precious Ring, 6 Common Neck for level 5 plus (2 star) 2 Earth Elixir, 5 Precious Ring and 1 Common Neck for level 6. Total cost to do so is 17836 gold (125 Mojo).

Gatekeeper (common) needs (1 star) 10 Light Elixir, 22 Fairy Flowers, 6 Common Neck for level 5 plus (2 star) 2 Light Elixir, 5 Fairy Flowers and 1 Common Neck for level 6. Total cost to do so is 17836 gold (125 Mojo).

Avenger (common) needs (1 star) 10 Light Elixir, 22 Fairy Flowers, 6 Common Neck for level 5 plus (2 star) 2 Light Elixir, 5 Fairy Flowers and 1 Common Neck for level 6. Total cost to do so is 17836 gold (125 Mojo).

That is a cheap way to get a lot of Mojo points.

You can also upgrade a Rare cards for level 2 Soulbind. The good thing is that Blind Warrior and Barbarian are part of the second tier Soulbind and they are already in your deck and levelled to 6. There are actually 4 cards in this tier, next to BW and Barb this is Archeress (who you might just have already gotten from the first free promotion on Nutaku) and Sentinel. If you only need Sentinel, this are the costs:

Sentinel (rare) needs (1 star) 15 Fire Elixir, 18 Lixurious Diadem, 6 Rare Neck for level 5 plus (2 star) 3 Fire Elixir, 4 Lixurious Diadem, 1 Rare Neck for level 6. Total cost to do so is 35664 gold (125 Mojo).

And for level 3 Soulbind (including Savage and Inquisitor) you need:

Amazon (legendary) needs (1 star) 22 Water Elixir, 10 Fairy Flowers, 6 Legendary Neck for level 5 plus (2 star) 5 Water Elixir, 2 Fairy Flowers, 1 Legendary Neck for level 6. Total cost to do so is 69k gold (125 Mojo).

Taking the costs into account, you had better stick to level 1 soulbind and maybe level 2 if you really need it to balance your deck. Like I did to be able to win Sands 16(a) 100%.

How to get Items for this strategy
Obviously we need a lot of 1 star and a bit of 2 star items for this strategy. How do we get those? Well this is where we are going to open our silver boxes and gold boxes. Those boxes give a lot of items. JRich discovered that we can get the items level (1 star, 2 star etc.) we want, by selecting our deckstrenght to match a certain value. In this stage you have a load of weak cards. Just select 7 of them in your deck. Your deckpower should be below 917 to be save. We only introduce this now, since in the beginning you have a small deck and all 1 star / 2 star items you get you are going to need anyway. Thanks @Peter1964 for finding this table back in the Discord chat: The deckpower you select on your first deck, will determine the star level of the items you loot from bronze, silver and gold boxes. It doesn't have an impact on Chests nor Coffers. Yet the league you are in determines the amount of duplicates you get from boxes too (both and from the chests itself). So being in a high league is good to get more duplicates from your boxes.

Very important: don't forget to select a stronger deck when you start a fight!

You can select your strong deck on nr. 2 and do fights with that stronger deck. Be sure you select your weak deck on nr. 1 before opening a box. What happens is you get a few items (random) of level 1 and some of level 2. There are 2 slots in the Silver Box that give special loot. This could be gold (up to 8000), this could be energy (25 or 50) and this could be slightly better items (2 star in this case).

When you open 20 silver boxes and maybe 1 or 2 gold boxes, you will get a load of items that you don't need and some that you need. If you want to be safe, first open all boxes you need. Then reselect your deck and fight the chapters you need. The boxes give you a lot of gold (around 4000 per box) and a lot of energy (varying between 5 or 20; I found in the beginning a bit less, in my case it was only 5 energy per box). With this energy you can do fights and the gold from that fights combined with the gold from the boxes, can buy you new boxes.

You need to make a calculation of how much Silver boxes you need. And maybe you need extra gold to start with.

4th/5th till 6/8th win

 * 1) You get a lot of gold and you have calculated which amount you need.
 * 2) You have learned which common cards you can upgrade up to level 6: first you do the cards for soulbind group 2, then for soulbind group 5 then for soulbind group 4. If there are more items (that you don't need the next time to level up the soulbind groups cards that didn't hit level 6 yet), you just level other common cards. My finding is that you can easily upgrade up to 600 mojo each day. So in this step you upgrade all common and maybe rare cards you can.
 * 3) You open your Silver Boxes (or buy them) maybe even open 1 or 2 gold boxes to get more mojo and win the tournament. By doing so you also get a lot of 1 star items that you can use the next day. If you have enough time you can exchange step 2 and 3. But anyway you want to open all silver boxes you can and rather keep your items for the next day than keep the boxes. Keep in mind that opening boxes will make it possible to get items to upgrade more common cards cheaply a next day and get a lot of cheap mojo then. Keep also in mind that the energy you get, also gives mojo when you do the fights (5 per win, 1 if you loose). So you just might need to open less boxes than you initially thought or either wind up with more gold (which is not bad).

Renew
This is a feature from Duels. You can do it at the start, but it's better to wait till it actually gives some real awards, since you can only do it once every 10 days. Only getting 4000 gold is not helping. Try to get till the point you can at least get 1 golden box. I've waited 6 days till my deck could get to Champions League 2 and get 52k gold and 2 gold boxes. Then 10 days later I could (with my Event Deck of 6003 power) go to LL 3 and get 100 rubies, 125000 gold and 3 golden boxes. That is a big help! I extually then got into a hurry to be sure to get to LL3 again in the next 10 days (so I had to win a few times in a row, which was possible with all the rubies I saved).

7th/9th till 10th win
In this phase your playing strategies will resemble those of experienced players. The only difference from the previous phase is that you now can also use your rubies. And you use it only as little as needed to buy energy and get more gold and a bit mojo points for the fights (never use it for gold boxes, that is really throwing away rubies).

If you haven't spent your rubies and if you are able to do Sands 16(a) by this time (if not Sands 6 is fine too) you can get a lot of gold from rubies. Gold that you need. I used it to get a 4 times winning streak (also using the levelling of common cards here). For your 7th/9th till 10th win, you use your saved rubies and every 100 rubies you get from the next wins. Together with Renew, the 50k gold, 3 silver boxes and 1 gold box every time you win, you should be able to win at least 1 out of 3 days and have your 5 star Temptress soon. While writing this manual, I was surprized how fast it went in this phase. Our initial goal to get a 2 star Temptress in one month, its very well possible. To go beyond and have a 5 Star Temptress, is actually possible too.

Your 11th and 12th win
This is the point where we get our 7 cards P-deck with 75% bonus. Making it possible to reach LL3 in Duels and fininsh the Rivers Map.

There are 2 ways to get there:
 * 1) Maybe you lost mostly all your resources to get to the 5 star Temptress. It's a lot of gold to upgrade her and don't make the mistake to not upgrading her before you move on. She really has to be 5 star before Owl and LB drop.

If you lost most resources, you could go for a top 20 win instead of top 3 win. If you got one Owl duplicate, your deckpower will get up extremely. It will be enough to reach LL-3, which is expecially good with 'Renew'. If you got 2 Owl duplicates, you can win River 15 (with some other minor upgrades). River 15 is pretty good for a beginner. It was not a long time ago that most players had a hard time to get to River 16 and River 15 was the end for many players.
 * 1) You go for the top 3 anyway. If you got the resources you should probably do it. Between getting into the top 1-3 and getting into the top 20 is mostly not that big of a difference. Unless you have a real crazy top of 6000+, it's mostly just 300/400 mojo. Taking into consideration that winning will give you also 100 rubies, 1 gold box 25k extra gold and 1 extra Silver Box, well it's much better then to just win the tournament instead of staying at place 20 (unless as I wrote previously the top is crazy). You have to be a bit lucky in getting into the right groups, yet this final phase can be done in a week.

11th/13th win till 15th win
You are reaching the end of 'being a beginner'

Once you have gotten Owl up to 2 star, you have reached a point that you can win most chapters in the Rivers Map. And the Rivers Map will give you a load of Gold and some points from finishing them for the first time.

This gold will be a lot for you as a relative beginner. It will be possible to make a streak of winning 5 times in a row. Just opening Silver Boxes, maybe upgrade some low level cards for Soulbind, reïnvest the energy in Rivers 15 and reïnvest your daily win rewards in new wins. The end is sweet. After a 3 star Owl deck, your deck will be balanced (all cards equally strong, except Temptress that will be much stronger). You will be able to farm enough gold to win every 2 or 3 days and slowly build your deck to advance to the Island map.

The fifth phase
Get out of here!

You have reached the end of the beginners guide. You can now stop reading and live your life.

The world is your Oyster!

Still under construction:

- Early event strategies

- ‘double clicking’ strategy

Tools links
Visual Chest Map Smutstone Tools