Almost as irritating as the Sorcerer King strategy

Roxxsmom

The Hlaalu patron strategy where the npc buys every card in sight and blows them up every single turn, even ignoring the crow patron if it can make them more points in a given turn. I can beat it by doing the same thing, but it's not as satisfying to blow up the cards I was buying in the hopes of making combos

Seems like the npcs are doing that a lot more than they used to also.

Wish they'd make the Orgnum and Hllaalu patrons like the crow and Hunding patrons, so they can't be turned when they favor you. That would make the decision when to use them a bit more strategic than they are now (rather than simply spamming them each turn).

Is spamming the Hllaalu patron a common strategy in ranked games?

SilverBride

I don't know how good it is for spamming because you have to have higher value cards for it to be effective. But I have purchased higher value cards specifically to sacrifice them for the power. I was once able to sacrifice 2 of these back to back when a tithe card became available in the tavern.

spartaxoxo

They'd have to rework the deck to make it fair for that patron to only be usable once. The deck generates little power on its own, and sacrificing a card means you can't use the card for any other benefit.

In my opinion, the only thing wrong with the Hlallu deck is how blatantly overpowered Currency Exchange is

Necrotech_Master

the best strategy to counter a hlaalu spamming npc is rahjin

you fill their deck with useless cards that they cant sacrifice, while they make dumb decisions sacrificing all their good cards

at the same time rahjin cards focus on -prestige, so between the -prestige and the rahjin patron ability, you can stall out a hlaalu spamming NPC really fast (and in fact i prefer the NPC having hlaalu because they make such dumb decisions with how frequently they sacrifice cards)

SeaGtGruff

I only sacrifice agents with Hlaalu when it's strategically meaningful. And I prefer to never sacrifice an agent with taunt, even if I know my opponent is going to knock it out in their next turn, unless it's a contract agent, since regular agents can be used again after they've been knocked out, whereas sacrificing an agent removes it from the rest of the match.