An In Depth Look at Skyweaver Prisms 2/5: Intellect
Insights into Prism Balance and mastering Ari
Welcome to Part 2 of my In Depth Guide to Skyweaver Prisms. Today we’ll discuss Ari. You can get some design insights to Ari here:
https://www.skyweaver.net/news/design-intellect
I’ve been procrastinating a bit with this one because these articles take a lot of time to write. In this article I’m going to be doing a different approach that will take even more time but offer even more gains. And after finishing the #Samya500 challenge, I plan on learning Ari next. So let’s do it together!
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INTELLECT
Summary: INT is unique because it was added to the game after the other Prisms were established. Honestly I’m not a big fan of playing against INT. It’s the biggest scumbag prism by far. It’s almost like the designers got together and brainstormed the scummiest/unfun mechanics to play against and grouped them all.
If you’ve ever had your board wiped out by Blizzard, or mass Dazed, or lost to a Hive/Lily/Necrosiss single handedly you’ll know what I’m talking about. I’m joking but also dead serious.
Spirit Animal: Slimy Snake
Appeal: One of the strongest Discovery choices. Best removal in the game. Powerful generators that win the game single-handedly.
Elements: 1) Best in class removal 2) Snowball Units 3) Armor/Zap/Barrier
Strengths: INT is one of the kings of the current Discovery metagame with some of the strongest cards/highest winrates around. Between all of its removal options, INT is very good at dealing with enemy boards. Once it can take the board, it has by far the most powerful snowball units that create Pressure and single-handedly win games.
A lot of INT units also come with lower stats but Armor or Barrier making it hard to take the board back once lost.
Weaknesses: INT units have poor stats. While it’s tough to take the board from INT, it’s also hard for INT to take the board back itself. And if INT doesn’t draw the truly strong generators, it has a tough time closing out games due to the weak/passive nature of its non premium units.
I’ll no longer be posting the old Conquest matchup table. I think the data is pretty obsolete there. Instead I’ll be deep diving into the Conquest statistics provided by the devs. By avg. Conquest winrate in the last Patch 89 data, here’s the classes:
Average Conquest Card Winrate, by Prism
INT 52.4
AGI 51.1
WIS 51.0
HRT 47.9
STR 46.2
So this data shows us INT has the best cards on average. I went further and divided each of the Conquest Winrates by the overall Class Winrate to see the best performers. For example. Fire Noble has a 54.84% conquest winrate for WIS. Dividing by the 51% Avg. WIS winrate, you get a 1.08 Adjusted bonus for Fire Noble.
Average Standard Deviation, by Prism (Compared to 1.00 Base)
HRT .031
INT .028
WIS .026
AGI .022
STR .022
What does this mean? The average card has a score of 1.00. HRT has a deviation of .03 PTS from the AVG of 1.00. So it has a slightly higher spread between its very best cards and its very worst cards. To be honest, after running the numbers, I’m pretty surprised how close the ranges are. Speaks to pretty good game balance.
I was thinking the overpowered int cards such as Hive (1.07), Lilly (1.06), Mechabun (1.06), and others would lead to a higher gap. But INT (and HRT/WIS) are dragged down by their weaker cards.
Exploring further, I split Conquest cards into top 10% and bottom 10% outliers. Every Prism has 102 cards (for 510 total). And of these totals, 49 cards are 1.04 or better (top 10%) and 45 are 0.96 and lower (bottom 10%). Distributions:
Distribution of Top 10%/Bottom 10% Outliers, by Prism
AGI has 7 top cards and 7 bottom cards. Very stable and concentrated.
STR has 8 top cards and 5 bottom cards. Again, very stable.
WIS has 10 top cards and 8 bottom cards.
HRT should have the widest spread. It has 15(!) top cards and 15(!) bottom cards. So 30/102 cards are very good or very bad.
INT has 9 top cards and 10 bottom cards.
It looks like HRT is the only Prism that really suffers from big boom vs big bust.
Ok finally, let’s wrap up with some INT specific info that will help become a better INT player.
So it’s a given that Conquest players are the best Skyweaver players. If we analyze the difference in card winrates from Conquest Discovery vs Ranked Discovery, we can see which cards are performing better/used better by the stronger players.
For INT, every single card on the list performs better in Discovery Conquest (52.45% AVG) versus Discovery Ranked (50.45%). But which outperform the best?
Some quick takes on this list. I’m just a Samya expert, not Ari.
For Mechabun, I’m guessing there is some skill expression based on when to tempo it out versus holding and recycling the hand. Based on this big difference, I’m guessing the recycling hand effect is very powerful (I don’t think tempoing early will lead to +4%).
The mass removal cards can auto win a matchup against AGI if held from the start.
Mutate/Encapsulate/Frog King are very specific removal cards that work very well against certain key cards.
Nessie is very strong going 1st and very strong against AGI.
Mootichi can win games single handedly, especially in slower matchups.
Good players are much better at developing the board properly to let cards like Supermind, Electron, Mootichi, and Hive flourish.
Looking forward to exploring this as I start a 500 game Ari challenge.