Dice Masters Team Building

In this article, I will be sharing with you on how to build a good team for Dice Masters. Before you read, just take note that this article is meant for beginners who just learn to play the game and need some help to come up with a good team. PS I have no dislike for anyone or any characters, all my sources are based on my opinions and it’s purely strategic, no hard feelings! 

Before we start, why is it important for a player to build a good team?

No matter what kind of game you are playing, drafting, constructed tournament or casual play, YOU WANT TO WIN. Your opponent isn’t going to sit there and let you finish him/her off, so you need to find a way to win before he/she does.

Step 1: Main Source of Attack

This is the part that most beginners lack, when they build a team, they have no clue on how to win, so they would end up building a wall of characters that sits in the field and turn after turn, they have yet to deal damage to their opponent. When you play the game, you need to make sure that you have a source of attack, because you don't win the game by being pure defensive. In dice masters, the 2 main source of attacks are combat damage and non-combat damage. 

Combat Damage

Combat damage are damage produce by characters in the field. It is very common for players to win the game via combat damage, because you can deal 1 to up to 20 or more combat damage in an instant. However, combat damage are not that easy to trigger as your characters are often blocked by your opponent's character. So for combat damage to go through you can use the following methods: 



1. Overcrush - Characters with overcrush deals their excess damage to your opponent after knocking out it's blocker(s). You could use action or character's ability to trigger this effect, characters with overcrush should have very high attack value. 

2. Unblockable - I don't think I need to elaborate more on this. Characters with unblockable abilities should have decent attack value. If a character doesn't have unblockable ability, you could use effects that make your opponent's character unable to block. Similarly, you could use action effects or character's ability to make a character unblockable.

These 2 are the main source for combat damage, however,  if there are any other opportunity for you to deal combat damage, do not hesitate to do so. 

Non-combat Damage



This damage comes from action effects or character's ability. They are the easiest to deal as they can trigger once you use an action or trigger a character's ability. However, the damage dealt by non-combat damage are rather low, maybe 1 or 2 damage, and characters that can deal more non-combat damage would need longer time to set up.  

Step 2: Playing Style

After choosing your main source of attack, you will now choose a playing style for your team.. Playing style helps with the way you play the game, each style features a different strategy a player can use within the game and each style has it’s own pros and cons.

Aggressive

An aggressive team is fast and they can finish your opponent before your opponent can have time and resources to react to your attack. Since an aggressive team is based on speed, you need to have characters that are cheap and good. 

Control

A control team is used to counter any and every character in the game! Although the team itself is powerful, it takes a long time to set up, as many of a controller characters are high cost. A controller must prevent your opponent from doing a certain action in the game and your opponent will have some sort of penalty if they want to reactivate those actions. 

Combos

 + Avengers Characters
+ Bolt Characters 
+ Sidekicks 

There are different types of combos that can be made in the Dice Masters game, a combo team is a team that has characters supporting a certain combo and can finish your opponent in no time. Combo doesn’t mean that all characters must have the same text or affiliation; it just means that abilities triggered by those characters will support each other. There a lot of combo available in the game, most commonly are basic action combo, sidekick combo, pure energy combo, avengers combo, villains combo, JLA retaliation combo, lantern combo etc. 

Mid-Range

Mid-Range style is like a team that doesn't have synergy with one another, your characters just attacks, defend and support. One great thing about Mid Range is that you are adaptable to the game. A mid-range team must have all kinds of things prepared, offensive, defensive, preventive and supportive, they don’t work as well as a combo but they can still function just as well without any similarities between those characters.

I will be doing an article that will elaborate more about all 4 playing styles in the game.

Step 3: Picking your Cards

Now that you have chose your playing style, it is now time to build your team. You should search for characters that are based on your playing style. When choosing a character, there are some factors that you would want to look at.

Cost
Cost plays an important role in the game. A character that has a lower cost means you can buy them easily. As most of you who played the game before can see, to roll out a character is only a 50% chance, so you have another 50% to get energies, having a low cost character providing energies instead of characters wouldn’t be so bad as compared to a 7 cost character that shows an energy even after reroll. 

Stats
A die also will show you the fielding, attacking and defending value; a lower cost character should have relatively low stats. An average cost character should have reasonable stats. A high cost character should have high stats. If any character can provide you better stats given their cost, such as, 3 cost with high attacking value or 6 cost with 0 fielding cost, then you might consider choosing that character for the stats part. If you are using combat damage as a source of attack for your team, choosing a character with high attack value would be more viable.

Abilities
Now we move on to the main Meta of the game. What makes a character so powerful? That would be the ability that it possesses. To judge character ability, just provide yourself with some questions; are this character’s abilities worth the cost? Are the abilities something I want or need in my game? Can I make good use of the ability? 

There are various types of abilities in this game:
Attacking - Triggers when attack, characters should have reasonable attack value and abilities that makes it want to attack.

Blocking – Triggers when blocking, characters should have reasonable defend value or blocking abilities that make your opponent think twice about attacking.

Fielding – Triggers when field, characters should leave the field easily so you can trigger this ability over again. 

Active - Triggers as long as the character is in the field, this character should have high defense value so it can stay in the field long enough for the ability to trigger, or it must be cheap enough to buy a few of them so your opponent have trouble getting rid of them. 

Situational – Has different ways to trigger the ability, such as having another character in the field or having some situation like rolling 4 dice of different faces. Since this ability is situational, you need to make sure that your team have use of them or it would take up your precious space in your team.

Action cards also shares the same factor when picking them, so make sure that you have an affordable and useful action in your team. 


Team building is up to your creativity and there are many ways to play it!

Recommended Cards

For any playing style, there are 2 types of characters or actions that is recommended to help your team. 

1. Ramps - Ramp are basically characters, global ability or action that help you to generate more dice to roll. It would take ages to buy a 6 costs character without ramps, so help yourself by using actions or characters that ramp enough dice for you to buy your character faster. If you don't want to use ramp, you could use cost reducer action or characters to make purchasing much easier. 

2. Preventor -  A character or action that can knock or lock out a target character that is bothering your game.They will be helpful to your team when you face a character that is use to counter characters in your team. 

Step 4: Dice Limit

Now that you have chosen the characters and action to build your team, it is time to allocate their dice. 

Since most card allow 4 dices to be placed on them, you should have the appropriate number of dice in order to use them. Low cost attacking character should have more dice placed on them since you are going to use them for attack, so the more the merrier. Expensive character should only have 1 or maximum 2 card on them, because you probably wouldn't buy all of them. 

Building a Team with your collection

Now that you have read the importance of a good team, what team should you build? If you are a new player, i suggest you to build a team with characters you like. If you have yet to start your collection on Dice Masters, then i suggest you to read on my review for each series and then select those characters that you fancy.

Usually I would suggest players to buy singles, if you know what team you like to build, buy that card and dices that you are missing and start playing. If you have your own collection, you can try to build a team with characters you have. Start with a base team, either something you have or a team you like, play games with those team regularly and then find ways to modify your team as more series are release in the future. Once you learn how to master one team, you can try to build another team. This would be the simplest and cheapest way to build a good dice masters team. 

Conclusion

Dice master is something like rock paper scissors, only more complicated. Each team you build will have a counter against your team. An aggressive team will finish a control team before they get a chance to do all the set up. A control team will break a combo team, and preventing or locking characters and their abilities and eventually lose the game. A combo team has better synergy than a mid-range and can then defeat them. A mid-range team will be ready for an aggressive team and can slow them down, and eventually take the win. So don’t be surprise or disappointed that your opponent can defeat your team, it’s basically luck and strategy combine into one. Just go ahead with a game play you are comfortable with and start playing! Most importantly, have fun while playing! I hope that my article helps and thanks for reading.