Cover image by Izabel 🏳️‍🌈 on Unsplash

Today I thought I’d go over the ways players have attempted to break the game of achroma through infinite loops, and why, so far, they don’t work.

First up, the Phisto/Cintimani Stone loop.

When Phisto was first revealed, I was pretty excited about the possibilities with him. The fact you get your money back on any card erased from your canvas is a very strong ability, not to mention the fact you draw a card. However, the strategy a numer of players were toying with was to recycle cards with DIG, and use it to abuse his ability. Cintimini Stone represents a great combo with him, however the idea originally was to use the Stone‘s ability, and the fact it’s heroic, to create an infinite loop.

In practice, this was overruled, but here’s how you can still use this combo to great effect:
You have Phisto and another character on your canvas, and another player has Cintimani Stone in their dregs. Let’s call it StoneB.
You play Cintimani Stone from your hand, let’s call this StoneA. You use the ACTION on StoneA to play StoneB from the opponent’s dregs on another character.
At this point, you do not check the heroic rule, as StoneB‘s ACTION has just fired and needs to complete first. This is similar to what happens if you play a Chromatic Storehouse when you already have one on your canvas. If you checked heroic rule first, StoneB could go to your dregs and you could play it again creating an infinite loop. Thankfully, the heroic rule waits for you to finish resolving ACTIONS, so you play another card from any dregs. If there is a third Stone out there, great, but otherwise, just play a high value card.
Finally, you check the heroic rule, discard a Stone (ideally StoneA as then it goes to your dregs), GAIN 5 shards and draw a card.
If you have a Hex Clunker Engineer in your hand, deploy it, and repeat the play 1 more time.

Nice combo if you can pull it off. Not infinite, but pretty powerful.

The next infinite combo that reared it’s head revolved around Club of Dagda.

Club of Dagda is a very powerful object that gives you +1 whenever you attack. It was realised quite early on (early May) that if you could find a way to protect the attacker AND the defender, you could repeatedly attack, gaining +1 each time, thus winning the game. One such method could be to play Jamshid Orb on the opponent’s character and protecting your characture with Release the Fireflies. This went under the radar for a while, until a couple of community members in mid-June (most notably aroberts93 then PythonPlusPlus) started deckbuilding around the combo and it became apparent rather quickly that this was a problem.

As such, we now have a ruling that prevents this from ever happening:
“If a Card is reduced to 0 Shards, but cannot be Erased due to Protection or similar, it cannot be attacked again until its Shards have refreshed”

Thus endeth infinite attacks. However, Club of Dagda combined with PROTECTION is still a very strong combo, and can result in a complete boardwipe of all opponents’ characters (assuming they don’t have poison >4).

And finally, the Hod mirror loop:

This is a new one:
Let’s say I play Hod and choose Player A. Whenever Player A GAINS shards, I gain the same amount.
Next turn, Player A deploys their own copy of Hod. They choose me.
Player A resolves a +1 character.
My Hod triggers, so I GAIN +1.
Player A’s Hod triggers, so they GAIN +1.
My Hod triggers…

This infinite loop results in an instant win for one of the Hod players (most likely the player on the most shards when the loop was triggered). However it is not a problem because you can’t build around this combo. Yes, you can copy Hod with Serpent’s Ring or Double Trouble, but in both these cases you don’t get the ACTION on Hod, so he essentially does nothing. The only way this is happening is if two players bring a copy of Hod to the game. That just doesn’t happen. I look forward to it happening, but it definitely doesn’t break the game.

That’s all for now. There’s so many great micro-strategies in the game of achroma, but as yet, noone has managed to truly break the game, which is a credit to the designers.

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