*Obsolete* Kitty Divine Shield Archtype Review

[HonchKing]

UPDATE: As of version v1.9, major changes were made to kitty girl that render this deck as well as this guide completely obsolete. However, I will keep this post up so future players may learn about ECB’s past.

The Kitty Divine Shield is easily one of the most powerful decks in ECB and can be difficult and frustrating to beat.

What makes this archetype so frustrating is Kitty Girl’s ability to dodge damage while encase itself in tons of armor, while using healing spells and triggers to heal the damage it receives. Plus the fact that many players tend to run both trap detection and sabotage, it's no surprise that this deck is a complete monster in HC, easily burning through enemy decks.

Card explication:

The best version of the deck, in my opinion, is the one posted down below. I don’t own Divine Shield so I couldn’t put it in the picture.

Creatures:
Kitty Girl is obviously the best creature simply because of its ability. There's a couple of creatures worth mentioning. They are Lord of Templar’s, Scepter, and vamp duke . Lord of Templar’s is pretty good option as it’s immune to assassination which is the most used counter to the deck, so I’d recommend it if you have it. As for Scepter I’d recommend against it. It doesn’t offer much other then it’s resist to special attacks.

Heals:
Teppanyaki is a must since it can heal both your Kitty’s at the same time and it has a low cooldown. Goddess’ Favor is also a good addition because once your Kitty Girl has enough armor it will be impossible for your opponent to 1 shot it so Favor is guaranteed to activate. Healing could be used, but it’s vastly inferior to the two mentioned above.
Drain life or summer time aren’t bad options either.

Trap detection:
This card is also a must in my opinion. You might even want to run a second copy over the favor if playing HC as another way players might try to counter you is to run double detection of their own

Sabotage:
This card is another powerful addition as well. Sabotage, shadowbolts, death tower and wrath of bahamut are all popular spell counters to this deck.

Divine shield:
Don’t really need any explanation here. It’s the main card of the deck. You can try to run this without it, but the deck just doesn’t work as well.



Counters:

Spells:
Normal damage spells don’t work too well against this deck because of all the armor it gains which reduces the damage these kinds of spells will deal, but HP deduction spells work fairly well since Kitty has low HP and they ignore armor. Below I’ve listed all the spells that work relatively well against this deck. Won’t recommend canister shot unless your desperate, but all the other ones are pretty effective.

HP deduction:
Canister shot
Gathering Storm
Assassination
Drain life
Shadowbolts

Other options:
Death tower
Wrath of Bahmut

Creatures:

Enchantress:
Prevents the healing from favor or teppananyaki making kitties easier to pick off with cards like assassination.

Blade master:
His damage increases depending on the amount of armor the target has, essentially negating the armor gain effect. Plus he gets an attack type bonus on kitty.

Aileen:
She completely ignores armor and she gets the whole 150% attack bonus, so with a sinister strike she can cleave right through a kitty regardless of her armor.

Frost hunter:
With two of these you can shut down a kitty deck by making it so they can never deck and gain armor.

Hellhounds:
Can attack two kitties at once and gets a 125% attack bonus. Also has a low cooldown.

Corrupted wolf pack:
Deals an HP reduction the few the number of enemy creatures, so if there’s on 1 kitty on the board and you have 2 wolves you can quickly whittle her down.

Godfather:
Always does a counter attack when kitty hits him and gets a 125% attack bonus. Not a great option but it’s there.

Sweet Pirate:
The obvious answer a lot of people think of when they think of dodge. Yeah she gets the 150% attack bonus and 100% guaranteed attack, but the problem is knowing when to run her. She help sagainst this one specific deck, but unless you run a deck with heavy sinister strike synergy, she’s just gonna be a mediocre card which isn’t what you want to play in HC.

White tiger taoist:
Not a great option, but it can dodge all of kitties attacks. Kinda suffers the same problem as pirate.


Triggers:

Trap detection:
The obvious answer for this deck since it’s so trigger happy (no pun intended = ] ). The more the better since this deck often runs detection of its own.

The guardian:
Guaranteed trigger on a kitty and it didn’t run out like other traps. Also does decent damage.

Recap:
Overall the Kitty Divine Shield deck is incredible powerful, but the fact that it requires Divine Shield to work means it rare to see in HC, but it’s best to be prepared for it.

[ECB-Bookie]

You’re forgetting one of the most powerful spells frost bolt which can potentially prevent kitty from attacking or one shot kill it. Many people don’t realize that frost bolt levels up quite well more than most cards. It’s strength at level 30 compared to level 1 is significantly different and much more exaggerated than leveling up most cards. Since the divine shield cards stacks so much defense and very quickly then it’s easy to find yourself against kitty’s with 300-999 defense. Level 30 frost bolt will deal 80x def/10 damage so vs 500 defense it deals 4000 damage every 7 seconds not to mention will delays its cd by 50 seconds. It will deal with other tanks too like Spector and lots of Templar’s in a single attack as well and in 7seconds makes it much faster than spells like Bahamas which are too slow for hardcore. Frost bolt is also just a really good card when it comes to hardcore bc very often you face decks with 1-2 units and it pretty much freezes the units from attacking. If the deck is stacking defense which is also often then it deals with that too so it’s just a very useful card in core that never goes to waste.

Countering it with specter is also good as it can never kill a specter that has one accompanying heal card.

Enchantress is a great anti heal card in core but the game does need another anti heal card badly. Nonetheless playing enchantress solves so many hardcore decks it’s almost a must.

Sweaty pirate works great vs kitty in pro because she will almost always kill it on its first attack but in core this is likely a spotty option. Depending on the timing of when kitty deck comes out she May get too much defense to counter with pirate. Once kitty’s defense gets over 500 not even this card is likely to be effective.

The staggering blow assassination combo will also likely make any unit with 999 defense very killable.

[ecb_admin]

Nice analysis.