Path of Champions 2.0 In - Depth Guide: Viktor 2,5 Star
Masters Player Conansson and Path of Champions expert YouuXun come together to help you defeat Viktor
Hello and welcome to another Path of Champions guide! In this one, we will take a look at Viktor, the former final boss of Lab of Legends and now a 2,5-Star adventure.
We are Conansson — a Master constructed player who is finishing up collecting decklists from every single Path of Champions encounter, and I’ve created all the images/decklists in this article — and YouuXun — a Path expert who completed the first Path of Champions to 100% with all S Badges and has defeat Galio plenty of times in the new mode and wrote all the text in the article except this Introduction.
Let’s get started!
This is the adventure with biggest chance to high roll you. Mushrooms, key cards, random keywords, randomly generated cards.
However, it has the most unique routing options of any adventure so far, allowing for an insane amount of flexibility when it comes to choosing your battles. Even so far as to being able to skip an entire fight.
Enemy Mutator
Mostly not something you need to play around (except Viktor, iterative improvement on your units, Sumpworks Map, Lucky Find)
First fight: Plaza Guardian
- If you don’t win early you’ll likely lose the late game.
- Be aware of your draw pile, a lot of players deck out.
- High threats: Assembly Bot + Plaza Guardian
- Be aware of buffed Aftershock and Mystic Shot
Choice - Crushbot vs Profiteer
- Crushbot: if you’re able to buff units after they’re on board (eg. Illaoi, Jhin lv. 2)
- Profiteer: if your stats are on summon (eg. Darius, Bard)
- Slow fight
- Go for early swarm strats
- Fight is generally easy, just very grindy.
- Kill Funsmith and Henchmen on sight.
- Leave Electrorig alive when blocking it because it shuffles bad cards into the enemy deck most of the time
- Be aware that Elusive from Mariner and Sumpworks Map gives +1/+1 from Mutator as well
- Keep key ally units above kill range of Aftershock / Mystic Shot
- Can’t buff a unit if they have none.
- Play around the fact that Lucky Find is focus speed and don’t let enemy use it when possible
- Their whole deck is basically board-reliant, so if they have no units they literally can’t do anything but use Ricochet
- Generally all low-health units, so units are easier to kill
- Bloody Business and Boomerang Blade can swing a game hard. So be ready.
Choice - Crushbot vs Profiteer
Porobot - Better if you’re midrange-late game
Vagabond - Better if you’re able to secure early-mid
- RNG can destroy you here. Kill whatever has the most annoying keywords so when Mimic drops you won’t be malding.
- Kill assembly bot early, the spells that can pump it don’t have immediate impact but it can quickly get hard to deal with.
- Kill any and all regen/elusive units when possible. They are highest priority.
- Swapbot is generally bad but could be game changing if your deck can pump a single unit very big.
- Their early game is where they are weakest, but if you fall behind on mana too much, they will grow a bigger and bigger advantage from round 5 onwards.
- Rite of Dominance stops a lot of swarm-based lethal swings. Keep it in mind just in case they manage to build a board and you decide to trade evenly.
- Destroy the landmark or delay the countdown if possible
Azir Miniboss
- You almost always will have to take a lot of hits from Sand Soldiers to the nexus. Don’t fear, as you always fully heal after this fight.
- Sand Soldiers’ Overwhelm will trigger Nexus Strike when it pierces through a unit.
- Kill pretty much every unit except the Sand Soldiers (order of priority below), only try to block the Sand Soldiers when neccessary or occasionally when you can prevent the Nexus Strike damage from going through.
- The Foe has a lot of spells to both prevent attacks and cause deadly ones:
-> Quicksand / Scrying Sands: Just keep in mind your units might have less power when you’re attacking/blocking
-> Arise! -> They almost always have it, especially if Azir is on the board. This card makes open attacks a lot less safe. Take note of how many soldiers they can summon based on their mana before you attack.
-> Desert’s Wrath: Technically you beat it by open-attacking, but alternatively, you can get them to play it defensively to get it out of their hand so they don’t use it offensively which is often much scarier.
-> Rite of Dominance: There isn’t much you can do to play around it, but you can use it to your advantage. If you have a wide enough board and open-attack when the AI only has 4 or 5 mana up, they’ll almost always use Rite of Dominance to destroy their mana crystal.
-> Shifting Sands: Beaten by open-attacking
-> Emperor’s Divide: Can be used to deal insane damage or block a lot of blockers. The Foe will almost only use this to block when they don’t have any non-burst spell in hand. If you have direct damage removal or silences, this is what you’ll want to save it for.
- Key targets to destroy/kill in order of priority:
-> Emperor’s Dais (If you can)
-> Azir
-> Sandcrafter
-> Inspiring Marshal
Choice - Hexcore Foundry vs Desert Naturalist
- Hexcore Foundry - if you can deal with with wide boards, or can’t deal with tall overwhelm units.
- Desert Naturalist - ONLY if you CAN’T deal with very tall overwhelm units (like 8/7 overwhelms).
- Honestly Hexcore is almost always easier. AND usually gets you a better reward.
- Keep as many low cost cards as possible, just vomit your hand out ASAP.
- Get rid of any card draw
- Be aware of Shady Character, and Hextech Transmogulator that can punish you for having big followers.
- +1/+1 from Elusive from Sumpsnipe Scavenger
- Enemy has lots of removal spells. And burn.
- Keep track of what Death Ray Mk they’re on, because they will almost always draw the next version next turn.
- Usually runs out of steam in about 5 turns.
After you win, you can still go to the other fights/nodes, but you’ll probably want to jump straight to Viktor.
- Save removal for Grumpy Rockbear
- Be bigger than Grumpy Rockbear (not really a strategy.)
- Has almost no interaction besides Roiling Sands from Rockhopper and Challenger from Desert Naturalist
- Play around Roiling Sands by playing units after the enemy burns their attack token.
- You may need to burn the nexus for the final bits of damage.
Choice - T-Hex vs Raz Bloodmane vs Viktor
- Viktor if you have 20 or more health and are able to.
- Raz Bloodmane if you’re either midrange or late game
- T-Hex only if you’re able to deal a lot of 2-damage pings to each Turret EVERY TURN. Or able to reliably wipe the board. (Don’t go to T-Hex.)
T - Hex
- So you didn’t listen, huh?
- Make sure you have removal for the elusive turret
- Have a plan to beat an 8/8 every round if you can’t win early enough
- Enemy has a lot of damage-based removal for both tall and wide units
- One of the cheesiest, but effective strats is to let the enemy fill the board with garbage units and then just do your best to *not* kill any of them, even if you have to take Nexus damage. That way they can’t summon 8/8’s on you. If you’re going to cheese it, kill the following units:
-> Sump Dredger
-> Unstable Voltician
-> Chipmunk Shredder
-> Plaza Guardian
-> Any turret 4 damage or above
- Regret not choosing Raz.
Raz Bloodmane
- Watch out for your units losing power on Raz’s attack and being unable to block Fearsome all of a sudden.
-Your units are almost always going to be vulnerable, so you don’t need to worry about it much. Just have spell based removal ready if your key units get challenged.
- Boomerang Blade can really crush you
- Rite of Dominance can ruin your trades.
Final Boss: Viktor
- Double Armed Gearhead start isn’t real.
- IT’S NOT REAL. IT CAN’T HURT YOU.
- Lose a revive off of Viktor having double Armed Gearhead on Round 1.
- The entire fight is tempo based. If you can control the board against Viktor’s scarier threats, you can win.
- Don’t stall too long unless you have a plan to beat Purrsuit of Perfection
- Kill Viktor as soon as you can. He WILL snowball out of control with 3 or more Hexcores. (Probably less.)
- Kill Mechanized Mimic if they would gain 3 or more keywords from a single attack.
- Kill Assembly Bot early if possible.
- Nyandroid / Subpursible / Daring Poro / other elusives can get problematic quickly, especially if you’re expecting a Mechanized Mimic to come down soon. Take them out.
- If Viktor generated a Hex Core at the start of the round, you will likely have one action to take for free (enemy will spend the turn playing Hex Core). The same is not true for Ignition created by Ballistic Bot.
- Stay at 4 Nexus health or higher, or you will take a Get Excited to the Nexus to finish you off.
- Be aware of the random cards that the enemy can generate from Trail of Evidence, Eminent Benefactor, and Flash of Brilliance. You won’t be able to play around them most of the time, but keep track of the generated cards when they’re out of the enemy hand.
- Try to keep one BUFFED unit alive, the enemy will often use Iterative Improvement to copy it and end up playing the non buffed unit that is almost always easier to kill than one of Viktor’s own units.
Closing Words
If you’ve made it this far, hopefully it means you didn’t get crushed by RNG. The Viktor adventure can be one of the most interesting with so many potential paths, yet one of the most frustrating because it feels like some of the encounters are incredibly unbalanced in comparison to their counterparts. Hopefully we were able to help with your thoughts on what path to take, and how to play around some of those unlucky moments!
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