Card Wars - Adventure Time: 5 Tips, hints and cheats to be the cool guy

Adventure Time fans chewing through the Card Wars campaign will want to check out these hints for flooping their way to domination.

Card Wars — Adventure Time allows iPhone and iPad players to enjoy all of the charm of the cartoon show while playing through a high fantasy strategic card game. Players take turns summoning creatures onto one of four territories, attacking with them in a reflex-driven mini-game, and defending against attackers from opposing territories.

In between, players cast spells, activate, err, floop creature powers, build structures, and initiate character-specific super powers to take out their foe. It’s a linear single-player game with a level progression not unlike Candy Crush Saga, complete with timers for how often you can play and progressively more difficult stages, but the deck-building element keeps things fresh and creative. If you’re really digging the gameplay, there’s a proper physical card game available with considerably deeper gameplay.

So, how do you do well in this cutely branded, lightly freemium card game? Well, here are some pointers to get you started off. If you’re wondering where there game’s inspiration comes from, you can watch the episode of Adventure Time here if you’ve got 10 minutes to kill.

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1. Stick with one land type if you can

Nothing is worse than having one of your lanes entirely open because you aren’t able to draw a creature of a specific land type. Though having, for example, all corn fields, can make you vulnerable to certain debuffs, like the pig’s floop, it’s ultimately worth it in order to keep your lanes well-populated and protected. If you want to mitigate risk against your land type, try adopting a second, but going up to three will likely be more hassle than it’s worth.

2. Activate hero abilities as soon as possible

Tips, tricks, hints, and cheats for Card Wars on iOS

You get to use your hero ability every three turns, so you want to make sure to pop them as early as possible so you can put some time into the cooldown for the next one soon. Sometimes it’s not entirely practical, such as using Jake’s ability for extra magic points when you have nothing to cast or floop, but at the very least, don’t forget you have the abilities. They can often make or break a round.

3. Use your gems on chests

There are a few sneaky freemium-style timers built into Card Wars, but don’t be fooled into burning up your gems for more hearts to keep playing or to retry lost matches. Instead, use your gems to open chests and get rare cards. Though it may be easy to default to the Algebraic chest since it has higher-rarity cards, that doesn’t necessarily translate to in-game value. Once you have a few heavy-hitting creatures from an Algebraic Chest, you can probably get by on the lower-grade Cool Chest.

4. Work on three-starring earlier missions when timers get long

If you’re having a lot of trouble beating higher levels, go back to previous stages and try to complete the quests. If you can get three stars, you’ll earn gems, which are handy for earning new cards from chests, as well as level up and find new cards in regular chests. Those new cards may very well help you bust through your higher-level challenge.

5. Practice the Battle Wheel

It’s common for a lot of players to turn off the battle wheel since it’s fairly difficult to use effectively, but with practice, your timing improves and gives even the weakest creatures a chance to deflect attacks from heavy-hitters. Some players even consider this advantage as cheating, but I’d say it’s worth it. Besides, this adds a bit of twitchy excitement to the standard board game formula.

Your tips, tricks, and cheats for Card Wars?

Those are just our suggestions for getting started with card wars, but what are your strategies? How far have you made it through the campaign? Leave a comment!