Monster Train – My favourite clans?

For today’s post, I wanted to talk about my favourite clans in Monster Train. At the time of writing the review, I didn’t want to talk too much about the non-starter clans due to spoilers but I figured it’d be okay to talk about them in another post… and well,… that’s your spoiler warning! You’ve been warned.

So, first up: I really enjoy playing the Hellhorned in combination with other clans as you can buff up one unit and make it seriously strong and let it just pulverize all enemies while your allied clan focuses on heals, more buffs, or defence. I also played around Stinger decks with the Awoken and I tried out a few imp decks with the Hellhorned. It’s fun but it’s not that strong really overall once you unlock more things as you’ll need certain artifacts to make it work, I guess. The Stygian Guard are fun as well but I haven’t played too much around them just yet.

No, in fact, my favourite clans are the Umbra and the Melting Remnant. They both specialise in buffing units by murdering other units. In the case of the Umbra, your starting champion gets stronger using the “Gorge” ability which buffs him up whenever he eats a unit. There are so-called Morsel units that get eaten at the end of the turn. You essentially summon those and add different effects to your units and buff up your champion or other cards, which is a lot of fun. The Exiled Champion of the Umbra is called Primordium and is a unit that essentially gets eaten multiple times and when that’s done, it enhances the Eater’s stats by its own stats, which is a lot of fun.

Well,… that one was my favourite for a while now but then I unlocked the Melting Remnant, candle-people that also get stronger when units die… but in a different way. The champion of the Melting Remnant is Rector Flicker who can be levelled up to either get stronger when units die (harvest) or to essentially reform units at the end of the turn (resolve). Those are the viable upgrade paths, from what I’ve seen. Reforming a unit means that it gets put back into your hand and its stats get increased, it’s free to play and it also has one extra stack of “burnout”, which… you might have guessed it… kills the unit after the stacks run out. The Melting Remnants are essentially short-lived but they hit hard. There are a lot of different mechanics there and they synergise really well with the Umbra as they also wanna kill off their own.

With the Melting Remnant, I already made it through some good runs, racking up bonuses for killing off my units and essentially, getting some super units with multistrike going that also get buffed by other units and effectively hit for 180-something damage (times 2) and kill everything. It’s hilarious. It gets ridiculous and I’m really enjoying these builds!

Meanwhile, the Exiled Champion is less about reforming others and more about getting reformed. Little Fade essentially has the “Quick” ability allowing them to strike first before getting taken out. You essentially play it, let it strike, let it get killed, and then it gets revived in your hand again afterwards thanks to the “Endless” ability… but it also gets upgraded stat-wise which is lovely. Little Fade is essentially a snowball ready to destroy your house and give you a cold. It’s great.

And I have to try out some of the other combinations. I’d imagine that the Umbra are the best choice here for the Melting Remnants but the Stygian Guard or the Awoken might also work quite well. There are a lot of opportunities here and I’m really enjoying Monster Train right now.

If you have any suggestions, let me know! Is the DLC worth it? Does anyone know? Either way, I just wanted to give an update on this one since I’m really enjoying it right now. Looking forward to playing more of Monster Train on Thursday on Twitch! Feel free to backseat me there! Jokes aside, I’m loving the game right now and am playing it on and off now. Hopefully I get to post more about it soon again!

Cheers!

This post was first published on Indiecator by Dan Indiecator aka MagiWasTaken. If you like what you see here and want to see more, you can check me out on Twitch and YouTube as well. If you find this post on a website other than Indiecator.org, please write an e-mail to me. Thank you!