Yi Xian The Cultivation Card Game: Strong Builds Guide

Strength: ★★★★★
Side Job: Musician

Sword Intent? Dharma? In the same deck? You’re darn right buddy. This deck marries two very strong concepts into what I think is the strongest deck in the game if left uncountered. If you’re lucky, you can kill the enemy in just three turns, if you’re unlucky… well I guess four turns will have to do. This deck is the fastest I’ve seen that does as much damage as it does, and probably needs a nerf if I’m going to be honest.

What are the counters? The key lies in Inspiration Sword. If you can block that attack through guard up or decent defenses, you’re in the clear. However, this deck has space to tech in counters very easily. Using a card like Tremolo to shave off Guard Up, or utilizing defense piercing to ensure the Injured proc. This build can be done on every Sword character, with each character bringing in their own boons to the build.

This picture posted deals over 170 damage over its 3 turns of play. So without defensive options, this will kill every character pretty easily. If you lack upgrades, you can add in the Sword Intent doubler to do a four turn kill. You can counter the innate Guard Up of Hua using Tremolo at the start of your deck as well.

Strength: ★★★
Side Job: Elixirist
Character: Long Yao
This deck is the slowest of them here, but you sure feel like an immovable rock when you play it! This deck uses Elixirist to attempt to upgrade Sky Delicate Bracelet. Through multiple stacks of Guard Up, and relatively high amount of defense, its very hard for most decks to pierce through you. All while you slowly ramp up your Qi to beat them with Egret.

Counters are enemy Guard Up and their own defense piercing, and predicament for immortals. This deck is quite slow, but you can tech in the card that damages based on your defense if you need more firepower. Due to the glaring weakness to the chase stopping card from musician, I only have this at a 3 star strength.

Strength: ★★★
Side Job: Formation Master
Character: Tan
Had a bit too much fun labbing this psycho deck. You can build this is a ton of different ways. You can remove all the defensive cards completely if you want, or put them earlier, or only use defensive cards and just kill using the continuous card. The positive to this deck is its massive adaptability. Due to the double echo formation, your options are essentially a 3 card loop, or a 5 card loop. The goal being to use 2/3 chase cards respectively so you can chase every turn.

You have to be incredibly lucky to get everything you need in this deck to be honest. Its a lot of gold cards. An aggressive variant can probably win in just a few turns and doesn’t require much, but the defensive parts of the deck are highly RNG dependent to get.

Counters? I have no clue. When I played this I demolished everyone. Because of its adaptability, I feel the biggest weakness is burst, but even then this deck can rip out a lot of HP very quickly if it wanted to, then kill you in the end regardless. The best part is that the opponent will have a hard time even parsing your deck due to the constant reversing.

Strength: ★★★★
Side Job: Formation Master
This is one of my favorite experiments. Utilizing echo formation to continuously chase with an element that usually cannot. This deck is scary fast with its scaling, while simultaneously being incredibly defensive. It will usually kill within the 2nd loop of play, and you will usually live to that point because of the high amount of defense.

The reason this deck is at a 4 star for strength for me is its consistency. It is very difficult to get the required cards you need as it has lots of repeats, and literally cannot function without echo formation and the chase continuous card. Without them, you are just a normal earth build, which isn’t inherently bad, but much weaker than the other decks on this list.

Counters are defense piercing builds. Most notably Metal decks can utilize heart pierce to one shot you with Tripod on its first loop. However, Metal is lame and uncreative, so you have the moral victory when you lose to it.

I know there are tons of other buids that are very viable, but these are the ones I use often and have fun with. I might update the guide with more builds as I use them.

Special shoutout to the following builds that cause most of my losses, let me know if you want a paste of these as well, as they are very competitive, I just don’t use them much:

• Metal
• Poison Burst
• Double Skip turn (feat. Jiang)

Any way, just wrote this for fun to show off things I’ve tried and had success with, hopefully you all can have some fun with these builds as well, or use them to help you climb as a few of them are extremely powerful.