The Only Nether Guide You Will Ever Need
- This is a work in progress and will have a functional framework in a few days 6/15/06
Scope of This Guide
This is a guide to playing Nether on Blitz and S1.
First of all I will start off by saying, the strength of Nether is its efficiency in the land range of 2k-6k. After you have broken 6k land with black you're on your own. Why is Nether so efficient at these land levels? Black Sabbath. You can think of playing Nether in the same way one might play Zerg on SC. Lots of cheap crappy units that you can use to probe all enemies with and find weak spots. If you're not making twice as many attacks as a Nether mage than you normally would as other colors then you're doing something wrong. Generally with a full set of 200 turns you need to be attacking at least 60 of those turns. Thats 30 attacks. If you can run positive mana you can easily get to 50 attacks per run. Sounds absurd? There are three spells that make this possible which will be discussed shortly.
As soon as you have Black Sabbath researched and cast you should be grabbing as much land as possible. Two spells that are indispensable in this endeavor are Blaze and Mental Thrash. Blaze is a mini inferno. Early on in a round it can gain quick land. Mental thrash is a little more expensive but highly effective vs Eradication mages. Make a shit-ton of attacks, and then when you think you've made enough, make some more. When done attacking disband your Skeletons. They are useless. Recruit some Imps and disband Skeletons leaving only a small percentage at the end of your turns. Keep as many Zombies as mana constraints permit. With all of your newly gained land you might want to put a decent defense up. Summon up some wraiths, preferably enough to make them topstack. With BS up you should be summoning up wraiths as you max out your mana during research. Never let your research turns go to waste in terms of overall production. Recruit a few fake stacks in VERY small numbers. You should always have ten stacks. Fog/satchel, fog/web something along those lines should work well for you on defense. You could always do the fog/bottle of eversmoking as well. As long as no one hits you from below you should be fine. With any luck some of the guys you hit down will counter you from below and give you free damaged status.
