Absolver - How to Make a Better Deck

Deck building is crucial to success in Absolver. If you feel you’ve hit a wall in your performance, take a look at these tips.

Other Absolver Guides:

Introduction

All credit goes to Anon!

Deck building is an aspect of the game that people tend to overlook, or do improperly. After a decent amount of hours, I’ve found a “Winning formula” that’ll hopefully help you win more fights.

There are really only two things to look for:

Move Selection
Move Placement

Move Selection

When choosing your moves, consider:

The animation (is it confusing?)
The speed range & damage
The properties i.e. Charge, Avoid thrust & vertical, etc.

Remember, varying speeds among your moves can play mind games with your opponent, but they should be relatively small within your normal chain. Your alternatives should usually be bigger moves (With slower speeds)
Take the Jackhammer Punch: Decent ranged Double hit move with a confusing animation (The character pauses for a second) and slower speed making it the perfect move to spice up your deck

Another thing to note: Stagger style moves have some of the best in the game. Personal favourites of mine include Drunken Crane, Foot Slap and Spinning Flute Swing.

These aren’t necessary to your deck; it’s all about preference, but let me explain:

Drunken Crane has excellent range and damage for its speed, is non-telegraphed and allows to access your bottom right alternative (Not too many move with similar qualities).

Foot Slap has decent range, damage and speed, has an Avoid low property and a confusing animation.

Spinning Flute Swing has great range (Particualrily side to side), speed and damage, and another confusing animation.

Moves don’t always need to be confusing, but it helps.

Next, pick a nice balance of Guard breaking moves, Avoid moves, Charge moves, etc.
I personally don’t use Charge breaking moves; I think they’re too easy to dodge.
Make sure you have one of each.

When choosing Guard breaking moves, opt for ones that Avoid lows (Jump Out Elbow or Knee Strike) Use this move when your opponent is opening with a low This removes the need for an Avoid High as a starter.

Avoid using kicks that don’t have any property unless you purposefully chose it for its damage or something (Of all the moves i’ve parried, Leg Breaker was the easiest one).

Finally, don’t overload your deck with one kind of move i.e. all Charge or Avoid thrust & vertical or Double moves. They might work against worse players but experienced fighters will run circles around you. Avoid thrust & vertical actually works sometimes, but there are ways around it.

Move Placement

Now that you know which moves to look for, piecing it all together is where the hard part starts.

As you’re making your deck, pay attention to which side your moves are coming from. Forsaken, look for which side most of your attacks are coming from. Kicks are especially easy to identify. Try your best to alternate sides if possible.

As a general rule of thumb, your normal chain should come full circle. You shouldn’t compromise this for having one move that you feel you need to have.
Your alternatives should usually all be big, slow attacks with high damage. You should at least have one Charge move and one Guard breaking move, connected to your more popular stances if you can.

Have your opener (A quick punch or kick) at your top right stance. Your stance tends to change back to this one every time your hit while in guard, so unless you have something fast enough to interrupt his pressure, you’ll be forced to run away or use a power
after your first two moves, the opponent usually feels the need to dodge or counter so make your third a wider move.

Make your other three stance starters either low sweeps or Avoid thrust & vertical (ex. two sweeps and one avoid, not all of them necessarily one type).
This is a thing I feel is essential to any deck. When you’re applying pressure and he dodges to the side, your stance relative to him changes. And every time this happens, you go directly into the first move of that new stance. People tend to dodge and counter with a thrust move, so this method allows you to maintain your pressure.

And to add to that, Avoid thrust & vertical moves catch dodges in one direction depending on how you’ve made your deck, further reducing the chance of him getting away from you.

Make your alternatives flow between at least 3 of them. If your opponent gets too focused on parrying for example, break your rythym with 4 or 5 big, slow moves.

Try to build your deck on multiple levels. have segments in your deck for example, where you can go between a normal and an alternative move repeatedly (Like a kick and a Charge move).

Remember to have a nice balance of wide moves and narrow moves.

Finally, if I were to describe the flow of your deck, It should be like going from a sprint to a jog to a walk. Start fast, then get a little slower and then make a part of your chain have three huge kicks in succession to break the rythym.

Remember, this is important but things like knowing what move lead to where and being able to read your opponent and act accordingly.

Hope this helped!