Tech Tips: Potion of Consitution

It’s time for a tech tip!

Welcome to a shorter but still in-depth mini tactica. It’s a new more focused series of mine about tech cards I commonly use and why. This will help shed light on why I choose certain cards as well as why you should run them too. Today I’ll be going over Potion of Constitution.

Potion of Constitution is an upgrade card that can be played as a reaction when an equipped fighter takes damage during an attack action to reduce the damage taken by 1 to a minimum of 1. Quite simple really. So what makes it worth talking about? Comparing it to Great Fortitude (or other +1 wound upgrades) they seem to share the same role. Basically +1 wound. That’s true if you only take it at face value but if you dig a little deeper, you’ll find some awesome tricks.

Firstly Potion of Constitution effectively gives you +1 wound without modifying your wound characteristic. What’s so good about that? Well it helps play around common cards that your opponent may be running.

Giant-Slayer is a rare but a rather easy objective to score. While it became more difficult to score once Deathly Fortitude and Sudden Growth were restricted, plenty of players still love lumping +1 wound upgrades on their 4 wound fighters (not to mention all those Mollogs roving about). All of a sudden you now have a 5 wound fighter that’s effectively worth 3 glory to your opponent which is quite the big change. Potion of Constitution makes your 4 wound fighters just as tough while making this objective effectively dead to your opponent.

Now Gloryseeker is an extremely common card seen in many a deck and for good reason too. +1 damage against fighters with a wounds characteristic of 4 or more. Very strong and usually very easy to get. Only Zarbag’s Gitz and the Godsworn lack any 4 wound fighters. That’s 2 out of 16 warbands. With +1 wound upgrades, all of a sudden that extra survivability you’ve given to your 3 wound fighter has now made them vulnerable to Gloryseeker.

Once again Potion of Constitution gets around this by not modifying the fighter’s wound characteristic while still giving them that 1 damage negation. This important for many warbands that utilise 3 wound fighters such as Thundrik’s Profiteers, the Godsworn Hunt and Zarbag’s Gitz to name but a few.

Outside of these card interactions there’s still the downside the Potion of Constitution works only once and can’t be stacked whereas Great Fortitude (and similar upgrades like Tome of Vitality) can be stacked and last all game as long as the equipped fighter remains alive. You can even heal them up too. It depends on what you want, survivability against the next attack while potentially negating cats your opponent may be running or a static +1 wound upgrade that can potentially put you in just as much harm as without it but lasts all game.

Warbands that have a high volume of 4 wound fighters find less use out of Potion of Constitution due to the rarity of Giant-Slayer but that objective is potentially super easy to score depending on your meta.

Outside of the already mentioned 3 wound warbands, Ylthari’s Guardians benefit a lot from Potion of Constitution. Most of their fighters have a wounds characteristic of 3 and the card also counts as an upgrade so it boosts survivability while also contributing to scoring Lithe Spirits.

I’d still recommend taking Potion of Constitution if you’re just running a single copy of Great Fortitude. Negating the effects of Gloryseeker is just such a huge benefit. Even then you can always run both together to have an effectively 6 wound fighter but now you make yourself a target for Giant-Slayer.

Anyway that’s it for my first article on tech cards I use to play against the meta and make cards that my opponents are potentially running useless. This is more of how you look at card choice to play around your opponent more than the game and punish them for using predictable commonly seen meta cards. It’s almost as important as rolling crits.