Muerte Hero Guide by LSV
Enter Death's domain and learn to play Muerte with this new Hero Guide!
Muerte is an imposing Hero, and despite having a straightforward Hero Power, it takes some finesse to fully harness the power of death. Let's see what we can do to ensure our opponents are the ones taking their last breath.
Hero Power
Muerte is powerful, though it has a limit - it's restricted to just doubling the first Last Breath ability each brawl. That means that Last Breaths that summon characters are trickier to use, since you will essentially waste the ability if you don't have space for extra characters. As such, most Muerte builds focus on stats (Good Boy, Friendly Spirit, Empress Pea), spells (Monster Book), or damage (Wretched Mummy).
Hero Gameplan
The goal with Muerte is to always be getting value from your Hero Power. How you get value changes over the course of the game, but if you ever present a team without a Last Breath, you're leaving money on the table. Eventually, you find whatever Last Breath you want to build around, and work towards maximizing it. Early on, you'll pretty much take whatever you can get, and late game you usually have a more specific set of characters in mind.
Early Game
In the early game, you don't play all that differently from most Heroes, though Black Cat certainly moves up in your pick order. Once you hit level 3, you want to pick up Lucky or Wretched Mummy, as their Last Breaths are quite effective early.
Getting two Lucky triggers a turn can easily help you go on a shopping spree, and build up a strong force early. Wretched Mummy snipes multiple characters, especially when pumped by a support, and can stick around on your team for quite some time.
Besides these Last Breath characters, Muerte mostly just wants you to buy normally, and present a solid team. The real build-arounds don't show up until levels 4+, so you aren't too worried about getting the exact right pieces yet.
Mid to Late Game
Once you have access to Monster Book, your first on-ramp into a final comp appears. With Monster Book, the plan is to lead with Book in slot 1, and a bunch of Mages like Spell Weaver, Wizard's Familiar, and Aon to take advantage of the extra spells.
This spell-based build is definitely interested in finding Crystal Ball and other spell Treasures too, though if you can get multiple Books (or better yet, an upgraded one), it can pop off nicely even without Hat-Ball. When you get 2-4 spells each brawl off Monster Book, your Mages will grow quickly, and you even get to throw a variety of combat spells at the opponent.
One note is that Copy Cat isn't usually the direction you want to go. In order to have Copy Cat work, you want it first or second with Monster Books behind it, but then you risk the Cat being attacked before it can go, and you have to put more Mages in the front row than you would like. It's unlikely that those front row Mages will be in play when the back row Books die, so you aren't even getting extra high-value triggers. For the time being, I'd avoid Copy Cat in builds like this.
Another direction to go is Good, with Friendly Spirit and Good Boy providing massive stat boosts. Good Boy getting two triggers immediately is huge, and leads to overwhelming numbers.
These builds want you to play Good Boy first (or Friendly Spirit if you don't have Good Boy yet), with stat-boosting treasures and supports. Unsurprisingly, that also overlaps with Empress Pea's territory, another character that enjoys being supported and has a powerful Last Breath ability.
One quirk of Muerte is that you can't control which Last Breath ability goes off first (though whatever you put in slot 1 is more likely to pop), so you are actually disincentivized from running too many Last Breaths. You want your Good Boy or Empress Pea to double-trigger, and running a Friendly Spirit in slot 3 or 4 can sometimes cause you to lose Muerte value if it dies first. It's counterintuitive, but you ultimately just want 1-2 good Last Breath characters, not a whole board of them.
Winning Comps
These are real player comps, courtesy of Untapped.gg's Storybook Brawl site!
Tips and Tricks
- Coin of Charon is great on Muerte, as you often have a slot 1 character that you want to build up over time
- Likewise, Hermes' Boots give you a greater chance of having things play out the way you want them to
- Mages and Good are the two most likely endgame comps for Muerte, so bias your character purchases in those directions (Lady of the Lake works in either!)
Facing Death
Muerte is a fun Hero, and can do a lot of work if you can get to the late game. The ability takes a while to get going, but is awesome once it does, and I've always enjoyed putting together sweet Muerte comps. Good luck, and get ready to collect some souls.
-LSV