Are you new to the game of Animation Throwdown? Use this beginner’s guide to help you advance further without falling into common beginner’s traps. First, the game may appear to be easy with the odds fully stacked against the opponent, but as you advance through the game to unlock more advanced quests, you will find that both adventures and arena battles to be harder and harder. Thus you will need to play strategically to advance further.

Please note that this beginner’s guide will go over some basic features to help you get started, and this beginner’s guide will not touch upon more advanced game play strategies or setups. In our next game play guide, we will go into more details on deck building and general strategies.

1. Focus on the Quests to Level Up Your Character
When you first start the game, you will be bombarded with tons of quests that help you level up. Always focus on completing as many quests that you possibly can to get all the power, coins, and xp possible. It can be helpful to simply push through the quests as far as possible before your cards are too weak to do so. Then go back to the beginning and start doing your stage mastery. The reason is that many of the simple quests simply ask you to complete certain islands.

It should be noted that Animation Throwdown offers “daily” quests that reward you with small amount of gems daily if you complete them all. These daily quests include Quest Battle, Arena Battle, Pack Purchase, Card Upgrade, and Research. We believe that the daily quests reset around 4~5 PM PST daily.

2. Arena Hero Level and their Skills Matter
The first playable character that you choose does not really matter. However, one thing that matters is the actual levels of these “heroes”. You can gain “hero” tokens by chance when winning in arena battles. Heroes level up when you have collected enough hero tokens. Heroes token drop by chance and they are pretty rare to come by.

However, by the time you have obtained enough Arena level, you should have the heroes leveled up pretty nicely.

3. Watch Ads to get additional in game boosts
Before you start blasting your energy in the game, consider activating the “optional” ads boost first. Watch 3 ads in a roll and you will enjoy 50% more coins, 50% more card drops in normal quest, and 50% more hero token drops in arena battles. It should be noted that if you watch another ad within the timer, it will be automatically extended to the max.

For example, you have watched 3 ads with a timer of 4 hours, watching another ad at the last hour will automatically extend it to 4 hours.

4. Save Your Powers to Upgrade
Powers are earned mainly in two ways in the game – through quests completion and recycling cards. You can also recycle “shards” that you obtain through questing or card packs opening to obtain more power. Powers are needed to upgrade the cards.

Generally speaking, you should spend very little power on upgrading your Common (white) cards, if you have any extra power, save them until you absolutely cannot advance further. You want to treat your power like they’re gold, upgrade them with Rare cards or better only. Ideally you want to spend all of your power on your strongest cards / combinations.

5. Understanding Basic Cards Information
The game does not do an awesome job at explaining the cards. However here’s a basic overview of them.

Rarity Tiers
Cards are divided into 4 different tiers.
Common (White)
Rare (Green)
Epic (Blue)
Legendary (Purple)

Cards can have various “Skills” that are activated during their turn. These skills can be ranged from dealing damage, blocking attacks, HP steal, and more.

Traits and Animation Universe for each of the cards matter once you are past the beginner stage. Many of the higher level cards and hero skills are “class” focused. Meaning that they will only affect cards with certain traits or from certain universes. So it can be helpful for you to start thinking about upgrading your cards towards a certain universe such as Family Guy, Futurama, King of the Hills, Bob’s Burger, or American Dad.

In short, you should focus or lean your universe based deck upgrades toward the first few epics or even legendary that you obtain in the game.

6. Basic Information on Game Modes
The currently released game offers two game modes – Adventure Quests and Arena Battles.

Adventure quests are “islands” that you beat. Each stage has a set of loot table that offers you various card drops, as you beat them, you unlock more items on the loot table with the enemy becoming stronger. At first you may have hard time beating silver or even gold levels, thus it may be better to save your energy to push islands that you have good chance of beating early on. You may want to start farming fully mastered quests later on to “grind” for epic cards either for your deck or power recycle purpose.

Animation Throwdown arenas pit you against real player’s decks. Since the game is fairly new, you will usually be matched with opponents that you can easily beat. However, there can be exceptions where you are matched up against crazy epic or legendary cards that easily wipe you out. As you advance through the arena levels, you will find that your opponent’s decks will improve quite exponentially. In short, do not try to gain arena energy with gems too fast, you may find that your cards are unable to keep up with your opponents.

7. Join the Most Active Guild ASAP for additional coin perks
It does not really matter which guild you join at the moment in the game, there is no competitive battling nor ranking for tournaments. You will simply gain additional coins by joining guilds with certain number of active members. You can earn 50% more coins by joining a guild with 45+ members. So join a guild right away to enjoy that nice boost!

8. Research Combos All the Time
Many of the card combos for rare and higher cards are not available in game right away. You will need to first “research” them through the research center. You want to keep your research timer running at all costs.

Common Combo: 15 Minutes
Rare Combo: 2 Hours
Epic Combo: 6 Hours
Legendary Combo: 12 or 24 Hours?

9. Best Way to Spend Your Gems
Never spend your gems on timers nor energy unless you have the cash to blow and waste. If you are a F2P player or plan to spend very little money, spend your hard earned gem at the places that matter. The best place to spend gems are the “event” packs that offer you epic or above or packs with chances of legendary drop. Legendary cards are the gamechangers that can win you many battles, and they are the best way to spend your gems

10. Understanding “Combination” Power in terms of Rarity
If you are new to the game you might want to get as many combos as you can. One important thing to know is that a well fused epic can provide more bang for the buck.

Below is a quick conversion to help you get some idea. As you can see, getting a Tier 2 Maxed Epic will be much easier than a Tier 2 Legendary. To put thing simply, a maxed fusion tier card card will always beat a lower fusion tier of a higher rarity.

Maxed Epic = Legendary at Level 3

< Tier 1 Maxed Epic = Tier 1 Legendary at Level 3 < Tier 2 Maxed Epic = Tier 2 Legendary at Level 3 Since the game is currently designed for legendary to be extremely hard to get, it might help to get maxed Epic until you get more copies of legendary cards.