For those of us who love animation, some of our favorite shows might include Futurama, King of the Hill, Bob’s Burgers, American Dad and Family Guy. In case you don’t know, there’s now a game that combines these great shows into one great game: Animation Throwdown. It might look familiar to anyone who’s ever played Hearthstone, but Hearthstone doesn’t have moments from all your favorite shows in it.
If you’re reading this, you’ve probably already downloaded Animation Throwdown and played around with it a bit. Be prepared to take your game to the next level, because this is the ultimate Animation Throwdown guide, and I’m going to throw all the tips and tricks I can at you. By the time you’re through with this, you’ll be dominating the arena without ever having to spend a cent.
The Basics
When you open up the app, you’re going to see the home screen, which looks like this:
On the top left corner of the screen, you can see my username, my experience level, and the current hero I’m using (Roger of American Dad fame). I’m currently level 10, and 370/500 experience points to level 11. Staying on the top and moving to the right you can see the “Special Events” bar, which will keep you posted on the current deals they’ve got going and any in-game events that can help you out in battle. Beyond that you can see the amount of coins (2,210) and gems (370) that I currently have.
Below my user info on the top left, you can see the Quest icon which tells you about your current quest progress. Below that you’ll see a TV screen with the number 3 in it, which is the number of videos I have watched in this period. Watching these videos gave me a loot bonus, which I’ll get back to. Below that, the “…” will take you to your quest chat, and finally the flag with a mug of beer will take you to your guild screen.
Finally, below the coin and gem info on the top right you’ll see a deck of cards, which is the current pack which is being sold. This is a special set of cards that you’ll have to fork up a lot of gems for, but the cards are all great. Far below that you’ll find a K for Kongregate (the game’s publisher) options, and lastly a gear for general game settings (like sound options, etc). Now for the fun stuff.
Research – This is where you can research new combos. In Animation Throwdown, you have two basic types of cards – let’s call them Characters and Things. A Character might be Futurama’s own Fry, and a Thing might be Futurama’s own Olde Fortran Malt Liquor. Once you’ve researched the combination of the two, you can make Drunk Fry, a card much more powerful than either of the two on their own. Researching combos can take anywhere from 15 minutes to 24 hours, depending on the cards you’re researching. Research is crucial to getting stronger and defeating more difficult enemies.
Adventure – Adventure is basically the story mode of Animation Throwdown, and one of three actual game modes (along with Challenges and Arena). Here you can battle through episodes of all your favorite shows and earn rewards along the way. Each Adventure mission can be won nine different times, from copper to silver to gold mastery. Each mission gets harder each time you beat it, but the rewards become greater too, from more coins to better cards. If you’re having trouble advancing through the story mode, you might want to go back and replay a mission you’ve already beaten.
Deck – In any card game, the deck you play with is absolutely crucial. This is no different in Animation Throwdown. However, you don’t just choose your cards in the Deck screen, you also upgrade them. When you get duplicate cards or just cards you don’t want, you can recycle them for giggitywatts. With these giggitywatts you can upgrade other cards. If you have two cards that have been upgraded all the way, you can fuse them together to make an even stronger card which can be upgraded further. Like research, upgrading cards is extremely important for making progress through the game.
Challenges – In the challenges section you can play a slightly different kind of game. A challenge is a limited-time battle against a single opponent who gets stronger every time you beat them. In these challenges, you don’t earn regular coins, but you earn challenge-specific coins which you can use for challenge-specific rewards. Even though you can’t earn regular coins from the challenges, the rewards are definitely worth it if you play enough of the challenge, so I would recommend going for the challenges whenever you have the time for it.
Arena – Last but definitely not least is the arena. This is where you can test your deck against other players and earn great rewards for doing so. By winning in the arena, you can improve your arena level (which is different than your overall level and helps you unlock new hero levels) and earn hero tokens towards leveling up your heroes. The arena is my personal favorite game mode, and it is where you can reap arguable the biggest rewards in all of Animation Throwdown. You will learn to love the arena, and trust me, it gets harder as it goes on.
Battle
Animation Throwdown is a simple card game which does not take a long time to learn. There is no energy system, as you are able to draw one card each turn and you are able to play one card each turn. Cards can only attack other cards directly across from them, and cards attack every turn they are able (cards cannot attack the turn they are played). If there is no card across from a card, the opposing hero is attacked. If the attacking card has higher attack than the defending card has defense, then the remainder is applied to the opposing hero.
Cards don’t just have attack and defense (displayed on the bottom right of the cards), though, as more powerful cards also have different traits. These traits are displayed on the bottom left of the cards, and can be further investigated by tapping on the card in question. Most of them are self-explanatory. One of the best ones is Crazed, because it can make cards incredibly powerful as long as they stay alive.
By the way, there are four types of cards: common (white), rare (green), epic (blue) and legendary (purple). You can get any of these cards by buying packs, with the odds of pulling one of course going down as you go up the ladder. These types determine how strong a card is, and also determine how long researching a combo involving one of these cards will take.
Deck-Building
As the game will regularly remind you, you’re only as good as your deck is. You keep your deck solid by constantly upgrading your cards as much as you can. If you don’t need a card, go recycle it so you can start upgrading the cards you do care about. By the way, if you recycle a card you’ve already upgraded, you get all the giggitywatts back, so you don’t have to worry about committing to cards you don’t want. You can recycle duplicates too, but don’t recycle all your duplicates since you can eventually upgrade them and fuse them with the cards already in your deck.
Make sure your deck only has cards which can make combos with other cards, otherwise they’re just wasting space. You always want to keep a good ratio of Character cards to Thing cards, basically something around 1 to 1. If your Character cards are updated enough, though, they won’t even need combos to do serious damage, so you can start upping the ratio of Character cards to Thing cards.
Strategy
Like any game with freemium timers, a key to Animation Throwdown is figuring out how to spend your time playing it. You get a new adventure life every 10 minutes, so you have the most opportunity to play adventure levels than anything else. You get a new arena life every hour and a half, so you should make sure to play the arena whenever you can if you’re at a full 10/10 lives if you want to be efficient. Finally, the challenge lives work a little different, as you get a set amount every period, which might be 8 in 24 hours or 5 in 15. These don’t gradually regenerate as the adventure and arena lives do, but they drop at once with every new period.
The way I see it, you should play the arena whenever you can, cause it gives you great rewards, and you only get so many arena lives. You should also play the challenges whenever you can, because if you play every challenge life you get during a period, you can get great rewards that aren’t available anywhere else. It’s important to play the adventure lives too, but they regenerate much more quickly than any other lives do, so you should worry about them last.
You also have to make sure that you’re always researching combos whenever you have a pod open, since your deck is only as strong as the combos it’s capable of making. For some reason, the game doesn’t always seem to tell you whenever research has been completed, so check back often just to make sure you’re not wasting a pod. Also, even though waiting 24 hours to complete some research is a hassle, it’s usually worth it for the powerful combos you’ll get.
Finally, I would recommend watching bonus videos every time you play the game. By tapping on the TV on the left of the home screen, you can access the video screen. If you watch three 30-second videos, you get great loot bonuses for four hours. Even better, if you watch one more video at any time during these four hours, you get another four hours, meaning you can keep these bonuses going all day while watching minimal ads. Keeping your video bonus active can help you advance through the game that much quicker.
Now you should be equipped with all the information you need to start winning in every game mode Animation Throwdown has to offer. If you need advice, feel free to ask me any questions you might have. I’ll try to help you take your game to the next level in any way I can.
Download Animation Throwdown for iPhone or Android
I have the pc version on Steam, Why don’t I get the option to watch the 30-second videos for bonuses? It seems unfair to me if those who watch the vids are progressing at a faster rate because of them. Am I putting in the time just to fall further behind those who do not?
You don’t have that option on Steam? I didn’t know that, that’s really a bummer.