Yeah, Arena is very stratified, and requires a lot of tweaking defenses and multiple offensive teams as you move into Plat.

Some of the longer term Plat regulars talk about 5+ different strata within the old Gold 4. Where the breakpoints were, what teams you needed to have in each breakpoint to be successful. What champs would "wall off" each strata, and what comps you could put together to break through each wall.

Without that, Sunday night Plat Pushes became a touch more difficult/impossible.

I strongly recommend building a Stoneskin Cardinal team, if you can. I find it makes it *so* much easier to find opponents to beat. The meta still hasn't really shifted enough to address this new team.

I now just keep a Lydia in on Defense at all times. Seems to limit the Stoneskin Cardinals to people who are doing that WITH a Brakus or some such.

AKA, me :)

Can only do so much on defense. Can't prevent all Krama wins. lol

Right now, while Arena is still broken, all I am doing is staying in Gold 4. No extra tokens or refreshes.

What are you running on defense? I'm finding my team of Arb + Maulie + Lydia + Rotos is still scary enough that people aren't picking on me much.

I haven't seen a speed/blender team to use cardinal against lately.  usually duchess/nek or duchess/siphi combos, with a warlord or a damage absorber and some tanky dps.

I run it quite a bit against both Duchess/Nek and Duchess/Siphi. I do avoid Warlord and Serris, though :)

Go back and forth on some high resist stoneskin stuff for Go Secondest Duchess. Just putting in Lydia made a HUGE difference. No longer being hit every 10 minutes.

Looking at my current page, there's a serris, lydia, hege, or warlord on every single team lol.

Seems that people are onto the stone skin cardinal.

I am running Lydia/Hege at the very least in defense. A little switch up the others here and there depending on what I am seeing hit me. Duchess finally making it back into the Defense team. Feel like she hadn't been in one for a year.

Hege absolutely does *not* counter Cardinal. In fact it's the exact opposite. Cardinal is a hard counter to Hegemon teams.

As for Lydia - again, not a counter. Yeah Brakus makes it easy, but even without him, literally just toss a level 1 Torturehelm in to absorb the revive, and be on your way.

Warlord and Serris though, I'll give you that. I still do fight Serris teams that are higher rated than me, since it essentially just becomes a coinflip - you have a 50% chance to ignore the buff removal, and then ontop of that, however much more you gain from the chance of resisting.

Send Warlord or even the SW guy please. Brawler?

Then I will await your Brakus and Stoneskin. lol