Health as a Resource: Greeding Safely vs. Stabilizing

You start with 100 health, and every point of it is spendable. Strong players don't treat health as "how alive am I" — they treat it as a currency they trade for gold, tempo, and information. The skill is knowing the exchange rate, and it changes as the game goes on.

The exchange rate

Losing a fight costs health equal to a base amount plus roughly one per surviving enemy unit, and the whole thing scales up with the stage. Concretely:

• Early game — a loss might cost single digits. Health here is cheap; trading it for economy (a loss streak) or for not over-spending is a good deal.
• Mid game — losses climb into the low-to-mid teens. Health is now meaningfully valuable; you can still greed a round, but you're paying real money for it.
• Late game — a full-board loss can be 15–25+. Health is expensive. One bad round can drop you from comfortable to critical.

This is why the same play — "field a weak board this round to save gold" — is smart on stage 6 and reckless on stage 26.

Greeding safely

"Greeding" is taking a sub-optimal board for a round to gain something (gold, a bigger future spend, interest). It's safe when:

• You're high health (say 60+) and the round's loss is affordable.
• You've scouted your opponent and the loss won't be a full-board blowout — a close loss costs far less than a stomp.
• The thing you're greeding for is concrete and soon — a level breakpoint next round, an interest bracket, a roll-down you've planned. Greeding "just because" is not a plan.
• You can afford to be wrong — if the greed backfires, you're still above the danger zone.

Reading your own damage clock

Do the arithmetic other players don't:

• Estimate what a loss costs you this stage (base + likely survivors, scaled).
• Look at your health and the boards still alive. How many losses can you take before you're critical?
• If the answer is "two", you cannot greed — every round needs your best board and possibly a spend to stabilise.
• If the answer is "six", you have room to run an economy plan or take a calculated risk.

The danger zone is roughly 30–50 health in the mid-to-late game: not dead, but two or three bad rounds from it, and the losses only get bigger. If you're there, the correct play is almost always to spend — roll to stabilise, level for a bigger board — because economy is worthless if you don't survive to use it.

Spending health on purpose

Sometimes going lower is right:

• Carousel priority — being lower health means you pick earlier. If a game-defining item is on the carousel, a round of taking damage to pick before your rivals can be worth it.
• The final all-in — if you're second place at 40 health and a risky 3-star could win you the game, take it. A guaranteed second is worth less than a real shot at first.
• Skipping a stabilise you can't afford — if fixing this round would break your game plan and the loss is survivable, eat it and stick to the plan.