Overview
Kidnap is one of the more interesting ways of interacting with your opponent in Card Battles since it allows you to remove a tower from your opponent’s side of the field at the cost of giving your opponent the full value of the tower back in cash. This guide goes in depth about the Kidnap card and how to beat it.
Intro to Kidnap Rushes
Kidnap is an interesting power in Card Battles. It allows you to remove an opponent’s tower, however it fully refunds the tower’s cost. Doing this creates a hole in the opponent’s defense which allows you to kill your opponent with a rush that might not have worked before. On the other hand your opponent could just as easily drop something else to defend with the extra cash.
Kidnap punishes decks that rely on a single tower to do most of the defending. Towers like the laser cannon and reactor sub are powerful no doubt, but if you’re going to rely only on one of those cards to get you through the game, you will be in massive trouble vs Kidnap rushes.
How to Beat Kidnap Rushes
The first step in beating a Kidnap rush is to prepare for what kind of rush your opponent will send. At the moment, the 3 most popular rush cards are the Spiked Ball Factory (55 zebras), Dragon’s Breath (6 camoregrow ceramics) and the arctic wind (10 fast-cooldown MOABs).
You should already have cards in your deck that can beat these rushes. The next step is to plan ahead and include additional cards in case your main defenses get kidnapped. This is really where the other power cards shine.
Since power cards can’t be kidnapped, Juggerlanche is a really solid backup plan for example. Other cards like the cluster bomb, glaive ricochet, and bloonjitsu are good ways to round out your deck as they can cover for certain rushes in case of a kidnap.
Take a look at this deck for example:
To defend a zebra rush, a Juggernaut and a Glaive Ricochet are used. In case one of them gets kidnapped, the tornado wizard can come in to replace one of the two. To defend a camoregrow ceramic rush, the purge card is used along with the tornado wizard which doesn’t have to worry about regrow messes thanks to the purge. In case of a kidnapping or if purge can’t be drawn in time, the bloonjitsu becomes a backup. To beat someone going all-in with 10 MOABs on round 19, a sabotage ability is used followed by counterushing with 10 MOABs from the plasma vision or by spamming multiple low-level towers and boosting in the event a counterush is not possible.
Or look at this deck:
Both the laser cannon and the reactor can solo zebra rushes so having both in hand will basically make you invincible round 12 since you can drop one and then drop the other in case the first gets kidnapped. Ceramics get decamoized by the reactor and then finished off by other towers or shredded by the laser cannon. Super Monkey Fan Club hard counters any round 19 rush and even in case of a kidnap, it’s possible to sabotage the rush and spam triple darts and other low-level towers to finish off the rush.
Other Kidnap Uses
Since most kidnap decks aim to beat their opponent before round 20, if you can survive past that point you’ve basically won the match. There is one other use for kidnap though.
You can deny your opponent farm income by kidnapping their farms. Even though they get the full value of the farm back, they will be losing out on whatever cash the farm was making. Below is a table showing how many rounds it takes for kidnapping a farm to pay off.
As you can see, it’s not really worth it to kidnap low-level farms however kidnapping a factory will pay itself almost right away since you will be denying your opponent $3600 at the cost of only $1000. This becomes especially important later on in a match as you will be able to delay your opponent’s infinite ZOMG rush for example.
Anyway I hope this guide helped. Now go out there and get free wins off of kidnap noobs 🙂