Deck Construction for Soloing Ivan Soulsinger?

Austin asked me a question about coming up with a deck construction for soloing Ivan Soulsinger and his minion in The Drake Hatchery. He's the one holding the cool death sword you see in my header graphic up there.


Yeah, that one! The Soulsinger's Blade.

I ran this fight a few times just to re-familiarize myself with it. For the basics, Ivan is a Rank 8 boss with 4,000 health and comes with a Wandering Soul minion, who is a rank 8 fire caster with 1,055 health. Ivan and his minion are extremely fond of casting weakness (yeah, like what boss is DS isn't, right?) It seems better to just cast through the weakness because there were seriously like 3 of them on me. Just deal. M'kay?

Here's the deck I was using:


This setup is all about a good offense (notice no shields . . . not really needed in this fight . . . especially for a death wizard with life draining spells).

What I liked about this deck is that it allows me options. If I want to take the minion and ivan out one at a time, I can. If I want to stack them up and take 'em down in one fell swoop, I can do that as well. Notice that I'm using a death trap necklace and I have two wraith cards from gear (one from the Malistaire robes and one from my wraith pet). I also have two scarecrows. I only need one, but hey . . . I'm a boyscout like that. Also notice that I'm using a sword/wand that isn't death. I've over-stacked prism because it's important to get that down on ivan, but also to just be prepared (one prism per attack spell there for the folks counting at home).

Scarecrow Method
If you're going to take him down in one spell, you'll want to stack up soulsinger with the following traps:
prism
death trap
death trap necklace
feint
spirit trap
curse

And the wandering soul with either the other necklace death trap or the feint (depending on how your hitpoints are doing)

spirit blade and death blade yourself and cast the crow. If you used the necklace death trap, you may have to tap the minion with a wand hit to push him over the edge. If you're lucky, you could do that in advance to take off a weakness, but seriously, they LOVE to keep weakness on you.

Wraith Method
If you're going to take the minion and Ivan down separately, may I suggest taking the minion down first. 1) he's got a lot of nasty spells like minotaur and a firezilla that can be painful. 2) low hitpoints.

1- A simple death blade + necklace trap + pet wraith combo will take him out, even with a weakness on you.

2- Deathblade and spiritblade yourself for Ivan, who then needs to be stacked up with a prism, feint, curse, and spirit trap to take him out, again, even with a weakness on you.

Hope that helps! Good luck on getting your sword.

Happy Dueling!