January cometh, and with it etelia and more pure snow than you can shake a stick at.

Preparations guide for the newbies:

At least one Ice Breath-Ice Aura lykos

At least three deviants

A few gp3 beasts with an elemental attack to fight wild etelia with.

You will need to get to level ten. This is where your snowflake is hiding.

To win against wild etelia, be prepared for the long con. These things pack a punch. So invest in a firebreath dragon or icebreath lykos or two. They can't be petrified or fearsome looked or magic horned. Unicorns iin my experience are pretty useless. An acid spit cockatrice with regeneration gives you a slight edge. This year I'm adding poison, just to be really horrible :D

Fighht the wild etelia and be prepared to lose ten times. BUT LEAVE YOUR PET THERE, don't fight when its energy hits zero. Come back after ten hours when your pet's energy has hit ten again, and resume fighting. Eventually, you'll win.

Any questions?

I'm sure my poor lykos are looking forward to yet another year of getting mauled by etelias (they get pretty nasty when you get into the upper teens of levels!). They're more than capable of going far enough to get snowflakes, though, so I'm not too worried.

On that note, anybody know if etelias/enemies on upper levels use any sort of (simple) strategy? Are they more likely to select their most damaging moves (ice breath, or maybe an ice spikes boosted rush or something) or is it still completely random the way it is with regular enemies? By level 16 and up I'm losing so much it doesn't feel random, but that could also be due to their boosted stats. I know it's probably easier to just start over at the lower levels to get crystalline ice from weaker ones, but I'm a sore loser. ;P

Well the worst are the ones with Magic Mirror, because that means you set YOURSELF on fire. Which really sucks.

They usually use Ice Breath so Elemental Resistance is nice, or possibly Counterstrike, but these aren't likely to take effect often enough. 

I'm going for Regen, which gives me a slight edge, Acid Spit and Poisonous Claws/Venomous Skin. We shall see. I have a couple of Napalm dragons, and a few Venomous Skin cockatrices, and some Ice Breath/Elemental Resistance lykos.

I love the Regen the most though. It might get me just enough of an edge to narrowly win. One out of ten times...? 

I've been breeding some good pets, but now I see I need to level them up! (Lost track of the time... oh well.) 

I've still got a unicorn on the tundra last year, a relic of sending basically every level 50 pet with decent genes I had onto the Tundra as the event was ending. She's at level 10 and defeated one etelia on the island several months again; it is probably time to admit defeat with the other. 

But! I also have the lykos that made it to level 31, so he's definitely getting pulled off of breeding offers for some snow adventures. 

I wish more pets had Magic Mirror--I've been meaning to breed unicorns with that gene, but even with it they won't be much use on Tundra. Probably.

It doesn't activate very often, same as Elemental Resistance.

It's also a problem that unis don't have an elemental attack, and of course Magic Horn doesn't work on etelia. 

My new cockatrices keep getting born witth Petrifying Gaze instead of Acute Eyesight, waaah.

I have a bunch of Petrifying Gaze too, but at least I kind of wanted that for Battlefield and arena options... (Also a strain of Poor Hearing that I'm having trouble getting rid of, grrr.) 

Yeah, my poor lykos have knocked themselves out against magic mirror so many times, especially since I never know if they have it at first. On the lower(ish) levels I can just smack the etelia with an ice spikes rush and call it a day (don't have much elemental resistance in my breeding strains, but ice spikes has its uses). But their defense gets pretty high so that stops working eventually.

My other favorite thing is when they have silent pace and I get stalked to death eight times in a row. I get a hit in on attempt number nine!... except that they also have magic mirror and murder my poor beast with its own ice breath. Etelias are special.

I hate silent pace :(

I've bred me some silent pace perfect pumas so time to give those etelia a taste of their own medicine. Just gotta get off my butt and level them up. Hopefully, they do good. 

(ง •̀_•́)ง

Please don't put too many of them in the arena and destroy me, haaaa *cries*

I'd say be afraid, but even after posting my last message about lvling, I forgot to throw them in the arena xD If I know myself, I'll probably keep not leveling them until Tundra actually opens then probably gonna speed level like two and use up my scroll of insights.

It might be nice to breed up a few pumas, but honestly just getting the decent lykos (lykoi?) project finished was already so much work (and I mostly used scraps from others' projects+studs, rather than building my own line from the ground up). Decent breeding pumas are hard to find and buy, too, but you can get a breeding with a perfect lykos stud for a very reasonable price.

Since I tend to only be active sporadically throughout the year, this is the first year where I'll have a whole pack of finished breeding project pets instead of just a few very close ones and tons of mediocre ones. I just need to level them. Might try and get a few with elemental resistance, too. There's a decent stud or two out there that can help me, I'm sure.

... Of course, at level 18 in the tundra they're gonna get smacked around anyway, genes or no, but I'm still looking forward to using them all!

Yeah, pumas are probably the breeding project I'm most proud of because the very few that have perfect pumas are pretty tight handed with them. The gene set I bred for was actually bred specifically to fight Etelia so I'll be pretty sad if they do bad. But on the other hand, just found out today, I'm the only player in bk with my specific perfect pumas geneset so I guess that's kinda cool even if they turn out to be useless for what they were bred for.

I'm having nough problems with breeding cockatrices. You get to the point where all your beasts are related to each other, and then you're stuck. 

I did manage to buy about two really good ones from SerenityDagger on the pet trades but I also had to buy quite a few duds in between, because the genes weren't researched. However, now that I have new blood I can at last make some further progress.

I think the thing I wish the most about the tundra is that the etelias that we raise were anywhere near as strong as the ones we fight. I've got one with pretty good genes (enough that I don't want to risk more mutagens on it) and another with okay genes (that's the one that will be breeding this year), but they're not anywhere near as strong as a well-bred gp3 pet.

At least they're pretty, though.