Factions
Each Duel of Champions deck was built around one of six factions, and each faction carried its own identity, pace, and win condition. This page is the index: pick one below for a full breakdown, or read on for how the set fits together.
Duel of Champions asked players to commit to a faction before a game even began. That choice set the tempo of every match: some factions wanted to grind a long game out, others wanted it over before an opponent's board ever stabilized. None of the six were reskins of one another: swapping factions meant swapping how you were supposed to think about a turn.
The lineup also wasn't invented for this game specifically. All six pull from town alignments the wider Heroes of Might and Magic series has used for decades: a mage tower, a human stronghold of knights, a demon-infested pit, an undead necropolis, a naga-led sanctuary, and an orc warcamp. If you know the mainline strategy games, the roster below will feel immediately familiar.
None of the six were designed to be played the same way twice in a row, and that variety was deliberate. A newer player usually benefits from picking one faction and sticking with it long enough to learn its rhythm before sampling another, since switching too early tends to blur which decisions were faction-specific and which were just general card-game fundamentals. A more experienced player often ends up keeping two or three factions ready (one steady, one aggressive, one built around a specific trick) and choosing between them based on the matchup, not a fixed preference.
A quick way to sort the six without reading every page first: Haven and Stronghold are the two most direct, asking a new player to make fewer judgment calls per turn. Academy and Necropolis reward patience and are best picked up once the fundamentals feel automatic. Inferno and Sanctuary sit at the sharper end (fast and punishing, or subtle and easy to misplay) and tend to suit a player who already has a faction or two under their belt. Each faction's own page above goes into exactly how and why.
Faction choice worked differently depending on the format. In constructed play, a deck's faction set the frame before a single card was chosen: the composition of unlockable and craftable cards available to a Necropolis deck, say, was a fixed pool a player built downward from, so the faction decision effectively pre-selected which strategies were even on the table. Draft modes flipped that: a player picked cards first and let a dominant faction emerge from what the draft actually offered, which meant a good drafter needed to know all six identities well enough to pivot mid-draft, not just the one they favored in constructed. That split is part of why the faction pages on this site describe intended identity and playstyle: the specific cards available shifted across sets and patches, but what a faction was trying to do at the table stayed consistent for the game's whole run.
The pairings above aren't rigid tiers; they're a starting point for narrowing six options down to two or three worth trying first. Most experienced players eventually found their preference didn't map cleanly onto the beginner/intermediate split: a slower player might click with Academy's setup-heavy game plan immediately, while a naturally aggressive one struggles against Haven's defensive shell no matter how many games they play. The fastest way to find out is still to read a faction's own page, then play a handful of games against each of the other five before settling on a main.