THE FIELD NOTES · CRITTERFRONT

Dog and Pollen: a compact opener

Two upgraded units combine marching pace with repeat poison hits. A useful small-board starting point, with real counters in the complete early-game panel.

Test budget6g

Net roster investment6g

Base-copy purchase total8g

Round rules testedRound 1

Net investment deducts merge refunds from the purchase total. 0g of the test budget is unspent. This is an owned-roster comparison, not a starting purse or a promise you can find these copies in that round. Shop rolls, reroll costs, liquidity and other players’ purchases were not simulated.

Approachable · 2 DEPLOYED RECRUITS

The exact roster

Dog

Star II · 2 base copies

Swiftclaw / Catalyst

Front-running movement support and a kill-triggered tower attack-speed buff.

Pollen

Star II · 2 base copies

Brood / Catalyst

Repeated poison application on defense and an attack-speed slow on final marcher death.

Open this roster in the planner ↗

Exact families and stars, with an illustrative starter layout. Edit both formations before playing. This is not a recorded simulation layout. The planner’s base-copy value is the 8g purchase reference, not 6g net investment.

What the families activate

Attacking threats

No active threshold on this side. Individual abilities still matter.

Defending roles

Catalyst: 2 distinct families · 2-family bonus

Duplicates do not add faction members. These are current rules interactions, not proof that a particular bonus caused the recorded score.

Give each side a job

Placement notes below are practical interpretation of the abilities, not experimentally optimized hex positions.

YOUR DEFENDING TOWERS

Cover the route

Placement suggestion, not a tested hex layout: keep Pollen within Dog’s two-hex buff reach and give both a useful view of the incoming route.
Try to let Pollen maintain contact long enough to build three-hit poison stacks; the two Catalyst families also enable the first echo bonus.

YOUR ATTACKING MARCHERS

Plan the approach

Let Dog take the lead while Pollen remains within its two-hex Pack Leader reach. The movement buff depends on Dog actually being the frontmost living marcher.
Pollen’s final-death slow can disrupt nearby enemy towers, but do not sacrifice a useful Nexus runner merely to trigger it.

Recruit toward it, without forcing it

This is a conditional recruitment plan, not a tested shopping sequence. Keep a playable board while the shop decides which copies are available.

Suggested collection priority, not a tested buying sequence: use Dog and Pollen offers to form one two-star copy of each.
This requires two base copies per family. Six gold is net investment after refunds; the eight-gold sticker total is not the cost of finding the offers.

Where it can struggle

Only two bodies means control or lost firing time can matter a great deal.
Its early score uses nine fully invested opposing compositions, not every cheaper army in the 50-roster universe.

Recorded matchup notes

Dog two-star plus Mushroom two-star scored 58.3% points against this pair in twelve early-panel battles. That was two wins and ten draws, not a sweeping counter.
Dog/Pollen scored 75% points against Mushroom/Seed in their twelve direct battles; this does not predict every live placement.

What the experiment measured

75.9%

Historical points
A win is 1 point. A draw is ½.

Opposing compositions: 9
Battles in this comparison: 108
Opponent-panel 95% interval: 62.0%–88.9%
Cap or allocation-drop battles: 0

Only opponents spending all six gold enter this score; cheaper controls are excluded from this comparison. Each opposing composition has equal weight. Repeated seeds and swapped seats are not independent opponent strategies. The interval describes this tested panel, not ranked players or a guaranteed result.

Formation sensitivity · the same roster under three placement policies
Test policy	Historical points
Planned defense · front-row offense	75.0%
Random legal defense · randomized Nexus	72.2%
Planned defense · randomized full-depth offense	80.6%

Scores pool many placements. None of these numbers is a result for the editable starter layout linked above. They compare both armies’ applied Nexus damage, not total DPS.

Evidence source and reproducibility

Frozen run: finite-early-20260906
Stage: finite-panel
Roster: r-7833bd2b151177e02b9c

Download the compact evidence snapshot, including source SHA-256 hashes. Read the method and limitations.