The engine hands Paladin some of the weakest attacking numbers it computes — 3.5 expected damage a turn, a burst ceiling of 10 that Barbarian's 18 towers over — and then matchup note after matchup note warns your opponent not to trust the score. Both are true, and closing that gap is your job: Crit adds 4 to a big hit, Protect halves an incoming one, Retribution returns half of another, Accuracy deletes their defense roll, and Tithe sells you rerolls at 1 CP apiece. None of that lives in a damage average. Play the printed odds and you lose slowly; spend the tokens and the Combat Points and you win the same games the math gives away.
Your first three turns decide whether the token plan ever comes online, so build with the dice you're given instead of the dice you want. Swords showing? Mighty Prayer — 60% of turns with best-play rerolls — deals 3 undefendable and banks both a Crit and an Accuracy in one swing. Helmets showing? Retaliate hits at the same 60%, and while it deals zero damage, it loads Retribution and pays you 3 CP — three future Tithe rerolls, real tempo dressed up as a passive turn. A scattered roll points at Holy Attack: the small straight lands 59% of the time for 6 damage and a point of healing. What you never do early is fish for four prayers — Righteous Prayer connects on just 10% of dedicated turns, and a whiffed turn against a racer like Ninja is a hole this kit cannot dig out of.
The middle turns ask one question on repeat: in this matchup, are you the clock or the wall? Against builders you are — surprisingly — the aggressor: the modeled clocks give you 15.8 turns to kill Artificer against her 30.3, so keep swinging and end it before her machine assembles. Against racers, flip it: Pyromancer and Barbarian average 6.7 damage a turn to your 3.5, so your job is taxation — Divine Defense already blanks about 2 per hit, Protect halves their biggest committed swing, and Retribution hands half of one straight back. Whichever role you're in, keep assembling the spike, and mind the fine print: Crit is +4 only on an attack already dealing 5 or more, so it rides Holy Attack (6 becomes 10), Righteous Combat (base 5), or Righteous Prayer (8 becomes 12) — never Mighty Prayer's 3. Pair the Crit with Accuracy and the spike skips their defense roll entirely. Before you unload, check their board for held negation — a Smoke Bomb or a Blind wipes the turn you spent three turns building.
Late game, Paladin gets to buy what other heroes pray for. Resolute Faith! needs five prayer faces — a 1.3% line by rolling alone — but Tithe sells rerolls at 1 CP per die, so three natural prayers plus a funded wallet turns the ultimate into a purchase: 10 damage (14 with a Crit riding it), 5 healing, and Blessing of Divinity, the token that sets you to 1 health instead of dead and that nothing can strip. With it up you can trade straight into their kill turn and still be standing. Below 20 health, hold Protect instead of spending it for value — halving the wrong hit is how walls fall. And run the heal engine to the final turn: Holy Light fires on 70% of turns and heals per heart rolled, and against attrition kits — Cursed Pirate's post-flip upkeep burn, Vampire Lord's Bleed chip — outlasting isn't the backup plan, it's the whole win condition.
Paladin's die runs 2 swords, 2 helmets, 1 heart, and 1 prayer — the 6 face — and every priority falls out of that split. Swords and helmets are the common currency, which is why the twin 60% lines, Mighty Prayer (3 swords plus a prayer) and Retaliate (3 helmets plus a prayer), are your defaults: either is a keep the moment a pair shows on roll one. Righteous Combat wants 3 swords AND 2 helmets, a full board that only assembles 41% of the time — but it's your biggest reliable hit, roughly 7 damage once its two bonus dice add their expected 2, so commit when the first roll already shows four of the five faces, not before. A scattered roll pivots to the small straight: 59% for Holy Attack's 6. Two hearts early points at Holy Light — 70%, healing per heart, plus two bonus dice that can mint a Crit, a Protect, a card draw, or 2 CP. Prayers get no natural chases: 10% for four, 1.3% for five. The rule is buy, don't fish — with three prayers showing, each 1-CP Tithe reroll is a one-in-six shot per die at the fourth — the only respectable road to those lines.
Combat Points are dice for this hero: Tithe converts 1 CP into a reroll of any single die, as often as you can pay, or 3 CP into a card draw — the passive that lets a funded Paladin outrun his printed odds. The income is built into the kit — Retaliate pays 3 CP outright, Righteous Prayer pays 2, and Divine Defense and Righteous Combat's bonus dice each pay 1 per prayer face they show. Budget by phase: early, spend on rerolls that force the 60% token lines — a single CP that upgrades a near-miss into Mighty Prayer just bought you a Crit, an Accuracy, and 3 undefendable for one coin. Midgame, hold a cushion of 3-4 CP so a three-prayer roll can chase Righteous Prayer's 8-plus-a-Crit — four 1-CP rerolls make landing the fourth prayer about a coin flip. One open question: the board text says Tithe works at any time — whether that repairs a bad Divine Defense roll mid-attack is a physical-copy ruling DiceSlayer will verify on camera.
Honesty first: Paladin's card deck and upgrade cards aren't in the verified data yet, so you get economics here rather than card lists — DiceSlayer will verify the upgrade paths on camera. What the verified kit does tell you: Tithe prices a card draw at 3 CP, the cost of three rerolls, so every draw is a bet that an unknown card beats three guaranteed shots at a 60% token line. Early, take the rerolls every time. Late, when the spike is assembled and you're digging for a finisher or an answer, the draw gets better — and note that Holy Light's bonus dice can hand you a card draw for free on a heart, which means your healing turns quietly restock your hand at no cost. Until the deck data lands, default to rerolls and let Holy Light do your card digging — and expect no upgrade-priority claims here until the physical copy is on the table.
Deny him quiet turns — this kit wants two or three assembly turns, so pressure every single turn. Deny the spike its landing: hold one negation effect — Blind, Shadows, Smoke Bomb, a forced reroll — for the turn he sits on Crit plus Accuracy, because blanking that swing erases three turns of his work. Deny the wallet: every Combat Point you drain or steal is a Tithe reroll he doesn't get, dropping him back to the printed 41% and 10% odds his whole game is built to escape. And route damage around the wall entirely — upkeep ticks and undefendable hits never meet Divine Defense's three dice.
Hit hardest right after he cashes tokens: the turn after a Crit-Accuracy spike his board is bare, and restocking takes multiple 60% rolls. Hit when his CP is empty — no Tithe means no bought consistency, and a broke Paladin is exactly as streaky as his printed 41% and 10% lines. And run the lethal check before your kill turn: if Blessing of Divinity is up, he survives at 1 no matter how big the hit, so bank a follow-up jab before you commit the haymaker — killing him twice is the actual assignment.
Paladin almost never earns your ban. The community lists him B tier, and the engine gives him just four scores above 50 out of 43 — three builders plus Huntress at 52.5, a number the lab's own notes say not to trust because Nyra's aura isn't modeled. If your roster brought any speed you already own him: Ninja 35.3, Iceman 35.4, Barbarian 36.1, Pyromancer 38.0 from his side of the table. The one roster that should think twice is a slow, builder-heavy bring-3 — his trustworthy wins are Alchemist 55.3, Artificer 53.6, Necromancer 52.8, and a heal-loop grinder can eat a slow lineup alive. Everyone else: spend the ban on a real threat and let the tokens come.
Paladin is a specialist, not roster glue: his engine edges are thin — a best score of 55.3 into Alchemist — and his losses are lopsided, so he earns a bring-3 slot only when the job is specifically beating the builders. Slot him beside a racer: the same Ninja, Iceman, and Barbarian class that beats him is exactly what your roster wants covered anyway, and in exchange he farms the engine-heavy fields where Alchemist (55.3), Artificer (53.6), and Necromancer (52.8) actually appear. His hidden roster value is insurance — Blessing of Divinity means burst-reliant opponents have to kill him twice, and that steals games the scoreboard says he loses.
The round clock is Paladin's second opponent. The modeled kill clocks are brutal reading — 48.8 turns against Pyromancer, a Barbarian clock pegged at the model's 100-turn floor (effectively never on printed pace), and the slowest pairing on the board against Gunslinger at 33 and 27 turns. In 3/1/0 Swiss a draw pays barely more than a loss, and Paladin's natural attrition game is a draw machine. The fix is spending: Tithe is an accelerator, so burn CP to force spikes early instead of banking toward a perfect turn, and when the round clock runs short, switch scripts — with Crit and Accuracy banked from an earlier Mighty Prayer turn, Holy Attack becomes a 10-point undefendable swing on a 59% trigger, and it ends games the wall script only extends.