The Darkness is one of the final bosses that tries to stand in your way of the sweet Candle King card back! I hope this guide can help you grab a victory.
The Darkness Basic Information
- Hero Power: Encroaching Darkness (0 Mana) – Summon a 5/5 Darkspawn.
- Flavor: There’s a reason to always keep a light on down here.
- Starting Health: 70
While The Darkness terrorizes Dungeon Run fans, it hasn’t found a lot of success in its side job as a Highlander deck ruiner.
For general dungeon run information check out our Kobolds and Catacombs Dungeon Run Guide!
More Final Boss Guides
The Darkness’ Deck
The Darkness mostly runs a Defensive Priest deck but with a few other class spells that seek to ruin your day.
- Forbidden Shaping
- Potion of Madness
- Evasion
- Shadow Word: Pain
- Sudden Betrayal
- Looming Presence (Heroic)
- Shadow Bolt
- Shadowfiend
- Shadow Word: Death
- Cabal Shadow Priest
- Entomb
- Twisting Nether
- Psychic Scream
- Mind Control
The Darkness Gameplay Video
How-to Defeat The Darkness
The Darkness will spawn a 5/5 Darkspawn to its board every single turn. To combat this you start the game with three 0-mana spell cards that will destroy all Darkspawn from the board. This is both good and bad. It’s great when you want to remove a board full of its annoying spawns, but it means you’ll have to be fairly patient with them while they clog up your hand and potentially make cards like Golden Kobold pretty awkward.
Being aggressive against The Darkness is a bit problematic because it runs defensive cards like Looming Presence (Heroic) and Psychic Scream. However, Looming Presence can actually force The Darkness into fatigue and make it so you can eventually burn it out. This can be a good strategy if you have a deck that can continually generate value like with Deathstalker Rexxar or you have the passive that doubles your Health. Psychic Scream can also burn it in this scenario by adding minions back to your deck while The Darkness’ deck slowly whittles away.
The Darkness runs Sudden Betrayal, you’ll have to be aware of your minion positioning and it might be worth it to wait a turn to attack if you are just going to destroy two of your minions. It also has at least a few Cabal Shadow Priest in the deck so after it gets to 6-mana make this a consideration in your thought process of what to play.
If you are late in the game then be very aware that any big minion you play could eat a Mind Control. Make sure you have a way to deal with this if it happens or you could just lose the game.
One of the few ways you can be aggressive against The Darkness is if you have the all minions have Stealth passive. This gives you more of a chance to be aggressive without worrying about your minions getting stolen by Mind Control or Entombed. However, most victories seem to be obtained by just outlasting and out-valuing it.
Good luck in your battle against Darkness! It’s an age old war, but I hope these tips will help you obtain victory.
Mine was definitely an “outvalue and outlast” win, but it took a lucky Mage deckbuild to get it. Double Health, Unique focus (Kaz, Reno, Frosty Jaina), and passive +3 Spell Damage. When you have 100 health and a Reno, several spell clears plus the 3 candles, all with big spell face damage… it’s a smooth ride. And yeah good luck getting all that love from RNG :/
Free win if you get the stealth thing, over half of his hand becomes useless
Very nice guide! Should be concluded that you can always know how much dmg you are going to take next turn just by looking at the board; he doesn’t run any direct dmg spells. This was crucial for me, as I milled him down while trying to control the board and taking the least amount possible of face dmg from his minions. I must say it was a close call and I did get lucky with treasure picking, but still this tip might help you beat him 🙂
So many of his spells and Cabal are useless against the Stealth passive, just have to bait bad board clears.
The hint about outlasting and out-valuing the Darkness seems to be valid. I just defeated it with my Farseer-type Shaman deck. Kel’thuzad, Sylvanas, reincarnate etc. generated too much value for Darkness to deal with. Due to Psychic Screams I had 20 cards in my deck when the Darkness went into fatigue, which eventually killed it.
And best of all, Runespear cleared his board three times! So all in all, go craft Runespear kappa.
I’ve got lucky once in this boss fight. I was playing mage and had used Tolin’s Goblet (Draw a card, Fill your hand with copies of it) pretty op since I had about 7 free slots for cards in my hand and it was filled with Roaring Torches (Deal 6 Damage). By then The Darkness only had about 35-40ish hp left and I just finished him off with the torches. Most epic moment in my dungeon runs so far!
I did the same with priest, filled my hand with mindblasts Ez win ^^
Helps getting a yshaarj with a barnes on turn four, having said barnes pull out a yshaarj…and it snowballed from there. no fatigue needed.
I only beat the darkness once. I had three of those time warp cards and played all 3.
You played at most 2. You can’t be offered 3.
Couldn’t he potentially get a third from The Vault?
Erm … am I wrong or is that a huge misplay at 09:33?
I thought that – should have ploughed the bat into a Darkspawn… but I’m not sure how the effects would have queued.
Best case scenario, the damage from the exploding bat causes Acidmaw to kill everything before it dies.
Worst case scenario, if the explosion from the bat kills Acidmaw before its poison triggers, then ploughing the bat into the middle spawn would have killed that and Acidmaw leaving the last spawn on 1 health.
“However, most victories seem to be obtained by just outlasting and out-valuing it.” … good luck with that 😀
I reckon this is far an away the hardest boss – but it’s nice to know the damned thing is beatable, I’ve never managed it and I had him 5x in a row when trying to complete my Priest run.
“any big minion you play could get eat a Mind Control” I think there is a typo here. BTW the guides are awesome keep up the good work, I look forward to the rest of them!
Should be fixed! Thanks, glad you like the guides.