Now that Teamfight Tactics has muscled its way to the top of the autobattler games pile, it's sometimes easy to forget that the genre began not all that long ago with a Dota 2 arcade mode. There's a new arcade mode out now called Lostland Commander that's making waves, and it borrows ideas from deckbuilders, Auto Chess, and others for a whole new game.
Some of the basics of Lostland Commander will be familiar if you've played Auto Chess or any of its variants. You'll recruit heroes to your bench and play them on a field, upgrading these characters by drawing duplicates from the random selection available to you each round. Instead of fighting head-to-head against other players, however, you'll be taking on increasingly powerful waves of monsters and bosses.
Monsters that escape from the field during a round power up the boss, and so you'll need to upgrade your heroes with gear and capitalise on synergies to make sure you've got as much power as possible on the field at any given time. This time out, though, you've also got a powerful captain at the head of the team, but you'll need to keep them protected because you'll lose the game if they burn through all three of their lives.
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