Pygmalien Guide

Learn how to play Pygmalien in The Bazaar with this in-depth hero build and strategy guide!

The Basics

Although he was in a dire situation during the previous patch, Pygmalien feels much improved at the start of 2025 with patch 0.1.4. That patch nerfed Dooley quite a bit and made everyone's favorite boar the king of charging items once again (on top of not accumulating thousands of Poison stacks anymore). Pygmalien gained some relative strength compared to the other two characters, and he also became a more reliable pick overall.

Let's take a look at the most important items for both of Pygmalien's strongest builds after the patch!

First, the Weapon builds that we were basically forced to run before the patch are still pretty good. You can either look for Crook and surround it with various Medium items—which Pygmalien has plenty of—or find a Weapon that is able to carry you to the late game due to a strong scaling ability and then build flexibly around it.

You typically want to surround your Crook with Atlatl, Flail, and/or Jaballian Longbow because they can make the most of the bonus power.

Going for one huge Weapon that is responsible for beating your opponent in a few shots gives you more room to work with, but it also requires you to focus on building that weapon's power throughout your entire run. Plus, you usually want to enchant it with Deadly (+50% Crit Chance) in order to make it, you know, as deadly as possible.

The "new" way to build around Pygmalien, by charging items, is very good with the reduced skill encounters because there are fewer Freeze effects around. The idea here is to find several items that have the ability to charge themselves and allow them to feed each other's cooldowns to activate constantly.

Other similar items include Weights, Marbles, Vineyard, and Landscraper.

One thing I've found quite difficult with this build is getting a lot of damage going if you rely solely on the speed of your items. Indeed, while it isn't too difficult to get your Matchbox or Yo-Yo to trigger all the time, boosting their damage output is a different story with the rework to level up rewards.

Currently, unless you take the risk of getting some useless Loot items from the random Loot level up reward, you will see very few Cinders and Sharpening Stones during the course of a run, which limits how big you can make your primary damage dealers.

To remedy this problem, try to look for items that can boost your build throughout a fight, such as Weights. Skills are obviously the best way to mitigate this issue, but the good ones aren't that simple to find anymore. My advice is to focus on leveling up quite aggressively once you find items that are worth boosting, and then you'll know which support items you should focus on.

The Reinforced Steel skill will make your Yo-Yo go crazy, but you have to find the right properties for it.

Finally, let me give you the most important piece of advice when playing Pygmalien: pick Fort on sight. It's such a strong item!

Early Stages

In order to get your run on the right track, you want to find the items that you're going to build around as quickly as possible. Your starting item will have quite an impact on your build because it should give you a direction to explore. Then, depending on that direction, you will look to focus on certain types of encounters:

  • The Charge build wants to find Small item encounters in order to grab Yo-Yo, Marbles, and Matchbox early on.
  • The Weapon build will focus on Medium items and Weapons, so search for Medium Weapons to pair with Crook or look for your scaling item. Obviously, once you find your scaling weapon your focus should change to upgrading it quickly in order to max out its scalability, and then you can build up its attack with your encounters.
  • If you happen to choose Uwashiwali Bird as your starting item, you'll have to do some long-term planning since most of the strong Properties won't be available in the first few days. In that case, focus on tempo to win your early fights and just visit the best overall encounters you have available.

Best Encounters

Finn's Big Bite

An extra 5 Regeneration is great early on, and boosting Healing items like Bushel or Uwashiwali Bird is another solid option.

Economic Seminar

Gold will never be a bad option, especially now that skills are more expensive. Plus, Properties are key to almost all late game Pygmalian builds.

A Strange Mushroom

I'm not certain about this one yet, but now that skills are harder to grab I often enjoy getting one for free from this encounter. Obviously a pick if you have Bushel as it will give it a great boost !

Jungle Ruins

Gaining two Income early on (like by Day 2 or 3) will amount to ~20 gold by the end of the run.

The Lost Crate

Leveling up unlocks powerful skills and an Enchantment on level 10. Once you find your key items, you want to focus on experience as much as you can.

Best Monsters

Banannabal

Duct Tape is a decent Charge item that you can keep in your late game build if you're able to upgrade it.

Giant Mosquito

Found on Day 2, this is a great Weapon to pair with Marbles. You can use it as a temporary stand-in for a Yo-Yo.

On Day 3 I find Eccentric Etherwright to be quite easy to beat, so I tend to pick it for the extra gold and experience. However, you could also try to beat Frost Street Challenger for a chance at looting Weights.

Day 4 is a similar scenario; Retiree has a strong skill (Extreme Comfort) and item (Bushel) that you could loot, but elites represent more gold and experience. If you are feeling confident, Hydrodude has a very strong skill if you found Marbles (Slow and Steady), which will give you that much-needed scaling ability for Yo-Yo or Proboscis.

From here I will typically pick the elite if I'm able to beat it, with a few exceptions for possible great skills (such as Bonk from Thug). On Day 5 I'll pick Trashtown Mayor every time if I think I can beat it because Augmented Weaponry and Augmented Defense are still fantastic skills despite being moved back three days.

Racking Up PvP Wins

Pygmalien is great in PvP at two stages of the run: very early and very late.

Early on you have more health than Vanessa and Dooley, which can make quite a big difference before they find a heavy hitting item. Sure, they will typically have more firepower, but a solid Heal or Shield item (or sometimes just the 5 Regeneration from Finn) can be enough for you to win with the storm.

In the later stages, you can leverage Pygmalien's great scaling ability or the fact that Gold and Diamond items with Charge abilities will basically trigger constantly. Coupled with a large health bar, this is typically enough to beat anyone that can't beat you in a few seconds or create insane amounts of Shield.

To reach this dream of an incredibly fast build, you need to find the other items with Charge abilities. You're looking for the ones you couldn't get your hands on during the first few days since they only exist in the Silver+ rarity.

Landscraper

Landscraper is particularly good with Bushel, but it can also just represent a lot of Shield on its own.

Vineyard

Vineyard can single-handedly make you a nightmare for Poison builds, but it is weaker than Landscraper against heavy hitting Weapon builds.

Ice Cream Truck

This is for more of a disruptive approach (and it's not a Property), but it's still a valid direction to consider—especially if you get it early enough to upgrade it to Diamond.

These items will eat up a lot of space on your board, so you typically can't fit more than one if you also have a Medium item (Bushel, Dog, Weights, Regal Blade…). You could fit two plus four Small items (Matchbox, Yo-Yo, Marbles, and a flexible one) if you find the Fort. Yes, just in case you missed it in the first section, you still want to pick Fort on sight and upgrade it to Diamond as soon as you get the opportunity.

Closing Words

Pygmalien feels much stronger now compared to before the patch, and many are calling him the best character in the game when you get the Charge build to click. In my opinion, the existence of Fort is enough to carry you to 10 wins when you get it to Diamond, as the extra two seconds on all your enemy's cooldowns is nuts. And now that the environment is less disruption heavy due to the Freeze skills being harder to get, having Fort pushes Pygmalien builds into a new dimension.

If you remove this item from the equation, Pygmalien is still solid when you find a way to scale your items, but you can sometimes just fall flat when you hit very fast without inflicting much damage.

No matter what, now is a good time to give this character a try, especially if you were disappointed in him during the previous patch.

I hope this guide was helpful, and I wish you luck in The Bazaar! If you have any questions or if you're looking for coaching, feel free to reach out on Discord @den_ccg.

Good Game Everyone.

Den
Den

Den has been in love with strategy games for as long as he can remember, starting with the Heroes of Might and Magic series as a kid. Card games came around the middle school - Yu-Gi-Oh! and then Magic: The Gathering.

Hearthstone and Legends of Runeterra has been his real breakthrough and he has been a coach, writer, and caster on the French scene for many years now. He now coaches aspiring pro players and writes various articles on these games.

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