Teach me how to love Aether Raids

The key I feel is the ability to lure difficult units out like Rein, Veronica and B!Lyn.

A strong (green) raven rome unit might do the trick.

The other two things that come in handy are using those cheap unit yourself, especially Rein. Or going for dancers.

Dancers are especially usefull to blast someone standing next to a wall and then safely pull back. Then you can just let the enemy come to you.

I like aether raids for being able to see the replays and then creating new strategies and layouts to find out what works best. It’s also fun once you get to higher tiers when it gets more challenging and you have to think more carefully about the what moves your going to make. I like it because it forces you to actually think instead of just being able to use a team of +10 whales to instantly clear a map. Only one person on my defense team is merged and I still constantly win against high merge teams, so it’s more of a merger of skill than pay to play, which is nice for us free to pay players.

Yeah well, that +10 ain't gonna get itself.

And I don't really see it as lame. Look at it this way. Once you hit higher tiers, you are royally boned with advantages or lack thereof. People prepare more (and are honestly douchier for picking Veronica in almost every map, though you can work around her, I guess).

It's just irritating how friendly the game is to meta units. Simply giving players control over their maps makes hyper-aggresive horses even stronger and more irritating than they ever were in arena. Also, you can't just force your way to a higher rank to stop seeing rein and co. because of how scoring works here.
Hopefully after a couple months people will be spread out enough it won't be quite such a pain to play. I kinda wish they'd given players random starting buildings/maps so there'd be more variety of team comps.