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ddm5182

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Posts posted by ddm5182

  1. Posted

    What they really need to do is print a new Core set that rotates the old one out of competitive play.  Or at least establish a second tournament format where only the most recent core set + most recent X battlepacks are legal.

    The cost to new players is already prohibitive; at some point, the economics of "well, if you want to build a competitive deck you need to shell out $700+..." are going to hurt new player acquisition.  WHI is already worse than competitive Magic: The Gathering for initial investment costs.  Not a good thing.

    Too, as a deck builder, I am getting tired of factoring in cards like Master Rune of Spite, Reclaiming the Fallen, Judgment of Verena, etc when designing new decks.  Not that I necessarily think these cards warrant a ban per se... I am just tired of building with them in mind and would like to see a fresh format where some of the cards and strategies these staples hold in check can be allowed to shine.

  2. Posted

    I'd say Innovation is the stronger card when:

    • you interact a lot on your opponent's turn
    • turn 1 is your critical turn & you need to play 4-resources worth of stuff to achieve your deck's desired tempo
    • you care about the "enters play corrupted" aspect of WE
    • you have BIG spells that you want to play in the midgame

    I'd say Warpstone is the stronger card when:

    • your deck wants raw card/resource advantage more than tempo (true when EITHER your overall card quality in a phase of the game is higher than your opponent's, OR you need to dig for very specific pieces to assemble a combo)
    • turn 2-3+ are your critical turns
    • you are mostly playing "tap-out" style, meaning you don't interact significantly on your opponent's turn

    In general I prefer Warpstone Excavation in a vacuum, though the choice really depends on your deck and the decks you expect to play against. 

    Side note - whether to care about haunted city depends on what you are using as a win condition and how readily you expect opponents to be able to interact with it.  There are definitely decks/matchups that don't care about having a WE in their battlefield, or at least, don't care enough to offset the potential power offered by free hammers in K/Q.

  3. Posted

    @Mallumo, can they though?  Card power level in a vacuum isn't good enough to say.  I agree with your point that Dwarves have some very powerful cards, but Dwarves as a deck worked well because of the inherent synergy between its powerful cards when it came to having solutions to the problems posed by the other decks in the metagame. 

    If you opt for RTF, you slow down to the point where, by the time you need to RTF, you havent been able to play enough guys to trade with & deal enough damage to have RTF be lethal.  If you opt for MT, you still slow down a bit relative to the other decks (esp empire) who don't have to make a similar choice, and now you have no "i win" card to handle unit-attrition matchups.

    See where I'm going with this?  I agree dwarves is better than many people will give it credit at first blush, but it took a MAJOR hit here.

    Anyhow, on the testing front Skaven fared reasonably well, taking 1 of 3 quick games we played at lunch vs. Empire.  I need to ramp back up on my ability to pilot the deck since its been a while, and we badly need to tune the list, but the potential is definitely there.

    Orc control I am a bit more sketchy on - in fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the final product incorporates some elements of both decks.  The one thing we've gathered so far is Empire's biggest weakness is to fast decks, so that's what we'll be working to exploit for a while.

  4. Posted

    Wytefang: I WANT DISCUSSION TO BE ABOUT THE GAME AND THE DECKS WE PLAY, NOT EACH OTHER.  OK? 

    I will totally engage you if you post an idea or a deck I think is bad, but I'm going to attack it based on its merits relative to decks I've tested it against, NOT your personal qualifications as a tournament player/poster on these forums/whatever.  Get me?  It would be nice if you would take the high road and do the same.

  6. Posted

    rofl, i come back and see none other than my biggest fan.  Hi Wytefang <3  Slow-roll any terrible deck ideas for 3 weeks lately?

    BigV - you are spot on man.  Even not playing for months now, my initial feeling is with you that they restricted the wrong cards.  I like the approach though, and I am *very* encouraged to see FFG doing something.  Where I am starting on metagame analysis is looking at what decks the "death" of dwarves make possible to attack empire from new angles.  In particular, going fast via Skaven or going big via Orc Control.  Will check in after some testing and let you know where we're at.

  7. Posted

    It took them FAR too long to get here, but they finally have.  Better late than never I suppose.  There might actually be some hope for the game if they are willing to admit their horrible design mistakes and take steps to address them.

    @ Clamatius - if dwarves & MROS aren't a worry, maybe its time to build a Skaven deck?  Can empire handle that kind of speed?  IIRC it spends a lot of time durdling with support kill in the early turns, and its non-Friedrich dudes all suck horribly.  Not really feasible for them to play MROS w/out tunnels either since they are certainly going to choose Innovation or Warpstone for their restricted card.

  8. Posted

    Chaos as a faction has something of an identity crisis.  Its core mechanics don't work well together, and none of them are fleshed out enough to be viable on their own.  I'll talk a bit about my pov on the "state of Chaos" today, then give a couple ideas on how it could be made better...

    For starters, corruption is not a very well-designed mechanic; given the ease of destroying/removing units in general, its primary use is as a "falter" effect (IE target creature can't block this turn) in aggressive decks.  Becase corruption requires a significant "critical mass" of corruption effects to be a fruitful control strategy, and because it also fails to deal with the hammers on units played to Kingdom/Quest, decks based around the mechanic will be strained to include enough corruption to stop unit-based aggressive strategies while at the same time packing enough actual removal to interact with their resource/card base.  I've never seen such a deck be successful, or adaptable enough to handle more than 1 or 2 "enemy" decks it is focused on beating.

    Too, Chaos lacks a good support base.  This is probably by design; to counteract the early dominance of Skaven as an aggro/unit-removal "rock" strategy, it seemed like the designers wanted to balance the factions by pumping up order, esp dwarves', access to cheap early resources from supports.  This has unbalanced the game given the existence of efficient cheap mass-unit removal with no counterpart for supports.  A "Troll Vomit" for supports that was costed less aggressively than something like Grimgor would go a long way toward making destruction unit-based economies competitive with order.  In general, I am fine with destruction having worse support cards, so long as they have both good unit-based resource cards and efficient ways to interact with supports.

    But, that does mean Chaos needs some resilient guys that help ramp up their economy.  A version of Clan Moulder's Elite that is restricted to Kingdom- or Quest-only would not be amiss in the current metagame: 2 cost, 2 hammers, 5 health (for resilience to Master Rune of Spite and the new Dwarf "Tracker" hero), perhaps balanced with a restriction that the unit must always be declared as a blocker if the zone is attacked.

    Chaos probably has access to the best "big" guys in Bule, Bloodthirster, Lord of Change etc.  Lord of Change in particular is a *broken* card in terms of power level.  But, the rest of Chaos' economy is so poor and easily disrupted that he is not going to see serious play.

    So that's basically where I see Chaos atm.

    Summary of what I'd like to change:

    • Viable unit-based economy, encouraging interaction between units in the combat step as the primary means of disrupting their resource/card engine - this means efficient, resilient units and/or cost-reduction a la Braying Gor made a more central theme for the faction.  Turn 2-3 Lord of Change needs to be commonplace for Chaos to be a feared deck.
    • Powerful interaction with supports, particularly mass support removal.  Ideally Chaos gets a "Plague Wind" effect that destroys only opponents' supports, efficiently costed at say 4CC, analogous to Troll Vomit.  This is an overpowered card on its own merits, but given the paucity of viable support options on the destruction side, this card is absolutely needed for them to be competitive with Dwarves.  Chaos needs a way to prevent the Dwarf player from overextending while developing their board.
    • Introduce a corruption mechanic that affects supports by removing their hammers while corrupted, and interacts with existing corruption effects (IE players can still only uncorrupt 1/turn, whether unit or support).  Also, print a critical mass of these cards to allow for a "turbo-stasis" style deck that achieves a resource lockdown as a win condition.  I'm not sure this is very fun (for the opponents anyway), but I am sure it is the only way Corruption can be a viable, tournament-competitive build-around mechanic

    Start there.  Basically chaos is being torn right now between 3 different axes - 1) a "big unit" ramp deck that tries to power out huge, powerful units - this deck doesn't work because the economy of Chaos, whether unit- or support-based, is not competitive.  2) an aggressive deck that tries to utilize power-boosting effects, "Wheel of Fortune" style cards in Will of Tzeentch, and corruption effects to push through damage.  This deck doesn't work because the units are not aggressively costed enough to offset their vulnerability to the cheap mass removal available to other factions (MROS, Vomit).  3) a "stax" deck that tries to lock down units via abusing corruption effects.  This deck doesn't work becuase corruption doesn't interact with supports/units in Kingdom/Quest when used as a control mechanic rather than an aggressive one.

    If at least one of these decks got enough love to be viable, Chaos would be in a much healthier place.  As it is, much work is needed...

  11. Posted

    You guys are being really shortsighted discounting Friedrich IMO.  He's a freaking BEATER.  He's good enough to build around, far moreso than Wilhelm.

    TBH I've always thought Wilhelm sucked in the current card pool, and in all the games we've played vs. empire I've pretty much been proven right... too often he forces you to make bad attacks on zones you wouldnt naturally go after.  That's pretty much terribad for an aggro deck (the only way to be competitive w/ Empire right now).  He's a trap, and decks built around him are highly likely to be awful until Empire card base can support a non-aggro deck.

    Friedrich OTOH is exactly what Empire wants.  He doesn't make Empire good enough yet, IMO, but he is a card.  Dismissing him is a mistake.

  12. Posted

    Post some walkthroughs vs. dwarves?

    Clamatius and I arent even playing W:I anymore becuase we've given up beating dwarves.  If you think you can beat them, I'll take ideas from anywhere at this point.  Freely admit I havent playtested the matchup, but the theoretical holes in your strategy are pretty glaring, and obvious to more than just me (as you'll recall from the feedback you got in your "slow-roll my deck for 3 weeks" thread).  If it doesn't turn out that way in practice, cool.  I'm open to changing my mind.  Post a couple game walkthroughs turn by turn when you have some time?

  13. Posted

    Card design thread!!!

    Reasonable answer to Mining Tunnels, Innovation & Warpstone Excavation:

    • 'Dese Go Boomz!! Orc Quest, 1OO.  As long as a unit is questing here, opponents cannot play developments from their hand.  At the end of your turn, if a unit is questing here, put a resource counter on <>.  Remove X resource counters from <> and sacrifice it: destroy all supports with printed cost X or less and all developments.

    Weak answer to Reclaiming the Fallen:

    • Dazzling Glare Dark Elf Tactic, 4KKK. Until the end of turn, if a unit would enter play under an opponent's control, it enter's play under your control instead.  You choose in which of your zone(s) the unit(s) enter play.

    Medium answer to Reclaiming the Fallen:

    • Bastion of Filth.  Chaos Support.  2C.  1 power.  Forced: When a unit enters play, if it isn't the first unit that has entered play this turn, corrupt it.

    Strong answer to Reclaiming the Fallen:

    • Ban the f***ing thing.  FFG Tactic.  0.  Forced: stop designing broken cards.

  14. Posted

    It is a sad state of affairs when we are saying "please print Tormod's Crypt, maindecking 3 of them in every deck to combat a single broken card is our only hope".  (And make no mistake - if they printed a card that hosed the discard pile, it would be a 3-of in every deck right now).

    @the list - yep.  That's a fine orc control list.  Will lose 90% of its games to Reclaiming the Fallen.  Plenty to work on & tune here if RTF wasn't in the game, but since it is, move along folks... not really much point in attacking the dwarves along the unit control axis.

  15. Posted

    I have a completely different take on the mirror... I want to be the aggressor, because the dwarf ranger/grudge thrower attrition plan is both really slow and really bad on the card/board advantage front.  So my plan would be use a couple of early grudge thrower-fueled attacks to burn the first zone, then RTF to burn the second.  Slayers are the key card in the matchup; Lure them Out is critical to fight through them.  OIC is right out - too slow, doesnt do enough, and you want to be OICing Slayers anyway, not Rangers.

    And now for fun storytime.... today's test: Clamatius' DE list (posted above) vs. Dwarves.

    Games 1 and 2 were both not anywhere resembling close.  Lets just say Dwarves are capable of broken starts and leave it at that.

    Game 3 OTOH was a real nail biter from the dwarf seat.  He opens on Sorceress to Quest, double-Warpstone to Kingdom.  That's a so-so position for a dwarf deck but upper 10% for him easily.  I go Ancestral Tomb to Kingdom, Innovate into Cannon Crew to Q and... nothing.  So, a top tier start for the DEs and a pretty bad one for the dwarves.  Should be interesting.

    It gets even more rocky from there, as he Sorc + WNYBs my first Ranger (AND reanimates it into his Quest!) before I can find a Grudge Thrower, then drops a second Sorc.  It's hurting time kids... Still, I manage to swarm out a good number of dudes and lay into his Kingdom with a Longbeards.  He's steadily chipping away at my dudes in the Quest zone and putting pressure on my board but not really doing any damage.  He steals a couple more of my guys (Slayers, Longbeards), threatening to live the dream of activating Dwarf Ranger to ping things while playing a DE board.  Eventually he has 5 dudes in his battlefield and is threatening a 2 turn clock.

    Then I cast Reclaiming the Fallen.

    BUT WAIT!  I don't kill him.  (Bet you didn't see that coming!!)  After a couple of grudge thrower activations to pump my team to ~20 some-odd power, he thins down the attacking force by using his stolen slayers and... Ranger pinging + WNYBing a grudgebearer (LIVE THE DREAM CLAMATIUS!!!).  So his entire defending force is wiped (including both sorcs) and his zone is near burning, but he survives.

    During his turn, he draws a mighty 1 card, but his board presence is enough to burn my battlefield, and he drops a couple of guys to his quest zone to protect it.  It all comes down to my turn...

    I draw 4 for my turn, with about ~10 cards left in the deck... Slayers, Rangers, Contested Village, Stand Your Ground.  DOES NOT GET THERE.  I develop the CV to draw off my lone active Mining Tunnels.

    Then I cast Reclaiming the Fallen again and win.

    Nice.  Game.

    (Thanks for reading!  Please ban RTF!)

  16. Posted

     @Clamatius - I thought of an even cooler way to hit them with Slayers... plus it gives you access to using some of their even more broken tricks like RTF, Mining Tunnels, SYG etc.  You'll never guess what it is... :P

    @Kefka - without thrower in the meta, the 3x Burn it Down become unit kill almost without question.  At that point its just tuning, but for my part I find MROS to be a card that by its very existence means you don't have to play more than 1 - people will build around it as long as dwarves occasionally keep them honest.  Slayers/SYG/RTF is really the main angle of attack for dwarves against big unit strategies, while Ranger/Grudge Thrower shores that up against smaller unit swarm.  Currently my unit control suite in Dwarves is 3x Slayers, 3x SYG, 2x RTF, 1x MROS, 3x Rangers, 3x Grudge Thrower, 2x Master Rune of Valaya.  The MROVs probably going to become Lure them Out (better way of dealing with opposing Slayers).  So things do not bode well for your spearmen, though they are no doubt a sexy unit.

    Today's question: why can RTF be played on the opponent's turn?  It wasn't amazing enough as a near-guaranteed zone burning in the lategame, it had to have added value reanimating all your Slayers during their battlefield phase too?  I can't think of a single other tactic on this power curve that doesn't have "play on your turn" if not "play at the beginning of your turn".  

  17. Posted

    @ orc decks: agree, MROS is a serious problem, but thats only if you embrace the *aggro* aggro route and play what amounts to a pile of Skaven (whether they are rats or not).  The "i love it, hit me harder" deck running Boar Boyz etc can shrug off MROS, but it also is slower than a dwarven spoon army.  (That's an f-d up universe, when orcs play 4 cost dudes w/ 1 power and dwarves play Longbeards). I'm not sure Dwarves even cares about getting Grimgor'd if you're on that plan, honestly.  You can't be fast enough to punish them and not get blown out by spite.

    @ DE decks: might be something here.  If there is, and you have the stones to play unit removal against dwarves, they start playing 1-2 Long Winters and hiding their RTFs from your disruption.  (Insert side note gripe about the extensiveness of dwarves' toolbox).  The dwarf deck can easily accomodate some Long Winters for value - it might be a good inclusion regardless.  Spoon brigade with mild disruption v Spoon brigade with KUNG FU UNDEAD REANIMATED HORDE ACTION... I know which side I want to be on.

    Another side note... why are dwarves the best undead deck? :(

    @ Lizards... meh.  Why give up SYG, Rangers, Grudge Thrower and co for a reason to play 3x MROS main?  If you really want to justify 3x MROS because Skaven gets something filthy in the next battlepack, I can get on board with this, but Lizards aren't quite elegant enough of a deck to sway me, yet.

    <- is on the "wait for more battlepacks" plan, personally.  But, I'd love to be surprised...

  18. Posted

    So Clamatius and I playtest dwarves v empire today.  I'm driving the dwarves, with a few metagame tweaks and miser cards for testing.  Things like 1x High Elf's Disdain, 1x Zealot Hunter, 2x Demolition, etc.  But otherwise pretty stock dwarves.  His empire brew I'll let him cover in more detail, but basically aggressive, volley gun + wilhelm plan with minor resource disruption subtheme.

    We run through a couple of games, which dwarves initially take easily but he tightens up and starts learning the right lines of play.

    Our last game of the day is by far the closest.  Epic battles back and forth with actual blocking and combat steps more meaningful than "4 to quest, go".  On the penultimate turn, I'm squeezed into 3-for-1ing myself by triple blocking his Wilhelm, but I keep my battlefield from burning.

    Then I get resources, draw, ponder my options...

    And I play Reclaiming the Fallen to completely blow him out.

    Nice. Game.

    (yes, I slowrolled it during the game too.  thanks for reading!).

  20. Posted

    @SeanXor, its not worthless.  Look at Clamatius' "High Elves Gone Wild" build.  Its probably worst than Descendant of Indraughnir there in the high-cost finisher spot, but its a viable consideration.

    @Penfold, you tell me man.  I think Wytefang's deck is terrible, its easily disrupted (far moreso than thrower ever was) and *easily* played around, especially from a dwarf deck that can sac its own dudes to grudge thrower.  You're more than welcome to sleeve it up and give us some reports.  If results are positive, it is generally very easy to get me to change my mind.  Clamatius has a couple ideas of what we can try vs. dwarves, and we might get around to playtesting those soon, but I've basically given up on beating them in the current cardpool.  RTF is just absolutely devastating to all destruction strategies, and while I really like the High Elf indirect deck, it is just not fast enough.  There might be an empire build with some game, but I'm dubious.

  21. Posted

    You were right as to why I put "right" in quotation marks.  I'm oversimplifying for the sake of making the point. 

    Obviously the game is far too complex to actually solve given any reasonable amount of resources and time.  That doesnt mean there isnt a solution though.  My goal is to get as close as possible.  That doesn't mean I only ever play & tune one deck; on the contrary, in order to find the best deck I have to play & tune *all* of the decks, or at least as many as can be reasonably assumed to be competitive (and probably a few that arent) each time we get a new cardpool.  Optimal deck selection is a function both of the internal power/consistency of a given deck and of the expected field you would play against - as above, a problem that has a solution even if it is both hypothetical and unrealistic that we would ever have enough resources & time to prove it.

    Same point for technical playskill.  We may not know the right answer, but there is a right answer, and we can strive to get closer to it as we learn and discuss the game.  (In this case, "right" translates to "highest EV line of play" or "most likely to lead to a win").

    Does all this make sense?  I'll freely admit that, from some povs, I have less "fun" playing the game this way.  In fact, the game may not even be designed to play this way, e.g. the designers may not give a crap how balanced the meta is, trusting to informal player contracts to keep playgroups balanced.  To that, all I can say is: oh well.  That's how I'm wired; I dervive my fun from solving the puzzle.  We'll all be better off if we respect that there are multiple approaches to the game and none is more or less valid than another.  (Appreciate your quoting that bit of my post too).

  22. Posted

    Wytefang, I don't understand what you're trying to say.  Your above comment is hedged with so many "doesn't necessarily mean", "probably" "I'd just suggest" type comments that I honestly can't discern the point you are trying to make. 

    Are you saying "proving stuff is hard"?  Are you generally observing that these forums are a pointless waste of time? Or just expressing your personal opinion about the state of things today, not meant to be generalized?

     

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