Guest posts by foyle

1

Rainbow Decks / Statistics on 43 Rainbow God Deck - 80% win rate

« on: December 15, 2009, 10:10:03 pm »

it looks like we have the same reasons for liking the deck (small enough to be fairly reliable, and multiple copies of cards).

Having said that, the Maxwell's demon may be an exception to this because you never really need to rely on it.  It and the Otyugh's are basically serving the same purpose, the Demon just uses a different quantum (and the one you have marked) to do it so it could ease up the gravity quantum usage a bit.  The demon would be nice for seism since you could kill the pesky 9/11 guys after a firestorm, who are the only real threat if you are able to get his shield.  You could also get any of his unborrowed guys, and you usually have a bunch of extra entropy vs Seism since the pace is usually slow against him. 
However there are certainly some disadvantages to the Demon, so I am not saying it is better to include him I just want to try it out.  One notable problem is that in the first few turns you will often actually have less Entropy quantum than gravity due to the super novas, so you wouldn't be able to get the Demon out on turns 1 or 2 like you can sometimes do with the Otugyh. 

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Rainbow Decks / Statistics on 43 Rainbow God Deck - 80% win rate

« on: December 15, 2009, 10:10:03 pm »

Seems a very good deck, problem is that a bigger (48-50 card) deck can give you more card variety, leaving you the chance to use an eternity and miracle: this improves your games against scrorpio, rainbow and morte (that have very low winning %) not slowening you too much.

I think more card variety is worse though... what I like about this deck is that it is fairly reliable what cards you will have, yet unlike the super small decks (which, being smaller, are even more reliable) you have a backup copy of each creature so its not too bad if the god kills one.  Eternity you really don't need, I guess it is sometimes nice to rewind the opponents card but even at 43 cards this deck really never needs to rewind your own cards.  In fact even without the Eternity I basically always continue to draw cards as fast as possible until I'm down to about 7 or 8 cards (except vs Miracle, who I usually stop at 15 cards unless I have been able to destroy his light towers by then), and it has never been a problem.  By that time you should have enough damage on the table to kill the god within 3 turns.  I have decked out only once, and it was when Rainbow drew a miracle on his last turn before dying (he had no cards in his hand prior to the turn).  You could stop drawing a little earlier than me as well without much impact if you really wanted to be sure you didn't deck out. 
As for Miracle, there are some very rare occassions it would help, but to add it you would need to change a lot about this deck.  First of all you won't have enough light quanta as it is to ever cast it, so you would need a lot more towers or unupgraded sundials or both.  And having the sundials be free to cast is very useful in common situations for me (example, with the low number of towers, on turn 2 it is not too rare to have 1 entropy quanta, one or more supernovas, and no cards you can play other than sundial.  It is very nice to play a free sundial, knowing that the next turn you can use your supernova(s), which will supply enough quanta to use the sundials card draw.  I also don't think Miracle is that good, even against Scorpio... drawing a Feral Bond is usually better.  Scorpio really hasn't been that bad for me so far with this deck, since it usually doesn't take you too long to draw some combination of otyughs/firestorms/pulverizer that you need to keep him under control, and with 2 boneyards, 2 queens and 2 feral bonds in the medium-sized deck, you can usually quickly build up enough creatures to out heal his poison.

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Rainbow Decks / Statistics on 43 Rainbow God Deck - 80% win rate

« on: December 15, 2009, 10:10:03 pm »

I think I agree its better to keep 3 Otyugh's just so you draw one faster.  I actually had a game last night where ALL 3 Otyugh's were my last 3 cards of the deck.  Since I had no eternity I was kind of freaking out, but somehow I won (I forget which God it was now... was not Miracle or Incarnate, I think it was Chaos Lord or Morte).  Since Otyugh is a main part of this deck I was impressed that the deck was still versatile enough to win without it (my Fallen Druids did not mutate my fireflies with any creature-controlling abilities either).  Basically the fact that I had 2 rain of fires for creature control and supplying my bonewall allowed me to win without the Otyugh.  But in any case, it is not an experience I want to increase by having only 2 Otyugh's.  And with 3 you usually get one by the time you have 4 Gravity Quantum which is a great help in staying in control and speeding up the game.
Thanks for the tips regarding Seism.  I had not noticed exactly at what point he rewinded the Otyugh, so I will try to keep him from growing that big (then again, if in a Seism game I am able to eat more than 3 creatures to begin with it probably means I've gotten enough quantums to win).  I had also not thought of not eating his gnomes, perhaps I will try that.
I did try one variation where I just kept all the same cards and added one PU.  Once I made this change I played about 5 games, and for 3 of them I got absolutely terrible draws and lost (I lost to MIRACLE and INCARNATE in back to back games!).  In both I just had strange draws where ~20 cards into my deck I still had not drawn sundials or creature control (Otyugh/firestorm or even a druid I think).  In all the games I had a PU in my hand which was doing me no good (I could PU Miracle's 18/18 dragon but that won't make him kill me any slower).  I couldn't help but think, "if only this PU wasn't in my deck I very well may have drawn that sundial on my last turn."  And then even in the games I won, the PU was never that useful.  Since there are multiple copies of all creatures in the deck, you usually don't need to PU your own that badly.  PU-ing some 15/15 thing is always nice, but it almost never wins the game for me.  So I decided since adding a PU a) expands your deck even bigger when the number of towers you have already is walking a thin line, b) will very rarely be the difference between a winning and losing game vs the AI and c) this deck is already reasonably fast as far as false gods go, it didn't seem worth it.  And there aren't really any cards I would want to take out.  I like the number of firestorms, Otyugh, Hourglasses in there for sure... I also would not want to take out a Fallen Druid since having only 1 with them being so easy to kill is annoying.  And Druids are also great for speeding the game up.  If you wanted to replace a card for the PU I would probably go for a FFQ, but I don't think it would end up being worth it (with only 1 FFQ you would often not draw it until late game, which could slow some games down considerably since the fireflies are basically your only unit with any attack power aside from mutations)

I'm not sure how many games I've played with it so far (too many considering its only been a couple days!), but I'm still lovin it.  Rainbow and Hermes I have not found to be too bad, though they can occassionally win.  Really though it seems like going into each game I expect to basically always win, unless I am facing Seism who I lose to more than I beat.  But I'd rather just lose those games against Seism than change the deck around and add cards that are more or less useless against other gods.  

If on the rare chance I try some variation that does work, I will let you know!  Maxwell's demon is another one that I would be interested in trying to fit in if possible since the mark is Entropy, but like PU it may just prove to not be vital enough to warrant adding.  With the rain of fire's the Demon would work great and may be nice at killing some of Seism/Rainbow/Herme's creatures that are too big to eat normally (they are also still just as useful after suffering an opponents rain of fire, which is nice as well).  The demon is perhaps one that an Otyugh could be replaced with since it serves basically the same purpose.  Disadvantages are if you happened to start with 2 Druids and a Demon in your hand, it would probably take quite some time to play them all.  Though then again Druids usually aren't that useful in the first few turns of the game anyway.  I think I will try that next time (replace 1 Otyugh with 1 Demon) and see how it goes.

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Rainbow Decks / Statistics on 43 Rainbow God Deck - 80% win rate

« on: December 15, 2009, 10:10:03 pm »

Vice123,
Thanks for posting these, I tried this last night and had similar success to what you are reporting (though of course played many less games).
I like this deck, I think it may be my favorite God Farming deck so far.  I actually lost to Miracle once but it was just a strange draw where I got no sundials before his dragons could kill me.  Other than that I basically only lost to Seism, though he generally rocked me (I think I went 1 for 4 or 1 for 5).  Losing a lot to Seism seems fairly unavoidable though, and even adding a protect artificat is only going to help in the 1/3 of the games when you can draw it early.  Your deck seems fairly fast too though (although there is no Eternity I had no problem with running out of cards and usually didn't even have to slow my drawing down except perhaps against Miracle), which is nice and you will usually win with elemental mastery.
Playing this deck (or just looking at it) you will notice there is a huge constraint on Gravity and Life quantums.  Although it can seem annoying when its happening (very often you have to choose between Pulverizing a permanent or eating a creature, or creating a firefly or mutating something) in my experience it did not really lead to losses (I guess if you are able to get an Otugyh and Pulverizer out in the first place, you are probably in control and likely going to win even if you can't use both every turn).  There are also a couple quantums that aren't used at all, however I can't imagine many tweaks that could make it better (I like the size of the deck and wouldn't really want to add more cards).  One thing that I might try, and I'm not sure if you have already or not, is replace the 3rd Otugyh with a Parallel Universe.  Aether is not used by anything, and with the constraints on Gravity, in many games I only cast 1 of the Otugyhs to begin with and keep all the rest in my hand.  However, this would of course would lower your chance to draw an Otugyh, and one of the things I really like about this deck is you usually get one very early on which prevents the god from amassing a huge army before you draw one (this is especially nice vs Scorpio who I ended up beating probably 4 out of 5 times or so).  Alternatively I would also like to try it with the PU added and nothing taken out and see if it messes with the balance.  If there were some way you could do Mark Gravity that would be nice, but I don't think it would work with Supernovas and I don't think it would be worth it to downgrade to regular Novas just for that (then your Life quanta would be even more rare, and with not that many towers in the deck the Supernovas seem pretty critical in the early part of the game).

Anyway I am just rambling, there are my random thoughts on the deck and thanks for posting it, it works great!

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General Discussion / Slot wheel mysteries revealed (finally!)

« on: December 15, 2009, 10:10:01 pm »

Given that method for the spins, and the fact that we now know the composition of the T3 decks, this presumably means we can calculate the odds of winning various cards (read: rares) from those decks.

EDIT: This should also help us optimise rare farms, too, if someone so inclined wants to run through the maths.

Daxx, I tried to get into this issue on another thread in this category:
http://elementscommunity.org/forum/index.php/topic,570.msg5612#msg5612 (http://elementscommunity.org/forum/index.php/topic,570.msg5612#msg5612)

I have a couple posts looking at the math and the results of a simulation I ran.  It seems the best is probably 6xRareA, 6xRareB, 6xRareC, 12xPillar.  This makes it so Pillars will almost never be in your spinner, so you have a decent chance of winning the other 3 rares.  6xRare A, 6x RareB, 18x Pillar also works and will give a little higher chance for winning rare's A and B than the 6x6x6x12 method, but you will also get a fair amount of pillars in there too and less overall rares than 6x6x6x12

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Fire / Mono Fire Speed Deck for grinding AI3

« on: December 15, 2009, 10:09:54 pm »

As he stated it is a simulation he created, that will simulate what cards you can draw/play based on a certain deck, using that information to calculate how many turns on average it will take to do 100+ damage (against an opponent who does nothing).  So no, it will not play the actual game for you, it is just doing calculations.

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Card Ideas and Art / equality between bolts: give more power to the icy one!

« on: December 15, 2009, 10:09:53 pm »

I'm not so sure it would really be hugely different to do a similar deck with current cards Scaredgirl.  First of all the deck you are hinting towards seems like it would have well over 30 cards (you listed 18 cards so far without any that will dmg them or give you quanta).  So ideally I think you agree this would want it to be trimmed down to 30 cards, and since even with the change in this situation both Sundial (free cost, 2 turn delay for all mobs) and Congeal (1 quanta cost, 4 turn delay for 1 mob) are superior to the Ice Bolt (1 quanta, 2 turn delay for 1 mob), you would want to keep 6 Dials/Congeals and probably would end up minimizing the ice bolts to somewhere between 0-2 anyway.  Squids may or may not be necessary, I just won my first one recently so I haven't tried it out yet -- I do know that I find them quite annoying when Scorpio has them, but that will certainly vary depending on what kind of deck you are playing.  But my overall conclusion was that I had doubts that replacing 1 squid with 0-2 ice bolts that had a 2 round delay would really make a "huge" difference, though that is of course just subjective anyway.
Either way though that doesn't really matter, I agree that 100% chance of 1 round delay is probably better anyway and I think that could be a nice change to make the card more useful.
As to Jellyfish idea about 2 dmg every 5 quanta, this would make the card stronger than even fire bolt in damage alone so that does not make sense.  It needs to do less damage than fire bolt, but have some other somewhat useful function as well.  Currently the side effect is not really useful at all because it is too low of a chance to rely on, so if you want to cast the bolt on a creature that has more HP than you can deal with the bolt, you are better off waiting until your quanta is large enough to kill it with the bolt outright (in which case it doesn't matter if it freezes).  

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Card Ideas and Art / equality between bolts: give more power to the icy one!

« on: December 15, 2009, 10:09:53 pm »

I doesn't? Just think about a poison deck 6 x Ice Bolt (with 100% freeze), 6 x Congeal, 6 x Sundials. Opponent could be totally shut down.

I am not sure if this would be overpowered or not, I am not totally convinced though.  I do think it would be good, but may not be vastly different from doing the same thing with the current cards and throwing some squids in there.  Also in the case you would be using it here, it seems like although the Ice Bolt is useful, the Congeal is the much more powerful spell still.  If you would be using the Ice Bolts/Congeal to just freeze lock opponent creatures while they are poisoned to death -- in this case the Ice Bolt, while useful, is still only 1/2 as effective as the Congeal anyway.  So it is hard to say this is "overpowered" while Congeal is not.  I do understand that in a way it allows you to get 12 of a similar card instead of just 6 though, which could cause problems. 
It does seem though that Ice bolt is generally a disappointing skill as it is now though.  What about the same idea, but 100% chance of a 1 turn freeze?  Basically just changing the card from 50% chance of a 3 turn freeze to 100% of 1 turn freeze (note: I am not positive its currently a 50% chance, I rarely see the spell cast so I forget how often it happens but it seems 50% could be right).  This would actually lower the amount of expected turns of the freeze lasting (from 1.5 expected to 1), but I like having a 100% chance you can count on much more than a random effect. 

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Off-Topic Discussions / Is Obama going to apologize?

« on: December 15, 2009, 10:09:53 pm »

Bush did pretty much the same thing, though admittedly he was only running for the presidency at the time and was not yet the president:
http://www.snopes.com/politics/bush/bushcuss.asp
He also did not apologize for it:
When directly asked about hsi remark, Mr. Bush responded, "I regret that a private comment I made to the vice-presidential candidate made it into the public airwaves," which was not an apology.  when pressed as to whether he would apologize, he replied, "I was making a comment to... Cheney.  I didn't realize, obviously, the mikes were going to pick it up"

Honestly I don't remember how big of a news story it was at the time though.  I remember hearing about it but I'm not sure if it was a front page story for weeks.
Anyway, I don't have very strong feelings either way, I generally agree with jmizzle7 on this one.  He obviously should never say it on record, but it is not really that terrible of a thing to have said.  Then again I don't think what that senator did is very bad either, he at least knew his comments were public though.  I may be somewhat biased because I think Kanye West is a jackass (we are talking about a man who hijacked a PBS fundraiser for Katrina victims by claiming the ridiculous statement "George Bush doesn't care about black people", among many other annoying attention seeking things he has done)

As to the hypocricy of the administration, I am not going to try to deny that but I also think that is a general behavior of each administration.  I do see the news story on CBS and MSNBC though.  ABC probably does not want to report it since it was their interview and was off the record, so it seems that would be against policy for them to quote it.

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Game Suggestions and Feedback / Gameplay mechanic suggestion: apply elemental marks to cards in play

« on: December 15, 2009, 10:09:53 pm »

I think I understand it, but I could be confused.  However, I don't like the idea at all.  First of all, it does seem more confusing than having the numbers directly adjusted.  Second of all, from a strategic standpoint I don't like it.  It would mean you could never mix different abilities (such as casting momentum on your lava golem for example).  It seems to me that this makes things much more boring and greatly limits the different strategies one can come up with.
In regards to Chival's comment of: "and bijay exactly what balance are you afraid of ruining LOL. this game is not balanced at all."  I agree with bijay on this one.  Although I agree that the game is not perfectly "balanced" or anything, I think you are underestimating the amount of change that this would require making to pretty much every card.  To list some quick examples, plague and retrovirus would become two of the most useful cards by far (it would have the effect of removing every ability from every enemy creature, plus putting a death counter on them).  This in turn makes mind flayer and lobotomizer pretty terrible in comparison.  All characters that 'grow' also then become fairly useless because the opponent can easily just add some other ability to the creature to negate all of the growth you have accumulated.
So basically I think this change would require rebalancing of the whole game, many cards would have to be changed completely, and the end result in my opinion would be a system that is worse than what we have now anyway (I see stacking effects as one of the best aspects of this game, not one that should be removed).

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Card Ideas and Art / equality between bolts: give more power to the icy one!

« on: December 15, 2009, 10:09:52 pm »

I think what he is talking about could work alright even with the freeze being 100% of the time.  Perhaps the un-upgraded could have 50% and the upgraded would have 100% or something.  Remember he is talking about an either 1 or 2 turn freeze, which is less than the actual freeze card (3 turns) and congeal (4 turns).  So basically the card would be like a mix between a weaker Firebolt and weaker Congeal card.

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Seism / Anti-Seism god-farming deck: is it possible?

« on: December 15, 2009, 10:09:52 pm »

I haven't tried to make an anti-Seism deck so I don't have any comments for you, however there is a thread about this already that may help you: http://elementscommunity.org/forum/index.php/topic,416.msg3560#msg3560 (http://elementscommunity.org/forum/index.php/topic,416.msg3560#msg3560)

As an aside, I was able to win 2 Pulverizers on Friday or Saturday playing the top50 decks.  Two of the decks that I would occassionally play against were just "rare farms" filled with their rares and I was lucky enough to win something most times I faced one of them.  I thought top50 might be good in general to win pulverizers since it is a very common item in their decks, though they usually only have 1 in their deck and I wasn't able to win anything rare from the countless amounts of normal decks I played against while doing this.  Almost won a couple Eternities too, though I already have one of those from the quest so I don't really need another anyway.

Since I almost never beat Seism with my god deck I don't know how often you can expect to win it from him.  But anyway my suggestion outside of your deck strategy is if you are going to be playing for awhile, I'd do top50 for about 30 min to see if anyone has a "rare farming" deck submitted at the time and if so keep doing top50.  If everyone you are getting matched up against has a real deck in, then move on to Seism.