I'm sorry to say it, but I'm happy Earth got eliminated. This war was quite miserable, for several reasons. There's the usual blah blah RNG, where we had a few nearly sure wins lost (6 reverse times losing to grabbow...) but that's not anybody's fault, and while it contributed to our loss, it's not really what I want to say.
1) I got to play 2 out of 7 of my matches, and sub for 2 more. Why? Because nobody is left in War in North American timezones. My entire team was 6-8 hours east of me, as were all my opponents, so I could only play matches on the weekends. This didn't make War fun. I had a good team and I stand by them 100%, but I joined War to play matches, not get subbed for. A similar problem exists for tournaments; most of the best NA timezones for tourneys were deleted, and I haven't been to a tournament in months, not because I quit them, but because they're at 3am or 4am or 6am or else Saturday evening when I'm normally out.
2) Many of the event cards were worded extremely poorly. They had to be read, and read, and read again. Even then, we had no idea what they said. We discussed and asked in chat, and we still often didn't know.
3) Two of the event cards (rounds 5 and 7) had tiny microscopic 1 point font timers several pages down from the main page, where they were easily missed. Furthermore, even if we hadn't missed them, due to the timezone problem above, we still didn't have any time to do anything about them, because the only time our team could meet was Saturdays, and by then, the event cards had portions of them expired. When it takes a minimum of two days to send a back and forth PM between teammates, because I send one after work, and they send one when they wake up, and I get my first chance to read it after work the next day, when I then send a reply, well, it's pretty obvious only a chatroom is going to get anything done, and by then, it's too late for the event cards.
4) Information regarding how to use some of the more complex actions in War was not explained properly, or had contradictory explanations. deuce22 asked me after our match why we didn't send "The Immortal" as our deck, to which I responded that it lost last round and was discarded. He asked why we didn't save it with discard tokens and I told him we didn't have any from the previous event cards due to the above mentioned problems, and that we only got some this round that we hoped to use in round 8 if we made it there. He said that they could have been used in round 7, which contradicts what we were told and read, and apparently their team WAS allowed to use round 7 discard tokens for round 7. I have no idea how this happened, but the event cards and rules surrounding some of the more unusual features, like side matches, discard tokens, and so on would have made a technical writer commit suicide in embarrassment.
Anyway, so yeah, I don't care that we lost; stuff happens. I do care that War was (again) managed so poorly. I will not be participating in War #12. If I'm not having fun, what's the point? I shouldn't need to get people in chat to help translate broken English explanations or muddle through an event card that makes quantum electrodynamics look simple, and I'd like to actually be able to play some matches in my time zone for once.
