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Captain Scibra · « **on:** October 09, 2014, 02:43:27 am »

Alright, here is where the general collection of cards will go for vault planning.

We have an effective size availability of 12 decks, but we don't need that many in pillars/pendulums. We simply need to keep on hand 6 decks worth of pillars/pendulums.

I'm going to say we start with 45 Gravity pillars and 45 Gravity pendulums.

That leaves 275 cards to work with.

48 for chargers and mercenaries? Seems high so this one is strongly up for debate.

I will update this when specific decks are decided upon

dragonsdemesne · « **Reply #1 on:** October 09, 2014, 05:05:48 am »

That sounds like too many chargers/mercenaries, but we will need a lot of them. Keep in mind that they are pretty weak unupped, though. I doubt we're going to use many unupped ones in our decks.

We'll want a full (or very near it) complement of certain off-element staples, like dimshield, fractal, lightning, shockwave, wings, nova, graboid, earthquake, pulverizer, explosion, steal, etc.

A couple marks of gravity instead of pillars might help when expecting earthquakes. (especially vs team earth or water with trident, but anyone might have it)

Gravity shield is a total hoser with the right prediction.

Reflective shields (psiontal, UG spam) will be important in certain matchups; we'll definitely need a few of those.

Colossal dragons make some ridiculously CC-resistant creatures. Not the greatest hitters, but when expecting, say, owl's eye or lightning or something as enemy CC, we'd just laugh.

I love my stalls, so I'd say a full complement of sancs and miracles. Probably sundials, too, since they can be run upped.

trashduke · « **Reply #2 on:** October 09, 2014, 05:02:41 pm »

From the rules: "Conversion: Teams have the option to convert some of their cards. This means that they can replace any card in their Vault with a Pillar or a Pendulum of their element. Converting helps teams to avoid a situation where they would be otherwise forced to build "suicide" decks. Teams have unlimited conversions each round, including before round 1."

This means we can count out the minimum number of pillars for round 1 and fill the rest of the vault with deck cards (maybe 60 pillars to allow 10 for each of the 6 decks for round 1; these could be converted to pends, so it doesn't matter). Then, depending on which teams were are put up against, we convert to pillars/pends as needed.

Maybe we need more than 60 to start, but in any case the rules definitely favor starting with more non-pillar/pend cards and then converting as needed.

Drake_XIV · « **Reply #3 on:** October 09, 2014, 05:10:03 pm »

We'd only need pillars/ pends for 5 decks unless we plan to forgo a Novabow.

dragonsdemesne · « **Reply #4 on:** October 09, 2014, 06:42:14 pm »

It's probably a good idea to take some extra pillars/pends, so that when we inevitably have to discard stuff, we've got some less painful discards. When I was on team time, we started getting squeezed pretty hard in later rounds and even with maximum conversions (not sure if that's a thing now) we had to field decks that had less quanta than we would have preferred.

edit: just read trashduke's post. My concern is no longer relevant, since conversions are still allowed and are now unlimited. Having enough for six decks to start should be sufficient, however; I can't see any reason to take more unless we want to run stalls. (I like stalls... :p)

dragonsdemesne · « **Reply #5 on:** October 10, 2014, 02:09:43 am »

I don't know if it's worth it (I couldn't convince team entropy in war 5) but holy light might be a good pick. We are fairly confident it will work against teams death/darkness, and we can use it upgraded to put in literally any deck.

trashduke · « **Reply #6 on:** October 11, 2014, 06:15:09 am »

Here are my thoughts on the Vault - as a disclaimer, I've never done this before, so I probably don't know what I'm doing.

We could start with 60 pillars (that could be converted to pends), then the following Gravity cards (numbers as baseline rough estimate):
chargers (18)
Black Hole (18)
Mercs (18)
Grav Pull (18)
Acceleration (18)
momentum (18)
Armagios (12)
Titan (12)
otys (12)
Catapult (12)
Shields (8 )
Dragons (8 )
Chimera (6)
Salvagers? (?)
Fire eaters? (?)

That totals 238 cards including the pillars.

In terms of off-element cards we are allowed to have up to 9 copies. The following cards are very strong and mix well with gravy:

discord
fractal
sun-dials
flying weapons
adrenaline

If have 9 of each of these that makes 45, and we are up to 283 total That leaves us with 82 cards; and the following are nice possibilities:

Nova
Panda
Bone Wall
Pulvy
Graboid
EQ
PA
BB
Druid Staves
Deflag
Immo
Phoenix
Miracle
Sanctuary
holy light
Fog shield
Wings
shockwave
reverse time
eternity
Devourers
nightmare
steal
Lightning
PU
Dim shield
Silence
Lobo

Not sure what the right balance of these would be - but it does make our gravy choices tough. Thoughts or comments (aka - somebody step in here who actually knows what they are doing)?

dragonsdemesne · « **Reply #7 on:** October 11, 2014, 06:45:00 am »

Chimera is pretty bad in most cases, although you might be able to make a few decks around it. You actually just reminded me of an idea I had at work today; I'll post it later tonight. I think you've got too many momentums; I doubt we'll need very many of those. There's likely too many gravity pulls and accelerations as well, though I definitely think we need them, just not that many. Black holes are good in some decks, but again, I think 18 is too many. I don't think salvagers are worth taking, but maybe up to 6 fire eaters could be worth it. No more than that, though; they have no use outside of a novabow or a fire duo, and unless we wanted to use both at once, we wouldn't need any more than one deck's worth of them.

In a magical dreamworld I'd like to see most/all of the nongravity cards you listed in our vault... but we won't have room for all of it, especially since our team cost the most in bids, so technically we're already in 12th place. Of course, we'll catch up and win war easily, but it means we have to work at it a bit :p I also think we should be using more dragons than just 8.

Somewhere in our forum, Captain Scibra mentioned that he didn't think DBH would be a good idea. I still think it is a good idea, but we don't really need more than one in our arsenal, maybe two at the most.

Also, it's 24 cards max for in element ones; not sure if you took that into account, but since you capped all your things at 18, I figured maybe that got missed.

trashduke · « **Reply #8 on:** October 11, 2014, 06:01:58 pm »

Quote from: dragonsdemesne on October 11, 2014, 06:45:00 am

Chimera is pretty bad in most cases, although you might be able to make a few decks around it. You actually just reminded me of an idea I had at work today; I'll post it later tonight. I think you've got too many momentums; I doubt we'll need very many of those. There's likely too many gravity pulls and accelerations as well, though I definitely think we need them, just not that many. Black holes are good in some decks, but again, I think 18 is too many. I don't think salvagers are worth taking, but maybe up to 6 fire eaters could be worth it. No more than that, though; they have no use outside of a novabow or a fire duo, and unless we wanted to use both at once, we wouldn't need any more than one deck's worth of them.

In a magical dreamworld I'd like to see most/all of the nongravity cards you listed in our vault... but we won't have room for all of it, especially since our team cost the most in bids, so technically we're already in 12th place. Of course, we'll catch up and win war easily, but it means we have to work at it a bit :p I also think we should be using more dragons than just 8.

Somewhere in our forum, Captain Scibra mentioned that he didn't think DBH would be a good idea. I still think it is a good idea, but we don't really need more than one in our arsenal, maybe two at the most.

Also, it's 24 cards max for in element ones; not sure if you took that into account, but since you capped all your things at 18, I figured maybe that got missed.

Thanks for the comments dragon, I agree with what you've said and think that your suggestions will open up our out-of-element options. Looking at last year's vault was pretty interesting (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AkMokImU4lROdFhrSmktUmFoQUpjaDM4SDVkM2Z3Zmc#gid=31), basically the most in-element cards they had were for mercs and they only had 15. I was taking that as a rough estimate. Their totals don't show up properly in later rounds, but looking at these subsequent rounds in the gdoc linked above, made me want to pad a little more, but you're probably right. They had 57% in-element vs. other elements while my estimates above are 238/365 which is 65%, so cutting down the numbers for momentum, Acceleration, gravity pull, black holes, and chimeras would help bring us to a reasonable number (even adding 6 fire eaters would still drop the gravity numbers by a bit).

What numbers were you thinking for these cards? 10 or 12 instead of 18? and then 8 or 10 instead of 12? What do the rest of you think?

Captain Scibra · « **Reply #9 on:** October 14, 2014, 05:28:55 am »