Guest posts by PuppyChow

37

Card Ideas and Art / Re: Skelesaurus | Skelesaurus

« on: November 29, 2011, 10:38:06 pm »

Mutating something into a skelesaurus would be awesome   Skelesaurus with devour ftw... makes devouring armagios look bad.  It counters spine carapace/fire shield pretty hard, too, especially if we ever get a way to remove poison from creatures.

Heh. I may alter supermassive later to stipulate that they cannot be mutated into either if that ends up being a problem, since there would eventually be 12 of these types of creatures so mutating one would have a rather high probability. (Which would make sense; how could something like a photon mutate into an ocean or mountain or something?)

38

Card Ideas and Art / Skelesaurus | Skelesaurus

« on: November 29, 2011, 10:26:29 pm »

*Note: Executive decision: Supermassive series is postponed for now until there are more uses for high health creatures that don't get OP when hp gets up in 100s. Cards are edited accordingly... Series is made into a "High Health" series.

NAME: Skelesaurus ELEMENT: Death COST: 8 TYPE: Creature ATK|HP: 7 | 21 TEXT: Bony: Create or add 2 bone walls on death. Degrade: Add 2 poison to Skelesaurus each turn.	NAME: Skelesaurus ELEMENT: Death COST: 8 TYPE: Creature ATK|HP: 7 | 21 TEXT: Bony: Create or add 3 bone walls on death. Degrade: Add 2 poison to Skelesaurus each turn.

ART: David Monniaux -- Creative Commons (Attribute required): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Palais_de_la_Decouverte_Tyrannosaurus_rex_p1050042.jpg IDEA: PuppyChow NOTES: Previously a member of the "supermassive" series I was making, now toned down to simply a high health creature. Even bones turn to dust over time, especially those as old of Skelesaurus. However, with age comes strength too, so Skelesaurus is not easily taken down in ways other than its bones degrading. Finally, when it does die, its larger bones are still leftover, providing bones for a bone wall or even creating one. SERIES: High Health

39

Patch Notes and Development News / Re: Elements 1.29

« on: November 29, 2011, 01:41:07 am »

The rating system seems off to me, you should be able to rate decks upon winning as well as losing, don't you agree?  Besides stopping chronic winners from rating decks they feel deserve the bonus, the current system limits raters to those the deck to be rated has just beaten, a biased crew at best.

Nope, if you were able to rate decks you win against, people will start creating farms. These farms will lose easily, but they stay in the arena because everyone will give it a thumbs up. And most of these "chronic winners" only give bonuses to new decks. 

The farms would go out. This "Thumbs Up" would just halve the amount of rating lost, as thumbs up currently doubles the amount of rating gained.

This still makes farms stay longer than usual, which would be more evident in plat. Bad IMO.

Farms are bad how? I can see the line of reasoning with the Top 50 -- farms could literally stay up forever, and in addition were self farmable. But with number of decks in the arena, the odds of getting one are astronomically low and nobody really makes them since they want the extra cash, little though it is. Saying that farms would stay too long is definitely not a big enough problem to offset the benefits.

Allowing winners to vote could balance out the bias towards no that only having losers vote does. The winner voting wouldn't gain any extra electrum or score or something -- it'd just half the amount of rank a deck loses, and maybe also award the deck creator one-three electrum.

40

Buff This Card! / Re: Immortal | Elite Immortal

« on: November 29, 2011, 01:33:44 am »

I like the idea of immortal Immortals . I think their name doesn't mean "untargetable", but "undying". Other thing is with Phase Dragons as (just my imagination) they phase out for a second, so they can't be targeted. How about changing Immortal stats, removing quint and giving him passive skill "Immortal", which means "When killed, becomes Immortal again". That wouldn't make any problems with gravity pull combo or Rage Potion, but would be cool:

Creature against CC
Cremation fodder (even now, when it's nerfed)
Devour fodder

That would be also cool, cause it could be stopped by freezing, but also buffed by your spells.
Just an example of such card:

Immortal 4/3 for 4 quanta, immortal -------> Elite Immortal 5/3 for 5 quanta.

It's quite cheap, so it wouldn't be only in Aetherstalls, and can be stopped by delaying and freezing so it isn't OP to give them Attk equal to cost.

How about that?

I like this idea, and the general range of damage and cost as well. Just not sure whether or not a card so long standing will receive that big of a reworking.

41

League Archive / Re: Championship League 3/2011

« on: November 25, 2011, 07:43:40 pm »

PuppyChow: 2
RavingRabbid: 1

42

Card Ideas and Art / Re: Neutrino | Tachyon

« on: November 22, 2011, 12:40:12 am »

An imaginary number is a coding nightmare. In fact, it's dead impossible. The defense of creatures is likely saved as an int (or integer). Computer's can't handle imaginary numbers unless you build a specific class for them (object oriented programming). This class would emulate imaginary numbers by having two ints, a and b, and b would be the imaginary part. This class would then need to have all the possible functions of math with imaginary numbers, such as multiplication, subtraction, addition, subtraction, square roots, and more. Then this class would have to have a to string method so that the game would know how to output an imaginary number onto the screen.

Then, after this class was finally created, all game programming that involves a creature's defense would need to be altered to accept objects of this ImaginaryNumber class instead of an integer, and all creature cards would need to be changed to having an object of class ImaginaryNumber as their defense too. And the code within these methods (for instance, the code that makes basilisk blood add 20 hp on) would need to be altered too -- not only the method heading.

This amount of reworking to emulate an imaginary number for health would then need a lot of debugging to make sure it works.

All this work for a single creature? No thank you.

And if you have no clue what I was talking about for all of that, rest easy knowing you are a) not a nerd and b) that this card is mechanically impossible.

43

Other / Re: Relic | Relic

« on: November 22, 2011, 12:22:26 am »

Zanz has said in chat that there is zero chance of relics ever getting a use. That was a few months ago, but I'd say it still stands. Any use you can think of for relic can probably be done as a new card by naming it "Aged Artifact" or something of that sort.

44

Sports / Re: Should Joe Paterno have been fired?

« on: November 17, 2011, 11:49:38 pm »

Most definitely. To put it simply, if you know of a possible incident of child rape, from an eyewitness, and do not go to the police, you are completely wrong. Furthermore, if the person in question is employed under you and you do not fire him or reprimand him other than telling him to stop, you are completely wrong.

Joe Paterno was completely wrong. He wasn't fired for legal issues, yes, but the scandal would have affected him so negatively he probably would not have been an effective coach, and I'd say the moral issues are enough to fire him anyway.

45

Death / Re: Shard of Sacrifice | Shard of Sacrifice

« on: November 15, 2011, 02:10:27 am »

Oh, ok. So why was it better to play them all at once instead of chaining them again?

The only reasons I can think of to chain SoSas are 1) if you are at 8 cards and want to avoid discard and 2) to time an EM correctly.  And I'm not even sure if you could find a situation where chaining them would help in the second case over just playing them separately; I'd have to think about it more than I want to :p

I'll bite. You have 200hp, and the opponent has 39 damage on the field. You will win from poison in 4 turns. If you play the SoSacs one at a time:
Turn 1: You take 40 damage from SoSac. Poison means you win in three turns.
Turn 2: You have 199 hp. Poison means you win in two turns.
Turn 3: You have 200 hp. Take 40 damage from SoSac, or don't play SoSac. You either have 160 or 200 hp and will win next turn.
Turn 4: You either have 161 or 199 hp, depending on choice from above. You win without EM.
But if you played the two SoSacs at once...
Turn 1: You take 80 damage from SoSac. Win in three turns.
Turn 2: Poison means you win in two turns. You have 159 hp.
Turn 3: TTW: one. HP: 198.
Turn 4: You win this turn, and have 200hp. EM.

In other words, in cases where you have close to max hp, the opponent has between 20-40 damage (closer to 40, the farther away from your max you can be), and you will win in 4 turns, playing multiple at a time will result in an EM while not playing multiple won't.

46

Death / Re: Shard of Sacrifice | Shard of Sacrifice

« on: November 01, 2011, 01:05:11 am »

The break even point is now 10 damage per turn, right? If the opponent has 10 damage per turn, then once the SoS's effect is over you will have the same exact health you would have had if you hadn't played it. It starts blocking damage at 11 per turn, but at that point it is hardly worth its cost unless you're a mono death. It really only starts getting useful once its at around 15 damage per turn, when you save 20 health overall (you get a net 10 instead of net 30 done to you). But you can't start chaining them until the opponent has 20 damage per turn, right?

I'm not seeing this card being as good anymore. To be able to chain them your opponent needs to have 20+ damage on the field before you get down to 40 health. Won't happen very often and at that point its cost isn't worth it; even if those conditions are satisfied, it's just 12 turns where you won't be playing much either unless you're mono death. Not saying its underpowered, but now rather than being a great card that could be used to help decks that normally wouldn't be viable viable, it's now a bit more limited. Oh well.

With 32 damage done the threshold was 16 damage before 32 health left, which happens much more often than 20 damage before 40 health left. I'd say 36 damage would be a happy medium but at that point its splitting hairs I suppose. It's still a good card. Just won't be *as* good.

Break even at 12|10 damage per turn. Thus it will be played at 13|11 damage per turn. At 13|11 damage per turn (4hp healing per SoSac) it is slightly less efficient than Heal or Holy Light.

How are you calculating how much quanta SoSac takes? It's different for every deck. For some decks the cost of using it is a lot, and only in mono death decks is it *slightly* less efficient than Heal or Holy Light.

So what you're saying is that at its threshold of usefulness, it is still not as useful as heal or holy light and is only usable for mono death. That means SoSac is basically a useless card, since I'd rather use the more efficient holy flash if that's what we're going on.

And if we aren't going on that, you're only going to be able to chain one, maybe two. Let's say the opponent gets 15 damage out by the time you're at 55 health. A completely reasonable expectation. You play SoSac. After using its healing up, you're down to 45 health. You play another. After it gets used up, you're down to 35 and can't chain another. So the rest in your deck are useless.

AKA, I'm not looking at this card in terms of its "efficiency" because it uses a different quanta cost for every thing. I'm looking at the unique terms when this card is truly worth a spot in your deck. Yes, it may heal some damage if the opponent has 12 damage out, but in no way would I use it as the stall card of choice if I knew the opponent would have 12 damage out. Think an upgraded sundial: If the opponent has 15 damage out, playing a sundial "heals" 15 damage per dial. At zero cost, unless you want to draw an extra card. SoSac would cost all quanta besides death and only heal 5 more than the dial.

Here are the conditions in which I would say this card is useful as of right now:

• Opponent has 20 damage on the field. This ensures you will be able to chain them as long as you have them.
• You have played the majority of your combo unless you're mono death. Chaining SoSac = not getting much quanta and not playing many cards.
• You have at least 41 health.

To me, that means this card is not as useful as it should be. Yes, it's a fairly good card, but definitely not as good as I'd like it to me. Making it cost 36 health wouldn't make it overpowered, but it'd be much more usable.

I was referring to the minimum threshold for usefulness in a duel. (Mono deck with 13|11 damage per turn incoming) I was expanding on what you said since you only mentioned the upgraded break even point. Sundial stalls 1 turn for both players and has a minimum threshold of being at least as valuable as 10hp healing would have been. Again these are minimum thresholds. The points where players should be mostly ambivalent about whether to play the card or not. Players typically wait beyond these thresholds because they built their deck to enable higher value average usages through synergies.

Yes, and I'm saying that this minimum threshold is not a useful tool to measure a card by, or at least this card anyway. I'm just saying that this card isn't worth it except for mono death, meaning I don't think it's that great a card... I don't think we're really arguing about anything here haha.

47

Gravity / Re: DECKS

« on: October 31, 2011, 11:19:21 pm »

I do like that idea and deck.

Okay, so we have 3 new decks? I'll add them to this topic once they're finalized.

48

Patch Notes and Development News / Re: What does Elements look without turns - Halloween treat

« on: October 31, 2011, 02:39:32 am »

HAHAHAHAHAHA I LOVE IT.