Guest posts by ggabriel2

1

Gold League Decks / Went #1 for the first time

« on: February 09, 2012, 02:46:27 pm »

by ggabriel2

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75m 75m 75m 75m 4vj 4vj 4vj 4vj 4vj 4vj 576 58o 58o 58o 5aa 5aa 5t2 74a 74f 74f 74f 74f 778 778 77f 77f 77f 77g 77g 77g 77g 77g 77g 7n2 7q4 8pm

Card was gravity pendulum, decided to go for flying pulvy and things kind of got out of hand after that. Pretty surprised to break the top 10 with this since it's kind of a rubbish deck I just threw together and has been struggling to stay above 85%, but it turns out people give out a ton of thumbs up for trios.

EDIT: And now I'm back down again. Not surprising, the deck's HP is starting to get low.

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General Discussion / Re: Do you like the idea of Shards?

« on: January 14, 2012, 06:40:52 pm »

I don't like rare cards in general, too much of an accessibility barrier for new/casual players.

Rare cards that introduce new mechanics or do things that would be ridiculously impractical to do otherwise are worse.

Rares that have unique powers that make them complete game-changers are the absolute worst.

Most of the old rares were pretty reasonable design for rare cards. There were non-rare cards that duplicated their functions, and in some cases duplicated the actual rare cards themselves! The rare cards were just more repeatable, more efficient, or more widely usable, but generally not overwhelmingly so. Even the old shards were pretty good: you could use Jade Staff + Flying Weapon as a pseudo-SoG, Stoneskin was an version of SoD, and in most cases there wasn't much difference between using an old SoR and just including an extra quanta source to fuel your powers. A lot of the new shards pretty much toss that out the window.

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Patch Notes and Development News / Re: Elements 1.29

« on: October 10, 2011, 02:34:16 pm »

Wow. I admit that when I first saw the talk about new shards I figured update would pretty much kill Elements for me--the game involves a surplus of grinding even without a whole slew of new big ticket rares. I'm glad to see that my fears were largely unfounded; most of the new cards are pretty reasonable and on the whole it looks like things are getting more balanced, not less. Still not in love with the idea of new shards, but looks like I'll be playing a while longer.

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Card Ideas and Art / Re: Reaper Touch | Reaper Touch

« on: July 15, 2011, 03:01:38 am »

It's OP because it is not only a lobotomizing spell but also does not give the target creature any benefits.

The closest precedent is Liquid Shadow, which shares 2 of the same 3 effects (lose active skill, gain 1 poison.) It's true that Reaper Touch is a much more powerful CC spell, but Liquid Shadow is a dual-use card that is arguably a buff first and foremost anyhow. And Liquid Shadow gets cheaper.

I like the concept. It's a three-way CC threat: damage reduction, damage, and lobo in the same card. It packs an appropriately hefty cost, though, which seems to be a running theme with a fair number of 's cards. If the crowds demand a more interesting twist than pure CC, an alternative using the same card art might be to make it poison + lobo + immediate burrow on the target and change the title to something about graves. Then it becomes a dual-use card in its own right, retaining the damage reduction/damage/lobo combo while giving it a potential alternate use as a temporary pseudoquint (until it dies from poison.)

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Card Ideas and Art / Re: Poltergeist | Minor Poltergeist

« on: July 14, 2011, 11:25:23 pm »

Spend and destroy one of your permanents in order to have a 20% chance of doing what Chaos Seed does for ? What?

The concept of having a creature that you can target (apparently) but the enemy can't is interesting; giving it an alternate death condition and making it fairly useless for its cost is probably the way to go, but I'm having trouble wrapping my head around the point of this other than a way to get an invincible Butterfly Effect target.

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Forge Archive / Re: Wave Distortion | Wave Distortion

« on: July 14, 2011, 01:54:01 pm »

Oh man oh man oh man this is a spectacularly good concept and I really want to see this in game. I could do without the weird achievement unlock-style purchase condition, but it's easily the best card concept I've seen pitched in a while.

Balance-wise, I think you pegged it pretty well. If anything I'd say it's underpowered--one primary use here is as a cheap imitation Silence, and getting double the duration for double the cost is a really good trade, but while you can use Distortion as a specific counter to certain spells you're generally not going to be able to completely lock down the opponent since they can still play creatures/permanents. They also get the option to spend their spells as Shockwaves for free CC capability, which tends to make for a more interesting gameplay experience than being stuck not able to do anything at all. I would say it could use -1 to the cost or possibly +1 duration.

The uses for this card would be amazing, though, and would fill a niche that people have been badly wanting for a while. It has some interesting possibilities for deckbuilding flexibility, since you can essentially add dual-use CC to all the spell cards in your deck, but more importantly it's a soft counter to a lot of control/denial cards. Explosion, Steal, Black Hole, Quicksand, Silence, Nightmare--a lot of the most frustrating cards in the game can be held off while you have Distortion up, plus it can stop some potent setup cards such as Supernova or Quintessence. At the same time, though, it doesn't threaten to trivialize any of these strategies: the cost per turn on this is a significant drag, low duration means it takes a lot of cards to chain them, and you're feeding your opponent free CC power.

The works really well, too. I think badly needs more love, and the gameplay themes of flexibility and freedom (in that it can counter denial strategies) are a great thematic fit.

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Duo-Decks / Re: Taking liquid antimatter to the next level (1.28 FG farmer)

« on: July 13, 2011, 02:41:43 am »

Considering there was a post about possibly not having enough pillars followed shortly by a post about having too many pillars, I'm guessing it's probably just about right. And sure enough, it's a fairly common occurrence that in the crucial early stages of a battle you will find yourself with just barely enough quanta coming in to play stuff as you need it. More often you'll have a little bit of excess (which will turn into a lot of excess as the fight goes on, but that's okay because if you last that long you've almost definitely won--assuming you are not foolishly trying to tackle a Feral Bond god, anyhow), which gives you a bit of a safety net just in case.

Swapping in a few pendulums would definitely help your case against denial gods (who tend to shut down your much more easily) at the cost of being a lot worse at facing heavy rushes. Considering that you can easily milk some of the rush culprits, and most of the denial heavy gods will shut you down even with some extra pendulums, I think it's probably not worth the switch.

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Duo-Decks / Re: Taking liquid antimatter to the next level (1.28 FG farmer)

« on: July 12, 2011, 03:35:17 pm »

Score definitely increases. My EM% is not as consistent as win% but with practice you should be able to EM at least 20% of the games you play. If you can EM 1 game out of 5, it is impossible to lose score (because every 1 EM gives you 120 score and every 4 losses gives you -120)--and you're not actually losing 4 games for every 1 EM.

Actually there is a way to beat Scorpio with decent %, but that includes exploiting a bug on Poison+Antimatter: If you're about to get lethal poison damage, and the creature #1 is Antimattered, you're not gonna lose.

This doesn't always work, and even when it does you'll usually be at lethal poison long before Scorpio plays a dragon--which means that as soon as he does play that dragon, it will probably finish you off before you can do anything about it. Scorpio is very much beatable, but with or without the bug you're mostly reliant on him getting a dragon out early and that's a rare sight.

I don't have any particular moral compunction against it, though. The first time I had a two-game win streak going in platinum arena I lost my shot at a rare spin because I antimattered my dune scorpion to get through a shield and inadvertantly made the opponent immortal. As far as I'm concerned, turnabout is fair play!

Edit: I've gotten only 1 pillar in the opening hand in 7 games of FGs. Just saying, i think it needs a bit more quanta production.

Common sense says that's an anomaly.

One-pillar draws are not that uncommon--they happen about 14% of the time with only 12 total pillars out of 32 cards. You will often be waiting at least 3-4 turns anyhow just for a good antimatter target to get played, though, so most of the time you can afford to wait anyhow.

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Card Ideas and Art / Re: Holy Aura | Holy Aura

« on: July 12, 2011, 03:04:27 pm »

Aether Mark -> Fractal Ball Lightnings. Slower and less reliable than conventional rushes, but when you're dropping a hand full of 6|5 creatures for a total cost of 9 you catch up in a hurry.

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The Arena / Re: Disparity of outcomes?

« on: July 11, 2011, 08:10:52 pm »

Decks will lose and drop out fast, so the only hope is that players will keep making more decks every day. Can this work in the long run?

Yes. Decks drop out fast because players keep submitting many decks per day. There are only 500 slots for active decks--and remember that the bottom 250 largely consists of decks that are on their way out, because room has be continuously made to accommodate new decks being submitted. Only the best 200~250 decks really get to stay in since the rest of the T500 is given over to those new untested decks and mostly consists of failing decks that are on their way out. The ratings algorithm automatically adjusts itself to keep rankings consistent: when Gold was at +6/-30 and you needed an 83% winrate just to stay in place, that was because the competition for those 200 or so "safe" slots was so fierce that there was no room for a deck with a mere 80-82% winrate. Right now things seem to have cooled off a bit, because Gold is giving out +8/-30 rating.

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Duo-Decks / Re: Taking liquid antimatter to the next level (1.28 FG farmer)

« on: July 11, 2011, 01:58:27 pm »

Nice :3

Also: Chaos Factory (http://elementscommunity.org/forum/index.php?topic=20107.0).

Side note: You're missing Dream Catcher in your breakdown

It's a pretty much going to be an auto-quit, though.

Early Discord (comes up surprisingly often for 4 copies in a 76 card deck) = bad.
Early Pests and BH trolldraining your quanta = bad.
Purple Nymph without playable LS in hand to pseudo-Lobo = bad.

The only thing saving you is the low damage potential, but the sheer amount of denial is enough to slow you down to their level. Early Discord is almost always the signal to auto-quit.

Whoops, yeah. Remember, though, the low damage potential is a double-edged sword (or rather, a no-edged sword) because your whole strategy revolves around hijacking the enemy's damage potential. About the only thing that makes Dream Catcher beatable is the possibility of a good hatch from an early Fate Egg, because if you're relying on micro aboms you need more than +10|+10 from CP to even get close to enough damage. (Deja Vus are decent if you can catch them with 3x CP or so, but due to quanta denial you can't afford to spread a lot of liquid shadow around; typically I think you'd end up trying to get one big vampire and then desperately stockpiling whatever you can so that you can take out any nymph that gets played.)

Speaking of the Chaos Factory variant, Dream Catcher is probably one of the gods where Mutation would be most useful: gives you an extra shot at getting a buff creature to use AM on, and if you hit a nymph you've killed two birds with one stone. I would still be amazed if you managed more than maybe 15-20% against him even with mutations (a generous estimate, I think)--still not even worth playing, considering it's not a fast or high payout match.

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Farming Studies and Statistics / Re: FG Efficiency Study - Applying statistics to all of the myths

« on: July 11, 2011, 03:19:59 am »

No, I don't wish.  The standard protocol, as mentioned, will be to tease out skipped data once enough raw data is collected, based off some determined FGei.

The deck is intended for aggressive skipping, but the StatMasta sample I posted followed your instructions to the letter. You specify not to skip any gods, but that "If you are 95% sure you cannot win a match, you may quit out", specifying that if you were literally out of options (e.g. quanta lock) and could no longer win that you could bail. I played out every single game until the point where it was no longer possible to win--not merely difficult or unlikely, not "well assuming he plays one more of those" or "unless I draw the next three cards I really need", not just 95% sure, but 100% absolutely impossible based on the present conditions in the game. I played through and recorded loss times every game for gods that I'm pretty sure have a < 1% winrate with the deck given.

quick question for you.
How much do the tower shields help? I don't see them helping all that much.

I posted a thread (http://elementscommunity.org/forum/index.php/topic,28482.0.html) where I go into more detail, but they do save you on a pretty routine basis. Most of the gods that lack PC can also spam enough creatures to potentially overwhelm you even with good antimatter/CP draws. You can certainly do "good enough" without the shields, but overall I'm pretty sure it's substantially to your advantage to have them in the deck.