Heir of the False Gods - Feedback and Looking Forward

[theelkspeaks]

As Heir of the False Gods is almost over, I thought I'd ask for some feedback both on my running of this event and on the ruleset itself.  Was it horribly unbalanced to play in? Is there anything I should keep in mind for my next event I run? Is there anything a future iteration of HotFG with me or anyone else as the host should keep in mind or rebalance?

I hope you all enjoyed the event!

[Zawadx]

Faster round updates, stricter deadlines. Please.

I have a lot to say on the exact balancing of FGs for the next HotFGs, but I'll wait until the event is over. But it was pretty fun an event, so kudos for the awesome theme!

[DANIEELA]

Faster round updates, stricter deadlines. Please.

Lets Rounds last 7 days.On last day opponents can start sending you their corespondence.
According to that you can decide who gets the win on deadline.

Simplyer deckbuilding.
Instead to obligate number and types of cards in decks,
just allow equal cards that some  FG has in his deck (and ban others)
with no further restrictions.

[mrpaper]

Faster round updates, stricter deadlines. Please.

I have a lot to say on the exact balancing of FGs for the next HotFGs, but I'll wait until the event is over. But it was pretty fun an event, so kudos for the awesome theme!

THIS... just so much this....

as for fgs... it was clear from the start that a few fgs were op and a couple up.... as a result... it was almost impossible to win the event with the 29 fgs so no one really reached for it.  Decay, seism, eternal phoenix we're the fg I was using most of the time but I woul much rather played all fgs... just wouldnt give  free wins as some are so crappy!
Divine glory, octane and Jezebel were also strong... the easy to look at this is how many people got the fg bonus point.  On the other hand, 11!! fgs had 4 people or less getting the bonus point .. so well I suggest you upped those 11 a bit (and maybe downgrade a few)and it will be much more fun!

[Zawadx]

Here's feedback on the FG Balance

FGs for possible nerfing:

Seism (17 Players): No matter how you did him, this guy was going to be strong. EQ+RT is an extremely strong denial base, and Graboids complement that with offensive power. But adding free Steel Golems just gave it incredible consistency and strength. With a possible 14 out of 40 cards upped and superior card quality vs pretty much all decks, this FG was a clear best. He was also pretty hard to counter. In future, it should be made slightly more inconsistent, perhaps with requirement of stone dragons and allowing free dragon upps instead of Golems.

Decay (19 Players): The most popular FG, due to its deck being the pretty much predefined Devtal (some players actually listed Decay as Devtal in match results ). tbh I felt that this FG was fine, since it could be countered and was prone to bad draws with 6 fractals. Maybe adding a requirement for a lobo would balance it out.

Eternal Phoenix (13 Players): My go-to deck in the later stages due to its ability to punish unrefined decks very well. EP can use standard Fractix, or Immofractix for added speed if you want. It has several counters, but when it works it hits hard. Maybe constricting it a bit would help.

Divine Glory (17 Players): Alright FG with a lot of versatility; the SoFree let it steal wins for a lot of players, but imo it was well balanced. Good counter to Seism with wings. Perhaps we should weaken the sofrees? It seems inconsistent enough to be balanced for me.

Octane (16 Players): Really strong offensive power gave it a lot of popularity early on. Octane is fine as is, as it can't really run as many hitters as the traditional UG deck. But if needed we could add one more OE+AW to requirements.

Jezebel (12 Players): Extremely fast for the meta, which made it seriously strong. Not sure how to balance it or if needs balancing tho.

Dream Catcher (10 Players): As the only speedbow FG, it had a lot of essential versatility. I used it as a seism counter early on; but later it just mellowed down with people trying out various FGs. imo This one is pretty good as is.

FGs to buff:

Destiny, Ferox, Miracle: Only slightly, as these could wreak havoc is buffed too much. Maybe remove a couple of requirements or add an extra upp or two.

Dark Matter: Never played against it, considering how weird its deck is. It pulls through as a real FG due to the strength of Light and Gravy upped, but really unsuited for the event. Allowing more charger/angel upps would prolly make it good.

Incarnate/Hecate: imo too many requirements for such a small deck. Removing some requirements would make them pretty decent.

Lionheart: Just too weird to work well. Dunno how to buff while preserving the theme; perhaps free upps for Golden HG? And removing lobo ban (which isn't that imbalanced anyways)

Paradox: Least popular FG due to the forced PUs, I believe. Free RoL upps would make it alright I think.

Scorpio:  Forced PU again ruins it. imo Removing NT ban is required.

Serket: Dunno how to buff; maybe some free pillars/pend upps? That would make it pretty strong but inconsistent

Elidnis: Again, forced PU. It needs more free ups, and imo removing the forced PUs (since the orifinal duo is weak enough to begin with).

The main problems with FG balance was already strong FGs getting stronger benefits (Seism, 'nuff said) and the weak FGs being weakened further. I know that weak FGs were supposed to be gimmicks to make the 29 FGs wincon harder, but that was seriously bad design imo. All FGs should be made stronger next time so that this wincon is achievable.

I'm up for helping out/hosting the next HotFGs. Should be fun!

[mrpaper]

Here's feedback on the FG Balance

FGs for possible nerfing:

Seism (17 Players): No matter how you did him, this guy was going to be strong. EQ+RT is an extremely strong denial base, and Graboids complement that with offensive power. But adding free Steel Golems just gave it incredible consistency and strength. With a possible 14 out of 40 cards upped and superior card quality vs pretty much all decks, this FG was a clear best. He was also pretty hard to counter. In future, it should be made slightly more inconsistent, perhaps with requirement of stone dragons and allowing free dragon upps instead of Golems.

Decay (19 Players): The most popular FG, due to its deck being the pretty much predefined Devtal (some players actually listed Decay as Devtal in match results ). tbh I felt that this FG was fine, since it could be countered and was prone to bad draws with 6 fractals. Maybe adding a requirement for a lobo would balance it out.

Eternal Phoenix (13 Players): My go-to deck in the later stages due to its ability to punish unrefined decks very well. EP can use standard Fractix, or Immofractix for added speed if you want. It has several counters, but when it works it hits hard. Maybe constricting it a bit would help.

Divine Glory (17 Players): Alright FG with a lot of versatility; the SoFree let it steal wins for a lot of players, but imo it was well balanced. Good counter to Seism with wings. Perhaps we should weaken the sofrees? It seems inconsistent enough to be balanced for me.

Octane (16 Players): Really strong offensive power gave it a lot of popularity early on. Octane is fine as is, as it can't really run as many hitters as the traditional UG deck. But if needed we could add one more OE+AW to requirements.

Jezebel (12 Players): Extremely fast for the meta, which made it seriously strong. Not sure how to balance it or if needs balancing tho.

Dream Catcher (10 Players): As the only speedbow FG, it had a lot of essential versatility. I used it as a seism counter early on; but later it just mellowed down with people trying out various FGs. imo This one is pretty good as is.

FGs to buff:

Destiny, Ferox, Miracle: Only slightly, as these could wreak havoc is buffed too much. Maybe remove a couple of requirements or add an extra upp or two.

Dark Matter: Never played against it, considering how weird its deck is. It pulls through as a real FG due to the strength of Light and Gravy upped, but really unsuited for the event. Allowing more charger/angel upps would prolly make it good.

Incarnate/Hecate: imo too many requirements for such a small deck. Removing some requirements would make them pretty decent.

Lionheart: Just too weird to work well. Dunno how to buff while preserving the theme; perhaps free upps for Golden HG? And removing lobo ban (which isn't that imbalanced anyways)

Paradox: Least popular FG due to the forced PUs, I believe. Free RoL upps would make it alright I think.

Scorpio:  Forced PU again ruins it. imo Removing NT ban is required.

Serket: Dunno how to buff; maybe some free pillars/pend upps? That would make it pretty strong but inconsistent

Elidnis: Again, forced PU. It needs more free ups, and imo removing the forced PUs (since the orifinal duo is weak enough to begin with).

The main problems with FG balance was already strong FGs getting stronger benefits (Seism, 'nuff said) and the weak FGs being weakened further. I know that weak FGs were supposed to be gimmicks to make the 29 FGs wincon harder, but that was seriously bad design imo. All FGs should be made stronger next time so that this wincon is achievable.

I'm up for helping out/hosting the next HotFGs. Should be fun!

Great suggestions... when does hotfg2 starts?

[willng3]

Very good feedback, Zawadx. So good in fact that I'm going to just use most of this as a basis for a few additional notes I'd like to make.

Here's feedback on the FG Balance

FGs for possible nerfing:

Decay (19 Players): The most popular FG, due to its deck being the pretty much predefined Devtal (some players actually listed Decay as Devtal in match results ). tbh I felt that this FG was fine, since it could be countered and was prone to bad draws with 6 fractals. Maybe adding a requirement for a lobo would balance it out.
Yeaaaah I don't see much of a way to nerf this FG since it essentially is Devtal incarnate. I'd suggest perhaps increasing the minimum deck size if only to make the combo less likely to occur in the early parts of the game.

Eternal Phoenix (13 Players): My go-to deck in the later stages due to its ability to punish unrefined decks very well. EP can use standard Fractix, or Immofractix for added speed if you want. It has several counters, but when it works it hits hard. Maybe constricting it a bit would help.
I'd personally limit this to not being able to use Dims. I felt that they made the deck too versatile even with the restriction.

Divine Glory (17 Players): Alright FG with a lot of versatility; the SoFree let it steal wins for a lot of players, but imo it was well balanced. Good counter to Seism with wings. Perhaps we should weaken the sofrees? It seems inconsistent enough to be balanced for me.
Definitely remove the ability to use SoFr here. IMO, the only PC/shield deterrent that should be permitted here would be Deflags. I'd also exclude Animate Weapons from the upgrade limit as compensation.

Jezebel (12 Players): Extremely fast for the meta, which made it seriously strong. Not sure how to balance it or if needs balancing tho.
Strangely I only encountered this once and it didn't seem to be much of an issue. I do think that increasing the minimum deck size slightly would be a good idea though.

Dream Catcher (10 Players): As the only speedbow FG, it had a lot of essential versatility. I used it as a seism counter early on; but later it just mellowed down with people trying out various FGs. imo This one is pretty good as is.
I used this quite a bit and it worked well because it was essentially a slightly revised version of standard Discake; the 2 BE restriction was pretty much negligible given that they were unlikely to appear in matches and the deck could pull its own weight even when they were. I'd say increase the deck size again here to reduce the ability to Speedbow everything.

FGs to buff:

Incarnate/Hecate: imo too many requirements for such a small deck. Removing some requirements would make them pretty decent.
I actually found Hecate to be one of my stronger options, though I'm fairly certain that has something to do with me having a decent supply of Red Nymphs to both rush and counter rushes when needed. If the Nymphs were banned and some of the other requirements were removed, I think it would be balanced.

Lionheart: Just too weird to work well. Dunno how to buff while preserving the theme; perhaps free upps for Golden HG? And removing lobo ban (which isn't that imbalanced anyways)
I'd also consider excluding Animate Weapon from the upgrade count since I think it would be easier to stick with the theme without detracting from the deck's speed/strength. I basically just used RoL/Hope for this because of that factor.

The main problems with FG balance was already strong FGs getting stronger benefits (Seism, 'nuff said) and the weak FGs being weakened further. I know that weak FGs were supposed to be gimmicks to make the 29 FGs wincon harder, but that was seriously bad design imo. All FGs should be made stronger next time so that this wincon is achievable.

[Regyptic]

Thanks for running this event elk. It was a nice concept and I had a lot of fun playing around with different deckbuilds for some of the Gods.

I think most of my feedback has probably already been covered by others but I'll give a few comments anyway. Speedier rounds and stricter deadlines are definitely necessary (obviously extending deadlines by a few days can be ok if people are trying but can only set a time a day or two after deadline). I know I was one of the slow ones a couple of times but after 2 rounds in a row of my opponents dropping out and with month long rounds at points it's not surprising some people lost motivation. I literally had over 3 month gap between matches at one point.

People have already said a lot about balancing different Gods and I agree with most of it. Seism, Decay and Eternal Phoenix were the most popular with good reason. Seism shouldn't have extra upgrades and could possibly have to include more time cards (Devonian Dragon maybe?), I think making Decay requiring a bigger deck would be a good idea and removing the Dim possibility from Eternal Phoenix sounds good too. Anything to stop them stomping most of the other Gods really. If balancing them ends up being too difficult then perhaps you could consider restricting each player to one or two wins with a God, after which they can't use them any more. This would obviously have its own problems but it would force people towards that secondary win condition and might add another layer of strategy to the event.

Other than that I think removing a few restrictions on some of the Gods would be good to encourage interesting deckbuilding. Hecate, for example, had 14 set cards in a 30-40 card deck with most of the rest of the cards being quanta leaving very little room for player input. As an example, with slightly less restrictions maybe instead of everyone building raging dolls, someone might have been able to make a Fire/Darkness Rainbow using Immo on Dolls to splash BB's and Gravity Pulls (you could still keep a few Rage Pots in there too). Hardly a meta defining deck but it would allow more diversity within the event. Some Gods already had this by the way. I saw a few very different Dream Catchers, for example (I'd really like to see the version Jen-i used against me at some point).

The only other thing I'd like to add is that the knock-out system should probably be better. There shouldn't be rounds where it is impossible for a player to move on and have to play a match anyway. In the second last round, the only way for Zso to stay in was to lose to mrpaper and hope Zawadx and I got exactly the right result necessary for both of us to make the cut. Maybe eliminations should happen every round after a point as well to speed things up a bit.

Once again thank you elk! I'm looking forward to your next event.