Round 5 Discussion

[willng3]

Chatroom:  http://piratepad.net/OldLadySoap

Deckbuilding:
Duel phase has started

Duels:
Round has ended

Spoiler for Standing Vault:

http://elementscommunity.org/forum/index.php/topic,38873.0.html

Spoiler for Discards:

We need to discard 30 cards from the following:

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5bs 5bs 5bs 5bs 5bs 5bs 5bs 5bs 5bs 5bs 5bs 5bs 5bs 5bs 5bs 5bs 5bs 5bt 5bt 5bt 5bt 5bt 5bt 5c9 5c9 5c9 5c9 5f6 5f6 5f6 8po

Spoiler for Salvaging:

We can salvage 6 cards from the following:

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52r 52r 52r 52r 52t 52t 52t 52t 52t 52t 55t 55t 55t 55t 55t 55t 576 576 576 576 576 576 576 576 576 576 576 576 74b 74b 8pk

Spoiler for Event Card:

Notes:
- Choose one of the above for each player (not each team).
- There is no need to create a special "Round 5 Event Card decision thread".  Instead Generals (and Generals only) may edit the Member Roles thread in their secret section with the Event Card choice for each player.  Sample format: Aether2: kev - Salvager - Blitzkrieg Strategy
- If a card isn't specified, it's assumed neither card is selected.
- Thanks to Sevs for the idea (see here and here).

Spoiler for Match-ups:

12

Gen. willng3

vs

Gen. ralouf

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Spoiler for Support Team Matches:

Kai attacks (three players set to defend)
Belligerence attacks (four players set to defend)
UnderneathTheLens attacks (five players set to defend)
drolly attacks (three players set to defend)
killsdazombies attacks (three players set to defend)
attacks (two players set to defend)
MartyrX attacks (two players set to defend)

[killsdazombies]

A tough match up, we are obviously running /aether, what deck will we run though?

[willng3]

I've put on my thinking cap for my match versus Death, and I think I've come up with a reasonable analysis as to what we should do for the next round.

First off, Death must discard 30 cards from these 2 decks:

Spoiler for Hidden:

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4sk 52g 52g 52g 52g 52g 52h 52h 542 542 542 542 542 542 542 542 542 61t 61t 61t 61t 61t 61t 622 622 622 63a 63a 713 713 713 8pu

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4vn 4vn 4vn 4vn 4vn 4vp 4vp 4vp 4vp 4vp 52g 52g 52g 52g 52h 52h 52h 52r 52r 52r 52r 52r 52r 542 542 542 542 542 542 542 542 542 542 542 71a 71a 8pj

Poof, a strong Fractal duo is gone.

With the discards in place they're now down to 108 cards which include the following decks:

Spoiler for Hidden:

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4sk 4sk 4sk 52g 52g 52g 52h 52h 52h 52t 52t 52t 52t 52t 52t 542 542 542 542 5up 5up 5up 5up 5v1 5v1 710 72i 72i 72i 7t8 7tb 8pt

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52g 52g 52g 52g 52g 52g 52h 52h 52h 52o 52o 52q 52q 52t 52t 542 542 542 542 542 710 713 713 713 71b 71b 71b 71b 71b 72i 8pk

Combined salvages, discards etc. comes to 61 cards from decks that weren't discarded, 7 cards from decks that were discarded, and 12 cards from salvages.  So we have a strong idea of what 80 out of 108 of their cards will be.  So 28 of their cards have the ability to be a complete surprise, though I'd be more than willing to bet that they're cards used to splash into Death for random strong duos versus certain opponents (Wings, Discord, Lightning, etc.).

Now when first looking at the situation from our perspective it seems obvious that Death would try to use their Darkness duo against us.  Steals take care of Dim Shields, Nightmare mitigates Fractals, and Dusk Mantle just acts as a general pain in the ass.  But wait a second, Death doesn't know for certain that we still have 4 Dims left in our vault, do they?  I'm sure it seems obvious that we would keep a few in reserve, but there's still a chance they might overlook this.  Let's also take a look at the rest of their match ups.

Death faces Earth and Aether this round.  Earth is down to what remains of the Immortal and some other miscellaneous cards and more importantly an Aether duo with Fractals and Dims.  Aether has god knows what remaining in their vaults, but lost their Sanctuary stall last round.  Aether's RoL/Hope probably also has the ability to counter most of Death's decks.

Based on these facts I'm actually not so sure we can expect to see their Darkness duo from them next round.  Depending on what remains in our vault we could still potentially outrush them even with Nightmare clogging up our hands in addition to Lightnings blasting anything they can throw at us.  Furthermore they don't know if we have Dims or not, whereas Earth and Aether definitely do.  Earth's Fractal deck seems much slower than Frogtal, which makes it a prime candidate for Death to use their Darkness duo against.  I don't think Death would send that duo against Aether, but they might try it if it manages to slow down RoL/Hope enough.

So if Death doesn't send that deck against us, what would they use?  Something fast or something that completely walls off our Frogs/slows them down is what I would expect.  Death has the ability to salvage 4 Dims from Darkness and I'd be very surprised if they didn't have a few Lightnings hidden in their vault somewhere.  Given that we didn't use any Silences last round or Dim Shields it seems like anything with Dims would give us trouble.  And then there's also Wings, though I'm not sure if they still have that or not.  Discord might also still be in their vault, and they could salvage Pandemoniums in an attempt to mow down our Frog army, but Silence takes care of that as well.

So to avoid rambling even further:  I think we should use Silences and Dims in place of Lightnings and Lobos for this round given that I think it's unlikely for something with ridiculous amounts of PC to be used here.  It's a bit of a gamble either way, but prediction always is.  I'd love to hear other thoughts on this situation though.


Salvages/Discards:
Well discarding for this round will be very difficult...

For salvaging I suggest we take 4 Bone Walls and 2 Mummies or 4 Mummies and 2 Bone Walls.  If we manage to defeat Death then that gives us the possibility of fielding a full-fledged Death duo, but we obviously can't make good use of 8 Bone walls or 8 Mummies which is why I'm not decided on which to take; it all depends on what we'll expect them to use.

Support battles:
I still need to think about this more, but food for thought:  we got hard countered considerably last round mainly for the reason that people anticipated rushes and built the appropriate decks to counter.  Now, if people expect the same again then what do you think will happen if we use stallbreakers or actual stalls against them instead?

Also, I have no idea who our support team duels are against since apparently the support team battle thread wasn't updated to show this.

[Helston]

Dim Shields/Silences - I was thinking the same thing and you've hit all the reasons I was going to. Worst case scenario the bring the darkness duo, leaving us with 4 dead dims, and them with 4 dead steals, so we sort of break even. One other thing we should note is that Earth could also have a RT/GotP time duo or Deflag/Rage fire duo up their sleeves from previous rounds, but as you said death know that earth/aether still have Dims.      

Salvage/Discard
Not sure which way to go here, at the moment I've chucked 4 BWs/2 Mummies into the Vault because of how superior our 6 frogs are to Mummies. If we do go with a death duo in future, we're probably more likely to need the defense because of the sheer offensive power a frogtal can bring.

Support teams
Going to get working on them now. We're going to need someone to sub for kdz by the look of it.

This is what's currently submitted:

by

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5de 5de 5de 5de 5de 5de 5de 5de 5de 5de 5de 5de 5de 5c7 5c7 61t 61t 61t 61t 622 624 624 624 7ae 7ae 7ae 7ae 7ae 7ae 80i 80i 8pu

For when you're playing the deck, here's the opening hand statistics.

Runs: 100000
Coin toss wins: 49930
Coin toss losses: 50070
Mulligans: 2208 (2.21% of all games)
Hands without 0 cost cards: 40 (0.04% of all games)
Hands without quanta generation: 40 (0.04% of all games)

Card	Number dealt	Number dealt per game	% of games in starting hand
Adrenaline	47745	0.477	38.97
Life Pendulum	321480	3.215	99.96
Dimensional Shield	94992	0.950	63.83
Fractal	23933	0.239	21.61
Silence	71216	0.712	52.57
Giant Frog	143131	1.431	79.68
Fractal	47573	0.476	38.86

Important thing to note is that this counts both games where you win the toss and games where you lose the toss, so it adds up to 7.5 cards instead of 7 or 8.