Vault Planning

[The_Mormegil]

I resent the absence of 1 Discord + 2 Gravity Pillars, Sanctuaries, Firestall and Adrenavamps, but it seems good. To be noted that you also aren't bringing Dim Shields (nor Phase Dragons, but I don't know if will decided upon that deck), Immolation (we need a good deck vs Aether if this is the case), Enchant Artifact (for the earth stall, I'd definitely play it) and Waterbow (but I think this is a good idea, it seems like a double of our Grabbybow).

The only thing I'm REALLY unsure about is the low amount of Life cards. With the augmented discards, we'll need to have backup copies of many of our key cards.


EDIT: The hell. I set up a spreadsheet on Google Docs to discuss the Vault. Instructions for anybody who wants to create his own Vault: go here (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Al68nhtmpFE0dHBzRC1Sb1NNVjNhTTBscXVFaVB3X1E&hl=en_GB), copy the sheet named "THE VAULT - BASE", rename it to "THE VAULT - [USERNAME]", edit in the numbers.


EDIT II: Second version of my Vault is up. 100% legal, but I preferred having about 40 more cards. 
Cons:
- only 114 pillars / pendulums, including those off-element
- few copies of many Life cards - I'd like to have 24 copies of Adrenaline and Cockatrice, for starters
- fewer Life cards than AK's version (only 57%! D:)
- there's no Mutation deck (it technically needs only 6 more cards - the Druids and the pillars - to be playable, but it steps on the toes of DBH trio and Novagrabby).

Pros:
+ Frogtal
+ AK's Light Adrenastaves
+ Adrenavamps
+ Poison Punch
+ Earth Stall
+ Novagrabby
+ DBH Trio
+ Firestall
+ Light Stall
+ Water Duo (with 5 Squids)
+ Lightnings to splash
+ Dim Shields to splash
+ Wings to splash
+ 6 Steals
+ 6 Deflags
+ RTs + Eternity to splash
+ 2 Purifies

[TheCrazyMango]

i desparatly want to take some squids for a spirit stall, i absolutely love the stalling power of squids.

[ak65ala]

I have slight problems with the adrenavamps and DBHtrio.  I don't like how they run so much on lucky draws, or how they can have fail draws.  For adrenavamps, I think the quanta balance is way off, too heavy on darkness and will overflow on life.  I have yet to find a new build that has vamps, nightfall, steal and cloak... has consistent draws and is over 50% life cards.  For the DBHtrio, my opinion of discord is it needs to come out turn 2-3 to be useful.  After that it loses a lot.  Against a rush, the trio would be too slow or clumsy to respond.  We can put these into our vault, but these are my concerns.

I have remade my vault again, starting from The Mormegil's.  The big changes I did was:

shift the quanta balance (more off-element pillars, no off-element pendulums)  I feel the best way to balance is to go life, off element pillars then fill the gap with life pendulums.  If you have 10-20 other quanta needed, you can do it with your mark + life pendulums.  After 20, I want to put a few off-element pillars to fuel the second half.  This is my style and is not the only way to do it.  I am not a fan of off-element pendulums as in most war duels, they only seem to be "pillars" since a majority of decks run off the off-element mark.Took out adrenavamp and firestall.  Needed cards somewhere and these were where I dug.  Added fallen elf (so we can have a turn 2-3 discord deck), put in a few more life cards (at 59.8%).

It looks like we are close.  I would be happy using The Mormegil's vault, after some slight pillar, pendulum shifting even, so I like where we are at.  I'd love to hear our general on this matter.  I'll check here every hour or so, to stay in the conversation.

[The_Mormegil]

shift the quanta balance (more off-element pillars, no off-element pendulums)  I feel the best way to balance is to go life, off element pillars then fill the gap with life pendulums.  If you have 10-20 other quanta needed, you can do it with your mark + life pendulums.  After 20, I want to put a few off-element pillars to fuel the second half.  This is my style and is not the only way to do it.  I am not a fan of off-element pendulums as in most war duels, they only seem to be "pillars" since a majority of decks run off the off-element mark.

Well, main point of having split off-element pends and pillars is that, while it doesn't really change anything as far as quanta production is concerned (Fire Pendulum with Fire mark is the same as Burning Pillar) it has a (very slight) advantage on a full pillars approach due to EQ targeting a single stack. Not really relevant, but I thought I'd point it out - every edge is needed to win.

As far as the DBH trio goes, it will (pun! Don't kill me...) probably need testing, but looking back at Death's DBH trio last War it did a hell of a good job. Also, it has a good chance of getting a third turn Discord out. Second turn discord is pretty much impossible (even the Elf deck has little chances of getting one), so a reliable 3rd turn Discord is about as good as we get IMO. Of course, I might be wrong about it...

It seems like we are at a good point, but I'd like to see what our General and Strategist think about it before closing the issue. We have little time, though...

[ak65ala]

shift the quanta balance (more off-element pillars, no off-element pendulums)  I feel the best way to balance is to go life, off element pillars then fill the gap with life pendulums.  If you have 10-20 other quanta needed, you can do it with your mark + life pendulums.  After 20, I want to put a few off-element pillars to fuel the second half.  This is my style and is not the only way to do it.  I am not a fan of off-element pendulums as in most war duels, they only seem to be "pillars" since a majority of decks run off the off-element mark.

Well, main point of having split off-element pends and pillars is that, while it doesn't really change anything as far as quanta production is concerned (Fire Pendulum with Fire mark is the same as Burning Pillar) it has a (very slight) advantage on a full pillars approach due to EQ targeting a single stack. Not really relevant, but I thought I'd point it out - every edge is needed to win.
As far as the DBH trio goes, it will (pun! Don't kill me...) probably need testing, but looking back at Death's DBH trio last War it did a hell of a good job. Also, it has a good chance of getting a third turn Discord out. Second turn discord is pretty much impossible (even the Elf deck has little chances of getting one), so a reliable 3rd turn Discord is about as good as we get IMO. Of course, I might be wrong about it...

It seems like we are at a good point, but I'd like to see what our General and Strategist think about it before closing the issue. We have little time, though...

I went to the beach and realized this... I retract my disgust towards off-element pendulums. 

I agree that a 2 turn discord with crazy elves is unlikely.  You need two novas, two amethyst pillars or one of each.  For DBH you have a 79% chance for a 3 turn (with it running singly off the mark + the pendulums).  Not sure if life pendulums are needed in it (looking at this one (http://elementscommunity.org/forum/index.php/topic,31880.msg431462#msg431462) from pika)... I'm okay with adding it since it does well ruining many strategies, it's just 'dangerous' in my mind.  Either it will be our pride, or be an easy kill.

One card I am sad we don't have is antimatters.  I find them to be very potent used with scorpions.  Stall on their creatures (it's usual use) but also a way to bypass shields (used on your own scorpions).  Many people don't expect this.  Add in discord and you have a good domination deck.  He're hoping we salvage some AM.

[willng3]

Okay, I've done a lot of pondering myself today, and there are a few concerns that I have.

Firstly, there are aspects of both ak's and Morm's Vault structures that I like and would be willing to take.  However, I'm not sure about some of the card and deck choices there.
1)  I would like a Firestall.  It was the most successful deck of War #2 and not taking one with us would make me feel very, very nervous.  It works in several different situations, and in the event that we suspect our opponents might bring a Sancstall, this deck is supreme even with the new quanta cap.  Sans Vault restrictions, is there a legitimate reason why we absolutely cannot bring this deck?
2)  The DBH/Discord trio.  I don't think we should bring this.  First off, it's probably going to be most useful during the second round when the enemy has seen some of our decks and starts to prepare in case they are used against them.  Secondly, we will know whether or not we should suspect a Sancstall of some type from them.  If that deck appears in any scenario, we have just screwed ourselves hard.  Also:  It appears that it's only missing a few Pillars in order for the specific deck to be taken with us?  I think we can salvage those from Gravity at any point if we want to, if we want to whip this out and surprise the hell out of everyone in the later rounds.
With that said, this allows us to take the Mutation rush if we want, or we can take something else we wanted but space won't allow.
3)  The Earth stall.  I noticed that both of you pretty much took pika's stall suggestion but removed the Wardens.  Was there a reason for this aside from needing more space?  6 EQs seems a bit excessive to me (I understand the thinking behind increased draw chance), although I'm not an expert at stalls so feel free to tell me if I'm wrong.  Keep in mind, however, that there will be lots of teams trying to use EQ against us because we have a bit of a weakness to it; we'll have plenty of opportunities to salvage these.
4)  AdrenaVamps.  The balancing on this one is likely going to cause the most issues, as Torb has admitted before.  There's not much room to allow off-element Pillars to use, so it's likely going to be used as a hard counter to a certain element.  The deck has the potential to tear Aether apart, but aside from that I'm really not 100% certain where it would function extraordinarily well.  It's more stable than Discord/BH, but it certainly has its weaknesses.  Scrapping this deck would free up several more cards for use though, which is definitely something to consider.
5)  Miscellaneous card choices.  The only one I'm really not a fan of is Eternity.  Without a Time deck focused on Deja Vu or Pharaohs I can't see us using this.  Was there a specific deck in mind that used these?

That's all the criticism I have, everything else looks excellent.

[pikachufan2164]

More stuff from Pika's deck lab:

Firestall

by pikachufan2164

Hover over cards for details, click for permalink

Deck import code : [Select]

5bt 5bt 5bt 5c2 5c2 5c2 5c4 5de 5de 5de 5de 5de 5de 5de 5de 5de 5de 5de 5de 5de 5de 5de 5f0 5f0 5f4 5f4 5f4 5f4 5f4 5f7 5f7 5fb 5fb 5fb 5fb 5gi 5gi 7aj 7aj 7dk 8po

Shield split in case of reflective stuff on the other side. quanta is a tiny bit strained.

This gives us a reason to stick Deflags into decks that are not Novagrabby, and can easily split into a Fire duo of Dragons/Cocks with splashed Rage Pots and Deflags.
Other notes:

- Firestall. I second the motion of having one to start with, since we need some legitimate support cards for our Deflags if we ever want to run them outside of a Novagrabby (something simple like Rage Potions + Deflags with Life attackers will do nicely, as Death ran a variant of that deck with success last War).
- Disc/BH trio. We're either starting the Vault with 5 Gravy Pillars, or 0. Pillars are harder to come by in salvages than Pends, though, and that particular deck needs Pillars to function properly.
- Earth stall. It needs 6 EQ because it's a large deck, and you need to draw them so you get a tempo advantage to let Warden and Spine work their CC magic. Also prevents too many creatures from hitting the board at once.
- Darkness duos. We need one so that we can legitimately run Steals instead of using them as a random splash.
- Splash card choices. RT is better in general than Eternity, since it's cheaper to use, and we don't have to devote too much quanta to it if we manage to salvage some Ghosts for a nice duo. It would probably be a better idea to have multiple sets of key splash cards if we can (12 Nova + 12 Graboid, for example, so that we can start off with fielding 2 Novagrabbies in Vault and pick up some more as the War progresses). The multiple stacks of off-element Pillars/Pends kind of scare me.

[The_Mormegil]

1)  I would like a Firestall.  It was the most successful deck of War #2 and not taking one with us would make me feel very, very nervous.  It works in several different situations, and in the event that we suspect our opponents might bring a Sancstall, this deck is supreme even with the new quanta cap.  Sans Vault restrictions, is there a legitimate reason why we absolutely cannot bring this deck?

This gives us a reason to stick Deflags into decks that are not Novagrabby, and can easily split into a Fire duo of Dragons/Cocks with splashed Rage Pots and Deflags.
- Firestall. I second the motion of having one to start with, since we need some legitimate support cards for our Deflags if we ever want to run them outside of a Novagrabby (something simple like Rage Potions + Deflags with Life attackers will do nicely, as Death ran a variant of that deck with success last War).

Yeah, I think Firestall is important too.

Disc/BH trio. We're either starting the Vault with 5 Gravy Pillars, or 0. Pillars are harder to come by in salvages than Pends, though, and that particular deck needs Pillars to function properly.

2)  The DBH/Discord trio.  I don't think we should bring this.  First off, it's probably going to be most useful during the second round when the enemy has seen some of our decks and starts to prepare in case they are used against them.  Secondly, we will know whether or not we should suspect a Sancstall of some type from them.  If that deck appears in any scenario, we have just screwed ourselves hard.  Also:  It appears that it's only missing a few Pillars in order for the specific deck to be taken with us?  I think we can salvage those from Gravity at any point if we want to, if we want to whip this out and surprise the hell out of everyone in the later rounds.
With that said, this allows us to take the Mutation rush if we want, or we can take something else we wanted but space won't allow.

I don't know you, but a Discord deck is needed. Also, I don't like mutations. At all. The deck proposed seems like it uses Fallen Druids mostly as CC and as an excuse to run Discord, since it can't reliably use the mutant's skills (which are the selling point of mutations IMO). Also, it hasn't got much fodder and is prone to CC (something we are already weak to). However, if we were to pack some (4-5?) Quantum Pillars I'd be ok with it (yeah I mean it). Why? I remember one match in Dogs Pit where I had a heavy denialbow that was screwing bad my opponent. Kept to it through the whole match, but he decided to run a splash of Quantum Pillars in a mono water. It countered Discord HARD. It's not even the quanta he produced, but just two turns of QP production mean the Discord's scramble is a lot less effective. Nova is NOT the same, due to Black Hole. So, if we were to pack a few QPs and call it a counter to Entropy, I'm with you. Consider it and run some tests if you wish.

Earth stall. It needs 6 EQ because it's a large deck, and you need to draw them so you get a tempo advantage to let Warden and Spine work their CC magic. Also prevents too many creatures from hitting the board at once.

3)  The Earth stall.  I noticed that both of you pretty much took pika's stall suggestion but removed the Wardens.  Was there a reason for this aside from needing more space?  6 EQs seems a bit excessive to me (I understand the thinking behind increased draw chance), although I'm not an expert at stalls so feel free to tell me if I'm wrong.  Keep in mind, however, that there will be lots of teams trying to use EQ against us because we have a bit of a weakness to it; we'll have plenty of opportunities to salvage these.

Warden is one of my favourite cards, but 2 in a 40 cards deck are just wasted cardslots. 40 cards deck need 6x of key cards, you even need to pack at least 3x of every shield / weapon if you want to draw them. So yeah, I think 6 EQs are necessary. Plus, EQs are splashable off of mark + 5-6 pendulums, and it's effective on some elements even without much support (light for instance).

- Darkness duos. We need one so that we can legitimately run Steals instead of using them as a random splash.

4)  AdrenaVamps.  The balancing on this one is likely going to cause the most issues, as Torb has admitted before.  There's not much room to allow off-element Pillars to use, so it's likely going to be used as a hard counter to a certain element.  The deck has the potential to tear Aether apart, but aside from that I'm really not 100% certain where it would function extraordinarily well.  It's more stable than Discord/BH, but it certainly has its weaknesses.  Scrapping this deck would free up several more cards for use though, which is definitely something to consider.

Adrenavamps are effective vs Aether AND Air IMO. I think we should keep them, but I'm not 100% sure.

- Splash card choices. RT is better in general than Eternity, since it's cheaper to use, and we don't have to devote too much quanta to it if we manage to salvage some Ghosts for a nice duo. It would probably be a better idea to have multiple sets of key splash cards if we can (12 Nova + 12 Graboid, for example, so that we can start off with fielding 2 Novagrabbies in Vault and pick up some more as the War progresses). The multiple stacks of off-element Pillars/Pends kind of scare me.

5)  Miscellaneous card choices.  The only one I'm really not a fan of is Eternity.  Without a Time deck focused on Deja Vu or Pharaohs I can't see us using this.  Was there a specific deck in mind that used these?

I started without Eternity, noticed it in AK's Vault and thought: why not? If we're running a deck with RTs to counter Gravity or Air - elements which can't have too much PC on their side, and won't probably waste it on us - Eternity is marvellous. If you get it out, it's pretty much game over for many decks. RTs are faster, and that is why I'd run 4-5 RTs and 1-2 Eternities. Also, if we have an Eternity in our Vault, we can run a deckout-counter easily (something to consider strongly for when we expect The Immortal or similar decks, also vs Light-Entropy Stalls).
I think it's enough to deserve, like, 2/373 cards in our Vault, but it's an opinion.

[ak65ala]

Hmmm.... 6 hours to go. 

EQ: 6 is nice due to it being easy to salvage out from a 40 card deck if the deck loses.  We can then hit UW with them (since they are weak to it.)

Mutants: It's a surprise deck.  I have seen enough life mutants win to know it's power.  It won't win to heavy CC, it won't win against a rush, unless lucky.  I agree with the quantum pillars.

DBH, adrenavamps: I've said enough on these.  They feel 'risky', i.e. being fantastic if they work, or a dead 24 cards if they don't higher stakes gamble then other choices.

It sounds like this is where we are at:

Drop DBH, adrenavampsAdd a solid firestallsheer up our earthstalldecide on discord (either a deck for it or mutants or drop it)agree on a few minor splash off-element cards.

We can start adding the 'good' cards to our vault and see where we are at even at this point.  I'll be gone for a few hours here this morning, but I will do my best to be back and able to help right before the deadline.  6 hours to go.