Round 7 Discussion

[ARTHANASIOS]

Our (last?) opponents are
and (and ).



I suppose I am Lt. by default.

Discuss...


decks revealed:

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5bs 5bs 5bs 5bs 5bs 5de 5de 5de 5c2 5c2 5bt 5bt 5bt 5bt 5v1 5up 7ac 7ac 7bu 7bu 7ag 7ag 7ag 7ag 7tb 7tb 7t9 7t9 7t9 7t8 7t8 8pt

(lost)

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5bs 5bs 5de 5de 5c5 5bu 5bu 5c1 5c1 5c1 5c1 5c0 5c0 5c3 5c3 5i7 5i7 5j2 5j2 5j2 7ac 7ac 7bu 7bu 7bu 7bu 7gn 7gn 7gn 7gn 8pp

(won)

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5bs 5bs 5bs 5de 5de 5de 5de 5de 5de 61q 61q 61q 61q 61q 622 622 622 622 7ae 7ae 7ae 7ae 7ae 7ae 7ak 7ak 7bu 7bu 7bu 7bu 8pu

(lost)

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5bs 5de 5de 5de 5de 5c5 5c5 5c2 5c2 5c2 5c2 5c2 5c2 5bt 5bt 5bt 5bt 5oi 5oi 5oi 5on 5on 5oo 5oo 5oo 5oo 7ac 7ac 7ac 7ac 7bu 7bu 7bu 7bu 7n5 7n5 8pr

(lost)

decks revealed:

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58o 58o 58o 58o 58o 58o 58o 58o 58o 58o 58o 58o 58o 58o 58o 595 595 595 595 59c 59c 59c 77a 77a 77a 77a 77a 77f 77f 77f 8pl

(won)

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5aa 5aa 5aa 5aa 5aa 5aa 5aa 5aa 5aa 5aa 5aa 5i4 5ig 5ig 5ig 5ig 5ig 5ig 5jm 5jm 78q 78q 78q 78q 7gk 7gs 7gs 7gs 7gs 7i6 8pp

(lost)

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594 594 594 594 594 5aa 5aa 5aa 5aa 5aa 5aa 5aa 5aa 5aa 5aa 5aa 5aa 5aa 5aa 5aa 5lg 5lg 5li 5li 5li 5li 5m6 5m6 5m6 5m6 5m6 5m6 77c 77c 77c 78q 7q9 7q9 7q9 7q9 7q9 7q9 8pq

(won)

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4vh 4vj 4vj 4vj 4vj 4vj 4vj 590 590 590 590 590 590 5aa 5og 71a 778 778 778 77a 77a 77a 78q 78q 7ae 7dm 7dm 80a 80a 80a 8pm

(won)

has tons of possibilities...

[Zyardran]

Hhmmmmm.

Will post thoughts here later

[dragonsdemesne]

Okay, well, apparently all the little babies won the argument, because we're being denied the opportunity to transmute between rounds.  Anyway, that means we have to field 3 decks, which means we're not going to bother transmuting anything.  We'll still salvage the same cards from Death, unless we want to swap the silence for a 4th PU.  For the darkness salvage, we can either take some water cards and make a water duo, or some darkness cards; the stilettos in particular would let us run siphonary and vader saders at the same time if we want.  We'd then likely take steals and discard them to one of the r6 losses.  We still have two days to make that decision.

Also, I just want to state for the record that I'm perfectly content to continue helping with deckbuilding and planning and such, even though I didn't get a match this round.  In fact, with some of the bullshit that's going on, I think I'm actually happier taking a break from having a match this round, so don't feel bad about that at all.

[ARTHANASIOS]

my suggestions

against :

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4sq 5l8 5lg 5lm 5lm 5mq 5mq 5mq 5mq 5mq 5og 5og 5on 5on 5on 7jo 7k5 7k5 7k5 7k5 7k5 7k5 7la 7la 7la 7la 7la 7la 7n5 7n5 8pr

against :

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5l8 5l8 5l8 5l8 5l8 5l8 5l8 5l8 5lm 5lm 5lm 5lm 5mq 5mq 5mq 5mq 5mq 5mq 5uk 5uk 5uo 5uo 5us 5us 5us 5us 5us 5us 606 606 7k2 7k2 7k2 7k2 7q9 7q9 7q9 7q9 7q9 7q9 7tb 7tb 8pt

against :

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4sq 5l8 5l8 5l8 5l8 5l8 5l8 5l8 5l8 5l8 5la 5la 5la 5mq 5mq 61t 61t 61t 61t 61t 61t 622 7jq 7jq 7jq 7la 7la 7la 7la 7la 8pu

[dragonsdemesne]

I don't really like the idea of using a permanent heavy deck vs earth, because they keep using pulverizer against us.  However, pretty much ALL of our decks rely pretty heavily on permanents, other than monolight, or maybe one of the crusader decks (since we can endow and then not really care if we lose the weapon, especially with multiple copies)

The deck that Artha built vs earth, however, I think might do very well against Life.  They've got a water duo, and one other deck, depending on what they kept (I suspect firestall, but that isn't certain) and I think that golden dragons + dims counters both of those fairly well.  I was thinking of using a version of the dimshield/sundial stall against life; any creature deck they field will basically automatically lose vs that, but the firestall could quite easily beat it.  To handle firestall, we could add something like 1 dragon/1 fractal, and 1-2 of the reflective shields.  If they did keep firestall, I think it would be hard for them to have also kept emerald shields (I was trying to count their cards from exposed decks).

The other problematic deck Earth has is the stoneskin/miracle stall.  We'd need quite a bit of damage to outlast that, and other than fractal, we don't have it.  I think that our best deck overall against Earth would be the siphonary.  It's probably the least vulnerable to pulverizer (since we can steal it) and their auburn nymphs are mostly useless against it, whereas they almost single handedly defeat our other decks.

Against air I have absolutely no idea what to do.  They have too many decks for us to predict properly, and we have few enough that they can probably predict us fairly well.  Just about the only saving grace we have is that their wings sucks against us.  That, however, means they probably won't use it, and we might be able to get away with a crusader deck against them, either the darkness one, or the air one.  I'd recommend the air one; we can then endow any OEs that Air brings to great effect, we can still attack past wings if they actually bring it against us, and we've got some CC for them as well.  Plus, if we use siphonary against earth, we miss out on some of the darkness cards like steal, and I think we really need steal to beat earth's pulverizer.

tl;dr

dimstall/sundial vs life
siphonary vs earth
air duo vs air

[dragonsdemesne]

vs Air (lieutenant)

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5l8 5l8 5l8 5l8 5l8 5l8 5l8 5l8 5la 5la 5mq 5mq 5mq 5og 5og 5on 5on 5on 7k2 7k5 7k5 7k5 7k5 7k5 7k5 7la 7la 7la 7n5 7n5 8pr

A lot of their decks seem pretty rushy, and pegasi might be better than dragons.  I'm not sure which way to go with this, to be honest.  Pegasi die to shockwave all too easily, but survive two OE hits.  However, if they are using OE, that's already one step against them as we can endow it.  Dragons are pretty hard to kill with air's CC, but they also are really slow.  I'm open to suggestions on modifying this deck, but I think that the air duo is our best chance against air no matter what.

[dragonsdemesne]

vs Earth (Upgrades)

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5l8 5l8 5l8 5l8 5l8 5l8 5lm 5lm 5lm 5lm 5lm 5lm 5mq 5mq 5mq 5mq 5mq 5mq 5mq 5mq 5mq 5mq 5up 5up 5up 5us 5us 5us 5us 5us 5us 7k2 7k2 7k2 7la 7la 7t8 7t8 7tb 7tb 7tb 8pt

I think the siphonary is the best bet, with steals.  We steal their pulverizer, and those pulvy decks should just lose.  The one deck I would be extremely worried about facing is their sskin/miracle stall here http://elementscommunity.org/forum/round-6/(earth-sideboard)-ji412jo-3-1-deuce-22-(aether-general)/  because if they make one big enough, this deck has no chance.  We autowin if ours is larger, but are totally screwed if it's not.  Also, I did not yet include the sundials because I'm not sure if I want them here or against Life, or even split them between the two.  If we use them here, that would fatten the deck, probably enough to avoid deckouts to sskin/miracle.  If we use them here, we will run the dusks unupped and probably the quanta as well.  I also included three vampire daggers because we'll probably be stealing pulverizer and want to replace it with another dagger ASAP.

option #2 with 3 sundials

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5l8 5l8 5l8 5l8 5l8 5l8 5lm 5lm 5lm 5lm 5lm 5lm 5mq 5mq 5mq 5mq 5mq 5mq 5mq 5mq 5mq 5mq 5mq 5uo 5uo 5up 5up 5up 5us 5us 5us 5us 5us 5us 7k2 7k2 7k2 7la 7q9 7q9 7q9 7tb 7tb 7tb 8pt

We could also do 6 sundials, but that really cuts into the other upgrades without lieutenant, and I think lieutenant is much more valuable against Air.

[dragonsdemesne]

vs Life:

Option 1: Arthanasios's deck he designed for earth

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5l8 5l8 5l8 5l8 5l8 5l8 5l8 5l8 5l8 5l8 5la 5la 5la 5mq 5mq 61t 61t 61t 61t 61t 61t 622 7jq 7jq 7jq 7la 7la 7la 7la 7la 8pu

Because of pulverizer, I think that this is a terrible deck to run against Earth.  However, because I think Life might be totally out of PC, I think it's a great deck to use against them.  I'm not sure why the deck had a mark of light, but if Silver Emerald has one, we can put it back in.  The advantage this deck has is that it probably does very well against life's firestall, if they managed to keep from discarding it.  (I tried to figure out if they did or not, and I can't be sure, but I think they almost certainly would have tried to keep at least the bare bones of it, the bolts/fahrens)

I've been doing a lot of talk about using the dimshield/dial stall against Life.  I think it would work against anything they have except for firestall.  However, the problem there is that I have already put the sancs into the siphonary, and it might want the dials as well.  This means the deck would end up looking something like this:

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5lg 5lg 5mq 5mq 5mq 5mq 5mq 5mq 5mq 5mq 5mq 5mq 5mq 5mq 61t 61t 61t 61t 61t 61t 622 7jq 7k1 7k2 7k2 7la 7la 7la 7la 7la 7q9 7q9 7q9 7q9 7q9 7q9 8pu

This assumes we take the dials from siphonary.  It also assumes we give 3 miracles to siphonary and 1 to the air duo, leaving only 2.  Now, I really can't see any reason to run the deck like this, as opposed to artha's version, which I think is better.  I would like to add a morningstar to artha's version.  Also, since my suggestion has Discord as general playing this deck, we can get way more upgrades.  I also think that we need more pendulums for aether quanta, and to help compensate for less light pillars, I've upgraded lots of quanta.

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5l8 5l8 5l8 5l8 5la 5la 5la 5lh 61t 61t 61t 61t 61t 61t 622 7jo 7jo 7jo 7jo 7jq 7jq 7jq 7la 7la 7la 7la 7la 7la 7la 7la 8pu

Now, this frees more miracles and dials for siphonary, so I'll go back to that.
edit: There's no way to put more dials into siphonary unless we either use unupped stilettos or swap lieutenant and upgrade roles, so I'm leaving it as is.

[dragonsdemesne]

Okay I am going to post the following decks into our preparation.

vs LIFE

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5l8 5l8 5l8 5l8 5la 5la 5la 5lh 61t 61t 61t 61t 61t 61t 622 7jo 7jo 7jo 7jo 7jq 7jq 7jq 7la 7la 7la 7la 7la 7la 7la 7la 8pu

I don't think they can beat this.  Pretty sure they have no way to bypass dims other than maybe firestall, and pretty sure firestall loses to those dragons.  Could maybe use the other 3 sundials here, and either unup 3 of the towers, or remove them entirely.

vs EARTH

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5l8 5l8 5l8 5l8 5l8 5l8 5lm 5lm 5lm 5lm 5lm 5lm 5mq 5mq 5mq 5mq 5mq 5mq 5mq 5mq 5mq 5mq 5mq 5uo 5uo 5up 5up 5up 5us 5us 5us 5us 5us 5us 7k2 7k2 7k2 7la 7q9 7q9 7q9 7tb 7tb 7tb 8pt

Add a couple cards like quanta or holy lights or something as filler if we are concerned about the deckout deck.

vs AIR

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5l8 5l8 5l8 5l8 5l8 5l8 5l8 5l8 5mq 5mq 5mq 5mq 5mq 5og 5og 5on 5on 5on 7jr 7jr 7k2 7k5 7k5 7k5 7k5 7k5 7k5 7la 7n5 7n5 8pr

I realized that all the dragons are spoken for in the dimshield deck, so I went with the pegasi strictly due to vault limitations (not enough dragons).  This -might- mean that we could drop the upped light pend for a 2nd upped miracle, but that might be too much of a strain on light quanta.  I'm going to leave it like this, though.


NOTE: I will get home from work roughly 30 minutes before the deckbuilding deadline ends.  That means after this post and putting the decks in the prep section, I'm done deckbuilding for this round, and any further changes are coming from the rest of the team.  I'll be rather busy on Fri/Sat, but if I am needed for subbing, I can probably do it later on Sunday.

[ARTHANASIOS]

I agree with dragons in his deckbuilding decisions.

Btw, I included Mark of Light just for the lolz!

sidenote: Is there any reason not to use 6 sundials against earth?

[dragonsdemesne]

Yes.  The reason is the number of light upgrades we need to have (at least 4) and the fact that upgraded vampire daggers are really good.  I definitely looked at that, but we'd have to sacrifice either upped daggers or else swap lieutenant and upgrade roles, and I think we need the ups vs air more than we need a couple more dials vs earth.  I suppose a couple time pends could be thrown in to support unupped ones, but I think that's too risky in a deck this size.

[ARTHANASIOS]

Well, it is over for us, it was a good ride...