I might as well throw out a few of my comments, since league's done on Monday, and barring a huge change in rankings (i.e. me dropping below 3rd) I don't plan to play any more games this season, I'll give a few more comments/thanks to people, too.
@blarp: Thanks
I tried my best, and I'm glad you had fun playing against me. You were one of my tougher opponents as well, and given that I'd never heard of you before playing in the league, I expected you to be easy, frankly, but you weren't :p
@newbiecakes/onizuka: You two guys were the only two that managed to beat me more times than I beat them (2-3 vs newbie and 1-2 vs onizuka) and while I did rant about RNG a lot vs Onizuka because our games were always so close, these two guys were really good players as well. I'll also give Onizuka a massive thumbs up because he told me he never used shard of focus at all in league this season.
@furballdn/kuroaitou + Laxadarap: Thanks to you guys for being online so much; furball/kuro both played 8 games against me this season, more than anyone else. Laxadarap played with me six times, so he gets an honourable mention
You three also had some pretty interesting decks, and a lot of them; I almost never saw the same deck twice. (and I kept track of what everyone used vs me for the second half of the season, to aid in predictions, so I know it's true :p)
@jenkar: Thanks for volunteering to run leagues, and thanks for putting up with my forgetting to capitalize names, etc, in my posts, as well as my hard to spell name :p (he mentioned both of those to me in chat at least once each!)
@everybody: Thanks for all the games, and sorry for some of the boring and mean decks I had. I never had any problems with people being jerks in any way, and I saw nothing but good sportsmanship from my opponents. I had a couple times where my opponents were very good about desyncs and things like that, and I tried to do the same for my opponents as well; a couple times after desyncs, my opponents simply just gave me the win because they knew they couldn't have won, and I did the same a few times as well when I knew I'd have lost had we not had the desync. As far as I know, there were no complaints about me in that regard, and I have none about any of the people I played with.
About things in general:
-Opponents were very hard to find (too hard) for CL. I know it will always be harder to find CL opponents than BL due to the upped card requirement, but even BL had some troubles this season. In CL, the standings have five people at 30+ games, and there's a couple more that should once the standings are updated again, but almost anyone who actually played 30 games will get a prize. (I think it'll change once standings are updated for the final time, but as it stands now, the last place player in CL will actually get the 5th place prize due to inactivity of the rest, but there's 3 or 4 more people who will have 30 by season's end) BL had it a little better, with ten people at 30+ games, and a couple more that might once we're updated again; they had three times as many played, but only about five or six more active ones, as most people in BL played under 5 games, which indicates to me that they tried it and didn't like it.
-shards were pretty heavily used. I personally don't have a problem with shards being used a lot, but I really don't like shards of sacrifice and focus. Virtually every deck had to consider these two cards when determining whether the deck was viable or not. Shard of sacrifice was responsible for my using purify in so many decks, and shard of focus was responsible for my later inclusion of mind flayers.
-Discord. This card's a real pain. I played several games that were literally decided by coin flip with this card. DBH mirror, the winner is whoever played discord first. DBH vs many other decks is also coinflip; if I won the coin toss with DBH, I often kept my opponents from playing anything the entire game, and that had to have been frustrating. If I lost the coinflip, they'd often get something out before discord landed and I'd be doomed. Also, and I really hate to say this, but DBH was often the deck I picked to use against players I thought were weaker, because discord simply messes up so many lower tier decks. (apologies to anyone who saw me use DBH against them a lot :p)
-prizes: I agree with cheesy that both leagues should have equal prizes. CL does require more electrum, obviously, but BL requires just as much skill to come out on top. I also agree with blarp that the prizes for league should be bigger compared to tournaments, but that's solely up to Zanz's discretion, so saying any more than that is futile. I mean, if I had 5th place in league and got 3k for all those games... I'd feel ripped off :p I was really hoping to get a mark or at least a foil chimera from the 4th place shard, but getting just electrum would suck.
-rating system: KRACH had its problems, like encouraging inactivity later in the season, but overall I still think it's better than it would've been had ELO been used. The biggest trouble with ELO is overranking poorer players at the beginning of the season and underranking better players, which means that it's very advantageous to play players you know/suspect are weak very early in the season and avoid those you know are strong, and later in the season, the reverse is true. KRACH gets around this, but it also encourages people to camp the top spots. Late in the season, for instance, I knew that unless blarp or onizuka screwed up big time, I couldn't possibly catch them, and that unless I screwed up, nobody else would be likely to catch me, so there was no incentive for me to keep playing, whereas in ELO, I'd have kept playing until the bitter end in an effort to catch them. A modified KRACH system would probably be best, one where the rating swing between higher and lower players isn't so high, and one where the points for beating someone closer in rank is a little higher, so that camping top ranks isn't a viable strategy.
-reflect ban: I understand why this was done (because purify resulted in desyncs when used vs reflection) but I think a better solution would have been to ban shard of sacrifice instead. Without SoSa, there is no reason to cast purify on the opponent, and it's a much better ban because it improves the meta more as well as removing that source of guaranteed desyncs. Furballdn mentions that 'nothing can stop a SoW golem besides SoSac' and while I don't agree with that, I do agree that SoW golems got a lot stronger after that ban. (I beat SoW golems with poison dials every time, and often won with speedbow rushes and chaos wyrms, and those last two had no SoSa)
