Shak'ars Revenge (FG-Voodoo)

[Nume]

1 aether tower makes 1 aether per turn. Aether mark also makes 1 aether per turn. So you need 2 aether towers to have more than you would with 0 pendelums and aether mark. Also, 2 aether towers and 2 entropy pendulums with aether mark produce the same average aether quanta.

[Essence]

Oh, so it's all about just not drawing any pillars.  I get it.  Not a strong enough argument for me to care, but I get it.


On a fun note, I've found that Rainbow is particularly easy with this deck, because you can frequently toss out a simple, unadorned Voodoo Doll and Rainbow will happily provide the Gravity Pull for you, slapping himself for some damage and saving your life in the process.  I've beaten him three times now with that trick.

[Nume]

Heh yeah same thing works with obliterator and dark matter. I seem to always have a grav pull or 2 in starting hand against them anyways though . But yeah, its not just about not drawing pillars, its about ai destroying the ones you do draw. If you get 1-2 towers first hand, and ai blows them up right away, you can often take a long time to get to 18 aether with the entropy mark aether tower version, whereas if the same thing happens with your pendulums, you can still get there pretty easily with your mark and snovas.

[Jangoo]

I just wanted to add, the other advantage of pendelums imo is that you can actually get away with using only 5 in the deck, which lets you keep 5 snova, 5 TU, 3 voodoo, 3 grav pull, 6 BB, and still have 3 precogs. If yoiu tried a deck with entropy mark and just 5 aether towers, you'd have tons of issues facing any kind of permanent control.

Well put Nume. Pendulums (or better: the mark) do indeed give you more stability and freedom
for customization by having to rely less on your permanents, there is no way to deny this.
I am also pretty sure that the pendulum-variant is better for PvP because of this.

You need 2 aether towers up to beat the production of the pendelum deck even with no pendelums out. [...]
1 aether tower makes 1 aether per turn. Aether mark also makes 1 aether per turn. So you need 2 aether towers to have more than you would with 0 pendelums and aether mark. Also, 2 aether towers and 2 entropy pendulums with aether mark produce the same average aether quanta

Absolutely not.
- You would need 1 -pendulum to break even with just 1 -tower by turn4.
By turn5, pend. + mark will have made 1 more.
- Comparing 2 with 2, towers clearly beat the pendulums to it, as a quick glance at the
turn 1-4-segment of that table will reveal. 
- The reason for this is that -pendulums take 1 turn to pick up their -production
whereas -towers get to it right away. (towerplay-dynamics)
- Starting from 3 vs 3  -towers have the upper hand, even if one insists to just look at
a purely theoretical average-spread that ignores tower-play dynamics.

It really would be a bit weird if anything other than the -tower were better at producing
 . If that were the case I would jump off my balcony right now, because gravity itself
has come in question. The -mark is nice but really not that nice ...

But yeah, its not just about not drawing pillars, its about ai destroying the ones you do draw. If you get 1-2 towers first hand, and ai blows them up right away, you can often take a long time to get to 18 aether with the entropy mark aether tower version, whereas if the same thing happens with your pendulums, you can still get there pretty easily with your mark and snovas.

In my experience the perm-killing gods don't pose a real threat to my -production.
Here is some actual stats from my games:

53 games (out of 150 games) against
D.Glory, E.Phoenix, Graviton, Hermes, Oblit, Rainbow, Seism, Dreamc, Decay
-> 32,1% win-rate
-> 29,0% win-rate including Octane (who sucks for way other reasons than perm.destruction
                                                          and crushed me an incredibly high 1/9 games)

The overall win-rate of the deck against all gods is at 27,1% right now,
so if anything, those tower-killer-gods are easy!


But like you said Nume, nothing beats (even more) actual experience.
When speaking about experience though, we must never forget, that these decks are so fast
and so "extravagant" that some 40 matches during which you lost a couple times to Seism,
Hermes etc. really don't say much yet.
Luckily, these decks are so much fun and so efficient that I will happily play another 150 games
and take a closer look at the issue. I really should go ahead and buy those -pendulums soon ... 

[Nume]

1 aether tower at the start would indeed generate 1 total more aether than just aether mark with no pendulums, but the point is that you always get that 1 aether per turn from the mark. My biggest arguing point though is that I have still yet to have a game where I had the cards I needed to win, and the TU's, and didnt have the aether while using the pendulum deck. In almost all cases (all of my cases) you end up with enough anyways and using pendulums instead allows you to add more copies of other cards to help get the combo going. In the end, I really doubt the win rate will be much different between the decks, so its really just a personal choice. My point is just that using entropy pendulums with aether mark does not handicap your aether production so you dont make enough as some people have said it would.

[Jangoo]

Yeah ... so that's kind of where we are at I guess.
I would find it interesting though, if you find yourself in the position to pull off some of those
abovementioned guerilla-tactics ... ?

Speaking of win-rate, would you like to take some stats and maybe even time them
so we can create an FGei (http://elementscommunity.org/forum/index.php/topic,14626.0.html)?

As of now, I am pretty damn sure that this deck-type is more than just a "type".
It may be a whole other league of FG-decks, unrivalled in terms of grind-efficiency.
Some time, I would love to edit the OP and add at least 3 different variations to it (towers,
pendulums, precogs, antimatter ...).
It would be so awesome to have some actual stats to go with it. As for efficiency, timing
those stats is the only way to turn a subjective "pretty fast" into an actual speed-stat.
   

[Nume]

Heh I might be able to some time. The biggest issue I have is that I tend to play for short periods sporadically throughout a night, and its often at work, so timing and even tracking stats can be troublesome. I often just have to base decks I like and such more off of what I think of them as I play them and how the games go. Also, I dont know if my score can handle me playing this deck too much longer, since I am at the point where I dont even really care that much about electrum .

[Jangoo]

Well, I'd appreciate it.
Like I said to Essence already, who also has some important things to do before she can get to
taking some timed stats: It doesn't have to be rocket-science.
As long as the timing somehow reflects actual game time, it will be much better than rough
guesstimates. Gametime, actual or not, is highly personal after all and where some people claim
to be taking less than 5min per game with rainbowdecks () others are stuck with a slow
computer, having to duke it out over 15min against stupid drawpower-Rainbow. 
But that's what that FGei-thing is supposed to be about: Getting a realistic idea of how fast
decks really are when taking different people into account.
There is also a mini-weenie-guide on how to time your game-time in that thread I linked above. 

Also, I dont know if my score can handle me playing this deck too much longer, since I am at the point where I dont even really care that much about electrum .

You are that rich eh?
Concerning score, that is not a good sign:
Since losses score -30 and non-EM wins around +80, your score should neither drop nor rise
at all, provided you are actually playing a win-rate around 27%.

Sure you didn't just lose to a bunch of noobs in PvP2? 

[Essence]

Like I said to Essence already, who also has some important things to do before she can get to taking some timed stats: It doesn't have to be rocket-science.

Well, that's a first.   

[Jangoo]

Ooops. It wasn't even a typo ... I actually thought that ... given your androgynous avatar ...
and that you have a kid ... and that some people back in the days said ... erm ... I gotta go. *runs off

[Celidion]

Ooops. It wasn't even a typo ... I actually thought that ... given your androgynous avatar ...
and that you have a kid ... and that some people back in the days said ... erm ... I gotta go. *runs off*

Fixed, you forgot the latter asterisk to end your action. 

[Jangoo]

Ooops. It wasn't even a typo ... I actually thought that ... given your androgynous avatar ...
and that you have a kid ... and that some people back in the days said ... erm ... I gotta go. *runs off*

Fixed, you forgot the latter asterisk to end your action. 

Lol, and here I was wondering why I was so exhausted all day.