Round 2 Strategy

[ffun]

Ok, guys, these are our opponents this round:

 


Let's see if we can begin some brainstorming regardings what we could probably face.

  probably won't be taking the same deck from rd1 again, but just to be safe we should consider it a possibility and playtest against it as well.

  knows it has some clear weakness against us due to eternity and RT, so they'll try something that can go around it. Their catapult deck from rd1 is an exemple. Since discord/BH is also a threat, maybe we should consider playtesting our Light stall against some of their decks to see how it does? At least it might work against those 2 decks.

  ... Well, we all fear the possibility of firestall, so we need to playtest against it. They probably won't use anything that relies too heavily on immo or nova due to RT. If we think they might go for a fractix, let's also consider some counters, such as nightmare, though it might play poorly against the stall - it would be great if we could work out something that goes well against it and the stall.

I'll try to think a bit more about the others later. Please post your ideas as well and let's start our planning!

[dragonsdemesne]

: They played almost the same deck both times.  With a lot of deflags, we probably shouldn't try anything permanent-heavy, and we will need to be able to deal with owl's eye.  Some sort of novabow rush with explosions would probably be pretty good here, especially if it had reverse time or some other way of handling dragons.

: If they use that same deck that they used against us in round 1, gravity shield (which nobody knows we have) and explosion will wreck it completely, but we can't rely on that.  I like the looks of discord in this one, especially backed by explosion for wings.

  : They put up two very good decks in round 1.  Sanctuary will stop discord, which they are almost certain to use.  We also have Wings in the vault, which looks pretty good against them, too.

: If they don't go with phoenixes, wings looks great here.  Discord will be weakened due to the novas/immos they will probably use.  Basilisk blood and eternity are decent ways of dealing with phoenixes, and graboids might be a good creature choice due to burrow.

: If they use that catapult deck against us, we can beat that fairly easily.  Deflags for the catapults will reduce their damage down to just the titans.  Titans can also be deflagged if not animated, and can be rewound if animated, which they might do if their catapults start exploding all around them.  Healing will also work pretty well against them, and has the added bonus that Sanctuary will hose black hole and discord, too.

: Reverse Time will be good here.  If they use adrenaline, we can rewind whatever it is on, and if they use basilisk blood, we can rewind our own creatures.  Life's creatures are cheap, so I think discord/EQ is a waste of time.  Eternity looks strong to me here, as does purify. (they used poison in one deck, plus they probably have scorpions)  A fast rush with reverse time looks good to me.

: Based on the decks they fielded in round 1, I think Light is the weakest team, so I'm not too worried about this one.  They used pegasus/wings and crusader/vampdagger in round 1.  Both have some vulnerabilities to reverse time, although the cloaks make it more difficult without explosions on our side.

  : Denial looks good to me here, discord, reverse time, or earthquake.

[dragonsdemesne]

Another big issue here is going to be the number of copies of each card in the vault.  We have to field seven decks at the same time this round due to this incredibly shitty event card :p  This means that some cards like deflagration are going to be spread awfully thin, so we'll need to design decks with that in mind.

One deck I think we should use somewhere is dune scorpion/momentum.  This will use a lot of cards that aren't really used in any other decks, thus freeing up cards in other duels.  We should use this deck against somebody we think will be packing shields, and against someone that we will not need deflag/steal against.  It will be best against someone without much creature removal either, but even if they have lots, we can play dune+momentum on the same turn and hit them once without them getting a chance to stop it.  Here's an example: (upgrades to be determined)

by dragonsdemesne

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This should pretty much always have a momentumed dune hitting on turn 2 or 3.  Nova will make it possible to do it on turn 2 if you got 2 pillars on turn 1, and also power the sundials, as well as partially defend against discord.  The deck is resistant to both creature and permanent removal just because if the dunes hit, only purify can remove the poison, and the only permanents are sundials and pillars.  Eternity would be a good choice to fit in here somewhere, too.

[dragonsdemesne]

Against life, what about a graboid rush?  That would give us access to titanium shield, which would really hurt things like adrenalined frogs/cockatrices.  It would also let us use a pillar/pend split easily, and we know they have earthquakes.  Eternity would be pretty nice against them, too.  Something like this?

by dragonsdemesne

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[dragonsdemesne]

For entropy, what about this?

by dragonsdemesne

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Sanctuaries and reverse times should hopefully slow their discords and graboids enough for us to get going on our creatures.  It might have some serious problems against earthquake, though.  Another choice here would be some sort of novabow as well.  Maybe gotp/nightmare?

I'm really out of ideas.  This is insane having to deal with seven fronts at once :p  I'll wait until the team starts showing up in IRC chat again so we can bounce some ideas around and test stuff before doing more.

[ffun]

Against we'll also have to take wings and shockwave into account, since they should have lots of those and they can hurt us pretty bad, as seem from our 1st loss. What if they played a wing stall with some critters, EE, shockwave for CC and/or killing blows and all those UGs that haven't appeared so far? Considering our natural lack of PC, that could be a possibility... Anyway, I would consider a time/fire duo with phoenix/deflag/RT/gotp(or pharaoh/nymph etc.). The birds ignore the wings and shockwave, while deflags can be used flexibly for either EE, UG or wings (when going for the final blow).

Maybe we should save the light duo for gravity (unless it does poorly against some of their other decks) and try a nova deck for entropy? A light stall could probably hold gravy pretty well, while it might not do the same against entropy, since they have access to other cards that can brake both a stall in general and in particular (such as earthquake) while still using discord, something gravy can't do.

I'm not sure about wings for ... Chances are they won't stay up much against all their deflags. OTOH, wings could work pretty well against , if we don't take your earth duo (which I liked a lot btw). Another choice against (and possibly or ) is an aether duo with dim shield, lightning for CC and fractal gotp. Something close to this:

by ffun

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[dragonsdemesne]

Yeah, taken individually, I think we could make decks to beat or seriously contend with any of our opponents.  The trick will be doing it for ALL of them at once, which is why this event is so brutal, and will probably singlehandedly determine the outcome of War, unless something even more insane comes along later.  (please no... I am NOT impressed with this event )

One option I wanted to put up for discussion (feel free to reject it) is the possibility of just focusing on the more important matchups and fielding crappy or even deliberately illegal decks (to avoid the penalty for illegal decks by accident) against the matchups that we feel we have the least chance of winning.  For example, the idea would be to basically forfeit against one or two of the matchups where we think we're basically f---ed, and put all our best efforts into the other matches and (hopefully!) win those.  If we planned it right, and won the games, we might be able to seriously cripple certain teams, or keep others from getting too far ahead, depending on how we wanted to play it.  The only problem with that is I really hate the idea of a tactical forfeit; I like playing to WIN

With regards to ffun's ideas against air, I actually really like the idea of using the phoenixes there.  We have a deck somewhere using phoenixes+deflags in a time/fire duo that looks pretty good.  I wouldn't want to use more than maybe two of the deflags in that deck though, because we don't have very many to spare.  A time/dark deck can make use of the steals (gotp/nightmare) but otherwise we're probably relying on deflags or else hoping we don't need PC.

A light stall would work against gravity if they use that catapult thing, I think.  (maybe something similar to the one I listed above for vs entropy, but ffun has convinced me we shouldn't use vs entropy)  The sancs should hopefully keep us from getting instakilled by catapults, and the threat of reverse time/eternity will keep them from leaving animated titans out; they will only want to play it and immediately catapult it.  With our healing, they'll probably need to do that twice on one turn, maybe even 3 times, to kill us.

I'll have to check if cockatrice flies or not (some fantasy rpgs it does, some it doesn't, hard to keep track!) but if it doesn't, wings should be great against life.

For fire and entropy, thinking about it a little more, maybe we should just basically go with a mirror match, build some sort of novabow.

For earth... depends if they use that same deck or not.  Gravity shield would own that deck, but if they play graboids, we'll look pretty dumb.

For water... not really sure what's best.  RT is probably fairly good.  Whenever I use water, it often seems to be short on quanta, but maybe that's just me being n00b at building water decks.

The other thing I was thinking, is that maybe we should save the novas/sundials and not use them in dune scorps.  We might need the novas for entropy/fire, and the sundials would fit perfectly in time/light stall.  A few more things to think about, I guess...

[TheManuz]

Against we could use the LightStall that was made to fight .

by TheManuz

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I like the DuneScorpion deck. I'd like to play it, eventually!

[ffun]

Heh, we're having quite a dispute on where to put the light stall! It sudenly seems like a nice choice against quite a few elements! What I like it against gravy is that it might go well against a disc/bh deck as well, which might be a good choice against us, but indeed it should also work well against air. Let's playtest it against all 3 elements (gravy, entropy and air) and see where it works best. How many Titans need to be thrown for a OTK? That would be my only fear on using the light stall against gravy if they still have a copy of that deck. As for the cockatrice doubt, no it doesn't fly! I like the fact that we are seeing more than one viable choice against a few elements, which will give us the flexibility to sport 8 reasonable decks.

I really think we should try to field 8 competitive decks and try our best to win all matches. We should only consider forfeits when our vaultgets way too diluted, and even then... Anyway, 8 matches should be the norm from here on, so we'll need to build 8 good decks regularly now

[10 men]

A general comment: Be careful when deducing the contents of another Team's Vault from the matches they played last round. For example from looking at our decks other teams would have to think that Reverse Time is only a minor roleplayer in our Vault...

For deck selection, we need to take a look at what we have in our Vault and then decide who we can use those decks against, and with what modifications. Our vault currently contains:
x Aether decks - we can make a lot of those because they don't need a lot of vital in-Element cards. Also we can salvage 6 additional Lightnings. We can build IGT-like stalls with Dim Shields or Domins with lots of Lightnings. We don't need a lot of Ghosts for those decks because we can simply refill with Fractal. We could easily play 3, possibly even 4. Needs about 2 Ghosts (for the Domins probably more, for the Stall we might replace some of them with Dragons or Pharaoh to account for Wings or stuff), 0 RTs.
1 Ghostmare - needs 6 Ghosts and about 4 RTs.
1 Earth rush - I believe I haven't even posted my favourite version of this deck yet, so here it is.

by 10 men

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I didn't take any EQs here as those are better for a longer game, this one just wants to rush and takes some BBs to ensure we are faster.
1 Earth Stall - needs 0 Ghosts, 0 RT.
1 Nova Graboids - needs 6 RT probably
1 random Nova deck - something like what we used last round against Aether could actually work again, probably without Purifies and with some other form of random control.
1 Discord Rush - needs 6 Ghosts, 6 RT.
1 Dune Scorp deck - needs 6 RT.
1 Light stall - needs 6 RT probably and some creatures, could be Ghosts could be something else like Pharaoh or Dunes.

[dragonsdemesne]

10 men's deck suggestions looks like a fantastic place to start.  For the light stall, I would be strongly tempted by the pharaohs over the gotp because the pharaoh has more hp and can make lots of creatures, and pharaoh will have lots of time (pun!) to do that in a stall.  Blessing/scorpion could also work, but I think momentum scorpion would be better this round; it gets around wings, bonewall, and dimshield, so if we are expecting one of those, it would work a lot better, plus momentum scorpion makes it easier to build the light stall with sanctuaries and sundials, which a blessing/scorpion deck might want.

[bripod]

That's the current standings. Greyed Teams are our opponents this round.