Questions
Water had a rough time in the standings last War. What do you think was your biggest flaw, and how do you plan to improve on it?
JcJ, awesome Brawl stuff. What advice would you give to the fallen?
Water made a lot of mistakes in vault building. We included too many gimmicky decks because they were cheap, and too many decks which were decent/average in pre-shard meta and just lame in shard meta. Additionally, rather than thinking about each opponent, and what we would want to actually play against them, we just built a string of decks. This meant that when it came to "what shall we play against X" We didn't really have enough options, so we ended up having to brutalize decks to find a new idea we were happy with.
Once it got into the matches we made further errors, both in under-testing and more importantly in trying to create odd decks like
this one, which not only were janky, but wrecked actual decks we included in vault like our Light Stall.
Personally, my errors were in taking too much of a back seat. I did a lot of work, but not enough off my own back, rather I allowed myself to simply be a work horse for dd. Now, I'm not saying that dd's ideas were bad, FAR from it, but I know I could have contributed much better as a 'two heads are better than one' influence, rather than asking "what can I do" too many times. Part of this is because it was my first war (and my god did I learn a lot - i can't wait for the new one to come along) and part of it was because I still believed my own knowledge to be inferior to dd's. In reality, his knowledge of Water was still superior to mine, but I had great overall meta knowledge which could have been used more in vaultbuilding against specific elements, as I mentioned before.
Now Brawl question:
First, THANKS! I love brawl and was proud of my work, and the work of the team. Advice to the fallen... communication is key, if people need to go AFK, that's absolutely fine, but simply saying "I don't think I'll be able to do my task this week" means somebody else can take up the slack. Getting work done as early as possible is key too, because leaving your the task to the last minute assumes that there will be no problems whatsoever with other peoples tasks. If you CAN do it early, no it early. This also means you can give feedback to each other and improve tasks, after all, it's a team game, not just a collection of individual competitions. Finally, your submissions need to have something about them to stand out. If you are confident that you can do the current task with absolute outstanding quality, then do. If you think others might have the edge, then make it have one of the following qualities:
Comedy (such as Krzy's Oracle / Nymph poster)
Innovation (such as Silver_Emerald's 'you are in a locked room, escape' task where he wrote it as a DOS text game)
Skill - find a way to include something you're great at (such as my use of music in various tasks, and making a balloon Pirate Sword for Espithel's 'design a sword' task)