War #3 - Voices of the Fallen

[DevilLoss]

ya just finished reading the rest of poor UW .

[Fan of Rainbows]

All Eulogies are finished along with Fire's Victory Speech.

Congrats Team !

FoR

[Mithcairion]

My "Thank You"s:

Thank you to my team, Team .  You guys all took me in and made me feel like a valuable member of the team, no easy task considering I went 0-for-War in my matches.  Not only that, but you were all more than understanding in what was an incredibly difficult time in my life.  It was absolutely amazing working with each and every one of you.  I definitely do not consider my tutelage in complete, but where before I was a neophyte in the ways of darkness, now I am an apprentice.

Thank you to the Warmasters, Kael Hate and ddevans96.  Yours is a thankless job, but without you we could not have this amazing (if draining) event.  You both deserve an immense amount of credit for hosting a truly epic War.

Thank you to each and every War participant.  There are specific people I could thank, but I know that I would leave someone out and that would be unfair.  You have all made this a truly memorable experience for me and while it was many long hours and hard work, it was also a great deal of fun.  I loved the deck creativity that I saw from each team and some of you made some truly memorable (I'm looking at you, !) decks.

Now, for anyone who wants to join the next War, I have a word of caution for you:  While the powers that be will are doing everything they can to make War a less tedious event, luck truly favors the prepared and I can't imagine a scenario where there will not be a good deal of "work" involved with this event.  Learn everything you can from the past Wars, even though the rules have changed.  You can always learn something you may not have known before, whether that be tendencies a master has, flaws that a certain deck may have, or simply a different way to look at a situation, it is simply impossible to know too much about the event.  Which brings me to my next point:   Know the rules.  Don't think you understand them, don't assume someone else does, don't gloss over them.  As anyone on a team that was penalized can tell you, they wish they had been more diligent and understood the rules better.  There is not a single person on a team who is not absolutely vital to the success of the team, so knowing the rules inside and out will do nothing but prepare you for victory. Also, almost as important as knowing the rules is to communicate with your team.  Good communication will help tremendously as the event goes along, as people will have real life to deal with in addition to what is a taxing War.  Again, everything I've seen/heard from teams that were heavily penalized was that it was due at least in part to a lack of communication or an assumption that someone else was taking care of something. 

As to participating in the event itself, there is something that Higurashi mentioned in chat one day that rung true with me, and it bore out through the course of this War (and I will assume prior Wars as well, considering what I have read/heard about them), "Predictability is death."  All you have to do is look at the brilliance of some (http://elementscommunity.org/forum/index.php/topic,24222.0.html) of the decks (http://elementscommunity.org/forum/index.php/topic,25579.0.html) to see that it is not always taking the power decks that wins, but rather taking the deck that the other team is not prepared for that wins.  And finally, please remember that while this event is the pinnacle of this great game, it is still a game and should be fun.  If you're not having fun on at least some level, then you really should reevaluate why you are in the War to begin with.

I hope this wall of text helps those of you who have not participated in War before to have realistic expectations should you make a team for the next War and you are able to enjoy the event as much as possible.

And once again, my thanks to one and all who made this great event as memorable as it was.

[deuce22]

I guess I will be the first member of team to comment on why we lost...RNG!!! Just kidding

But seriously though, I think we did pretty much everything within our power to win the war. In reality, we got really lucky through the first 10 rounds or so because we lost very few key cards. Once we were having to play 6+ generals in a round, most of whom were in the sweet spot, we started to realize we couldn't keep up with 8 duels each round. Luckily we dropped to 5 or 4 duels per round, but even that was a lot because we started to lose a lot of our key cards in the previous rounds.

If I had to pick a single point where we made a mistake that ultimately lead to our demise, it would probably be the decision to not suicide in round 12. Initially we decided to do 2 pure suicides, possibly even a 3rd. If we would have suicided, we would have been able to keep what key cards we had so that Higs and Pika would have had a good chance of finishing off the war. Instead, we lost several key cards/decks and our options going further were severely diminished.

Had we suicided, it's impossible to know if it would have lead to a war win, but it definitely would have improved our chances.

As for why we had so much success early on, that was purely due to teamwork. Everyone on team aether put in several hours each round for deckbuilding and testing. We were extremely organized and very motivated. After Round 10 or so, the length of war and the amount of work we had to put in to stay successful was starting to do its toll on us.

One last bit of reflection, which may seem as common sense, but here it goes any way. Never discard cards of your own element! In the mid-rounds, we discarded a few fractals, spiders, and immortals because we rarely used those cards, had SOO many cards, and wanted to keep our card diversity. This came back to bite us in the ass when we started losing key cards late in war. This wasn't the difference between winning and losing, but it made things more difficult when we started to lose cards.

[MrBlonde]

One last bit of reflection, which may seem as common sense, but here it goes any way. Never discard cards of your own element! In the mid-rounds, we discarded a few fractals, spiders, and immortals because we rarely used those cards, had SOO many cards, and wanted to keep our card diversity. This came back to bite us in the ass when we started losing key cards late in war. This wasn't the difference between winning and losing, but it made things more difficult when we started to lose cards.

Ahhh yes, a lesson i learned in War 1. Anyhow nothing to hang your head about, Aether dominated this war in my mind and and definitely rose your element to an elite level.

[Sevs]

One last bit of reflection, which may seem as common sense, but here it goes any way. Never discard cards of your own element! In the mid-rounds, we discarded a few fractals, spiders, and immortals because we rarely used those cards, had SOO many cards, and wanted to keep our card diversity. This came back to bite us in the ass when we started losing key cards late in war. This wasn't the difference between winning and losing, but it made things more difficult when we started to lose cards.

Even though i wasn't on a real "element", the whole discarding certain cards was the same with us. QP's after our second round were in huge shortages. We had to sub every nova we had and convert the full 24 still leaving us with a few deck under pillared. Then again we took only ~35 pillars in the initial vault, assuming we could convert enough each round and allowing us to hold as much variety of other cards. And as deuce mentioned not the reason we lost, i think the strategy helped in the long run, but if we had kept more players earlier it might have been disastrous.

[EvaRia]

Yeah.

The hardest thing to combat is the decay of your starting vault.

Even though we had the majority of the cards in War at one point, we still had to play 8 games... Which meant even if we won 5, we still lost 3, which is just as much if not more as other teams with a smaller card base.

With 30 card discards, even when you win the majority of your matches, the matches you do lose can be disastrous if you used a fair amount of key cards.

This is why I support 24 card discards... it gives you much more room and allows you to fight the decay much easier.

[Seraph]

Yeah.

The hardest thing to combat is the decay of your starting vault.

Even though we had the majority of the cards in War at one point, we still had to play 8 games... Which meant even if we won 5, we still lost 3, which is just as much if not more as other teams with a smaller card base.

With 30 card discards, even when you win the majority of your matches, the matches you do lose can be disastrous if you used a fair amount of key cards.

This is why I support 24 card discards... it gives you much more room and allows you to fight the decay much easier.

Hmm, I just have to note that your team seemed to use a lot of 36+ card decks, but it certainly does hurt to lose entire decks.
The only good part: discards are so much easier when you don't have to think about them.

[deuce22]

Hmm, I just have to note that your team seemed to use a lot of 36+ card decks, but it certainly does hurt to lose entire decks.
The only good part: discards are so much easier when you don't have to think about them.

Define "a lot". We only used sanc stall a few times, and I think we used a 42-card wings + dim deck twice near the end so that we could save some of those valuable cards had the deck lost. Other than that, everything else was 30 or 31 cards...

[Mithcairion]

Hmm, I just have to note that your team seemed to use a lot of 36+ card decks, but it certainly does hurt to lose entire decks.
The only good part: discards are so much easier when you don't have to think about them.

Define "a lot". We only used sanc stall a few times, and I think we used a 42-card wings + dim deck twice near the end so that we could save some of those valuable cards had the deck lost. Other than that, everything else was 30 or 31 cards...

I'm guessing he was remembering the event card where you could "not play" six of the cards in a deck which resulted in almost every team fielding several 36 card decks.

[EvaRia]

There were 2 events in a row that required or let us use 35+ card decks after 30 card discard came around.

[Zeru]

This is why I support 24 card discards... it gives you much more room and allows you to fight the decay much easier.

I cannot agree. I could not wait for 30 discard, it saves a lot of work figuring out what cards should be keep and what cards should be discard.