A team leading late in war is initially put in a tough position when they have to spread themselves thinly over a vault to come up with decks to counter officers with soldiers to start with. I believe time was the first out of the three early leaders (time, entropy, earth), to start to crumble under this pressure a bit. The event cards did a good job of keeping the downtrodden teams involved by giving them hope and a few new tweaks to stay alive. The pressure of us (earth) having to come up with enough creatures and quanta to field multiple decks finally broke us this past round. I believe entropy faced a similar situation as us. Admittedly, some of this may have been my own inexperience from being in a leadership position for the first time.
Ultimately though, I felt the combination of facing an increased number of officers (who not only have an upped card advantage along with other factors was our largest stumbling block. Other factors such as: staying in a range where we would have to strain to field 6 decks instead of being a few cards less and only having to field 5 decks, increased discards, and increased unpredictability and officer power in conjunction with the round 8 event card made things very tough on us. I told my team before the round, I would consider a 3-3 record a success. I had the opportunity to create a much more versatile and powerful officer deck vs. TorB, but the situation presented meant I needed to bring a more specific counter deck this round (which lost anyways). The justification for not suiciding was that a loss was just the same as a suicide at this point, so we went forward with what we thought was 6 competitive decks. All of this has led to a 32-21 team being behind a 17-17 team (darkness) and fairly weak decks remaining going forward.
I hope my team understands all of the hard work wasn't for nothing and hopefully we showed some people what a strong and united team can do against the odds. I am proud of what a strong opponent we proved to be throughout up until this point.
