Victory Belongs to the Most Persevering - Team Aether, War 5
I'd like to hear more about that from Team Aether in this thread.
During propaganda, Jocko and I came up with a banner idea inspired by a famous painting of Napoleon Bonaparte. I figured since we were doing this goofy banner, it would need a Napoleon quote to make the banner seem more appropriate rather than egocentric. This was the only quote I came across that I felt was appropriate for war. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized how true it was in the context of EtG wars. All wars except war 2 have been all about surviving to the end rather than dominating the whole war. While no team goes into war with the mentality of just surviving, it ultimately turns into that.
While aether has 3 very strong cards, the remainder of our in-element cards have limited utility. Aether is not built to survive many losses in war with 30-card discards. With that in mind, I suggested 2 strategies before war ever started that involved suiciding to 2 or 3 decks or doing 1-2 suicides per round beginning round 4 to ensure we keep our in-element cards intact. Needless to say, no one on our team was keen on the idea of suiciding. Ironically, our mediocre performance through the first 3 rounds allowed us to keep almost all our in-element cards and set us up in a position where we would never need to purposely suicide regardless of how many matches we lost.
Spoiler for brief story of late round decisions and outcomes:
Despite going 15-5 in rounds 4-8 and being in first place, we lost a few key matchups due to derpiness. The first was losing RoL hope to time in round 5 when we had specifically set aside 2 novas and a deflag in case we faced ghostal. Then we lost bonebolt to air in round 6 because we didnt add a dragon, which really hurt because bonebolt would have been an excellent option against both fire and time in the remaining rounds. After going 3-0 in round 7, we knew that we would not likely be able to go 3-0 again because of the cards we lost in rounds 5 and 6. We viewed
as our biggest threat in round 8, and we successfully mindgated both matchups, while losing 1 of our 2 grabbows to fire. We assumed time was basically dead after round 8 since we had 9 lightnings, and they really only had ghostmare left. So we focused on fire, and lost 6 of our lightnings due to a steamy surprise. I also lost our other 3 lightnings in an RNG battle vs 10 men. At this point, I thought we had no chance left to win war. Hain and Ave kept me going, and we discovered that grabbow with dims actually had a better than 50% chance against fire's remaining decks. We won that matchup pretty easy, while losing our last fractals and silence to time in a pseudocide. In retrospect, suiciding would have been a much better option since my pseudocide had maybe 10% chance of winning at best, but I was not really thinking clearly. Again, I thought we were dead for sure in round 11, but I continued to search for something that gave us a chance against ghostmare. I eventually came up with a pure PU grabby rush with tons of pends for RTs. In testing, it had a 40-50% chance of winning, which was far better than anything I ever expected to field. Fortunately, luck favored me that day as I made an epic comeback to force a final battle against 10 men. This time, we had the upper hand, and most of our deck options were able to defeat ghostal.
Long story short, we made a couple big mistakes in the mid rounds, then suffered a couple losses that nearly crippled us. Despite the poor outlook, we persevered and gave ourselves the best chance to survive. I feel a little bad that the war winner came down to an RNG matchup in round 11. However, this was how several of our matchups against time were determined, so it was almost fitting.
If I learned anything this war, it's that you should never give up. I let my emotions get the best of me at times, and I am so thankful that my teammates never lost faith.
