War #7 - Suggestions and Feedback

[Vangelios]

I do not know, but I think it is better to leave the war as it is, and create another event with elements competition, if we have the political will and players interested in it, we can model in General Discussion

[MyNameIsJoey]

Next war, make teasm the size of (rounded down) (War applications - 7) / 12.

[zerxil]

call it free for all. make it random pick for your team.  i think the last card picture should be bone yard...see you lost cards but gained upgrades. bone shield & shard of sac are good choices too.

[TheonlyrealBeef]

Although I like some features coming with new salvage and spoils there are others that I would like to see improved in the following ways (wall of text warning):

• Conversion. Conversion is currently at 24 cards max which was perfectly fine with 6 salvage per win, however, with 20 salvage you gain more cards than you can even turn into in-element pillars/pends. Suicide being the only logical way out if you go with 3+ losses and then still have to build 3+ decks you didn't use last round with ~12 quanta each. I don't know why the maximum was installed, but I would like to either see it removed or significantly increased, especially if paired with the next suggestions:
• Salvage. Salvage currently allows everyone and their mother to field 9001 grabows (ok, you only field up to 6 decks, so 6... fine :d), santuary stalls or whatever. My suggestion is to limit the off-element cards in vault after salvage to 9. This way, if you lose with a deck that relies on a combo with 6 of one card you can rebuild it but you can't just field 2-6 grabows. It's boring and unoriginal, whilst I like the new salvage for coming up with new and original decks. But apparently not everyone had my thoughts and just c/p-ed the opponents' boring decks and made them their own :p
• Transmutation. I currently find the lack of versatily of teams losing badly to be disturbing, there is nothing they can do to not keep losing against the same decks in future rounds because they cannot beat what counters their current vault which also implies not being able to salvage something to allow you to counter it. My suggestion? Add 2 transmutations for losses from the cards you don't discard into any element. With same restrictions as other transmutations that they cannot exceed that card's number past 6 of course.

[serprex]

I agree with Torb's sentiment, though a max of off element should be at least 12

[xyan]

discarding + limit on conversion = forced suicide or extra use of bows (in this common case, grabbow) as a deck with 5 quanta sources in-element and 6 novas is a lot easier to field after discards than a deck with 12+ in-element sources.

discarding + no available salvage from wins in-element most of the time for many teams + limit on transmutes = easy to be low on in-element cards needed, such as creatures, which makes grabbows a very good deck to spam if you have it.

salvage/discard numbers scaling a lot = teams can fall out of competition or jump up to safety REALLY fast. IMHO something like +15/-20 would have been good number for winning without making a team really safe with 1 5-1, or making a team be in danger of vault death or deck suiciding or deck death with 1 0-5 or the sort.

[Laxadarap]

So I thought of a cool idea.  What if you had a type of scrapyard for cards you have to discard or cards used in conversions.  This could be a max of like 10 cards or so, and it holds them for you.  Technically they are not in your vault and you cannot play with them, but you would be able to Essentially transmute into those cards at a cost of 2 cards for 1.  This would allow for more forgiveness of a bad round, and make predicting a bit harder in general.  It would somewhat stop the issue with teams only having 1 deck left and being easy to counter as well.

[Elbirn]

Now that I'm home and I actually have a chance to look at the EC and matchups...good god. I didn't realize dominating the first 8 rounds would put you at a disadvantage. Kind of wish we would have just forfeited all of our matches the last 2-3 rounds...

Not only do the final four rules heavily favor fewer matches being played, the R9 EC further penalizes teams with more matches. Plus, we face all 3 Gens (and likely 2 Lts) of teams with essentially renewed vaults. And we face 2 of the 3 teams twice, which means predictions are nearly completely random.

Once again, whoever made these rules should be shot.  On the bright side, everyone clamoring for a new war winner will likely get what they've been asking for, but aether won't go down without a fight.

So spoils/Top 4 goes away for War 8, agreed?

No really, I hate Deucey's whining as much as the next guy, but I've never liked these rules. 8 teams have been eliminated solely for the sake of time saving, and not because they were actually traditionally defeated, air almost didn't make it into top 4 despite having a vault nearly 1.5 times the size of the third place team (, who has the 6th place vault size actually), the second place team () got eliminated by a mere few cards...Oh, and the first place team, which has a vault size nearly as large as the other top 3 COMBINED has practically zero advantage over any other team, making the finals more of a crapshoot than anything.

[Acsabi44]

Oh, and the first place team, which has a vault size nearly as large as the other top 3 COMBINED has practically zero advantage over any other team

I dont think this is a problem.
Compare Football World Cup: In the group stages, it doesnt matter if you win all your games with 10-0, you will still have to fight an even match with the other opponents (who probably barely made it). No rule like the team with the weaker group stage record only fields 9 players etc etc.

I like that for this war, a huge early-mid advantage doesnt transition directly into the final rounds.

[andretimpa]

Oh, and the first place team, which has a vault size nearly as large as the other top 3 COMBINED has practically zero advantage over any other team

Not having to burn your relics to stay alive (aka in the top4) and potentially burning them on this round to get a decisive advantage that will reflect on the rest of the event sounds like enough advantage for me.

[mrpaper]

Oh, and the first place team, which has a vault size nearly as large as the other top 3 COMBINED has practically zero advantage over any other team

I dont think this is a problem.
Compare Football World Cup: In the group stages, it doesnt matter if you win all your games with 10-0, you will still have to fight an even match with the other opponents (who probably barely made it). No rule like the team with the weaker group stage record only fields 9 players etc etc.

I like that for this war, a huge early-mid advantage doesnt transition directly into the final rounds.

Well if it was like the world cup, we would face last place team still alive and not the Generals ... this doesn't really apply here unless you make the final rounds like a mini tourney, but that wasn't really like when it was tried (not by me anyway).  Also, in world cup.. even if we we're 9-0 going to last group game.. we wouldn't have any advavantage over whoever we face.

[Afdarenty]

Apologies for the wall of text. Maybe take it one section at a time?  Hopefully some of it makes sense.

Spoiler for Wall of Text:

Spoils

I'll have to agree, I don't like this spoils system much. One of the things I loved about War 6 was that the only way you could lose was by your own doing: losing matches. At any point you could make a comeback, your fate was in your hands. It wasn't over until it was over.

This war a number of teams knew they were very likely going out a while before the round 8 deadline. Major props to them for staying motivated, but I know that if I was on one of those teams it would take the fun out of war. I don't want that.

Going out like this also seems somewhat anticlimactic. I feel like someone clicked their fingers and just like that we went from a strong position to out of war. It doesn't seem like a dignified ending for us and other teams that went a long way and put a lot of effort in. It's like us saying, oh, we've won a few less times than other teams, lets give up. Yes, I know it's not exactly like that, but that's how I feel I've been forced to act by these rules.


Support

I suspect I might be alone in the community on this, but I for one missed support hugely. Because there's a bit less pressure to win these games and you don't have to use each deck you play multiple times we got to see more variety than in standard war games. Personally, I liked seeing decks that would never normally be played in war. Some examples:

Spoiler for Entropy - Life Stall:

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4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vn 4vn 4vn 4vn 4vn 4vn 4vp 4vp 4vp 4vp 4vp 4vp 50u 50u 50u 50u 50u 50u 50u 50u 50u 50u 5c2 5c2 5c2 5c2 5c2 5c2 5c4 5c4 5c4 5c4 8pn

Used vs Aether.

Spoiler for Entropy - Toadbow:

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4ve 4ve 4vh 4vh 4vh 4vj 4vj 4vj 4vj 4vj 4vj 50u 50u 50u 50u 50u 50u 50u 50u 55t 595 5ie 5ie 5ie 5ie 5ie 5ie 5if 5if 5rk 8pp

Okay, so there's a little Entropy bias  Guess which team I was on.

Spoiler for Air - Ghostmare:

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5oc 5oc 5oc 5oc 5of 5of 5of 5on 5on 5on 5pu 5pu 5pu 5pu 5pu 5pu 5pu 5rk 5rk 5ru 5ru 5ru 5ru 5ru 5uu 5v1 5v1 5v1 606 606 606 606 606 606 8ps

Obligatory mention. This thing won multiple times, and is much stronger than it looks.

I also think that support is a much better way to implement relics into war than what we had this year. The current relic system felt to me like it was just there because the WMs didn't want to see them go.


Conversions/Transmutations

After R3 playing 6 decks and going 3-3 meant you lost a total of ~80 cards, and gained ~60. This isn't a huge problem until you consider that the majority of cards being discarded are in-element, and the majority of cards being salvaged are out-of-element.

With the limited conversions and transmutation, teams were unable to get back the in-element cards they were losing. This pushed teams that weren't at the 'lose a game, lose a player' stage towards suicide decks due to lack of in-element cards. This, for me, should be a last resort and not something the rules prod you into doing.

Ideally I'd want unlimited conversion rule, and a transmutation rule that wasn't nearly as restrictive as this wars. For a more thought out view on this than my tired old mind can produce see TorBs post here.


Round Length

Personally, I'd like deck building to last a couple of days longer. It's a huge amount of work to be crammed into 2-4 days. A big thank you to kdz for listening to the community on this the last few rounds.