I dont think it will come down to the fight of the masters, but it is certainly interesting to see how rules are affecting the war. Rules will be changed hopefully for the next war, but just compare and results: 16/12 vs 7/12, and both have one deck to use.
Risk of losing cards is actually much lower when you have to field less decks per round as you dont have to make compromises between decks + master deck always has the advantage of upped cards.
There have been discussions about vaults being bad if you dont have enough of your element cards, but best scenario is actually being able to field lower amount of decks with extra strategies at your disposal with off element cards.
Yep. With the current rules, best Vault would be where you had 29 cards from your element and 100+ from other elements. With a Vault like that, only one player can participate during the round. You simply build a 58 (29+29) card deck for that player, and when he loses, you discard 30 cards, with only
one being a card of your element. Next turn you build a 56 (28 + 28) card deck, etc.
And here's the key:
going 0-1 is better than going 4-2. Crazy huh? With first one, even though you lose 100% of matches, you only lose 30 cards. With latter, you win
67% of the matches but lose 36 cards.
Losing that one match is not a big deal, but that "one player with a phat deck" strategy is even better if you actually
win. Then you get +6 which is a HUGE advantage against other teams who kill each other (they would need 6-0 to do better than you).
Unfortunately many teams didn't realize this strategy, and used 30 card decks, getting eliminated early. This is a CCG, and deckbuilding plays an important part.
Good news is that this strategy will not be available in War #2 because we have the
card conversion system. If you have 29 cards from your element and 100+ from other elements, you are forced to convert cards to your own element so that you can form as many legal decks as possible.
We can easily calculate the number of players joining the round by looking at the Vault totals.
less than 30 cards: team is eliminated
30-59 cards: 1 player fights
60-89 cards: 2 players fight
90-119 cards: 3 players fight
etc.