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Hizawk
Jun 18, 2004

High on the Lions.

Just downloaded this game, barely know what I'm doing but holy crap is it better than the GWENT from W3.

I love it!

I kinda just hosed around and made my monster deck and that seems pretty effective at the moment at level 2.

However, when you open card kegs, is there any way to tell the difference between the rarity of the cards?

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Various Meat Products
Oct 1, 2003

Hizawk posted:

Just downloaded this game, barely know what I'm doing but holy crap is it better than the GWENT from W3.

I love it!

I kinda just hosed around and made my monster deck and that seems pretty effective at the moment at level 2.

However, when you open card kegs, is there any way to tell the difference between the rarity of the cards?

The square in the bottom right corner. There are only four rarities though, bronze cards are white/blue, all slivers are the same, as are golds.

Subvisual Haze
Nov 22, 2003

The building was on fire and it wasn't my fault.
Played a mirror match against another Queensguard deck. His Donar stole a Queensguard from me on the second turn, basically winning the match right there. Donar is such a stupid card.

Magic Underwear
May 14, 2003


Young Orc

Subvisual Haze posted:

Played a mirror match against another Queensguard deck. His Donar stole a Queensguard from me on the second turn, basically winning the match right there. Donar is such a stupid card.

Pretty clearly your mistake for not using bran turn one.

dennyk
Jan 2, 2005

Cheese-Buyer's Remorse

Magic Underwear posted:

Pretty clearly your mistake for not using bran turn one.

If his opponent was reaching for Donar turn 2, he was clearly running Longships.

I expect they'll tweak Donar sooner or later, though; at the moment, with so many decks relying on bronze win conditions, he's more feast-or-famine RNG than the devs really seem to prefer.

Subvisual Haze
Nov 22, 2003

The building was on fire and it wasn't my fault.

dennyk posted:

If his opponent was reaching for Donar turn 2, he was clearly running Longships.

I expect they'll tweak Donar sooner or later, though; at the moment, with so many decks relying on bronze win conditions, he's more feast-or-famine RNG than the devs really seem to prefer.

Yeah I got greedy and wanted to drop a longship before discarding with Bran, which in hindsight was the very wrong play. It's probably non-ideal to run a QG deck with a longship, but they can be so
helpful in round one.

Donar roulette is crazy though. Stealing spotters/reaver hunters/pirate captains from your opponent is brutal RNG. I'm betting they'll change him to copying an opponent's bronze instead of stealing it.

MarshyMcFly
Aug 16, 2012

Subvisual Haze posted:

Yeah I got greedy and wanted to drop a longship before discarding with Bran, which in hindsight was the very wrong play. It's probably non-ideal to run a QG deck with a longship, but they can be so
helpful in round one.

Donar roulette is crazy though. Stealing spotters/reaver hunters/pirate captains from your opponent is brutal RNG. I'm betting they'll change him to copying an opponent's bronze instead of stealing it.

Playing war longships first is a pretty standard move as skellige.

Magic Underwear
May 14, 2003


Young Orc

MarshyMcFly posted:

Playing war longships first is a pretty standard move as skellige.

Not against skellige, precisely because of donar. Part of being a good player is being aware of common cards that severely punish you and playing around them. If you play QG against SK and play any non-gold before bran you have made a bad play, regardless of what the standard line is.

MarshyMcFly
Aug 16, 2012

Magic Underwear posted:

Not against skellige, precisely because of donar. Part of being a good player is being aware of common cards that severely punish you and playing around them. If you play QG against SK and play any non-gold before bran you have made a bad play, regardless of what the standard line is.

You won't know that they have a donar in their hand until they play it. If he does, then better to get him out of the way early.

My deck is a discard deck mixed with axemen so I get out my war long ships and axemen first then play bran and my other discard cards.

Magic Underwear
May 14, 2003


Young Orc

MarshyMcFly posted:

You won't know that they have a donar in their hand until they play it. If he does, then better to get him out of the way early.

My deck is a discard deck mixed with axemen so I get out my war long ships and axemen first then play bran and my other discard cards.

I don't think you're paying attention to what I wrote. I don't give a poo poo what deck you play. I specifically said queensguard, a deck that gets much much worse when one is stolen, and an instant loss when your opponent is also QG. When you get so devastated by a common card like donar, it is objectively a bad play to open yourself up it.

No Wave
Sep 18, 2005

HA! HA! NICE! WHAT A TOOL!
When you lose to the one out of ten games where the opponent both has a donar in hand and it RNGs into the QG steal? And when maybe a quarter of skellige decks are QG? Idk maybe. WL is so nasty if he doesn't have it so it might even be worth it if you have one QG in hand, probably definitely worth it if you have 2.

Granted from the opponent's side donar's pure upside given that the longship is what you want to lock in that deck.

Irrelevent soon anyways, neutral griffin will hose qg regardless.

No Wave fucked around with this message at 23:10 on Aug 7, 2017

General Morden
Mar 3, 2013

GOTTA HAVE THAT PAX BISONICA

No Wave posted:

When you lose to the one out of ten games where the opponent both has a donar in hand and it RNGs into the QG steal? And when maybe a quarter of skellige decks are QG? Idk maybe. WL is so nasty if he doesn't have it so it might even be worth it if you have one QG in hand, probably definitely worth it if you have 2.

Granted from the opponent's side donar's pure upside given that the longship is what you want to lock in that deck.

Irrelevent soon anyways, neutral griffin will hose qg regardless.

every QG deck will run neutral griffin to counter the counter-play anyway so it's not that big of a hit

still the card is troublesome and i hope they change it

Magic Underwear
May 14, 2003


Young Orc
God drat dashgaard is so fun. Aside from the super high tempo round 1 it feels like it has no right to win games, it's so janky but you can do some absolutely ridiculous poo poo with myrg+villen. Way more interesting than every other deck I've played.

dennyk
Jan 2, 2005

Cheese-Buyer's Remorse

Magic Underwear posted:

God drat dashgaard is so fun. Aside from the super high tempo round 1 it feels like it has no right to win games, it's so janky but you can do some absolutely ridiculous poo poo with myrg+villen. Way more interesting than every other deck I've played.

It is a pretty fun deck, all right. It's not weak against any of the popular meta decks, so there aren't many matchups I fear with it (aside from Dorfs, as they can out-tempo you *and* out-carryover you unless the opponent gets sloppy and lines up an early Scorch on a couple of their Resilient units, and their Blizzards and massive staggering from potion spam make Myrg useless). I have a 61% win rate over 75 games with mine, and the vast majority of games I've lost have been due to misplays on my part, or the occasional bit of bad luck. I've only had a few losses where I thought "welp, there was literally no way I could have one that one..."

It's really not as janky as it seems, either; it's very consistent thanks to the thinning tools, it has the tempo to win R1 (or gain 2+ CA on a loss, which is actually almost as good with this deck), and it has a reliable win condition against most of the current meta decks; Scorch + Borkh + Myr.g ensures that most of your opponent's non-gold power is going to burn one way or another, and Ciri/Stefan/Avallach put plenty of power on your side.

Kalko
Oct 9, 2004

Mind posting a link? Out of all the factions I like the way NG plays the most, but I put all my initial resources into a QG/Discard deck which I've been using to rank up. I think I have enough scraps and stuff now to make any one NG deck since I already have a few golds which seem to be common to a lot of them.

dennyk
Jan 2, 2005

Cheese-Buyer's Remorse
Sure, ain't my deck though:

http://www.gwentdb.com/decks/26649-4350-top-150-dashguard

Normally I tweak netdecks a bunch, but this one's been working really well as-is and I honestly can't think of anything I'd change given the current meta. You could maybe swap out a Standard Bearer for some other bronze tech card if you aren't seeing much weather, but they're rather handy for keeping your Ocvist alive in a pinch as well.

Also, just had the easiest game ever against Dagon:

R1: I drop a Pikeman, he passes instantly.
R2: Regain CA with Ocvist + Cantarella, thin a bit, draw out some potions and weather from the opponent, end up with all the right cards for R3.
R3: Opponent forgets he instapassed R1, dead-passes R3 with naught but a couple Harpies on the board. :downs: He shame-forfeited before I got over the befuddlement and played anything myself.

JERFit
Dec 25, 2007

if someone said they'd give me money to play music + not have a job anymore I'd say NO
After months of playing nothing but midrange scoiatel decks, I finally decided to try something else and made myself a skellige deck. So, of course, instead of playing something normal like discard, or queensguard, or axe men, I built myself a jutta war crier deck.

The r1 tempo is absolutely ridiculous, and over a whole match crach-jutta-shieldsmith-decoy-shieldsmith-priestess-shieldsmith-holger-sigrfrida-warcrier leaves you with a 30-40 point jutta in r3. Just pray for no geralds or borks, or hold onto the decoy for a second sigrfrida and another 20+ point jutta

JERFit fucked around with this message at 23:11 on Aug 8, 2017

Goatse James Bond
Mar 28, 2010

If you see me posting please remind me that I have Charlie Work in the reports forum to do instead

Magic Underwear posted:

God drat dashgaard is so fun. Aside from the super high tempo round 1 it feels like it has no right to win games, it's so janky but you can do some absolutely ridiculous poo poo with myrg+villen. Way more interesting than every other deck I've played.

One of you shitfuckers beat my Consume Monsters the other day because some stolen card or other buffed my grave hag to where Vill could scorch her before activation on the last oppo turn of the game. :shepface:

Kalko
Oct 9, 2004

dennyk posted:

Sure, ain't my deck though:

http://www.gwentdb.com/decks/26649-4350-top-150-dashguard

Normally I tweak netdecks a bunch, but this one's been working really well as-is and I honestly can't think of anything I'd change given the current meta. You could maybe swap out a Standard Bearer for some other bronze tech card if you aren't seeing much weather, but they're rather handy for keeping your Ocvist alive in a pinch as well.

Thanks for this. I thought I understood how the deck worked at a glance but I kept thinking "hmm, but they could just counter Bork by playing a buff card or something" then I read the guide and slapped my forehead (you time it so Bork goes off when the opponent has no cards in hand). Totally crafting this deck tonight.

I really like how deck building in this game is all about maximizing synergies with the knowledge that you will probably be able to draw and/or use every card in your deck each game. It feels like the decisions you make when building a deck or playing the game are more meaningful than in any of the digital card games based on the MTG framework (which is all of them).

dennyk
Jan 2, 2005

Cheese-Buyer's Remorse

Kalko posted:

Thanks for this. I thought I understood how the deck worked at a glance but I kept thinking "hmm, but they could just counter Bork by playing a buff card or something" then I read the guide and slapped my forehead (you time it so Bork goes off when the opponent has no cards in hand). Totally crafting this deck tonight.

Yep, CA is king with this deck. Ideally you want enough CA that you can play Myr as your last card after your opponent's last card to even out a couple staggered units, or your Scorch to nuke the biggest unit so Borkh takes care of the next one. It's very very rare for me to lose if I have CA in R3; most of my losses come from suboptimal draws in R1 that leave me unable to counter key opposing cards or keep up with a high-tempo opponent who really pushes the first round.

Draws are the deck's biggest weakness; you have a lot of cards/combos you don't want (golems, 2+ Pikemen, etc.) that you usually have to spend your mulligans on, so you often can't mulligan away other cards that you might not want to use in R1 or in a particular matchup. That can leave you screwed if you lose the coin toss and your opponent puts down a lot of uncontrolled tempo in R1 and you wind up even or behind on cards and double-digit points behind while holding nothing but Borkh and a couple Foot Soldiers or Standard Bearers or some poo poo. You can get a bit screwed by Calveit as well; can't count the number of times he's pulled the 'ol "Pikeman/Alchemist/Some critical silver I can't afford to play yet" combo. If you can, always wait till turn 3 to Calveit to improve your odds (of getting the ol' "Critical R3 Silver/Critical R3 Silver/Foot Soldier" combo, natch...).

Kalko
Oct 9, 2004

My first impressions are that this deck is pretty hard to play! I've played NF before and I'm familiar with all of the cards in it but when I drew my first hand I suddenly felt like I was playing the game for the first time again (coming off of weeks of playing nothing but SK). I played six games in casual mode and it felt like every opponent but one (the one win I had) knew exactly what my deck was trying to do, which was kind of unexpected because I'm rank 14 and I've never faced this deck even once.

My first opponent took me apart with what seemed like a SK axemen deck but with card advantage like Ocvist and Avallac'h (maybe this is a standard meta deck?) One of his plays was to demote a gold card draw (I think it was Avallac'h, not sure why my memory is so bad since it was only last night) then in a later round he Sigrdrif'd it back. I got destroyed by Yennefer in another game, and then I almost won one against consume except when Bork destroyed a Nekker another boosted one got pulled from his deck, giving him the win. He must've felt real good about one.

Subvisual Haze
Nov 22, 2003

The building was on fire and it wasn't my fault.

Kalko posted:

My first opponent took me apart with what seemed like a SK axemen deck but with card advantage like Ocvist and Avallac'h (maybe this is a standard meta deck?) One of his plays was to demote a gold card draw (I think it was Avallac'h, not sure why my memory is so bad since it was only last night) then in a later round he Sigrdrif'd it back. I got destroyed by Yennefer in another game, and then I almost won one against consume except when Bork destroyed a Nekker another boosted one got pulled from his deck, giving him the win. He must've felt real good about one.

The demoted Avallac trick is getting played a lot at the moment, I'd be shocked if the card isn't changed the next patch to prevent it.

Someone posted this SK Dash deck on reddit so naturally I've played it 4 times today already. http://www.gwentdb.com/decks/27677-hyperthin-cdash-gm-4500-75-wr

Duckbox
Sep 7, 2007

Speaking of weird Nilfgaard, has anyone else been doing Emhyr mill? Its the only Emhyr deck I've found to be competitive in the gold ranks, but it has some consistency issues and I find myself misplaying it a lot. It's not as dicey as the Fringilla gambit deck I ran (making people cry with a 90 point Letho at the start of round 2 was amazing, but hard to pull of consistently and one D bomb or shackles + scorch would lose you the game) and it doesn't demand crazy card counting the way Dash tempo does (haven't tried Dash control), but it's still one of the higher skill cap Nilfgaard decks and really easy to misplay.

There's different Mill netdecks including some with Calveit, but after some experimentation with poo poo like Treason (I wanted to see if I could make it worth a silver slot. I won some games by pulling axmen, spotters, etc, but it was just too random.) And using renew for double Avelach, I settled on having enough mill rather than more than enough. Right now I'm using Avelach for burst draw, Albrich for more draw, and Sweers for targeted milling (probably the trickiest card on the deck, he's amazing round one with a good targets, butvmostly useless round three when the opponent has already drawn/played their bronzes, and there's this constant dilemma of wanting to throw him out asap for full effect or save him for a juicy targets like reavers and nekkers). The rest of the deck is pretty standard nilf spy and Emhyr bounce stuff, but with reduced deck thinning. No golems, no roach, only 2 emisarries (debating a third), and an alzur's double-cross for grabbing either Alb or Sweets (I took Aesire out and switched my power commons to impera/rottosser just for this).

Basically, the way it works is I rely on the fact that most (good) decks are 25 cards with lots of thinning. I have Emhyr/Cahir/decoy for bouncing Sweers or Albricht to thin my opponent's deck or give them crap draws and then hopefully in round three they'll be decked out a have a a hand full of useless tutors, orders units, and other poo poo they wish they could mulligan. Once they've decked out (or are just out of bronzes), Tibor becomes a 23 with no drawback, Vilgefortz is an Assassinate with an 8 point body, and, and Avelach or Albricht (if you haven't used them yet) are pure card advantage.

The problem is getting that far. poo poo like rot tossers are fairly low tempo at first and there are a lot of combo pieces you want in your deck (like sweers) that can't be thrown out just any old time, plus the bounce kill combo itself is easy to gently caress up and get minimal use/tempo out of. I often find myself overplaying the first round or else passing early and getting shut out round 2 (there's nothing more frustrating than milling your opponent's whole deck and losing to the cards they drew.) Over all, my deck is an amazing counter to lean and mean CA/tempo decks and does surprisingly well against 30+ card NR decks (Sweers hard counters Henselt/pull and these decks have tons of cards they don't actually want ti draw. My greatest moment has been saving the Operator Reaver Hunter clone for round two, Sweersing and Vilgefortzing two into his graveyard and then bouncing a vicovaro so that I had three reavers and he only had two, then bouncing the littlest Reaver twice more.

My biggest problem has been against monsters. Consume in particular badly out powers me at first and then murders me with Gravehag (really looking forward to that nerf). I know I need to work on my passing game and never let monsters have last play, but I have to win rounds too and my power curve isn't cutting it. Any advice would be appreciated.

General Morden
Mar 3, 2013

GOTTA HAVE THAT PAX BISONICA
there's a non-zero chance that they're going to allow avallach to continue doing what he's doing right now

they're most likely going to add the stubborn and doomed tag to him

The Iron Rose
May 12, 2012

:minnie: Cat Army :minnie:

dennyk posted:

Sure, ain't my deck though:

http://www.gwentdb.com/decks/26649-4350-top-150-dashguard

Normally I tweak netdecks a bunch, but this one's been working really well as-is and I honestly can't think of anything I'd change given the current meta. You could maybe swap out a Standard Bearer for some other bronze tech card if you aren't seeing much weather, but they're rather handy for keeping your Ocvist alive in a pinch as well.

Also, just had the easiest game ever against Dagon:

R1: I drop a Pikeman, he passes instantly.
R2: Regain CA with Ocvist + Cantarella, thin a bit, draw out some potions and weather from the opponent, end up with all the right cards for R3.
R3: Opponent forgets he instapassed R1, dead-passes R3 with naught but a couple Harpies on the board. :downs: He shame-forfeited before I got over the befuddlement and played anything myself.

this is a loving fantastic deck. Haven't played for a month, but hopped back in and played 10 matches with this. I won 9 of them and shot from like 2150 MMR to 2600. The one game I lost was a Nilfgaard mirror match and I drew three Imperial Golems and three Alba Pikemen in my opening hand.

I'm not a huge fan of the consume archetype, honestly. I don't particularly enjoy playing it, and I played it a lot in the Closed Beta.

Kalko
Oct 9, 2004

I'm about the same MMR as you and I feel like it's easier to win in ranked than casual at our level, at least if you have a high value deck. I currently win a lot more than I lose in ranked with standard QG/Discard but I still see a lot of opponents playing decks they obviously made themselves, and also a fair bit of basic Geralt/Triss, whereas when I play casual it feels like I get matched more often against decks with a very similar scrap value to my own.

I guess in casual there will also be a lot of possibly highly ranked people testing whatever new netdeck is on the front page of the database sites too, so there's that.

edit : Actually scrap value doesn't really make sense in this game; every deck with min size and max gold/silver will have the same scrap cost, right? I guess I mean I see a lot of decks where I can see the archetype they're going for but they don't have all the optimal cards for it yet.

Kalko fucked around with this message at 08:12 on Aug 10, 2017

Duckbox
Sep 7, 2007

I've been the ranked noob in my share of games (I'm at 3700 now, but it took quite a while) and I think a lot of it is just people grinding with the same deck over and over and getting sloppy. I've certainly sat down and busted out my "ranked deck" plenty of times only to play like a total idiot who doesn't know how his cards work. I do know how my cards work, but when you've played the same deck fifty times that week, it's really easy to stop actually thinking. A lot of the time, people in casual are just sitting down for their daily or trying out new decks, so they may actually be playing a lot more intently than someone who's been hitting the new game button for the last two hours.

dennyk
Jan 2, 2005

Cheese-Buyer's Remorse

The Iron Rose posted:

this is a loving fantastic deck. Haven't played for a month, but hopped back in and played 10 matches with this. I won 9 of them and shot from like 2150 MMR to 2600. The one game I lost was a Nilfgaard mirror match and I drew three Imperial Golems and three Alba Pikemen in my opening hand.

Ouch; I've never had a draw quite that bad, though some have come close.

I've actually never had a true mirror match with this thing. Faced one other Dashgaard deck once, but it was one of the variants with Vilge and Tibor, and I ended up winning somehow or another. Other than a few Reveal decks way back in the lower MMRs and one Emhyr spy deck that soundly kicked my rear end, I never see any NG opponents.

I've messed around with Vilge in an earlier Dash deck myself, but I've found that Avallac'h provides more consistency and flexibility. If you save Vilge for R3, you may not have a good target for him to burn, and if you don't have Stefan, he can potentially screw you over even in R3 unless you really nailed your thinning. In earlier rounds he's a huge risk to play, as there are a lot of cards you don't want to play in early rounds. His offensive ability is generally counterproductive here as well, since this deck relies heavily on CA and you already have all the tools you need to take out most or all of your opponent's big units anyway. Avallac'h, on the other hand, you can play in a pinch in R1 or R2; it's not ideal, but it won't completely screw you like R1 Vilge into Scorch/Borkh/Myr usually will. (As a bonus, there's a chance an early Avallac'h could really gently caress up the opponent's hand, especially Monsters or NR; I've won a game or two that I probably should have lost because of that.)

MarshyMcFly
Aug 16, 2012

Wow this deck I found online through gwentify is amazing! I've been winning a hell of a lot more than when I was playing my custom made decks. I was running a consume heavy deck before but I found this killer skellige discard and resurrect deck and it has been doing so much better! Instead of winning like 10% of my matches I'm winning 90% lol.

Duckbox
Sep 7, 2007

Skellige discard is one of the top decks right now for a reason.

Kalko
Oct 9, 2004

I think he was being sarcastic!

Playing Dashgaard some more I came up against a NF reveal deck that turned like 40 points into gold in R3 with Letho. Rip.

I guess that's a pretty rare matchup but I kind of want to swap one of the Standard Bearers for a Shackles because it feels like YenCon is a hard counter to this deck when they drop it early in R3, which happened twice last night. I can't think of a way to play around it because this deck takes long turns with all of the card draw, but I guess I should save Avallac'h until late in the round since one of the times I played it early my opponent drew into their Yen.

Duckbox
Sep 7, 2007

Just had a nasty 7 game losing streak will my Emhyr mill deck, including my first ever mirror match which I lost because he drew Sweers first. Think Ill go back to dashgaard.

Magic Underwear
May 14, 2003


Young Orc

Kalko posted:

I think he was being sarcastic!

Playing Dashgaard some more I came up against a NF reveal deck that turned like 40 points into gold in R3 with Letho. Rip.

I guess that's a pretty rare matchup but I kind of want to swap one of the Standard Bearers for a Shackles because it feels like YenCon is a hard counter to this deck when they drop it early in R3, which happened twice last night. I can't think of a way to play around it because this deck takes long turns with all of the card draw, but I guess I should save Avallac'h until late in the round since one of the times I played it early my opponent drew into their Yen.

If you won R1 you should be bleeding as hard as possible in R2, you want a short R3 so you can win on gold value and your scorch effects are most effective. You should try especially hard to win R1 against swarm I'd say. If I was playing swarm I'd try to beat you in R1, open pass R2 and a long R3 so that even if I get hit with scorch it only hits a small proportion of my bronze value. So don't let me do that.

I honestly think shackles is a crap card.

8-Bit Scholar
Jan 23, 2016

by FactsAreUseless
So when does the full game actually drop?

When can I get Touissant cards

No Mods No Masters
Oct 3, 2004

8-Bit Scholar posted:

So when does the full game actually drop?

When can I get Touissant cards

We're all waiting on Gamescom in about 2 weeks, Gwent is supposed to have a big showing of their longer-term plans. Touissant characters are supposed to be added to Nilfgaard eventually but who knows the timeline.

Kalko
Oct 9, 2004

Magic Underwear posted:

If you won R1 you should be bleeding as hard as possible in R2, you want a short R3 so you can win on gold value and your scorch effects are most effective. You should try especially hard to win R1 against swarm I'd say. If I was playing swarm I'd try to beat you in R1, open pass R2 and a long R3 so that even if I get hit with scorch it only hits a small proportion of my bronze value. So don't let me do that.

I honestly think shackles is a crap card.

Oh right that makes perfect sense, and reading the guide again it says not to open pass R2, which is what I was doing.

In a couple of consume games I was playing R1/T1 Auckes and Myrg to bust eggs, and it felt like the right play (and I won those games). It can be surprisingly hard to keep Ocvist alive, though, even with a follow-up Standard Bearer to buff him.

Subvisual Haze
Nov 22, 2003

The building was on fire and it wasn't my fault.

Kalko posted:

Oh right that makes perfect sense, and reading the guide again it says not to open pass R2, which is what I was doing.

In a couple of consume games I was playing R1/T1 Auckes and Myrg to bust eggs, and it felt like the right play (and I won those games). It can be surprisingly hard to keep Ocvist alive, though, even with a follow-up Standard Bearer to buff him.

Yeah, when to pass r2 and how hard to play for r1 are key concepts that will vary a lot based on which faction you're playing as and which you're playing against. The huge benefit of winning round 1 is that you can dictate exactly how long round 2 goes and how many cards both players will bring into round 3 (assuming you don't play for the 2-0 win).

For example Queensguard can bring out huge value with a single priestess of Freya each round. Thus I want to go into round 3 with one priestess card in hand, because odds are incredibly small that my opponent can match with 1-2 cards what I can do with a single priestess. Dwarfs love to go deep in round one to maximize buffs and carryover, axemen require a lot of setup and thus also love a long round, that horrible new societal deck wants to go into round 3 with all scorches and golds etc.

The unfortunate side effect of these well defined win conditions is that seemingly everyone plays balls to the wall to win round one, and matches start to feel very formulaic. Card advantage and smart passes have taken a bit of a backseat at the moment.

Kalko
Oct 9, 2004

Yeah I love winning R1 against dwarves and going into R2 with a huge point deficit but still making them waste cards because they can't afford to pass. I also love going into R3 and laying out four golds in a row when I know they're holding back damage in their hand or they're relying on their board damage (eg. weather) to do something.

I'm slowly building the mental checklist of what I need to accomplish in R1/R2 vs different opponents now, like against consume I want to force them to play vampire man in R1 or R2 so they can't turn points into gold in R3, and against SK now I try to mulligan and/or dig for Auckes because he's MVP vs ships and axemen (though I've learned I can't afford to grab the third mull unless I've already sent back a golem and a pikemen).

I know there probably isn't a general rule for this, but in what situations would you try to seal the game in R2? I feel like I could've done it a couple of times when I had a 1-2 card lead and all of my golds, but I went into R3 anyway.

dennyk
Jan 2, 2005

Cheese-Buyer's Remorse

Kalko posted:

I know there probably isn't a general rule for this, but in what situations would you try to seal the game in R2? I feel like I could've done it a couple of times when I had a 1-2 card lead and all of my golds, but I went into R3 anyway.

Well, if you get down to the time you'd consider passing and you're actually in a better spot than you would be at the start of the next round, you might as well push. Really have to take everything into account, though, not just the score; for instance, say he's running QGs; you might be better off in R2 with the Queensguards and Cerys already on the board even if you're actually a little behind on score, vs. having him bring them all out again in R3 with a single play.

Conversely, if you know you've got your own powerful play top-decked (or in your hand when you have CA) and you can run him out of cards; no reason not to push R2; worst case you can empty his hand and make him rely on a topdeck RNG which will likely not equal your high-tempo play.

If you're running tokens, Dorfs, or some other high-carryover deck, pushing for 2-0 is often a viable strategy in a lot of games.

If you're well behind because you've just been throwing out trash cards or low-tempo thinning/carryover plays, that's when you need to be careful not to overextend, especially when you can't win the round with what's left in your hand; if you take it too far, your opponent might just call your bluff and cost you some of your CA and third-round power.

If you have a setup for a long R3 and you don't think the opponent does, dead-passing R2 might be the best move; assuming no opponent carryover, it's an automatic +1 CA for you (as you play nothing, but your opponent has to play a card). Pushing the round to bleed your opponent may cost you that +1 CA unless you can remain ahead of the opponent throughout the round (since if you pass while behind, he doesn't have to play another card himself).

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Kalko
Oct 9, 2004

So close, and yet so far...



Knight boosts back to 10 after stripping armor.

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