19XX once more

[vengefulpickle]

vengefulpickle vs @ratxt1

3-0

The video is short (~18 minutes) if you want to watch the set without spoilers: https://youtu.be/5DIwHrNaucI

Details

- @ratxt1 opens with a bold fast-timer persephone. The deck delivers me all the right cards, and I’m able to score the perfect.
- An early TPoS into Single A into A/A clash brings the game to 1 - 81. Yet again, the deck delivers everything I could have possibly wanted, and proves that Sets is stupid dangerous no matter how low her life total is.
- No perfects, no magic pixels, just a regular old Grave/Sets punchup.

[Caralad]

Caralad vs @Nopethebard

G2 was the only game that I felt in control of, both other ones were too close for comfort, including being down to 7 health looking at least a known AA in rooks hand. Yikes.

GG’s Nope.

[vengefulpickle]

vengefulpickle 3-1 @Ivan

- Got wrecked. Don’t think I won combat a single time.
psfist: - Came down to a PF on 3 life - 4 life.
- Got lots of recurring face cards, was able to bully w/ Q and out-of-combat damage.
- Down to the wire again.

Whew! That was a fun set. My heart was racing through the entirety of the Lum portions. GGs!

[vengefulpickle]

vengefulpickle 3-2 @Nopethebard

- A blowout. Got got by AAAA
- Down to the wire

- The crutch comes out

I couldn’t face the idea of Lum/Rook sets, so I went with the Arg pick… it was touch and go. GGs, @Nopethebard!

[Caralad]

Caralad vs @Cypher

Highlight is the comeback in game 4. I go down to 1 HP, and the Guile theme just intensifies. Hit the AAA but can’t follow it up with the last A in my hand because I’m on 9hp. Manage to just block next turn for the delayed Deathstrike Drugs.

GG’s Cypher. You played really well.

[vengefulpickle]

vengefulpickle vs @Caralad

[Ivan]

Ivan vs Cypher - 3:2





GGs, mate. Great tense set.

[Nopethebard]

NopetheBard beats Ivan 3-1

>
Accidental counterpick. Menelker fell to Gwen’s pressure
>
This got kinda dicey but Gwen’s speed and relentless aggression won the day
<
>
This came very close. Lots of bad dice rolls early on and Dragon pressure is scary. I was able to rally with a single K I kept recurring and came back. I eventually won with KD Pandamonium checkmate

GGs @Ivan! That was hype

[Cypher]

Game	@Cypher	vs.	@vengefulpickle
Round 1
Round 2
Round 3
Round 4

Cypher wins, 3:1

• Game 1 was the most “Midori” game I’ve played all month… in that I had a hand of powerful cards, and no way to dragonize them. The game begins typically enough, with me blocking a lot of Lum’s coins (to the point where I even discarded a card due to hand-limit), and trying to sneak in a couple of throws (which don’t work… I’m down to half health before landing a single hit). Eventually, I’m down real low (and my deck’s down to 17 cards), and finally draw a 2 (which my opponent promptly reveals using a Jackpot… instead of any of my four Aces). Of course, I immediately play Dragon Form and let rip a fully powered-up Final Dragon Buster for the KO.

• Game 2 sees my opponent counterpick with Argagarg, and it works. Good hand management from my opponent means that all of his throws and normals lead to efficient big-damage combos. What’s worse is that I outplay myself by being too clever with my dragon moves. Despite neither of my two Dragon Forms getting countered, they are both promptly thrown, and I die with three Qs in hand (and a few other pretty cards).

• Game 3 is tough, since my usual Argagarg counter pick is Gloria, and it’s quite intimidating to play Gloria in fast-timer. I go for Grave, instead (not much of a counterpick, I know), but I just play him like a grappler, throwing into Aces to make sure they do enough damage. That’s after spending, like, six turns in a row just playing nothing but Jacks, of course. Having sufficiently tilted my opponent, I dodge into a TPoS in the midgame (my opponent knew I had it but I knew that he knew, so I played it through the Joker bluff). Of course, VengefulPickle did have Jokers in hand (two of them!) so I spend the next few turns blocking those Jokers before eventually closing it out.

• Game 4 has my opponent switching back to Lum, so I’m blocking a lot. And it pays off, since I manage two TPoSes in this game (of course, that means I win it). The second one isn’t quite as impressive as the first, since it only closes out 9 damage, but it’s still very dramatic. Of course, all of that powering-up-for-Aces meant that my hand ended up with no notable throws in it, so I was spending a long time afraid of my opponent’s Blackjacks (he certainly got me a couple of times), and it was still an extremely close “down to the last combat” game; a great end to a great set!

I think it may have been streamed? If a YouTube video or some archived Twitch footage shows up, I’ll add the link to this post. Good Games and Well Played to my opponent!

[Cypher]

Game	@Cypher	vs.	@Caralad
Round 1
Round 2
Round 3
Round 4
Round 5
Round 6

Semifinals: Cypher wins, 4-3, after a lengthy discussion about how Double-KOs work in this tournament.

• Game 1 Caralad has started with Menelker before, and it’s a matchup I’m comfortable with, so I opt to start with Midori. Brother battle! Duffing his throw with an early straight keeps me fueled up, and despite getting hit with a few Black Face Cards, I do enough Dragon Things™ to win the game.

• Game 2 sees my opponent counterpick with Argagarg, but it doesn’t work quite as well for Caralad as it did for VengefulPickle. The game’s really close, but I manage to wait out his Aces until he plays them as Blowfish Spikes instead of Bubble Shield, dodging them with a topdecked 9. I manage to take it, but it’s quite the nailbiter until the end.

• Game 3 went great for me… right up until it didn’t. I’ve still got a lot of action in-hand, but a very brave throw from my opponent puts me on the ground, and then I get crossed up for the win. Very strong game from Caralad.

• Game 4 I swap to Grave, and our spectator comments “second time this tournament I’ve seen Grave counterpicked into Argagarg!” and then promptly realizes “hold on, Cypher, that you the other time, too, wasn’t it?” It doesn’t go as well for me this time as it did against Vengeful Pickle, despite good throw timing on my part. Last turn I decide to go for a raw TPoS instead of the “high percentage” dodge, and I get blown up for it.

• Game 5 is where things get crazy, as I decide “screw it, I’m doing fast-timer Persephone again!” and it seems like my opponent is just as excited as I am. I don’t play perfect (far from it, really), but I play well enough! The first two vortexes get stuffed easily enough, but one eventually sticks long enough to fill my hand and let me start mixing up between dodges and On Your Knees. Eventually I decide to chip my opponent down to 1 hp (even though I forgot to retrieve my Q from discard, earlier), and throw to close it out. I take a few minutes to compose myself, since fast-timer Persephone is stressful.

• Game 6 sees the strong counterpick of Gwen. It’s (famously) Persephone’s worst matchup, but thanks to my match against MysticJuicer in Lum’s Lucky Lottery (in which his Persephone soundly bodied my Gwen), I now at least know how to play it from the Persephone side. I am helped immensely by Jokering a massive wombo-combo very early in the round. Eventually, it’s down to the final combat before time-out, Caralad’s got the Dreadlands Portal in hand (and two more hit points than I do) while I’ve got On Your Knees. Both moves are lethal. I desperately want throw what I’m reading as a dodge, but no throws in hand! So I dodge, rather than attack into Gwen’s dodge, and after the Shadow Plague evens up the life-totals 15-15, the game ends in a draw!

Serious GG;WP to my opponent, Caralad. An extremely tense set that literally came down to the wire. We don’t know if a double-KO counts as a win-for-both or as a win-for-neither, so we’ll set up a few more rounds if we gotta.

[Nopethebard]

It’s first to 3, right? In which case it doesn’t matter because game 5 already decided the winner. It would both winning if it counted though

[Cypher]

Oh? I remember VengefulPickle saying something about the Group Stage of the tournament being First-to-3, but the Final Stage being a First-to-4. It seems like this was discussed in the November 20th posts, on this thread.

Anyways, I think that Nopethebard and Vengefulpickle are the two Tournament Organizers? We’ll stand-by for a definitive answer from the two of you.

[vengefulpickle]

So, yes, we said up-thread that finals are Bo7. Secondly, we didn’t specify, but Standard Tournament Yomi (as defined by my copy-pastes in other threads) is that a double KO is a win for both, except when it’s the last match of the set, in which case, replay. So, y’all have at least one more to play.

[Cypher]

You got it, thanks for the quick response! We’ll move forward with scheduling the final round(s) of our set. Just to make sure there’s absolutely no miscommunication, I want to ask for a couple of points of clarification:

1. The rules posted in Salary Cap, Balanced Team Battle, Lum’s Lucky Lottery, and Counterpick Cake all say “Double KO is a win for both players, unless it would cause both to win the set” (emphasis added). What you’re saying here is that the more-accurate rule should read “Double KO is a win for both players, unless it would cause either to win the set.”
   Am I understanding your last post correctly? In our case, a “win for both players” would have caused only one player to win the set, not both, so I want to be totally certain that I’m understanding the intended rules correctly.

2. When we play the next round of our set, are we locked into the same characters that were used in the Double KO round? Is it a new double-blind pick? Something else?

[vengefulpickle]

Aha! You’re right, sorry, I misremembered the rules. Let’s go w/ the rules as written there, which means the 4-3 result stands.

[Cypher]

Okay. That’s good news for me, I suppose. Thank you. Out of curiosity, what would the answer have been to Question #2 (about how character-selection works after a Double KO)?

(Also, if you want to add even more confusion to the mix, the rules for IYL 8 state different Double KO rules than the usual copy/paste rules have.)

[Caralad]

Yeah I think the IYL double KO rules are the ones that have stuck in my head the most. But as I said in the match I’m happy to accept the result.

[vengefulpickle]

I think I went w/ Double-KO is a win unless it’s match point for both players was inspired by FS, which does the same, for reasons of hype, IIRC.

[vengefulpickle]

I think when double-ko forces a replay, you replay the same characters (except in the stable formats, like Salary Cap, where it cycles back to the top of the order).

[vengefulpickle]

I really need to make that thread of forum rules (as wiki posts, so that they can be refined as needed).