So… I apparently did something stupid again. I really hoped to avoid this sort of thing during the tournament, because I know it’s not cool, but the mechanics of pbp are still new and awkward for me. Sometimes when I’m editing my spreadsheet, I’ll click “Discard and Draw” before I hit Enter to finalize the field I’m editing, and the edit is lost. I suspect that’s what happened on turn 2 when you killed my Poisonblade Rogue, but it’s also possible I just hit delete rather than dragging it to my discard. In any case, I’ve just realized that it seems to have disappeared from my deck. It wouldn’t have affected anything until this turn, so I can redo it if you like (probably the fairest option), or just undo the reshuffle and add it to my current hand in place of the last card I drew (My preference, if you’re feeling generous-- I obviously had a pretty good draw this turn, and I think I’m probably toast if I don’t get Nether Drain), or undertake any other remedy you and the tournament judge deem appropriate. I’m really sorry about this.
Honest mistake mate. It sounds like it affected your turn 3 hand though (if it wasn’t in the deck), so you do probably need to rewind your turn 2 draw/discard phase and reshuffle to see if you were able to draw nether drain and/or bone collector with the PBR in the deck for turn 3.
I’m not an official judge though, I think @zhavier is
Right now I’m forking my spreadsheet to do both options. I’ll post my revised turn as soon as EricF gives me his preference. You’re right that it affected my turn 3 draw, which is why I said redoing is probably fairest, but after having gotten lucky once (admittedly with some undeserved help, but lucky nonetheless), it stings a bit to have to dial that back and hope to get lucky again. Undoing the reshuffle and adding it back to my turn 4 hand represents a possible outcome of having done it right in which I did get lucky. I completely understand if my opponent doesn’t want me to have that advantage, but given that I’m likely DOA if I don’t draw Nether Drain turn 3, I’ll take it if he’ll give it. Another potential way to mitigate it without completely negating the luck I already had would be to put both PBR and ND into a turn 3 hand, and then draw the rest from the appropriate deck. That said, I’m totally fine with redoing it. I might even re-draw the Nether Drain, in which case I think I’m fine for the moment, with or without Bone Collector. Anyway, I’m the one who screwed up, so it’s my opponents prerogative as to how to fix it.
It’s up to zhavier, since I’m not going to make an official ruling on my own game, but I think frozenstorm has it right (back up to the point of error, correct it, and play forward from there)
We can wait for an official ruling if you feel it’s appropriate, but I doubt zhavier will side against you on this. It’s a shame, though. After a really rough first turn from you, I felt like I had a chance when I saw Nether Drain in my turn 3 hand, because most of the plays I forsaw you making involved Oni vulnerable to a ND kill. I have since redone the draw (but not the turn, yet) in a separate spreadsheet. I didn’t get ND, so I’m not optimistic about my chances in this game, particularly since you now know what I teched (a big advantage of not playing a hero turn 2 was that I could potentially be playing any spell in my codex turn 3, and had I not drawn ND, there’s a strong chance I wouldn’t have played a hero on turn 3 either, for the same reason. That advantage is now gone.) If you’re set on a hard rewind, I’ll replay my turn with the hand I drew, stipulating that zhavier will likely rule the same way. It is the most natural course of action, I have to admit, as much as it feels like a punch in the gut.
Edit @EricF: might I suggest that we dial all the way back to my turn 2, rather than turn 3? It’s bad enough not to draw the cards I need, but it’s made all the worse by having exposed my tech choices to you. Maybe it wouldn’t make a difference, but it seems to me that it might. We of course would be free to make the same tech choices, and I can promise you that if I do choose to go ND/BC again, I will use the same turn 3 hand I just redrew (without ND) so this isn’t just a ploy to get another redraw. In fact, since ND is the critical card, I’d even stipulate that if I tech it, I’ll make sure I don’t draw it turn 3 (by adding it to my deck after my turn 3 draw, rather than my discard before). You could likewise keep the same tech and turn 3 hand (and turn 3 plays, for that matter) if you wanted. I don’t know. I don’t want to be asking for an unfair advantage, particularly since I screwed up, but it seems like exposing my tech to you is an unfair advantage in the other direction… Do you think the knowledge that I have Nether Drain in my next hand will affect your decisions turn 4? If you can honestly say that it won’t, I rescind my request.
As the organizer/judge, I’ve been slowly developing a set of precedents to ensure that all games can be resolved without regard to the specific amount/type of benefit gained.
My most recent notes are here (under “Nit-picky details about correcting game errors”): http://forums.sirlingames.com/t/tournament-codex-asynchronous-winter-swiss-round-8/1502?u=ericf
I’m a little confused by number 2, which seems to be the relevant rule here, but if I’m reading it correctly, it means we only rewind my turn 3, and I have to draw a new hand. I was in the midst of doing that anyway, so here’s my new turn.
Player 2 Turn 3
[details=Tech StartingHand Workers]
[spoiler]TECH
Blackhand Resurrector
Skeletal Lord
STARTING HAND
Skeletal Archery
Poisonblade Rogue
Skeleton Javelineer
Graveyard
Hooded Executioner
WORKERS
Pestering Haunt
Thieving Imp
Poisonblade Rogue
[/spoiler][/details]
[details=NextHand]
[spoiler]Summon Skeletons
Nether Drain
Bone Collector
Deteriorate
Sacrifice the Weak
[/spoiler][/details]
[details=Discard]
[spoiler]Jandra, the Negator
Skeletal Archery
Graveyard
Blackhand Resurrector
Skeletal Lord
[/spoiler][/details]
Tech 2 card(s)
Get Paid - ($7)
Worker - ($6)
Tower - ($3)
Bigby Hayes - ($1)
Skeleton Javelineer - ($0)
Float ($0)
Stash 1, Discard 2, draw 4
[B]Board Info:[/B]
[B]In Patrol:[/B]
-
[I]Squad Leader[/I]: Skeleton Javelineer (1/1+A) -
[I]Elite[/I]: -
[I]Scavenger[/I]: -
[I]Technician[/I]: Bigby lvl 1 (2/3) -
[I]Lookout[/I]:
[I]Squad Leader[/I]: Skeleton Javelineer (1/1+A)
[I]Elite[/I]:
[I]Scavenger[/I]:
[I]Technician[/I]: Bigby lvl 1 (2/3)
[I]Lookout[/I]:[B]In Play:[/B]
[B]Buildings:[/B]
-
Base HP: 20 -
Tech I HP: 5
-
Tower HP: 4
Base HP: 20[B]Economy Info:[/B]
[B]Cards:[/B]
- Hand: 5
- Deck: 0
- Disc: 5
[B]Gold:[/B]
- Gold: 0
- Workers: 8
Edit @EricF I apologize again for the mistake, and I understand the reason it needed to be corrected the way it was. This is a tournament after all, so the games matter (insofar as a game of Codex ever matters). I am wondering, though, if after our tournament game is complete, you’d be willing to play a casual game with me with my original turn 3 in effect (and PBR added back in to my turn 4 hand, or something like that). This game isn’t shaping up to be very competitive, and I could use the practice of continuing a little deeper into the game with some semblance of parity. That and, frankly, I’d like to see how it would play out. I was happy with myself for making the Nether Drain call, because it seemed like it could bail me out of a bad opening, but a bad draw has now rendered a good call moot.
Edit 2: I meant to put BIgby in scavenger, but I entered it in my spreadsheet wrong. I’ll leave it if you like, but I would prefer it that way, and I can assure you that it’s just a typo: scavenger was the decision I made before my discard/draw, I just entered it wrong. In any case, If you kill him, it’s up to you whether I get a coin or a card. Compared to my previous error, this is basically no big deal.
That’s fine - I’ll bifurcate the thread at your original turn 3, with PBR added at the bottom of your deck (which means you don’t actually re-shuffle, and have 4 cards in hand, and 5 in discard, I believe?)
[details=P1, Turn 4]Manufactured Truth
Traffic Director -> Worker
Reputable Newsman
Arrest
Tiny Basilisk
Total Defense: 2, 3 // 4, 5
Total Attack: 5, 111, 2
Tech in Monkey + Moment’s Peace
[/details]
7 gold (8)
Worker (7)
Tech II Anarchy (3)
Tiny Basilisk (1)
Manufactured Truth, making Louis into a copy of the Basilisk (0)
Louisilisk trades with Bigby, you get a gold, since that’s what you wanted
Overeager Cadet trades with Javelineer
Onimaru trades with your Tower, your Base takes 2
Huey and Dewy poke your Tech 1 for 2 damage
Discard 2, rs, Draw 4.
Tech - Tiny Basilisk (1/2) can’t be attacked by Tech 0 units
Huey (1/1)
Dewy (1/1)
Base - 20
Tech 1 - 5
Tech 2 - 5
Spec: Anarchy
8 workers, 0 gold.
Hand: 4
Deck: 7
Discard: 0
[details=Next Hand]Disguised Monkey
Disguised Monkey
Moment’s Peace
Arrest[/details]
Now that I’ve noticed this thread, I can simply verify that redoing T3 was the correct call. Carry on.
As I’ve said, I suspect I’m toast here, but here goes nothing…
Player 2 Turn 4
[details=Tech StartingHand Workers]
[spoiler]TECH
Necromancer
Necromancer
STARTING HANDBone Collector
Deteriorate
Nether Drain
Sacrifice the Weak
Summon Skeletons
WORKERS
Pestering Haunt
Thieving Imp
Poisonblade Rogue
Sacrifice the Weak
[/spoiler][/details]
[details=NextHand]
[spoiler]Graveyard
Jandra, the Negator
Summon Skeletons
Nether Drain
Skeleton Javelineer
[/spoiler][/details]
Tech 2 card(s)
Get Paid+scav - ($9)
Worker - ($8)
Bone Collector - ($6)
Tech II (Necro) - ($2)
Drakk - ($0)
Float ($0)
Discard 3, reshuffle, draw 5
[B]Board Info:[/B]
[B]In Patrol:[/B]
-
[I]Squad Leader[/I]: Bone Collector (3/3+A)
-
[I]Elite[/I]:
-
[I]Scavenger[/I]: Drakk lvl 1 (1/3)
-
[I]Technician[/I]:
-
[I]Lookout[/I]:
[B]In Play:[/B]
[B]Buildings:[/B]
-
Base HP: 18
-
Tech I HP: 3
-
Tech II HP: 5 (Necomancy)
[B]Economy Info:[/B]
[B]Cards:[/B]
- Hand: 5
- Deck: 6
- Disc: 0
[B]Gold:[/B]
- Gold: 0
- Workers: 9
[details=P1, Turn 5]Arrest
Disguised Monkey
Moment’s Peace
Disguised Monkey
Tech in 2x Gunship //even though I’m skipping a worker here, I’m also going to be way down on cards, and these are the only things I know I’ll want in my next cycle.
[/details]
Note that your Base is at 18 from having the tower destroyed
8 gold (8)
Zane (6)
Arrest Bone Collector (3)
Basilisk kills Drakk, Zane to L3
Level Zane to 4 (2)
Disguised Monkey (0)
Monkey breaks Tech 1
Zane, Huey, and Dewy break Tech 2, your base is now at 14
(skip worker)
Discard 2, Draw 4.
No Patrol
L4 Zane (3/3)
Disguised Monkey (3/3)
Tiny Basilisk (1/1) can’t be attacked by Tech 0 units
Huey (1/1)
Dewy (1/1)
Base - 19
Tech 1 - 5
Tech 2 - 5
Spec: Anarchy
8 workers, 0 gold.
Hand: 4
Deck: 3
Discard: 5
[details=Next Hand]Jail
Building Inspector
Manufactured Truth
Porkhand Magistrate[/details]
[details=Discard]Arrest
Moment’s Peace
Disguised Monkey
Pirate Gunship
Pirate Gunship
[/details]
I’m calling it there. GG.
As this is your first tournament, I think it’s best to think about the whole tournament as a learning experience. You’ll get a lot better at playing, and a lot better at using the spreadsheet, really quickly. But you may also get some harsh beat-downs. A single victory in your first tourney would be impressive. If you think of this as a warm-up for your next tourney, you’ll be fine.
Just remember to ask your opponents and spectators to point out alternative lines when the game is over, so you can see how they’d have played it out, and why. (:
Yes, please, I’ll take any tips you can give me. That goes for anyone reading this.
Happy to oblige, but before I do I just want to echo what @ARMed_PIrate said. This game can be tough to play perfectly by the rules WITHOUT software considerations, as just the edge cases of card interactions with this many unique cards in play will cause confusion, no matter how well they are worded (I happen to think Sirlin & Co did a very good job on distilling the wording). Add in a custom spreadsheet that takes a little getting used to, and it’s no surprise everyone makes mistakes (shoot, I still forget half the time whether a technician death goes into discard before or after I draw, and end up with a bad reshuffle I have to redo, and I’ve probably played more than 100 forum games at this point!)
You handled this tremendously. I know the feeling of whiffing that turn 3 draw all too well, it’s by far the swing-iest bit of luck the game design has. You had to redo the best case (drawing both teched cards) and ended up with the worst case on your redo (whiffing both), and that’s a major bummer. You did well, teching Nether Drain immediately, that was a great choice (almost worth teching two of them in that scenario, as they are excellent at most points of the game against Oni, Midori, Zane and Rook).
You already know, though, that your turn 1 was the disaster that necessitated teching it immediately in the first place. Your draw was harsh for black P2T1, no Jav, Deteriorate, StW, Jandra or Imp, all decent tempo reducers. You’ll be vulnerable to MTruth or Arrest if you go for a hero, and Eric’s opening is counting on that.
Your best chances, I think, were Rogue in SQL + Bigby in Elite, with Haunt behind. Sure, you don’t really want Bigby as your main hero, but at least Oni can’t get free levels off that. Bigby isn’t a total drag, either: he can probably get a free kill on whatever EricF squad leads, heals cheaply, and with Haunt, PBR and Bigby, you put a lot of threat on Oni. He can’t just kill PBR for free, since haunt would trade back, so now he has to Mtruth to kill it (bad trade on cards for him) or Arrest it, if he wants to avoid getting Oni killed.
I’m not sure what the Necro/Blood/Law desired synergy is, other than typical Garth / Graveyard + Blood tech 2 shenanigans, so you probably just play for that from that point forward. He doesn’t have great ways to deal with Bone Collectors, he doesn’t handle card bleed great until Peace engine is online so Imp can do good work, and then yea you just smash him with Crashbarrows as he’s trying to set up tech 2? Not saying it’s a for-sure win by any stretch, but it’s probably what you try.
Hope that helps, GL in the rest of the tourney!
Well, I don’t have a lot of experience starting with Black, and I don’t have a lot of experience playing against Blue, so take what I say with a grain of salt. That said…
The first obvious mistake I saw was putting Garth behind the patrol instead of in it. Since the PBR would have been in front of Garth (in SQL) either way, you get no benefit from leaving Garth out of patrol. Putting him in Scav. would at least have given you a money bonus when he died.
I also think workering Haunt in the early game is always a mistake. There’s nothing as cheap as free.
I think you should have either played Graveyard, or workered Graveyard. If you’re not going to play it in your first two hands, you probably won’t get enough value out of it for it to be worth keeping. (The dumb thing I would have done as a crazy aggro player would have been PBR+Graveyard+Haunt. This would have been terrible long-term, but interesting short-term.)
Keeping Skeletal Archery around was probably smart, as Peace and Balance both have decent fliers. Good job not workering that!
I just saw that FrozenStorm posted, so I’ll read over his comments and see if I have anything else to add.
Graveyard/Garth/Blood Tech II strategy is certainly a powerful option. Oddly enough, though, when I first came up with this build, though, I was thinking more about Drakk enabling a Necro plan than Garth enabling a Blood plan. Skeletal Archery + Drakk Midband means skeletons can ping almost anything for 2 without dying, and War Drums makes them utterly ridiculous. That combo is what led to my only forum win so far (except for one that didn’t really count because my opponent though one of his units had died when it hadn’t, and neither of us caught it). Law is there because it’s good at stalling while I build up my skeleton army, and Bigby’s hand-fixing can enable a Skeleton Lord-> early tech III unit strategy. I’m still working on it. It’s worth noting that I came up with this before I’d ever played codex, and well before I was aware of the Necro/Blood/Truth build. Tbh, I way underestimated the strength of Blood tech II when I was just reading cards before the game came out. That being said, both plays are possible with this deck, and I imagine there’s even a reasonable way to play around Law with it if that’s what you really want to do.
Certainly a Drakk / Skeleton hero-centric play to spam tokens and abuse Frenzy / War Drums is also a very potent line. Hasty frenzied Bone Collectors are terrifying, and Lich’s Bargain + War Drums is just unfair 
Law is decent with its stall, but yea I think Truth is much better suited to complimenting the core gameplan. Fire isn’t bad either, Bob199 would get mad use out of Lobbers and Graveyard as tricky early-game pressure
I disagree with this bit of advice pretty strongly. I think that Graveyard is at its worst at the very beginning of the game, because you don’t even really want to replay your Tech 0 units except for Haunt and Thieving Imp (which is prohibitively expensive at this point). If you have an opening, then getting it built early is great, but not being able to stick it during your first cycle definitely isn’t enough of a reason to worker it. This is especially true in Necro/Blood/X, where Graveyard is at its best only once you hit Tech 2. I don’t think it’s that uncommon to have Graveyard floating around in your deck/hand until around the point where you hit Tech 2 and start playing Crashbarrows. Additionally, while playing it early has advantages, it also increases the risk of Graveyard getting destroyed or filled before being able to really shine.