So, are you guys all weighing on “tradition overrides the official rule”?
Maybe I’m just being rebellious but that sounds like a pretty weak argument.
Let me ask each of you what breaks fairness of the tourney more in the final match.
Players’ overall P1-P2 imparity
Head to head P1-P2 imparity
I agree it makes sense to swap P1 in a repeat match, generally speaking.
In this tournament format; however, players’ P1-P2 ratio is carefully tracked by the matchmaker in every round.
It just doesn’t seem right to discount it at the very end.
After all, this tourney is not about head to head match ups. If it was, final match should at least be best of 3 or something.
But it is not, the final is just another round of last remaining survivors.
Therefore, I feel that players’ P1-P2 ratio should be considered just like it has been in previous rounds.
Honestly, I hate to go P2 when my opponent has had fewer P2s than me as much as I hate to play P2 in a row in a repeat match.
It is tough to say which is less of the two evils. When in doubt go to the library.
Not asking to change the rules or make an exception. Answer is already in the official rule.
I believe the first player should be decided randomly.
I have always felt head to head parity was more important. P1 and P2 can matter a lot for certain matchups. So It wasnt just tradition, it was [an unwritten] rule for me. Also, “randomly” just happened to always result in the head to head parity. P2 parity was never guaranteed by the rules. Some of the tournaments have not been run strictly by the rules, to be honest. Mistakes have been made in matchmaking that were simply accepted and we moved on. As a judge, and runner, we do our best, but it isnt always practical to fix the mistakes.
These tournaments are meant to be fun and I want folks to have fun.
I am in the same camp as Zhav and Eric here that head-to-head parity, to me, always has felt like the more important thing. That said, I want to be inviting to newer folks and it only feels fair to abide the rules as written (and fix them for next time).
So @bansa you have the higher “seed” (win %) here, I will flip a coin on random.org (a canadian looney; it’s fun)
Post a call here, if it comes up your call you take P1, if not it’ll be Eric’s
Congrats to @bansa on the tournament win! A well fought, nearly successful rushdown to @EricF
If you hadn’t seen, I have posted the signup for our Winter Swiss tourney, I encourage everyone who participated to join us for standard play!
Thanks for a great tourney to all who participated, have a wonderful end to your 2020 (and let’s hope 2021 sees the end of this pandemic and a return to seeing people in the flesh!)
Thanks @FrozenStorm for hosting the tourney. I can imagine how difficult it would be especially with a whiner like @bansa constantly throwing wrenches. Thanks to all of you for being open minded and understanding different perspectives. Thanks to all the opponents I faced in the tourney for fun games, special thanks to @EricF who had me sweating whole game in the final. Have wonderful holidays!
I’m curious how everyone took the balance changes in general. I think it was a fun experiment where I can play the cards otherwise just be always workered and it was interesting to see unexpected new interactions with these minor tweaks. Here are some feedbacks on Blue starters.
Porky - Change removing gold cost on ability feels just right. It really adds an option to Blue starter and feels conditional just enough so that it’s not overpowered or underpowered.
Lawful Search - I was opposed to this change selfishly but it surprisingly adds a huge value to card management. I think it played a big role taking me to the final and is prolly almost overpowered.
Building Inspector - This was already the best starting option Blue had. Not quite sure why we would need buff on BI. I think BI works fine and is strong as is.
Bluecoat Musketeer - Still the worst 2 drop in game. I would choose vanilla 2/2 all day long. @Bryce_The_Rice was right on this one. I feel this change is not enough to make this card a viable option.
Ironbark Treant: Better in isolation, worse in comparison to Rich Earth. I almost never wanted to play this, when usually I’d at least strongly consider it. Rich Earth providing a Wisp felt like it can slow opponents down enough that such a big patroller wasn’t usually necessary.
Rich Earth: Strong. The initial Wisp makes it much safer to play, and the later Wisps make spending gold on Midori more useful.
Midori: Being able to stack the aura with other effects makes him pretty good, arguably more so than the stat increase. Still firmly a second hero rather than a starting hero, due to the cost involved.
Chameleon: Meh. When I’ve played Chameleon under normal rules, it was because the matchup happened to make stealth more useful than flying for Mimics, or made me want both. That makes Chameleon situational enough that I don’t think its cost is the issue. I wanted to try playing these with Drakk haste at some point, but it just wasn’t enticing enough compared with the new Mines, and my deck doesn’t have the card draw to do both.
Rickety Mine: Do I need to talk about this one? Mine is now really strong. The main issue is the extra pressure it puts on your hand size.
My biggest questions are how people felt playing against (and with, I guess) the quality of rules changes:
MIdori affecting units with no “printed” abilities - did this ever come up? I know the extra Wisp from Rich Earth and the +2/+1 made MidbandDori a much more frequent site than ususal.
Prynn midband triggering anytime she dies - I know this happened, did it feel overpowered, or just “yeah, that was really annoying, but it wasn’t game defining, and other heroes could have done something else just as powerful at that cost”
Rickety Mine not flipping a coin - it’s tough to separate out the guarantee of 2 activations from the power boost from being 1 + 3 gold profit over two turns instead of 0 + 1 + 3 over 3. But how important was that guaranteed 2nd activation?
If you haven’t already weighed in on the “Purple mirror should/should not have players messing with their opponent’s time runes” - what do you think?
It’s a more powerful threat when he’s paired with buffing heroes, such as Drakk / Bloodlust. Like a few other things, it was overshadowed by Mine, otherwise I’d have made more use of it.
With respect to Mine, it often felt like the 2nd activation was very useful, because it arrived at roughly the time Tech II became available. You’d have the same thing with the normal version, of course, just without the gold-positive turn beforehand to help set up for it.
I liked spark at cost 0 but agree it was a little underwhelming still. Letting it target anything would have probably been a good move.
Same feeling as Bomber on Fruit Ninja also; I really wanted to play it and do a Ninjutsu tech 2 plan, but it always felt like a worse choice than other things I could do.
Fuzz Cuddles was great as a 3/3, wonderful companion to hero gameplans like mine. IPN not self-killing
We definitely didn’t nerf Peace engine enough; Garrison needed limit or cost increase or something to slow that plan down.
Mine was probably a little bit overkill as well, the haste maybe wasn’t needed; it was a lot of gold infusion really early that we should have seen abuse cases coming for it w/ heroes like Cala. I think the “guaranteed” 2 activations makes sense and maybe we could have bumped the gold up a little more instead of giving it haste. If it was 2 cost but gave 5g (or 1cost but 4g maybe) I think that might have been a better buff.
Agree mostly with what others have said generally; Musketeer still a little week, BI was too big a buff, I really liked the Lawful Search change, I liked the Rich Earth and Midori changes.
The Prynn change was too much, should have probably gone with “Dies from something other than combat damage”. Getting a discard/draw skip on your opponent nearly guaranteed for 5g was really scary, nothing much else in the game you can get that kind of card economy/cycling damage for 5g
Maybe I’ll take some time Monday to go over each change and what I thought of it, but high level we killed Black too hard and didn’t take enough steam out of Peace’s sails. Overall though it was a fun first cut and I really enjoyed it
Mine’s second activation was the main reason to play the card, honestly, though i did feel like a card for a gold right now was situationally handy, the extra 3g the next turn helped supercharge me. The only time someone busted it was in my match with ericf, which i think i was losing anyway, but if he hadn’t busted it I might have had a follow up turn that actually managed to get back to parity.
Overall, yea, mine is pretty busted in a similar way to how dark pact is busted. One trades a tech choice for gold, and the other trades a tech choice for cards. If I was going to make it slightly less busted, id change it to cost 1g, generates 2g, keep the haste, only deal self base damage, and discard instead of trash.
I gotta think back; Rickety Mine felt really powerful to play against, especially because it’s hasted. I think being able to play it for -1 gold cost on your first turn makes it a powerful investment–and I saw it get absolutely busted with strategies like Feral Strike. From a gameplay standpoint, I also feel like the way it works plays really weird–you spend gold, then you immediately get back gold (because why wouldn’t you use it immediately). I don’t have a whole lot of other highlights that come to mind immediately.
