Right, Tower costs 3. I always misremember it as costing 2.
I am pretty hesitant about the Plasmodium + worker + float play. That’s 4 damage to your base and no hope of hitting anything next turn either. Maybe Time Spiral it to get it out a turn sooner? If you don’t, you’re not actually swinging with it until turn 4.
Ugh. The turn 2 play here is then probably not max Vandy. It’s probably midband Vandy (3), build Hero’s Hall (1) worker (0) and swing at base for 5. Then next turn is probably tech 1 (5), worker (4), max Vandy (2), and Garth (0) with teched metamorphosis, and on P1 T4 swing any surviving units, Metamorphosis and fetch a Twilight Baron with Garth, and attack with both heroes.
I’m not sure what defenses P2 can put out on their third turn given that P1’s third turn is likely going to involve swinging a 3/4-or-4/5 and a 3/3. Probably tech Origin Story and try to snipe Vandy on turn 3? But Black is still pretty flexible with this plan.
And worse, they could just completely skip the metamorphosis plan (a very sane choice), build Tech 1 on T2, tech 2x Bone Collector and just begin applying a more standard beatdown. Because probably anything Purple plays on T2 is going to get wiped also if they don’t put down any force projection on turn 1.
I’d lean towards Worker + Plasmodium + build t1. Now I’m sure you’re thinking, “What’s the point of having an undefended tech building on a turn where your hand can’t contain a card of that tech level?” Our opponent doesn’t know we drew temporal research in our opening hand (50/50 chance). We’re bluffing that next turn we tech2 t1 cards and use Prynn to cast temporal research and draw one of those (shuffle 5 cards, draw 2). Of the tech options we could afford either Seer (to speed up plasmodium) or even 2x Knight of the Conclave if we are really lucky. If we are willing to skip a worker and we got a good draw, plasmodium could arrive turn 2 with 2 bodies and a hero to back him up. Is all of that a long shot? Yes, but the possibility of that might make Vandy either hesitate to go all in and leave a defender, or shutdown your tech1 just in case, or maybe bring out thieving imp to try to make us discard temporal research. In the second case, your tech1 building is tanking damage for your base.
Now obviously we can’t actually do anything like that on our turn 2 since we just discarded (or even workered) temporal research. Which means losing tech1 doesn’t affect us at all. So on our turn 2 we actually build a tower, worker, then fading argo or nullcraft. Plasmodium will arrive next turn and we have access to Origin Story if they don’t take out our tower along with casting metamorphosis.
Once more experienced folks come to a consensus (if one happens), I’d like to see the same situation but assuming you are playing White instead of Purple.
Oh, and my inexperienced 2 cents on this situation:
I’d worker, float 4 gold.
P2T2, tech in 2 Seers, and start with 10 gold.
Bring in Vir and Max him (down to 2 gold).
Use Vir’s ability to look at the top card of your draw pile: if it’s Time Spiral or Seer, spend the 1 to swap it into your hand with something else, then spend your last 1 to play it, removing a rune from the forecasted mech. If it’s not TS or Seer, spend both gold on the Tinker and keep him in the back row, hope he survives 'til next turn. Either way, patrol Vir in Elite.
I’m not sure this is a good plan, and you’ll take a beating on P1T2, but you’re not sticking out a hero just to watch it die in a bad trade to a Vandy who immediately levels and heals, and it puts some moderate presence on the board, with serious presence starting the following turn. Hopefully enough to let you start seriously workering and moving into a real strategy. (Not sure what that is, but I haven’t played as Purple yet.)
You don’t even need to remove the seers, as the mech is tech 0 and so the highest priority unit to be sacced. However, interestingly @ARMed_PIrate, that was exactly the line I took in the actual game this was taken from. The setup was a little different from what I presented here, and I think I only got away with it because my opponent built a tower t2 instead applying more pressure, but I do think the ‘worker and float 4 gold’ is a line which is reasonable in this game state.
[quote=“ARMed_PIrate, post:12, topic:1449”]
I’d like to see the same situation but assuming you are playing White instead of Purple.
[/quote]This is a lot easier to deal with, for a few reasons. White has better starter deck units for this, including two 1-cost chump blockers. White has Rook, whose band 1 ability is “an extra HP.” And white has Snapback as a built-in strong answer to early maxband hero pressure.
Turn one play is probably to play Sensei or Smoker and patrol it in Scavenger. Otherwise, maybe play Savior Monk in Squad Leader, play Rook in Scavenger, make a worker? He can kill Monk with deteriorate + both units, and then kill Rook by maxbanding Vandy before attacking with her, but that’s such a crazy risky strategy - it means spending 4 gold on Vandy and skipping Tech 1.
Hmm. Play some combination of Ogre/Bombaster/Dog? It depends on your starting hand. Red gets a lot of mileage, potentially, out of floating a bunch of gold, if they can do something like Zane+Charge+Ogre on T2 or something. T1 Ogre in SL is a reasonably good defensive play, or just a one-cost unit in scavenger. Playing Red as P2 is often about putting cheap units in patrol and using hasty stuff on your turn to trade in ways that are favorable to you.
I’m actually tempted to suggest Worker-Neoplexus-Plasmodium. Not 100% sure on patrol leader, but it is probably patrol leader neoplexus – we do need to be getting a tower down sometime soon, but I don’t think we’re protecting it just yet. We can probably wait until vandy actually maxbands to bring in the tower?
If they sac we definitely bring in nullcraft, tech 1, and see what else we can do.
Probably our second tech should include origin story and we should be expecting to bring in prynn sometime?
The problem with Neo Plexus is SQL is that your opponent can kill it with Vandy and javelineer, and then level Vandy to remove the damage. So you’re down a card and 2 gold, and all you’ve taken from your opponent is their javelin rune (I guess you’ve also saved 3 base damage). That’s just not a good trade this early in the game.
The bigger problem is that this play is not rules-legal.
It probably should be, but as of tonight none of the rulebook, the rulings docco nor any of the DB entries for “vir”, “Seer” nor “Time Spiral” ever specifies that things which target “forecast cards” can also target “forecast tokens” nor gives any other interpretation which would support that (probably intended) functionality.
Um… What? Forecast uses the same Time Runes that Fading does, so I don’t understand what you think is illegal here.
Edit: Oh, it’s not about the runes – it’s about whether token units can be affected by the other cards. Remember, tokens are treated the same as any other unit except that any time they leave play, they immediately get trashed afterwards. There’s no reason to assume anything that works on a normal unit won’t work on a token unit.
The component list refers to them as “token cards.” The entry for tokens on page 17 of the rulebook doesn’t say anything like “tokens aren’t cards.” It doesn’t even make the suggestion I was expecting to see, something along the lines of “you can use anything to represent a token, such as a paperclip or a scrap of paper.”