CAPS 2017 Finals: Bob199 ([Strength]/Blood/Finesse) vs. FrozenStorm ([Demon]/Necro/Finesse)

I’ve been improving;) but I also feel like I caught some good fortune in this run of wins against the top players in this tourney

That 20 -> 0 turn against @EricF with all the finesse units still stands out as pretty ridiculous, as well as my drawing Skeletal Lord just as @Mooseknuckles would Doom grasp them.

With @Bob199 I teched well but also got a nice split, and with @Penatronic I drew the meta right on time, no less fortunate just earlier in the game, looks less crazy

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Celebrations are in order. As is my respect to both of you. GG

Frozen, care to share your thoughts about the deck? Would you say it has a particular weakness? Was there any particular spec/openning you feared while piloting it? Do you plan any changes?

Monocolor deck winning it all makes me feel uneasy about my deck-constructing attempts…

p. s. on a slightly unrelated note can someone explain to me how does Nether Drain “deleveling” work exactly? Does the hero actually lose stats equal to the difference or is it simply reduced to the appropriate stats of the new level (if those are indeed lower than the current stats)

@VaeVictus thanks!

Definitely the hardest time I had was P1 hero pressure and carefully playing around upgrades, with a special shout-out to Hardened Mox + Boot Camp + Drakk that @Penatronic rammed me with repeatedly. My losses were to Pena on Present Peace Blood, where that Mox got tons of value and I would have loved to have Plague Spitter or Orpal, and PetE’s Anarchy/Str/Growth, where I couldn’t stop MoLaC in time. But as it is a fairly hero-centric deck, definitely the scariest thing to do was be P2 against a strong hero opening, where I had to hide my heroes the first few turns to avoid giving up levels.

This is a known “very good” deck, nothing of my own creation, just something I wanted to try out for myself as I hadn’t actually played with it much. I don’t plan on playing this in tournaments regularly.

As for Nether Drain, it makes the hero lose levels, which often means losing stats and abilities. But they just become the lower statted, lowered ability version of themselves.

For example, a 4/6 rook with 5 damage Rook at lvl 8 with no crumbling rune gets Nether Drained, he is now a 3/5 with 5 damage that doesn’t have two lives; he dies from the Nether Drain, and as the nether drain caster I now have 4 levels to give to my own heroes (2 for the drain, and 2 for the kill).

If you have more specific interaction questions, please just let me know!

Yes I see, the confusuon came from me not seeing damage as “tokens” that remain on the card. Digital card games have conditioned me to only percieve the current stats of the unit not the amount of dmg per se. Thanks. Nether Drain is now broken in my book.

I will check again those games you’ve lost to get some ideas. Youur current deck does seem really strong to me.

What other decks are considered “decks-to-beat”? I’ve followed the tourney but the sample is to small for me to draw conclusions… Have any meta decks being established yet?

Nether Drain is pretty good :slight_smile: I mostly prefer it to Doom Grasp for dealing with heroes, as it is way cheaper and often similarly effective

As for the “decks to beat”, this is what I’ve seen as consistent top performers:

Purple Peace X (Past Peace Anarchy specifically)
X Strength Growth ([Growth] Strength Necro & [Anarchy] Strength Growth specifically, I may do [Demon]/Str/Growth for the next CASS tourney)
Necro Blood Truth
X Future Truth (I think [Feral] Future Truth is what Jadiel was running for this?)
Mono-Black / [Demon] Necro Finesse

These feel like the “top-tier” decks in the meta game right now. A lot of Anarchy & Blood, a lot of Necromancy, Growth Strength and Demonology also very highly used, and then Purple Peace machine.

Anyone care to chime in on decks I missed? @EricF are there any other kind of trends to piece out of results?

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So, basically birds + buffs. Mox + buffs. Haste. Black starter. Got it :smiley:

What is the idea behind Future X Truth?

Don’t forget skeletons + buffs XD

But yes, in general it has born out that early access to haste (red, Zane, Finesse), units that hit and survive over and over (Birds, Mox, Javelineer), and Black starter’s abundance of early immediate effects and pressure for cheap (Deteriorate, sacrifice the weak) are bearing out as very clear strength.

lots of omegacrons. Look at some games jadiel played.

I’ve started a spreadsheet (in excel) with conditional formatting where you put in a spec and it is idenfitied as having counters to major things (large heroes like rook, MoLaC, basilisk, token hordes, etc) as well as perks itself (strong early game aggressive hero, access to haste, a draw engine, strong t1 options, etc)… I can share it if there’s interest

Plus I’m fairly new, despite flooding the forum with games I’m playing, seeing what people would add to it would be interesting as I’m sure there’s stuff I’m missing with my limited tournament experience.

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I am very interested.

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Are you kidding?? YES PLEASE SHARE! Things that get shared with this group get rapidly improved by mindshare and contributions from others :slight_smile:

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How easily does excel translate into google sheets? Problem is I’ve made it on my work computer and I can’t access sheets on it.

If it doesn’t use macros, I find most can be just uploaded fine, if it doesn’t, I’ll happily spend some time doing conversion between the different formula and macros.

It’s just the conditional formatting, which has some fairly excel specific formulas in it, I would guess. It may even be easier to do in sheets than excel.

Where would the best place be to upload the excel file so I can just post a link?

Just mail it to me personally and delete the original…

And the knowledge shall be mine! MwahahA… etc.

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Microsoft’s cloud service might have some special Excel sharing thing, if you have an account there? Otherwise Dropbox, Google Drive, or your favorite “cloud storage” (I use drive, $2/Month for 100GB works well for me)?

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This is the spreadsheet just pumped directly into google docs, don’t have time to mess around with it tonight… the formatting didn’t transfer but just taking a glance at the conditional formatting tab in google docs makes it look way easier to do than it was in excel. If anybody wants the straight excel give me your email address or something… I’m definitely curious as to what people’s opinions will be compared to mine as far as what is relevant/important to look at when trying to decide on a tournament-quality deck.

My thought process is basically this, you have two options:
A) have a game plan that is just so strong and so inevitable that your opponent needs to respond to you
1. Peace engine stuff
2. Monoblack stuff
3. Growth/strength/anarchy stuff
B) have answers to the most common type A decks.

Raw spreadsheet

Probably should make a new thread too…

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I have been wishing more people would care about theorycrafting since I started watching these boards.

I think you have to have both a good game plan yourself and answers to common meta decks at the same time. I don’t think you can do either or.

I guess this tournament maybe would sorta refute the above, since I wouldn’t say that Frozen’s deck is really that answer heavy, but I feel like people should really still try to pack some kind of MOLAC hate atm in their decks.

Both frozen and Bob’s decks were type A decks- they don’t need an answer because they plan to execute their game plan fast enough to not ever need an answer to someone else’s game plan

Upgrade hate is tough to pack, you can only get it from a few specs. Technically, demonology does have it, though; just with Zarramonde, its tech 3 unit :slight_smile: But otherwise like the spreadsheet says, your only other options are Discipline, Future, or Balance.

People definitely do theorycraft here a fair bit, and quite often try out their theories with games (or scratch games, as @EricF did with me to play with the Black vs Blue matchup.)

I would have to disagree with that. FrozenStorm used a variety of different game plans throughout the tournament so I don’t think you can say that it has some specific game plan that it can get off quickly and win with every time. The way he played it was very toolbox-y.

As for theorycrafting, I have read my share of posts and I see very little attempts to argue about what is the theoretically best deck. That is more what I am talking about. I would assume there would be a special thread for that with 1000+ posts on it, based on my experiences with other games.