[Tournament] Experimental Codex Asynchronous Fall Swiss (XCAFS22)

This definitely looks like an auto loss for me. I don’t have a strong game plan available while Dreamfire has multiple great options, even with synergies between the specs. But of course I accept it! Let’s get going!

And we’re at the final! Dreamfire and FrozenStorm knocked zango down from his perfect win streak, so they now go head to head for one last time.

Round 10

  1. [XCAFS22] Round10: P1 FrozenStorm [Past]/Disease/Truth vs P2 Dreamfire [Blood]/Bashing/Finesse

Both players are at elimination, so the final will last for a single match.
Last call on requesting a change in decks.

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Interesting matchup! I’ll await a thumbs up or re-roll from @Dreamfire before starting the match, I’d favor my assignment at first blush but don’t feel it’s overwhelmingly lopsided

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I’m ready to go!

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Congratulations, @Dreamfire ! Yes you had Drakk for your last three games but that is less than half of what’s required to come through with it, you had quite some exceptionally well tech choices and executed everything almost flawlessly.

Also a big thank you, @charnel_mouse for organizing the tournament even though you didn’t have a lot of time, it really was fun! And a special thank you for your willingness to try out the new penalty algorithm sheet. I’m more than happy that everything worked out fine and that you even came up with a good idea how to deal with late matches and how to do the next pairings while considering such a still ongoing match properly!

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grats on your win, @Dreamfire . your matches were fun to read.

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Congratulations to Dreamfire! I’ll see about posting some stats when I have time. Apologies if I was sometimes a little slow putting things up, but zango’s tracker sheet was pretty pain-free. (I am curious what “Select pairings for next round” actually does.)

Thanks for playing, everyone!

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Thanks everyone, and thanks @charnel_mouse for organizing!

Does anyone have any new thoughts on the balance changes? Personally I would be in favor of testing further buffs to Troq, given that Bashing was assigned quite a lot but I don’t recall Troq being used for anything other than a warm body.

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I’ve gotten Bashing three times and I honestly thought A LOT about trying to do something with it, but came up short. There was just no way of actually making use of it for me. In case my warp gate discipline strategy against Frozen would have worked, I’m pretty sure that I would have cheated in an eggship or a stomper at some point - AFTER the more straight forward targets like tric were not available anymore. I also do recall you teching in the troyan duck with a tech lab against me in our epic tech 3 match, but that’s about it. So yes, if we want to see Bashing in a competitive match, we should consider further buffing it. (But the same probably holds true for law, which I can’t recall to have seen at all in competitive play in the last years)

Nothing fancy. Both preview and select pairings copy the relevant stuff into the tracker tab which then shows you what the next matchups will look like within the tab Round.
But if you click on select pairings, all the information about the current matches is also stored into the relevant parts of the Table_overview tab, i.e. for each player: number of games as P1, number of games as P2, roundhistory (=who have you played against during this tournament), number oy byes, number of times you have been paired up or paired down. The algorithm makes use of this information from Table_overview to compute the next pairing table.

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Well, bansa took [Law/Peace]/Finesse to the finals back in CAMS19. Surprisingly, that’s more recent than the last time we’ve seen Balance, Truth, Discipline, Present or Past in the finals of a standard tournament.

I actually think Law is quite playable for Bigby, Injunction, the tech I’s, and maybe Community Service and Insurance Agents, though it could definitely use some buffs to other tech II’s.

Law is fine, just not as a main spec. What I saw of Bashing this tournament was about the same as usual: has some nice things in it you’d like to try, but it’s never appealing enough during a match to take over something else. I think part of the problem in vanilla is that it has neither a strong hero (by either good stats or strong spells), nor a strong Tech II, and even the other lower-tier specs at least have one of the two. The balance changes made Troq’s level progression slightly better, but I still wouldn’t think of his stats as good, and his spells still aren’t strong; they just made his most-niche spell slightly less niche.

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That really is odd! Did you just manually look it up or do we have some kind of ongoing statistics about the finals?

The Collected Codex Resources thread has links to all the forum tournaments going back to 2016. I used it a while back to make myself a little excel sheet about tournament finalists. Here it is in Google Sheets.

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@FrozenStorm when will the winter tournament start? I have my kids at least mostly under control, so I would join.