Review: Shadowverse (Japanese Hearthstone)

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DSMatticus
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Post by DSMatticus »

This needs to be said; the tools for ranked analytics are kind of shit. You know how I keep trotting out example decks with problematic naming schema that no one really agrees on? Shadowlog is a community-driven aggregation site, and that is exactly the kind of problem it has to deal with! If you have any reason to suspect people might be fucking the names up, then Shadowlog is immediately a problematic source of information because people are on there fucking the names up.

As far as I am concerned, the tournie meta is the most reliable source of information for how the meta is developing and what it is converging towards. Because I can look at tournie decks, and see what's in them, and tell their creators their names are bullshit. Yes, it's a smaller sample size taken specifically from a subset of players with an atypical amount of resources. Budget decks and meme decks will always be overrepresented in ranked, even at master, and decks that do well against those budget decks and meme decks will have better winrates, and so forth and so on and it'll never really mirror the tournie scene. But tournie results are verifiable, which is a really important criteria if you're going to do any kind of rigorous analysis. And between the power of netdecking and the ability to fairly easily keep 1-2 crafts up to date by dusting the other 5-6... I really don't expect the ranked meta to be that far behind.

This is what the NGE Week One Top 8 looked like for Shadow. Those are all different hyperlinks. This is what the NGE NA Open Playoffs Finals looked like for Shadow. Those are also all different hyperlinks. There is one deck called an aggro deck in either of those listings. It runs three copies of Eachtar. All of those decks except the Nephthys deck runs 2-3 copies of Eachtar. Eachtar, Eachtar fucking everywhere. That aggro deck runs zero copies of Phantom Howl. Six of the seven midrange decks run Phantom Howl. Are they supposed to be called aggro decks? What I am getting at here is that aggro shadow as you imagine it did not have a strong presence at the tournament scene even at the end of TotG and your ranked analyics cannot help us parse the difference between the two decks because people are collectively too stupid to give things meaningful names. Hell, even your own metrics provide conflicting answers. Those midrange shadow decks - which are actual midrange shadow decks that should genuinely be called midrange shadow decks - are often built to be able to follow the exact aggro shadow curve you just described if they draw into it! They can and would love to do exactly that, but they also have the option of curving Death's Breath into Eachtar if they draw that instead or think it's the stronger play. You could be playing against midrange shadow on a perfect curve and not even realize you were playing against midrange shadow before they'd killed you.

The methodology is just kind of ass and you have way too much faith in its ability to handle areas where there are known ambiguities. Sure, my method isn't perfect either, but I'm clear with my caveats and am really only interested in following high-level play to begin with. Not because I'm that good, but because nobody wants to watch a bunch of Gold Nova's play CSGO; they want to watch Cloud9. Oh wait, bad example.
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Post by Username17 »

DSM wrote:As far as I am concerned, the tournie meta is the most reliable source of information for how the meta is developing and what it is converging towards.
You can think that all you want. But you're still wrong.

While there are people out there misnaming things all the damn time, the reality is that twenty five thousand games is a better aggregate than eight. Even the tiniest fragment of Shadowlog is several orders of magnitude more data than any tournament. Following a tournament result is basically like watching your favorite streamer or some fucking thing. It can give you a couple of good ideas, but the plural of anecdote is not data.

There are real problems with Shadowlog. It splits up decks that aren't different (Face Sword and Aggro Sword, for example), and it combines decks that aren't the same (Vengeance Blood and Blood Sneks, for example). And sometimes it does both of those things at the same time, like how it puts all the ramp dragon decks into three different piles that have pretty much nothing to do with their actual victory package.

So I don't know whether Sahaquiel Dragon decks are better or worse than Ouroboros Genesis Dragon decks. Both of those are incoherently jumbled into Ramp or Storm Ramp. But at the end of the day, you can still aggregate that data and find that Ramp Dragon decks as a whole were 13.4% of the meta and had a winrate of 52.3%. Which is the best Dragon build? I don't know. But analytics tell us that Ramp Dragon strategies were both popular and successful. And that has a confidence that no tournament report, that all the tournament reports combined cannot match. Because that is the aggregation of tens of thousands of game results.

Now do people straight up misclick and assign decks to the wrong categories? Absolutely. Among the Dragon decks there are six games logged for Phoenix Roost, a deck that was actually played zero times because you literally cannot play Phoenix Roost at the moment. The card is locked out and you can't even register the deck. But when you compare the eight thousand games of Aggro Shadow to the six games of Phoenix Roost there is fucking obviously something more going on than "folks click the wrong box." The misclick rate wouldn't push Aggro Shadow's winrate by one tenth of one percent.

Edit:
TL;DR: The Top Eight of a tournament is 16 decks because each player brings two. Do that one hundred more times and you'll have one percent of the data collected by Shadowlog in one week. Your bullshit "I don't need data, I got some anecdotes" approach is stupid and you should feel stupid.

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Post by Josh_Kablack »

GreatGreyShrike wrote:I have been playing a bunch of Dirt Rune. I am not prepared to say that it's good, or even definitively not bad... but Dirt Rune is really good at controlling and wiping the current meta Neutralcraft decks - it goes like 75 - 25 against Sword Neutral so far (though a lot of that is doubtless due to people deckbuilding badly). All hail Old Levi and Young Levi!
Please elaborate -- I'm really curious what you're running and how this is working for you.
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Post by DSMatticus »

FrankTrollman wrote:There are real problems with Shadowlog. It splits up decks that aren't different (Face Sword and Aggro Sword, for example), and it combines decks that aren't the same (Vengeance Blood and Blood Sneks, for example). And sometimes it does both of those things at the same time, like how it puts all the ramp dragon decks into three different piles that have pretty much nothing to do with their actual victory package.
No shit, really? You realize that is the exact problem I am illustrating with aggro and midrange shadow, yeah? It's another case of "what's the best ramp dragon damage outlet" "who the fuck knows" "what do we actually call blood sneks" "it's a control combo deck that uses vengeance, pick one, I'm sure that won't mess up our stats." Remember; you described an ideal aggro shadow curve and I showed you that that curve was a thing midrange shadow was commonly built to pull off. You - the guy advocating the strength of community aggregation, are a member of the community who put forward a metric for differentiating aggro shadow from midrange shadow that could not safely differentiate aggro shadow from midrange shadow. The idea that the nomenclature isn't cripplingly confused among the community blows my mind. It so obviously is, and you'll admit it in these two instances where your case is obviously hopeless but fight me on the third?
FrankTrollman wrote:Your bullshit "I don't need data, I got some anecdotes" approach is stupid and you should feel stupid.
Strawman, up your ass, etcetera.

This is not an argument about the strength of data versus me knowing a guy who knows guy. This is an argument about methodologically unreliabe data on one hand and relatively small sample sizes from an at least somewhat unrepresentative group on the other hand. Those are both kind of shitty for telling us what's actually happening in ranked for entirely different reasons. Though, to be perfectly clear, tournaments usually have 100-250 players who each bring two decks (Rage, at least, runs 3 decks with a Bo5) and there were eleven different NGE tournaments and even more JCG ones. Which decks show up in the top 8 is partially random, because the game itself is partially random, but if a deck consistently shows up in the final tournament brackets that actually is statistically significant. That is sixteen decks chosen out of several hundred decks repeated dozens of times. If you saw that kind of volume from any other sport in the world, you would correctly use it as a basis for rankings because it's actually a lot of fucking games.

Aggro bat windgod won exactly one TotG tournament out of nowhere and that was basically just random noise. I haven't seen a single definitively aggro shadow deck in any of the tournaments I've looked at while midrange shadow never failed to show up in multiples. Consistency over literally thousands of games at the highest level of play is not actually statistically insignificant. You are vastly overstating the problems with tournaments as meta predictors. This is how every other sport works, and there are people making absolutely mad bank shoving numbers into an AI and letting it make sports bets for them, because the predictive power of aggregate performance across competitive events is actually fairly strong.
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Post by GreatGreyShrike »

My Dirt Rune winrate has dropped precipitously, it's now more like 55-45; I think people are now netdecking more effective Sword Neutral lists. I think Earth Rite is still advantaged in the matchup but it doesn't dominate quite that hard any more.

I am pretty sure that the staples of the Dirt rune are the following:

Scrap Iron Smelter x 3
Witch's Cauldron x 3

Timeworn Mage Levi x 3
Dwarf Alchemist x3
Magic Illusionist x3
Red Hot Ritual x3

Mage of Nightfall x3

Halo Golem x3

Master Mage Levi x3

Now that's already 27 cards; what the other 13 should be is still up in the air a bit at present, at least in my mind.

Some people seem to be having success with running 2-3 Wizardess of Oz, and an assortment of spells that don't spellboost - Mutagenic Bolt, Dance of Death, Piercing Rune. A few even run Angelic Barrage for the Mutagenic + Barrage boardwipe off of a Wizardess. I didn't draw any Wizardess from packs and I am waiting for the meta to settle down before crafting any, so I have been instead using some Grimoires and Melvies to replenish my hands, and constantly messing about with other cards.

My tentative conclusions so far:

- Melvie has actually won me two games by decking out Dark Alice Shadowcraft opponents, which was actually hilarious. On the other hand, you have to be super careful when you use them against aggro neutral decks. Sword Neutral often is at about 6-7 cards anyways when they draw their draw-a-card-for-every-neutral card, so it's fairly good there.

- Petrify feels too small and slow against aggro but in other matchups is really good.

- Gingerbread House feels so bad in a lot of games - it's essentially a overpriced Red Hot Ritual if you play it on curve. But drawing into it on later turns it tends to be a lot better than other Earth Runes against this aggro meta. I am unsure if it's good or bad.

- Professor of Taboos can kill Blood's new wincon in it's ambush and can kill vagabond frogs extremely well, but feels too slow and single-target against the Neutral Aggro decks.

- Remi and Rami do good work slowing down aggro decks. So do Apprentice Alchemists. But in every non-aggro-neutral matchup I feel like they're underperformers.

- Golem Assault I only drew one of out of packs and I haven't made more yet, because it feels REALLY slow even if it triggers the earth rite aggro. It compares unfavourably to Ancient Alchemist or Apprentice Alchemist until you hit like Turn 8 - and if you get to Turn 8 alive against aggro neutral rune you will win anyways.

- Ancient Alchemist feels really slow, like a bad version of Death's Breath. Not good overall.

- Runic Guardian is amazing against the aggro neutral meta but only like 6/10 or 7/10 against anything else.

If Earth Rite looks like a playable deck a few days from now I will probably craft the Wizardesses and try the spell variant with more direct burn out - in theory it looks really cool, but I only have the vials to make a few legendaries at the moment.
Last edited by GreatGreyShrike on Sat Jul 01, 2017 10:49 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Josh_Kablack »

So, I think the big question for Alice Sword is which Sword followers aside from Cinderella and Albert make the cut:

Rabbit Ear is the sort of cardflow Sword has wanted for quite a while, but tends to be a win-more. Still it's common enough to be able to at least play her as a cantrip when not winning the board.

Red Riding Hood has a fairly-easy conditional removal evolve and also keeps her stats. The issue is that Feria and Lyrial also have stat-keep evolve abilities you want to trigger.

Ogrehunter (and the classic blitz lancer variant) are on-curve answers to prevent your opponent's Goblin Leader from snowballing -- but I'm currently running Rapunzels instead of these.

Alwidra's Command is solid, but 6 cost is looking slow. Also, I still need to craft these. Not sure if they would be redundant on top of Card Knights.

Old Man and Old Woman and white Ridge Swordsman also have pretty good 2-for-1 evolves, but they don't keep their stats and I don't think they quite fit in the deck.


The marginal Neutrals for Alice Sword look to be:

Rapunzel: Currently running 2 of these. Removal resistant toughness, but can get stuck if you are losing the board.

Ephemera: Great when she works, and boosts Shield of Flame. But t4 you'd so much rather play Alice or a pair of cards. So currently not running

Unica: Either draws removal/forces a trade to make Goblin Leader more reliable or gives you some breathing space. I'm currently not running, but most opponents are.

Goblin Princess: Seems to be the option for t5 if you didn't pull any card knights. The last word of putting a neutral card back in your hand can matter for powering Hector -- but Hector seems a better bet in other craft's Alice builds.

Snow, Whitecat Sage: Again, this seems to take a backseat to Card Knights and helps power Hector.
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Post by DSMatticus »

In neutral-related news, according to twitter the first two confirmed grandmaster decks were neutral cthulhu. Neutrulhu, if you will. On turn 1-4 you're basically the neutral engine of death (some combination of Unica, Lyrial, Feria, Grimnir, Goblin Leader, and Alice) with a side of Tove, Baphomet, and Goblin Mage. If that doesn't win you the game outright, you stall the game for a bit with Knuckles and Sabreurs while curving discount Spawn into Emeralda. Emeralda knocks down a ward and Spawn delivers 12-16 to the face. If you're in vengeance, Emeralda herself is another 4.

I'm pretty sure every meta deck that comes out of Wonderland Dreams is going to look almost identical on turns 1-4. The best counter to Alice is Alice.
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Post by Josh_Kablack »

DSMatticus wrote:In neutral-related news, according to twitter the first two confirmed grandmaster decks were neutral cthulhu. Neutrulhu, if you will. On turn 1-4 you're basically the neutral engine of death (some combination of Unica, Lyrial, Feria, Grimnir, Goblin Leader, and Alice) with a side of Tove, Baphomet, and Goblin Mage.
If you're going for the discount Spawn from Baphomet (or Bandersnatch) then Goblin Mage is counter synergistic. You do not want to draw Spawn, therefore anything that is even a tiny increase to your odds of drawing it before a t5 enhanced Baphomet is a bad idea. You might want Goblin Mage in the t2 Baphomet into t3 Demon Key build - but that one is not likely to run the neutral package.
I'm pretty sure every meta deck that comes out of Wonderland Dreams is going to look almost identical on turns 1-4. The best counter to Alice is Alice.
Yeah, this is a problem that they damn sure can't solve without nerfing at least one Legendary. (And probably Feria, and Goblin Leader too). In the Alice anti-Alice, it is kinda cute seeing how popular Teena has gotten since Wonderland dropped.

But just to quibble, I suspect we will see one (or maybe even two) meta-relevant decks that try to do something else. If there's actually a dirt rune package that goes 55% against Alice Sword, that's immediately meta-relevant.
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Post by GreatGreyShrike »

We will see what happens - I have played nowhere near enough games to have any sort of statistical validity. And a lot of players still have shitty decks, and a lot of players probably don't have full crafted sets of everything they need for an archetype. The 'lot of players' fully includes me - in a perfect world I'd have a full set of Wizardess of Oz...

The best matchup for the dirt rune in my experience was sword neutral - they vomit forth followers and you vomit forth removal just as fast and it cancels out more or less but your removal plays often leave bodies behind when the dust settles. Against blood with the neutral package I only actually played twice - I went 1-1, winning and losing once apiece to it. The time I won ended before the threat of Spawn could happen, while I lost when Spawn came out once. Not nearly enough data to state who is advantaged, but I feel like it's a lot different than Sword because of the spawn threat - think the lategame is much more even between the two decks.
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Post by DSMatticus »

Josh_Kablack wrote:If you're going for the discount Spawn from Baphomet (or Bandersnatch) then Goblin Mage is counter synergistic.
Goblin Mage is a neutral (neutrals good) that replaces itself in your hand (more cheap cards good) and gives you a chance of drawing the Baphomet you might have missed (virtual Baphomet copies good). On the flip side, sure, the card Goblin Mage pulls is one less non-Spawn card left in your deck, which increases your odds of drawing them all and not being able to do anything with your Baphomet's - but I'm not sure the net effect on the likelihood of pulling off the combo is even negative. I am too lazy to start plugging numbers into a hypergeometric distribution calculator and figure out exactly whether the net effect is to increase or decrease the likelihood of the combo going off, but I would honestly guess it's an increase. Thinking about it in parts:

The Baphomet fail condition is that you don't draw any.
The Spawn fail condition is that you draw both.
Not drawing any Baphomets is more likely than drawing two Spawns.

Goblin Mage saves you when it pulls a Baphomet.
Goblin Mage fucks you when you draw a Spawn because it made your deck slightly smaller.
Goblin Mage is more likely to pull a Baphomet than you are to draw a Spawn from a slightly smaller deck.

Goblin Mage is more likely to solve a more common problem than it is to exacerbate a less likely problem. Open to being wrong on this one, but that's my instinct.
Josh_Kablack wrote:But just to quibble, I suspect we will see one (or maybe even two) meta-relevant decks that try to do something else. If there's actually a dirt rune package that goes 55% against Alice Sword, that's immediately meta-relevant.
One of my takeaways from neutrulhu is that the Alice package can be small enough that it doesn't necessarily have to lock you out of your craft-specific cards. Neutrulhu runs 9x Bloodcraft cards in the 1-4 range overlapping the neutral core, and that's not even counting Baphomet because it's actually a T5 play. In the end, the whole deck is slightly more Bloodcraft than not. It's very easy to imagine that even if you have access to craft-specific counters that shutdown neutral aggro sword or whatever, you'll still have room to run your own neutral bullshit alongside that. There are totally decks that could pop up for which it makes no sense at all to do the flood the board mirror match thing, but I can't think of any off the top of my head that sound reasonable. I would have said blood, what with their access to cheap board clear through Revelation, but, you know, neutrulhu.
Last edited by DSMatticus on Sun Jul 02, 2017 6:00 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Archmage »

Yeah, it turns out the second 4-drop my deck wanted so badly was Alice. You get a much stronger early game with neutral 1-4 drops than you do with the bat package and it's better than the stalling package I was running in the next iteration of the deck.
Neutral Spawn
2 - Actress Feria x3
2 - Baphomet x3
2 - Unica x3
2 - Razory Claw x3
3 - Goblin Mage x2
3 - Goblin Leader x3
3 - Grimnir x3
3 - Sadistic Night x2
4 - Alice x3
4 - Big Knuckle Bodyguard x3
5 - Scarlet Sabreur x3
5 - Bandersnatch x3
8 - Revelation x3
8 - Spawn of the Abyss x3
I considered a version that replaced all the non-Baphomet 2-drops with spells, but that is almost certainly inferior to being able to curve Unica/Feria > Grimnir/Leader/Mage > Alice.
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Post by Username17 »

The fact that the neutral package is the correct opening for literally every faction except possibly Ramp Dragon is probably the last straw for me. I'm going to think about it for a bit, but I don't know if I'm going to keep playing anymore.

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Post by OgreBattle »

What kind of Shadowcraft deck does Nightmare Exectioner have a place in?

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I want to use it mostly because the art is cool
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Post by DSMatticus »

FrankTrollman wrote:The fact that the neutral package is the correct opening for literally every faction except possibly Ramp Dragon is probably the last straw for me. I'm going to think about it for a bit, but I don't know if I'm going to keep playing anymore.

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Yeah, I'm just bitching and twiddling my thumbs until the Wonderland Dreams nerfs hit. If Alice doesn't get one, I'm probably done. The powercreep has made the game almost entirely about turn order and draws, which is exactly what powercreep does - the less turns there are, the less time the law of averages has to kick in, and the more each individual draw and play matters. Cygames clearly doesn't actually have enough discipline to make a healthy CCG, but they get one chance to understand and fix the disaster they have wrought before I bail completely.

@Archmage, you should make room for 3x Emeralda. Even if you can't activate her vengeance effect, T6 Spawn -> T7 Emeralda nukes a ward and lets you send Spawn to face for 12-16 damage and leaves you with at least a 6/7 and 4/5 on board. If you have Emeralda in hand, that's often the smarter play than evolving Abyss and attacking a follower on T6. I think Runecraft is the only matchup that can reliably full counter the Spawn play and forces you to evolve immediately.
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Post by Josh_Kablack »

FrankTrollman wrote:The fact that the neutral package is the correct opening for literally every faction except possibly Ramp Dragon is probably the last straw for me.
Aside from the obvious, it also bugs me that:

1> The craft-centric mechanics have become largely irrelevant. Alice Sword does not care about Trait Synergy. Neuthulu only cares about vengeance for Emeralda getting storm to clear TWO wards on t7. Beuty and the Beast does not care how many cards you played this turn etc.

2> The majority of cards within any meta-relevant deck are from this expansion. Virtually everything else is obsolete. I'm not talking about just getting new toys and key cards -- I'm talking decklists that have like 4 or 5 different pre-wonderland cards. If you didn't have a horde of rupees / vials to drop immediately, then your deck is way behind.
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Post by Josh_Kablack »

DSMatticus wrote: @Archmage, you should make room for 3x Emeralda. Even if you can't activate her vengeance effect, T6 Spawn -> T7 Emeralda nukes a ward and lets you send Spawn to face for 12-16 damage and leaves you with at least a 6/7 and 4/5 on board. If you have Emeralda in hand, that's often the smarter play than evolving Abyss and attacking a follower on T6. I think Runecraft is the only matchup that can reliably full counter the Spawn play and forces you to evolve immediately.
Havencraft can kill the Spawn reliably enough that it's worth evolving immediately and sitting in ambush for a turn. That still deals the 2 extra damage when they do have Themis / Tribunal / Lion into Death Sentence.

But I agree that Emeralda is looking significantly better than Bandersnatch here. She kills a ward (or even 2) on exactly the turn you want to kill a ward.

I would also suggest considering Hungering Horde vs Sadistic Night / Razory Claw -- it's pretty likely to be able to clear multiple goblins (even if buffed) in the current meta. And maybe Lyriel vs Unica -- I'm honestly torn about that one myself.
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Post by Omegonthesane »

So what other mobile CCG should I be switching to if the new age of Alice Neutralcraft is set in stone?
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Post by DSMatticus »

Josh_Kablack wrote:
DSMatticus wrote: @Archmage, you should make room for 3x Emeralda. Even if you can't activate her vengeance effect, T6 Spawn -> T7 Emeralda nukes a ward and lets you send Spawn to face for 12-16 damage and leaves you with at least a 6/7 and 4/5 on board. If you have Emeralda in hand, that's often the smarter play than evolving Abyss and attacking a follower on T6. I think Runecraft is the only matchup that can reliably full counter the Spawn play and forces you to evolve immediately.
Havencraft can kill the Spawn reliably enough that it's worth evolving immediately and sitting in ambush for a turn. That still deals the 2 extra damage when they do have Themis / Tribunal / Lion into Death Sentence.

But I agree that Emeralda is looking significantly better than Bandersnatch here. She kills a ward (or even 2) on exactly the turn you want to kill a ward.

I would also suggest considering Hungering Horde vs Sadistic Night / Razory Claw -- it's pretty likely to be able to clear multiple goblins (even if buffed) in the current meta. And maybe Lyriel vs Unica -- I'm honestly torn about that one myself.
I think I'd save the evo for an Emeralda or something. Evolving anything that can go face is 2 extra ping, so unless the Spawn evo will be lethal or it'll put them in reach of whatever burn you're running, you may as well save it for the next follower that can go face - force them to find one counter for your spawn and a second counter for your evo, instead of one counter for both.

Definitely agree that hungering horde is more useful than razory claw/sadistic night in this meta. Also not sure how I feel about revelation, since it's a dead card if you manage to win the early game tempo race. Of course, if you win the early game tempo race you've probably won the game, so... And it is nice that an evolved Spawn can survive a revelation.

As for which 2-drops to run, an aggro opponent might ignore a Lyrial and just try to face-race you (especially if they went first), but Unica will stop at least one attack from going face or draw removal or something. She's basically a ward. Meanwhile, Lyrial has a smidge of ping on evolve, which is an economical way to finish off a wounded 2/3 - i.e. Grimnir or a buffed Goblin. Hm, I wonder how likely you are to see one of those in this meta. :roll: I'm not sure which is better either. I want to guess Lyrial, because trading a 2/2 into a 2/3 is a thing you're going to want to do all the time in this meta and Lyrial lets you do that.
Omegonthesane wrote:So what other mobile CCG should I be switching to if the new age of Alice Neutralcraft is set in stone?
No idea. I'm honestly not a big CCG fan, and I think the only reason Shadowverse hooked me was that it was super generous. If I'd had to grind to get a single competitive deck I'd have dropped it almost immediately, but instead I ended up with 2-3 competitive decks per expansion for three expansions straight without even sweating shit like the daily missions or take two; I just nuked 5 crafts to run 2.
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Post by Omegonthesane »

Frankly I am hooked on Shadowverse most pertinently because it's on mobile so I don't have to be at home on my PC to be playing it. Seconded on the generous thing, but I didn't even nuke a craft. Heck, it was only after several weeks that I thought to set all my animateds on fire.

Honestly never occurred to me to straight up nuke a whole craft for vials, but I'm still missing some core Disco Dragon cards from when I decided "fuck the Pachinko Dragon archetype" in desperation for vials. Which isn't a level of detail a new player should be expected to pull off admittedly.
Last edited by Omegonthesane on Sun Jul 02, 2017 8:10 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Josh_Kablack
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Post by Josh_Kablack »

So the first wonderland tournament results are in.

It does look like both Earth Rite and Haven have viable builds that do not include Alice.
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Post by Omegonthesane »

Wallet Dragon's still a thing too, although I do mean Wallet Dragon looking at that list of legendaries. Oh well, I drew 3 Israfils and never made a proper deck for them, guess I spend all my vials on that instead of the Alice package.
Kaelik wrote:Because powerful men get away with terrible shit, and even the public domain ones get ignored, and then, when the floodgates open, it turns out there was a goddam flood behind it.

Zak S, Zak Smith, Dndwithpornstars, Zak Sabbath, Justin Bieber, shitmuffin
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Post by Username17 »

Josh_Kablack wrote:So the first wonderland tournament results are in.

It does look like both Earth Rite and Haven have viable builds that do not include Alice.
One player in the top eight didn't run an Alice deck. One player in the top eight ran Alice Sword as their only Alice deck. All six other players were running Alice Cthulhu. Early meta results are equally stark, with Alice Cthulhu having a winrate north of 58 percent and seemingly actually weak to nothing but Nephthys.

This is a catastrophe.
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Post by Username17 »

Literally more than one deck in three is Alice Cthulhu now. Not that one deck in three is Bloodcraft as a whole or that Alice decks of various crafts are a third of the decks on ranked, I mean that literally one deck in three is just that one single deck that runs an early Alice package into a late Spawn of the Abyss package with a few Bloodcraft tempo plays to bridge things. And there's no reason to believe that it will become any less prevalent because it has no bad matchups at all. The deck is strong early, middle, and late. It's so oppressive and dominant that its winrate is being lowered by its own commonality. It wins 58% of the time against decks other than itself, but by definition it can only win 50% of the time against itself. It's so common that it plays the mirror so often that its overall winrate is now 55.2% - less than other previous dominant decks like Tempest era Midrange Shadow.

Ranked play in Shadowverse is basically dead now.

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Post by Josh_Kablack »

Literally more than one deck in three is Alice Cthulhu now
And the rest are tweaked heavily with answers to Spawn.

Rune runs Caprice and/or Mutagenic Bolt, Sword runs Roland, Haven runs Iron Maiden, Forest runs Pixie Mischief / Homecoming on top of the Will of the Forest it was always running. And despite this much hate, Alice Spawn is still the strongest deck in the Meta. If you can even call it a meta.
"But transportation issues are social-justice issues. The toll of bad transit policies and worse infrastructure—trains and buses that don’t run well and badly serve low-income neighborhoods, vehicular traffic that pollutes the environment and endangers the lives of cyclists and pedestrians—is borne disproportionately by black and brown communities."
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Post by nockermensch »

Fresh anedoctal evidence (that's it, I can't manage to win anymore) suggests that Spawn of Abyss is currently too strong.

16 damage to the face from a single attack, coming from a card that enters the game ambushed, may be unbalanced.
Last edited by nockermensch on Mon Jul 10, 2017 8:50 pm, edited 1 time in total.
@ @ Nockermensch
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