Month: July 2020

No Burn/Health Gain* Tournament

Wild decks and Control decks have dominated and shaped Epic’s competitive constructed meta forever. This is partly due to the effectiveness of uninteractable direct damage effects such as Strafing Dragon and Scarros. In a moment of frustration having just been burned out, after getting reverse burned out by two previous Kark players, following my own burning out of a third Kark player, I wondered what the game would be like if no burn (damage or life loss that can target a player) or health gain effects existed. I was intrigued and didn’t have an answer, so I decided to put on an unofficial Epic Digital tournament series to find out, this.

Format

In order to best explore what an Epic meta with no burn and (almost) no health gain looks like, I’m thinking the best way to do this is with a scheduled tournament, followed by two to four weeks of individually scheduled round robin matches, and then a culminating scheduled tournament. Each individual event will have a winner, and if someone wins two of the three events, they will be the overall winner. As of now, I am planning on not having prizes since I think it would be awesome if some WWG employees joined in too! (For example but not limited to CJ, Darwin, Rob, etc.)

I am hypothesizing that the removal of burn and health gain will simultaneously slow down the format while also decreasing the average game time. Therefore, every match will be best of three.

For the schedule tournaments, I figured we could use battlefy + discord and hold a tournament similar to the monthly tournament (4+ round of swiss cut to top 4/8 depending on the number of participants). Round limit of approximately an hour plus 4 turns with tie break going to the player with more health remaining and final tie breaker going to whoever went first that game. Use the same deck throughout the entirety of the tournament. Decklists will be posted after each tournament. First tournament will provide a baseline, last tournament will demonstrate how the meta evolved.

For the weeks of round robin, *ideally* everyone would play each other player once with between one and four matches per week. A player must use the same deck throughout the match, but may change decks between matches. Decklists will not be required to be posted during this event. This event will require discussion to iron out the details.

It will NOT be necessary to play more than one event.

Dates and Times

I figured we could hold the first tournament either Saturday August 8th at 12:45pm CDT or anytime Sunday August 9th. Let me know what times would work best for anyone interested. I could possibly do an earlier time on that Saturday if necessary.

The weeks of round robin would start that following Monday. The number of weeks would depend on the number of interested participants as well as the number of matches we would want to shoot for in a week. I would also personally be fine with allowing people to commit to playing only a portion of the events. The player with the most event wins (within the established “limit” per week) would be the winner.

The second tournament would most likely be on the weekend following the last week of round robin, as long as it does not interfere with an official WWG tournament.

Full Event Banlist

The full ban list can be found below and is primarily based around burn and health gain, but I want to go over the exceptions to those criteria first.

EXCEPTIONS

Banned: Ceasefire, Fumble, Blind Faith (WWG bans, even though this is a different environment from what they were banned in, they are too disruptive and efficient in a combat-damage-only environment and I don’t want the events to potentially center around already banned cards)
Banned: Thought Plucker, Muse (Primarily because I hate them and I’m drunk on my power from organizing this, but also because I feel they overly inhibit deck building)

NOT Banned:

Avenging Angel (While it does gain the player life, it has to deal damage in combat to do it, and there are multiple effective ways to interact with it for every alignment)

Clarifications/Considerations

[Gold Dragon is still banned for this because it doesn’t personally need to attack to gain health, and it threatens too much health gain. Similar reasoning behind Justice Prevails still being banned.]

[Soul Hunter is still banned for this even though I considered adding it back in since: it needs at least 1 other card to combo with it to deal the damage immediately, it doesn’t deal that much damage at first, and there are multiple ways to interact with it. Ultimately, I decided to keep it banned because Good and Wild have no way to interact with it if it is discarded and then continuously broken immediately at the start of its controller’s turns when it returns to play.]

[I considered banning other cards for this event too but decided not to at this time.]

All other cards that can gain a player health or directly decrease a player’s health without dealing combat damage are BANNED (for this event)

(The exceptions above are also included in this list)

Good (15)

1-cost Cards (10):

Absolve
Angel of Light
Angel of the Gate
Breath of Life
Ceasefire
Chamberlain Kark
Gold Dragon
Inner Peace
Justice Prevails
Royal Escort
Vital Mission

0-cost Cards (5):
(Blind Faith)
Brand, Rebel Fighter
Mobilize
Priest of Kalnor
Priestess of Angeline
Second Wind

Evil (11)

1-cost Cards (6)

Dark One’s Apprentice
Devour
Drain Essence
Drinker of Blood
Plague Zombies
Soul Hunter
Zannos, Corpse Lord

0-cost Cards (5):

Consume
Corpsemonger
Heinous Feast
Unquenchable Thirst
Villify

Sage (10)

1-cost Cards (4):

Blue Dragon
Helion, the Dominator
Storm Dragon
Thought Plucker

0-cost Cards (6):

Disappearing Act
Forcemage Apprentice
Fumble
Lightning Elemental
Lightning Mage
Muse

Wild (22)

1-cost Cards (16):

Ascendant Pyromancer
Draka’s Fire
Fires of Rebellion
Flame Strike
Flood of Fire
Forked Lightning
Hunting Raptors
Lightning Storm
Polar Shock
Pyromancer
Pyrosaur
Rain of Fire
Savage Uprising
Scarros, Hound of Draka
Strafing Dragon
Whirlwind

0-cost Cards (6):

Fire Shaman
Fireball
Flame Spike
Flash Fire
Forked Jolt
Javelin Thrower

Everything Open to Discussion

None of this is set in the stone, not the format, not the complete banlist, not the dates/times, etc. If anyone has any suggestions/recommendations etc. let me know and we can work through the best way to do this. You can either comment on here or any of the places I’ll cross-post this: the Epic Digital Facebook group, Epic Reddit group, Epic Board Game Geek page, the Epic Discord, or on Twitter. If it isn’t on here, please tag me as I can forget to check each of the locations at times.

Streaming

I will be streaming all of my scheduled tournament games and potentially round robin games too at https://www.twitch.tv/tomsepicgaming\. I plan on experimenting with a lot of different decks since I believe all alignments will potentially be viable.

Decklists

I will compile all of the decklists on here. Please send me the exportable deck code from the app at least after each tournament. If you could send me a screenshot of the full deck as well, that would be helpful, otherwise I can do that part myself.

A Note on Note-Taking

While talking to Christian Kudahl after our Dark Draft Showmatch he mentioned a note taking strategy that intrigued me. So, I asked him to write up his thoughts on it. Game one was saved and can be viewed here: Game 1 vs Kudahlissimo

I first talked to Tom Sorenson about a year ago because I was a fan of his blog. As an amateur Epic player with no real competitive opponents around, getting to read his draft guides and tournament reports was really exciting for me. Tom was even nice enough to help out with a lot of testing my game Unleash, which is scheduled to come out later this year. His expertise in competitive card games was a huge help.

With the Epic app, we also started playing Epic together. We always played Dark Drafts, and I was really excited when I was able to get a win against him now and then. After some matches, he challenged me to a best of five match which he would stream. It sounded like a lot of fun for me, though I was a bit nervous. I have never played Epic tournaments or any kind of “official” matches before. I knew he was strong, and I really wanted to beat him.

If you have not yet seen the match, I would recommend watching game one before reading more. It can be watched here:

Game 1 vs Kudahlissimo

To prepare myself, I started re-reading every entry on his blog. I wanted to internalize his style. What did he value in Dark Drafts? What did he overvalue? (Tokens!) Which cards did he draft even though he kind of knew he shouldn’t? (Rampaging Wurm seems to tempt him every time.) What does he undervalue? (Knight of Shadows, that guy is strong!)

I knew that Tom was streaming the match and he wanted to take some time explaining all his choices thoroughly to the viewers, so the matches would be quite slow. I wanted to use this to my advantage. I came up with the ultimate note-taking scheme:

With every pick in the Dark Draft, I would note the four cards I sent to him (I call this a quad). I would note the two cards I expected him to pick in one list (called ‘the decklist’), and the two cards I expected him to burn in another list (called ‘the burnlist’).

During the matches, every time he played or revealed a card, I would cross reference it with the decklist and the burnlist. If he played a card from the burnlist, I would find the two cards I had expected him to draft in the decklist and decide the one I think he actually picked, and swap the other with the card from the burnlist. If I ever saw him playing two cards from a quad (four cards I had sent to him), I knew the other two could not be in his deck, so I would stop playing around them.

With my scheme, I was ready to crush Tom on his own stream. So how did it go?

Pretty bad, actually. The first two games, I found myself making lots of mistakes that I normally consider myself too good for. I suspected that the reason was me spending so much brain power with this ridiculous note-scheme that I only had a small focus on the actual game itself. Tom played really well and I soon found myself down 2-0.

Like the basketball team in any American movie I watched as a kid, it was half-time in the finals and I was way behind. I needed to do something. I decided to throw my note-scheme out the window and play the remaining games from my gut. With a mix of good play and good fortune, I was able to get back to a score of 2-2. We now had one deciding game remaining.

Due to a baby-situation at home, I was unfortunately unable to finish the match. However, as a European, ending 2-2 is quite fine and the result of an exciting soccer match. I enjoyed playing the games a lot and my two final observations are these:

  • Realize that taking notes is not free. This also applies in real-life matches where the notes are taken internally in your head. In both cases, it costs brain power that will be taken away from your actual play. Is your note-taking scheme providing a benefit comparable to the effort you are putting in?
  • In other games (such as Hearthstone) using deck-tracking software is sometimes allowed. It is a piece of software which tracks for example which cards are still in your deck or how many turns certain cards have stayed in the opponent’s hand. All the boring stuff that you would be able to track by paper anyway but you don’t feel like doing. After this match with Tom, I realize that the power of such software in Epic Dark Draft would be enormous. By remembering all the Dark Draft picks and burns (and Deck 2, see http://www.tomsepicgaming.com/epic-theory-an-introduction-to-deck-2/ ), you theoretically have a ton of information about what is in the opponent’s deck and hand. It is probably for the best that such software does not exist.

I look forward to our next match where I will have revised my note-taking scheme. If anyone has a different note-taking scheme or other ideas on the subject, I would love to hear about it.