Star Wars CCG Blogs

i play hunt down against macgyver’s profit

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i play trm against brother justs’ mistryl

[video mp4="http://www.starwarsccg.org/podcasts/tournament1game5.mp4" height=360 width=480]

i’m going to tell a story. a story about a skill called sand shards. before i get into the story i need to give a good amount of background information. it is my hope that i can present this information in an interesting manner. if you are a fan of strategy games (as i suspect you are) i think you will find it interesting. this story took place almost four years ago, when i was playing a computer game called guild wars. guild wars is an mmorpg specifically balanced for player vs player (pvp) gameplay. unlike most other mmorpgs, you can start a pvp character at the maximum level with the best possible equipment. there is no need to spend hours leveling a character and waiting for the uber hammer of pwning to drop: the pvp is readily accessible with a minimal amount of time spent. so if your team is crushed you can be sure that it is because they are better than you, not because they have superior characters.

it also means that the game balancers primary concern is with skill interactions. before entering a match, each player must select 8 and only 8 skills for their character from either their primary or secondary profession. for example, a warrior/monk would most likely take something like 7 warrior skills and 1 monk skill. almost all competitive gameplay is done in 8 vs 8 format and there are no party restrictions. you can bring 8 monks if you feel like it, but doing so is a recpie for disaster. the game was balanced in such a way as to favor groups with a fairly even distribution of professions for maximum utility. in 2006 when this occurred, at any given time there were probably something like 5,000 people playing pvp. so if there are some skills that are significantly overpowered, you can be sure the player base would catch on fairly quickly.

so this story occurs during one of the beta release weekends for the game’s second expansion: nightfall. the development team knew that their internal testers could not possibly catch all broken interactions prior to release. so they would release certain aspects of the game to the public because 100,000 eyes catch things that even the most assiduous testers and developers could not. of particular importance here, one of the new things they were introducing was a character class known as the dervish, which had at its disposal a skill called sand shards.

at first glance, sand shards did not look like a very good skill. it was an enchantment skill that the dervish could cast on himself. when it was active, if the character failed to hit an attack, it would do a relatively low amount of damage to foes in the area. now, this was kind of cool, because of course the opposing team would spend a lot of effort in making sure the opposing melee characters were unable to hit all their attacks. disruption was a vital part of gameplay, an unmitigated melee character could do a severe amount of damage. so they would often cast spells that make the opposing melee characters blind, or allow their own characters to block attacks, and so a melee character would only ever do a fraction of his potential damage. and of course the team with those melee characters would try to make sure their characters did hit with attacks, and leaving them hindered so they could get the marginal sand shards benefit just didn’t seem worth it. sand shards was just not reliable enough or powerful enough to make the cut when you can only bring 8 skills per character. i, and most other top players, wrote it off with a glance and focused on the more obviously powerful skills.

but someone somewhere looked hard at this skill and realized an unintended interaction. if you could intentially make yourself miss rather than relying on your opponent to do it for you, it becomes a lot more consistent. if you could make yourself miss repeatedly at an accelerated rate, it quickly becomes truly powerful. if you could do that sustainably, then you have something broken. late on the friday night of the beta weekend, someone i know observed a korean dervish behaving quite oddly. he kept using the same attack over and over again, an attack that my friend knew was not even hitting. but strangely enough, he was somehow doing massive amounts of damage. he went to the opposing team’s base and killed their npcs at an astonishing rate. so my friend watched more, and slowly the pieces began to come together.

by saturday morning he had discovered and improved the broken interaction. the trick was to pair the dervish profession with the assassin. the assassin is unique in that his dagger attacks are based on combos. most of his attacks have to meet certain preconditions or they fail. for instance, many offhand attacks have to follow a lead attack. and then most dual attacks (attacks with both daggers) have to follow an offhand attack. these dual attacks were typically the most damaging, so the payoff generally lies at the end of the attack chain. the intent was to make their combos potent but prone to disruption; they do a great deal of damage but if you are able to prevent an early attack from hitting the entire combo falls apart. so if your first attack is blocked, you can go ahead and press the button for the next attack, but the attack will automatically miss and you will have wasted your energy.

but since sand shards rewards you for missing your attacks, so this is precisely what the sand shards dervish wants. one of the attack skills in particular, exhausting assault, would fail if not preceded by a lead attack. so the sand shardser brought this without even bothering to bring a lead attack: he wanted the skill to fail. and because exhausting assault is designed to interrupt an opposing skill, it has a shortened activation time of only 1/2 second. and it is a dual attack, which means that by missing with it, you’re not missing just one attack but two. consequently the sand shards damage is doubled upon each activation. to top it all off, if an assassin attack skill (such as exhausting assault) fails it recharges instantly and can be used again right away. so you attack someone with this. it takes 1/2 second and misses twice, sending out sand shards damage twice to all the foes in the area. that takes 1/2 second. then you can do the exact same thing right away because the skill has no downtime. so what you would do is go up to a group of enemies and just hit the same key over and over again to repeatedly activate your exhausting assault twice per second, sending out 4 pings of sand shards per second. now we’re talking about a lot of damage generated completely reliably at an extremely fast pace.

but matches are long. if you’re activating a skill every 1/2 second you have to be able to afford to do so, otherwise you will run out of gas and a good team will adapt to the quick burst of damage and take advantage of the later lack of pressure. and exhausting assault costs 5 energy and the player only gains energy back at a rate of 4/3 per second. and the maximum energy is 40. so you can go full blast with this combo for about 5 seconds, and then can do next to nothing. but. enter the final piece of the broken combo, the elite skill way of the assassin, another thoroughly mediocre skill. at the time way of the assassin was an enchantment skill the assassin could use to make all of his dual attacks free. now in a character with lead attacks, offhand attacks, and dual attacks, it is not worth wasting the your one elite skill slot on something that will improve at best half of your attacks. unless, of course, you plan on only using a single dual attack skill (for instance exhausting assault, the 1/2 second wonder) over and over and over, and are interested in doing so without expending ANY energy.

so there we had it, a character who could reliably and easily generate huge damage at unprecedented speed, and could do so for a prolonged period of time. now we just had to put it to good use. and of course the best way to put it to good use is to use multiple copies of it. and so we played four of the dervish/assassins and four characters whose job it was to keep them alive. to put into perspective how damaging this setup was, i’ll give some rough numbers (i don’t remember the exact figures). sand shards, on each miss, did about 25 damage. and because with each skill activation the dervish was actually missing twice, he did about 50 damage right there, per attack, to everyone in the area. a normal attack does something like 30-50 to a single target only and takes anywhere from 1.3-2 seconds, depending on the weapon type. a normal heal takes anywhere from 1/4 second to 1 second and heals a single target in a range from 80-200, depending on the heal. and the average maximum health is about 550. so four dervish/assassins using sand shards could do about 400 damage a second to multiple foes in the area. the opposing healers just had no way to keep up. within a couple seconds everyone around was dead, and it was short work to track down and eliminate those still standing.

once we had it all figured out we gathered together some people to abuse it like crazy. we chose a format of play that would best suit the brokenness of this build. we quickly realized that one of the obvious weaknesses was that we were not especially mobile, and relied on multiple opponents being in the area of our attack. so we chose a format that did not emphasize mobility and that had particular areas on the map of paramount importance. opposing teams would have to face our sand shards because if they could not hold that specific area, they would lose. we chose to play in the hall of heroes tournament.

i apologize in advance for making another digression, but the way this tournament works is fascinating. it does not promote skilled play quite as much as the highest level of the game, guild vs guild combat, but it is just such a great idea that i feel compelled to share. also, it is relevant to the story. the tournament is essentially a single-elimination tournament that has been running almost uninterrupted since the game was released in 2005. you enter in your team of 8, and face one or two opponents in each round, with varying maps and objectives. if you win, you move on to the next round. if you lose, you go back to the starting area. so does everyone else, so you expect the competition to get progressively better the further you advance into the tournament. after about 7 rounds you enter the final area, the hall of heroes. this is a three team king of the hill map and the team with their “ghostly hero” holding the hill at the end of the match is the winner, stays on and reaps the rewards while the losers get sent back to the starting area. each hall of heroes match features the returning champion and two new challengers who have worked their way through all the previous rounds. we chose this format for the exploitation of sand shards specifically because the final match was king of the hill. you can’t pick your spots in such a match. you can cover the entirety of the hill with sand shards brutality. it is either face the music or throw in the towel, neither of which is a particularly attractive option. and once you reap the rewards of winning the tournament, you go right back to the final match again and play more king of the hill. the format rewards teams that are particularly effective at king of the hill matches.

so on this day we entered the tournament and crushed our first few opponents. the first rounds are usually pretty easy but these guys were falling in a matter of seconds. in our fourth round we found that we were not the only ones to have discovered sand shards. but we were smarter than they were and had prepared for that eventuality. we had brought along a skill to counteract the effects of sand shards: healing seed. healing seed is an enchantment that a monk can cast on any character, and whenever that character takes damage, he and all his nearby allies are healed for 25 or so. a powerful skill that is balanced by being expensive, having a two second cast time (for monk skills, even one second is a long cast, two seconds is an eternity) and a recharge that lasts three times as long as its duration. even so, at the time most teams in this format brought two copies. we brought four, and coordinated our seeds so that one was always up. so as long as the seed was up on one character that was taking damage, they were all getting healed, and they were being healed for an amount equivalent to the damage. and so we defeated this team and another more sand shards teams en route to winning in the hall of heroes a few times.

the metaing had begun. we had identified the overpowered skill, and we had brought it. but we knew it would get out, so we also brought the counter to the overpowered skill. sand shards was the meta. and we were a step ahead of the meta. but the meta moves quickly. after a team is eliminated they can make adjustments and go right back in again. by the time you reach the final stages of the tournament your build may already be obsolete. and so it was with us. by the time we had won a couple matches in the hall of heroes everyone there was using sand shards, but we were the best and we had the counter to the meta, so we won. the meta adapted and soon everyone was using sand shards and healing seed and it became a giant slugfest. in a three way king of the hill match where there are 12 dervishes all on the hill each sand shardsing each other there is little room for error. your offense could wipe within a second if you slipped up, and that’s exactly what happened to our enemies as we won again.

but the meta adapted even further. many sand shards teams dropped one of their dervishes for a necromancer utilizing well of the profane. well of the profane is a necromancer skill that can only be cast if there is a dead person around. it exploits the corpse and creates (for a certain amount of time) a large area wherein all opposing foes lose all of their enchantments and can not have enchantments cast upon them. this goes right to the heart of the sand shards strategy. sand shards is an enchantment. healing seed is an enchantment. many healing skills are enchantments. the well of the profane totally negates both the offense and the defense of the opposing team. it was, as we say in swccg, the gg card.

so, upon being soundly defeated by the first team of this kind, we knew we had to bring a well of the profane necro of our own. in addition to the well, we brought a skill called consume corpse. now consume corpse essentially does nothing, except, well, consume a corpse. the key is that each corpse can only be exploited once, and well of the profane has a 3 second casting time and costs nearly all of your energy. consume corpse takes only a second. so if there’s only one corpse lying around and you try to cast the well, a smart opponent will use consume corpse and get to the corpse first. because the well needs a fresh corpse the well of the profane cast will fail. so against teams without a necromancer you can cast the well of the profane worry-free and destroy them because you have the “gg card” and they do not. but against teams also sporting a necro it becomes a battle of wits. both players are trying to get off the money skill and win it for their teams. but they know if they go for it prematurely they may very well lose it for their team. so the two necros cancel each other out and both teams are left to beat on each other until one of the necros can get the all-important well off, at which point his team wipes the other and often wins in a matter of seconds.

and so the meta continued to adjust. within a couple hours a new metagame was born, shaped, countered, adapted to. people found counters to the meta. then people found counters to the counters. and it went on. sand shards was the focal point, and everything shaped itself around that. who knows where it would have gone from there; the developers made an emergency update to the game and sand shards was fixed to only work with scythes, the normal weapon of choice for dervishes. the build we had been using only worked with daggers, the assassin weapon, so this change kept the skill in line with intent and curbed the abuse. and the guild wars population moved on to exploit other, somewhat less broken, skills for the remainder of the beta release weekend. and the developers gained a lot of information and so when it came time for the actual release they were able to put out a quality final product.

so let me know what you think. did you actually finish this whole story? i’m interested to hear responses

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The new definition of Awesome.

I’d been to a Coruscant regional once before, back in 2002 when the SWCCG world was a bit larger and starting to take notice of what Justin and I were doing in the northeast with a couple of guys named lott dodd and soontir fel. After Justin won the Kashyyyk Regional that year it was my turn to take a shot at it in Coruscant as I couldnt make the Kashyyyk regional.

Justin and Hayes Hunter made the trip down with me (truly one of the great trips we ever took) and things went well. I came in first after the swiss after beating Johnny Chu with the dark senate and it was time to play the final against him. I won the first game with Dark senate by 18 so all I had to do was lose by less than that and I had my first championship win. Here’s an exerpt from my TR on decktech.

Finals game 2
he deploys executor and gets him at endor draining, i drdop han/chewie/falcon and bravo fighter, hes like theyre each plus one, so i pay the two, an battle.. dont break executors immunity… but… fukc becuase of the +1 deploys… i onyl have two cards left…. bye bye han chewie falcon… bravo fighter vs. the world… he drops chirnoonoo and thrawn, battles i dont even know if he imp commands all i konw is that i lost 23 cards after the bravo fighter.. after that i still had a shot if i pulled quigons saber out of lost, which i forgot to do, and he just combatted me out because i was trying to pull off an edge instead of track sevens for combat and i lost by 19 FUKC!

Justin and Chu and I still talk about that Bravo Fighter debacle when talking about our playing history and how it cost me a regional win 6 years ago. We were even talking about it on the way to the regional on Saturday.

Back to the 2008 timeline, I was really liking a tanks deck of tatooine with watto to prevent battle destiny at one site and the moisture farm to make all my cannon shots +2 (total) in and out of that site, a heavy space package and occupation with some trickery. And this was BEFORE v16 when the deck got two HUGE boosts to it. Possibly the two best cards in the deck came from v16. I’ve been testing this deck since before the Kashyyyk Regional that I ran last month and played it at the cash event (2-0 against profit) the week before so with the new cards, some new tech and some strategizing I felt good bringing this to the Regional.

For light justin and I were going to play combat but after testing it things looked bad. it would beat huntdown but might lose to absolutely everything else. So we went to bed with zero ideas and woke up with even less. I called steve about a possible tigih list but that felt poor so we went with mainstays. I played ktod profit but lately steve had changed it a bunch so I kind of went back to the way we built it originally and threw in luke’s ulitmatum which chu showed us and is awesome. Justin played wys tweaked a card or two differently than mine. Justin had come off wys entirely too quick. I had a rough go with it at the cash event and needed to step away. I’ve been playing wys since worlds (before worlds if you count a month of testing it) and just needed a different deck.

Chu went with profit a couple cards different than mine and his old school agents with some really nifty tech that can really hose mains decks with jeedai.

One interesting note, I decided to pack one bravo fighter V to go take out zuckuss at a system if i had to (you can auto forfeit him to zuckuss after clearing the system even if they decline destiny) and it also gave me an excuse to play strikeforce V under my SE… but i have had bad luck at using bravo fighter at coruscant regionals in the past sooooo we’ll see.

After the normal pre-tourney goings on of decklists, paying etc it was time to play the games and here they are.

Game 1, my Profit vs. JW Millett’s HDADTJ

at least I think it was jw millett. JW was playing Docking bay HD and started two aliens, epp mara jade and boba fett bh. that really locked up what he could do first turn as he really was unable to back up the audience chamber well. he didnt do anything turn one. I got 3po down with saitor and said go. He dropped myn kneugh V with vibro ax from under the shield and said go. He didnt play the restricted access shield.

I had obi and saber and massa luke in my hand so they came down with two sabers, I missed the bounce on fett but clashed mara and then played satm/bp lost to get fett out of there leaving just myn and his 4 power and no destiny to my hit squad. After that it was still a while before he got vader out. I went and killed him with yoda and then he got vader at one dbay adn bliz4 at another dbay late but he wasn’t able to do much damage to me and I won by 25 forces.

FW 2+25

Game 2, my Tatooine Tanks vs. Some dude’s CPV Tatooine start

well at first I was like CPV this dude is probably a scrub then I was like wait, I’m doing CRV so maybe I’m a scrub. Shiza. he converted my tatooine which kind of Effed with my activation but needless to say this was a nutty game. He went up to space turn two with luke in red 5. I came down my turn 3 with Vader v, tarkin, personal shuttle v, and a tank commander for forfeit fodder. After that those guys never left the table. He came down with corran in ship,t hen jek in ship (not jek v though?) then han chewie falcon, none of those guys could get around tarkin cancelling one destiny and making the other -3. I, however, couldnt get through all his forfeit fodder before he had mace at one site with a saber and then quigon at another site with his saber. some how ben kenobi (old school) was able to clear a tank off a site with a 6 BD and he had 3 sites to my one site. so he was retrieving 3 with celebration while i was pinging for 1 (yes occupation and celebration were on the saem system. I had arica blocking one drain and then moved to block quigon’s with a tank and cannon. he battled me there and i defensive fired that motherfuckero ff the table and moved in front of ben kenobi. eventually i cleared him off the site and the system so he only had mace out who’s drain was blocked and my drains/occupation damage was just too much for him to handle when I could recycle a 5, activate to it and make my drains +1 with watto (outskirts drain for 3 ftw). This dude played super slow and at one point had no hand, had to take 5 damage, and sat there thinking for like 2 minutes before losing the force and it was kind of pissing me off but a full win by 13 was fine with me after it looked like i was going to take a loss.
fw 4+36

Game 3, my Tatooine Tanks vs. Vikram Bali’s TRM

So he goes first and I start imp decree and i get nice activations from him after he revos my bridge. I drop tank commander gun watto to the jyard and he comes down with leia, blaster, lando screaming and epp luke for backup. he plays flash adn shows a 3 so he can’t hit the tank. then he battles and tries to shoot and play BP to add 3 to hit the tank but he had zero force so he couldnt shoot, and i had watto so he couldnt battle. I drew 2 destiny and it kept leia around. I dropped epp maul on my turn but was so focusing on not shooting him lost that i forgot to swing and overflowed leia for 18 instead of 25 because i wouldve easily hit her with the destiny i’d drawn. after that there wasn’t much he could do, he came down with some other dudes and I’m pretty sure I battled them off and won another game by 25.
FW 6+63

Justin and I are both 3-0 at this point so we have to play each other, which sucks but what can you do.

Game 4, my Profit vs his KTOD Huntdown

I don’t remember how I took the AC in this game but I’m pretty sure it was just the normal clash+satm/bp that did it. He stupidly played the reactor terminal shield bc he thought it was restricted access, though I pointed this out before I dropped a free luke on him and blew him out (I did play my threepio for free though) that really cost him as it locked him into three shields and was unable to play coward to stop me from flipping at will. After that I just held the AC and drained while projectioning his site. This game is seriously blending together with the game we played in the… SPOILER ALERT (final)… but it was a total grind but I was able to win by 3 forces.

So now becuase Justin’s diff is still so high and i’m the only 4-0 we have to play again.

Game 5, my Tat Tanks vs. Justins WYS

I got a shit hand for space and resigned to just go up there and cloak with maul. I set up watto/tank turn 1 and emperor to the farm turn 2. Turn 3 I ripped occupation with watto so instead of draining just went upstairs and cloaked ashe was there doing fast damage to me trying to put pressure on. After losing vader v off the top he went over to kessel knowing it’d be tough for me to take a system. I did end up challenging at tatooine for a bit with boba fett and bossk in ship but it was short lived and at best held me from cloaking for a couple turns but in the end it was I who got shield busted and unable to play code clearance allowing him to edge twice for 5 each and in the end He was able to win by 13.

So justin and I are both 5 and 1 and need to win to get into the final. I think justin couldve gotten in with a small loss but after seeing taco bill’s diff when I sat down across from him for game 6 I knew I had to win and I was a little bit worried about his BHBM

Game 6, my Profit vs. Taco Bill’s BHBM

Bill started arica, dr.e then backed upw ith emperor and vader. I stacked up at the exterior site but he started IAO so I couldn’t nabrun in. I eventually dropped yoda and il9 to the AC and moved obi, boussh, corran, artoo BLD V and threepio inside. right away he zaps threepio. during his turn he zaps artoo. and drops p59. at this point he can zap on my turn and prevent DFTD so i wokling artoo back and redploy him on my turn. he zaps him again (so he doesnt have to lose p59 with the new BLD text) but I still have il9 to use with DFTD. I have no other guys in hand so i just battle with what i have. I swing and hit vader and satm/bp him to free luke, I bounce boba fett. I swing and hit p59 and then he force fields my final swing at emperor. His force fielding allowed me to play both gift and rebel leadership to draw 4 destiny and I clear the site and do one overflow (would’ve been four more overflow but i forgot about luke’s ultimatum v).

I free han and eventually spread out to two sites to increase the damage. he puts the <> dbay at tatooine with vader emperor janus and I move luke over to try and ping him for a bit. He decides to emperor zap luke on my turn so that I lose 3 for his objective. this works once and then I stop giving him luke. In the end my damage was just more than his with two drains of 2 and a ping of two, two his drain at the dbay that is projectioned and his drain of 2 at fondor with maul and presence there and I win by some forces.

finish 5-1, 10+66

Justin and I are beat and starving so instead of playing the final at the shop we head to brooklyn to the pizza shop of one of my closest/oldest friends who owns one there. we get some free slices (i had macaroni, cheese, bacon, ranch and a buffalo chicken bacon ranch, justin had the mac attack and an eggplant parm. chu went with buffalo ranch and a vegan choice I believe) then we headed back to Chu’s to play the final with chu as the referee.

Justin won so he elected to play dark first so that he could work on retrieving with the wys I suppose.

Our game was very similar to the first only this time he put vader outside turn one. on my turn 1 i came down with obi saber and cleared him off. Next turn I backed up with boussh but i left her undercover after he put 4lom down in the ac and drew. He came down with maul and killed obi I saved the saber and resilianced obi. Then I went into the AC and cleared it pretty easily and he dropped emperor outside and force lightning’d leia. I freed han and replayed her the next turn after I buried FL. Differently than our swiss game when I cancelled visage the first turn, we lost to visage every turn in this game and I elected not to cancel it because of his retrieval with wipe and my getting a head by leaving his image of the dark lord stuck outside when iw as inside draining for four and pinging for one. he went to space with zuckuss and eventually the back door with sidious and someone. My damage was just too much for him in the end and though I forgot to retrieve with wokling I was able to win by 6.

Our tanks/wys game was a little different. he was actually able to get both projections out against me (he didnt get either in the swiss game) and spread out to kessel as soon as I got my occupation/cloak going. he moved out there with just dash though and so I went down with bossk/zuckuss ins hips and overflowed him for 9 since he elected to keep dash out to stay flipped. Unluckily for me he drew high and I stupidly didnt put the forfeit 7 tank on the hounds tooth for fodder with really i think cost me hugely. He eventually cleared me off kessel but was only doing the damage there as he couldnt get a ground force together. he eventually got to the cantina and would’ve ended the game with the extra damage had I not drawn one card and it been u3po, but he blocked the drain, forcing justin’s squad to move outside. I think if i just moved u3po with them I mightve won by moving a commander to the cantina and doing some other movement but as is, justin was down to five cards, I drew two and cloaked maul from reserve deck FTL and with justin forgetting to retrieve with wokling also (he beat me by 5) it could’ve been a freaking tie. and we forgot to count lost piles.

So six years after losing coruscant regionals by 1 force I win them by one force, both times playing the bravo fighter.

So I get my third tournament win and my first glass trophy that I can’t drink out of.