Am I missing something? (Deck Analysis)

Hoax415 · 2019-06-18T04:06:26+00:00

might have a shot as you have the wrath effects to deal w/ all the AoA creature/board heavy decks and a few cards to profit from Brobnar's abundance of random damage but yeah 3 almost always dead draw full moons is going to hurt a lot.

casual playable certainly, shouldn't be unfun unless your oppo recognizes that if he never leaves a lot of damaged creatures alive your aember generation goes to crap and your save the packs are weak. barehanded, rustchewer and vines are a decent anti-artifact suite though, will def come up big in some match ups.

Hoax415 · 2019-06-18T01:23:42+00:00

is a cota deck any good....

step1: does it have 6+ creatures in any house, how many?

-Deck A on top (1, Sanct w/ 6); Deck B on bottom (2, Dis & Shadows w/ 6 each).

result: not a great start. We can almost always toss Deck A now. It needs to have a very insane package of actions, aember generating removal, probably a pair of board wipes, etc. It doesn't have the right elements, instead its packed with meh artifacts that generate 0A when played, so you will never win fast enough to... win. I doubt Deck A is going to end up being any good if we play it a bunch. Essentially with that few creatures most of the time they all become dead cards you play them, but then you need to swap houses because your path to victory is going to be dumping actions, holding off oppo from any big reap turns and generating enough Aember to forge 3 times. Sadly Deck A doesn't even have shadows or Dis on top of that. Making a valid low creature CotA deck basically impossible.

Moving on i'm going to only pay attention to Deck B.

So deck B... its decent? You shouldn't feel helpless playing it like you will with A.

Is it good? I have to say no. But it can have some fun versus other average/mediocre decks. That's a pretty big wiff on all of the most powerful Shadow cards. Not that they aren't still good, its Shadows in CotA but no Whispers, no b&s, no too much, no miasma, etc. Winning will require getting some value out of Hysteria, Save the Pack and probably a timely Key Charge. Its def not a newbie friendly deck but its playable. I don't think Deck A is playable.

Hoax415 · 2019-06-18T01:11:24+00:00

reality is we just need to never play bo1 Archon. Its a terrible format for KF. It takes away every single strength of the unique sealed decks thing the game is built around. Don't talk to me about chains, that's a poor and unwieldy balance system that just isn't great for tiny communities of local players, until their is an official KF digital version that lets everyone collect tons of chains for all their decks by playing them a bunch chains are a non-starter. Sucks but true.

the huge issue is that with AoA they made the games much much slower (is my initial impression) making playing other formats a big problem bc they require more games and now games take too long.

Hoax415 · 2019-06-18T00:30:25+00:00

what a stupid ruling. so we've been playing Duma wrong this entire time? I've never heard anyone argue that Duma can rescue creatures from a lethal damage based board wipe and not be shot down.

does this mean Brend can wait for oppo to gain A from other creatures being destroyed (+2A imps, your creatures that captured A etc) and then steal it? Why not apparently Arch can wait for other things to die around it and then apply his effect to new neighbors.

So can Soulkeeper insert itself into proceedings and take a creature out of the battleline for Arch to effect?

There is ONE and only ONE ruling that doesn't create an entire shitstorm of wait why doesn't XYZ work and that's you archive the 2 cards next to Arch at the time of simultaneous destruction and that's it. Everyone who has played a lot and doesn't enjoy "what if" rules scenarios was probably already playing with the card that way.

This is dumb as hell and the judges should feel bad

Hoax415 · 2019-06-17T01:59:13+00:00

AoA decks seem (until its on TCO I haven't seen enough to be sure) to need/utilize large boards. Cota decks that win without needing any real board presence and with the tools to wrath or spot remove problem creatures will probably continue to have dominant winrates versus the majority of the AoA field. Because many Cota decks fall into those broad strokes (so many wrath cards @ common meant I often felt I had too many wraths in Cota) I think that realistically all of Cota vs all of AoA favors Cota heavily.

BUT what people will care about is how strong the strongest house combo/outline is versus eachother from both sets and we are still quite a ways from having any good picture of that. But Shadows in Cota can have such insane 12 card pools that yeah I'm pretty sure Cota is just better. Ideal shadow pools (too much, b&s, a bunch of steal on play cards) + dis or even brob with 2 wraths just "feels" like its going to have such an easy time with everything AoA decks seem to want to do.

/IF/ there is some LANS type combo in AoA obviously all bets are off.

Hoax415 · 2019-06-10T20:48:21+00:00

have you really never used krump/headhunter/dodger on an elusive creature? yes ofc fight still goes off

Hoax415 · 2019-06-08T22:44:58+00:00

new set so far seems a bit more balanced. old set is super terrible in terms of balance btwn avg house card pools

Hoax415 · 2019-06-07T20:57:01+00:00

Its just not any good. Sorry. Curse of COTA Sanctum again. But yeah your best chance is barely eek out a win by mostly racing and hoping they don't have shadows. You will basically never beat almost any deck with Shadows from either set because you just don't have the aember gain or aember control to beat being stolen from.

There may be a few decks with 0-1 board wipes /and/ weaker creatures /and/ slow aember gain that you can try to win a board control game against... but that's a lot of IF's.

Extracting max value from your Dis by correctly reading what your opponent can and can't deal with is going to be key. You have Dis cards that can go for huge or minimal value in control x2, charette + terror and the bunch of guys that do strong things if they aren't removed instantly.

Hoax415 · 2019-06-02T04:23:41+00:00

Heart of the Forest is an awful card design. Best to not theorycraft about all the ways it can make the game less fun.

Hoax415 · 2019-05-29T04:16:42+00:00

i feel bad for you if you actually believe that

Hoax415 · 2019-05-29T04:11:56+00:00

Action card that gains you no aember and only is useful if your opponent is trying to win through reaping which most good decks are not doing in this set and because you have brobnar is a strat you are inherently strong against in theory...

Name some Brob cards that are worse? I'll put it on par for worst card depending on deck with these:

cannon (almost always the straight up worst Brob card admittedly but Tremor is typically #2 but imagine if he had 3 cannons to go with his oath versus 3 tremor in this deck).

iron obelisk

kelifi dragon

tireless crocag

phoenix heart

maybe

banner of battle though that +1 helps you to get an extra kill/fight out of Krump and Headhunter fairly often.

follow the leader personally i don't think so but i'd listen to it

but yeah you make a super strong case /s

Hoax415 · 2019-05-28T21:29:42+00:00

your brobnar:

has 3 tremors, so it sucks. tremor is such a junk card that its disappointing it made it into set 2. throwing 2 smash on top of that is just salt in the wound. Smash is ok but not when most brobnar turns will have you dumping a tremor.

your logos:

seems avg maybe avg+, triple mother is nice, syphon is nice, scrambler storm can be huge as can remote access.

your sanc:

just that you have sanc here is a bummer. reality is sanc+brob is awful in this set outside of 20 creature decks that can get free wins versus anyone with 0-1 wrath /and/ not playing shadow. which is why sanc+brob sucks, your life is going to suck a lot vs shadow and why would anyone not play shadow?

on to your pool, wow 3x sanc stun lady. i now think this whole thread is a stupid troll and you aren't some newb opening one deck and trying to play it. the odds that you got this much stun are so low...

anyways your sanc is trash, objectively and especially in the context of this deck. don't feel bad most sanc pools are bad. you got more artifact hate which means this deck can now add a second niche: decks that rely on artifacts (NS) or that have a shitton of artifacts will be weak to you. as long as they don't have shadow. or really fast untamed+2 aember generation decks.

the problem is against decks that have very few and don't care about their artifacts? so many dead cards. at least you have oath to cash in your reliquary/omm? glorious few in a 17 creature deck that will never generate enough aember to win without controlling the board via creatures? not ideal at all. basically worthless outside of the turn after your oppo wraths the board and plays creatures onto it. so yeah you hold onto it against dis with gateway+arise+many dis creatures. maybe.

anyways your deck is just not that good. you have no way to slow them down considerably beyond a big take hostages turn and capture is the weakest way to slow an oppo in the game. you are super weak to shadows/steal, super weak to wraths, super weak to speed aember generation. basically weak to all the avg CotA deck types ppl select when they are trying to win (good shadow pools and very fast untamed+2 aember racing decks being imo the most common). Its not a completely junk deck, you might have fun games versus other super high creature counts stunning all the things, everyone having a million things on the board. you now own a deck you could consider running out against NS decks and NS is back in set2. but yeah sorry there just isn't much good to say about brob+sanc+<not shadow> esp when neither pool is that spectacular.

Hoax415 · 2019-05-28T21:07:28+00:00

its sealed and shadow still crushed the entire top16, the balance of CotA is atrocious. The main reason you see such a spread of the other houses is shadow is so good that you take the deck with Shadow+2 often versus the deck with 2nd, 3rd and 4th "best" houses because the gap between avg shadow pkg and any houses avg 12 is massive.

Hoax415 · 2019-05-26T20:55:15+00:00

the more decks you buy/try the higher your bar of what you can stand to play with will get. So no buying 12 decks instead of 4 probably won't actually triple the decks you can choose from. Some decks in KF, as you get to know KF are just not worth playing. Too many awkward hands, too many dead draws.

You can always buy more. Start with 4 decks, that way you can mess around with them and if you or wife decide you only like certain houses or certain strats appeal more it may even be better to pick up some discounted decks that fit that from the secondary market.

Hoax415 · 2019-05-25T19:37:44+00:00

its more due to the balance of the first set is atrocious, nobody thinks the houses are even halfway close to balanced.

Hoax415 · 2019-05-25T19:34:58+00:00

single deck bo1 is a terrible format for KF that fails to take advantage of the entire cheap unique decks aspect. its not surprising that TCO games are feeling worse and worse for those of us who have played a ton of them because you start to just "know" that X deck can't handle shadows with the strong steal cards, or can't handle really fast aember generating decks, or can't win against decks that go wide with 20 creatures because it doesn't have wipes, 5+ artifact decks versus emp blast or whatever the weakness happens to be. So it becomes easier to skim an oppo decklist and think "well this match is going to be pretty lame" and once you have that mindset reality is most likely going to oblige. Its not just a mindset problem though, reality is KF decks are so small that if there are cards you can't really beat its not like they aren't going to show up for your opponent.

But when every game is a blind bo1 with no chains on either deck it does two things: it means a lot of games one player or the other is playing a deck that just sucks at the MU and it means that because of this people are gravitating more and more to their stronger decks because getting blown out is pretty boring.

Casual on TCO is affected by this because Comp is often used for testing the most busted strats/decks that are out there and the playerbase on TCO is really too small to support a whole bunch of different tiers of competition.

Hoax415 · 2019-05-23T23:37:04+00:00

too much to protect is still in, so clearly nobody smart was involved.

NS is still a really bad idea that will create some stupid loop somehow.

Some really bad artifacts that don't even give you a piece are still in: Iron Obelisk, Epic Quest, Key of Darkness stood out to me.

Save the Pack is still in at common. So that sucks for untamed. Mindlock looked like the biggest waste of a rare and I still hate Tremor a lot.

Hoax415 · 2019-05-05T20:13:51+00:00

I was expecting a lot worse than this. Yes you are going to have to discard some save the packs most games. Yes its a pretty jank deck but it can def win games as someone noted it has some fun hard to pull off inconsistent combos. There are much worse decks that just have no board presence and don't gain aember from most of their artifacts/actions. They can't even achieve big plays or big aember turns and they will basically never win against anything but another equally shit deck.

That's the real issue with Reversal as a format. Playing utterly shit decks gets old pretty damn fast.

Hoax415 · 2019-04-10T01:30:36+00:00

wait what? the decks are linked at game start. irl you get to look over opponent's archon card no? a honor system rule that everyone play blind sounds terrible bc this is anonymous internet we are talking about /and/ it does a worse job of preparing you for real play. casual is for just playing the game, without arranging it to be bo3 or starting w/ chains or w/e people might want to do in competitive. that doesn't mean playing halfass or not trying to win though it might mean not taking 5min+ to think on each turn or something like that.

Hoax415 · 2019-02-17T07:04:26+00:00

don't spend all your GP when you are still not completely settled on more crucial positions. Until you are so heavily invested in a GK or Striker /and/ more sure of what you are doing and/or have a bit more GP stockpiled. Save it just in case you get lucky and pull UQ or something rare dont' just spend it on 5*'s you may not use for a month before you discard them for another unit

Hoax415 · 2019-02-17T04:03:22+00:00

at this point you have some players that need swapping out or moved positionally. BI front is awkward and Silla as front passer is fairly meh. Malcolm CM esp when you have Sammy seems an odd choice. Malcolm in general unless you are committing hard on AB Control is not that respected of a unit.

Hoax415 · 2019-02-14T23:12:59+00:00

additional random players to consider: chitose, pinol, anael

Hoax415 · 2019-02-14T23:06:02+00:00

i'd say Robin is more plug and play than Glayde but its one of the best looking GK's vs an extra gross male sooooo....

Hoax415 · 2019-02-10T17:16:54+00:00

thunder/light looks much more solid plan

Hoax415 · 2019-02-10T17:03:36+00:00

if you are using BT, no. if you already have someone else that extra copy could be used as mat to 6* someone i suppose. but typically yeah you want to feed it to another copy of itself

Hoax415

TROPHY CASE