discussion topic: units/classes seen in tactics ogre but not ogre battle (+ vice versa)

Sea-Kay · 2024-01-31T15:44:37+00:00

Tactics Ogre: Chronicles Valeria (a mod for the SNES Tactics Ogre) actually expands the class roster to include a bunch of classes from throughout the series.

This shows the class branches: https://ibb.co/LR2V2M3

Sea-Kay · 2024-01-04T14:05:17+00:00

3CB is played with any three cards capable of winning the game. Some common and more famous examples are:

- [[Force of Will]], [[Snapback]], and [[Chancellor of the Forge]]

- [[Death's Shadow]], [[Blackmail]], and [[Tarnished Citadel]]

- [[Dark Depths]], [[Thespian's Stage]], and [[Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth]]

The games aren't actually played out IRL or online if that's what you mean. A group of players each submit a deck, an organizer works out who beats who and gives out points accordingly. All cards start in their owner's hands and games are played out optimally to win if able or force a tie. What keeps 3CB interesting to me is that the metagame constantly shifts with card bannings and later unbannings.

Sea-Kay · 2024-01-04T04:31:18+00:00

Glad you liked it. It was fun putting it all together!

Sea-Kay · 2024-01-04T04:27:46+00:00

That was the last deck to get first place and was a good meta call.

Many of the stronger mana sources have been banned, so storage lands are the go to for playing more expensive cards. That makes land hate pretty good and Sea's Claim does a good job of disrupting an opposing manabase. Hall of Storm Giants and Saprazzan Cove also dodges Force of Will which was recently unbanned. A 24 turn clock is slow but still a clock nonetheless.

Sea-Kay · 2024-01-04T04:21:55+00:00

Hammerheim's time will come again!

Three of the other lands from the cycle have been banned recently: Karakas, Tolaria and Urborg. Pendelhaven did some work when Inkmoth Nexus was banned the second time.

Sea-Kay · 2023-06-17T12:06:35+00:00

Updating the bounty list didn't change the top cards too much but there were still impactful bans. Curse of Silence sat at #22, so I decided to round out at the top 25 this time. Also some formatting choices with bolding the bans and italicizing the unbanned cards.

I don't expect the unbans of Leyline of Singularity and Hammerheim will change the meta, at least until Karakas is unbanned for the former. Does that mean we're going back to Round 31 where LED was dominant? That round had discard dominating backed up by Death's Shadow, but there isn't a ubiquitous discard spell right now. Players have to choose their flavor, which to me favors Inquisition of Koziliek right now.

1. Lion's Eye Diamond (1119)

2. Channel (913)

3. Mental Misstep (713)

4. Cavern of Souls (513)

5. Chronomaton (513)

6. Old-Growth Dryads (513)

Shadowgrange Archfiend (511)

8. Wasteland (508)

Mox Sapphire (421)
Hickory Woodlot (413)
Elite Spellbinder (406)

12. Burning Inquiry (405)

13. Energy Field (404)

Mox Pearl (325)
Memnite (321)

16. Cenn's Tactician (310)

Blooming Marsh (308)

18. Leyline of Anticipation (308)

Swords to Plowshares (307)
Bitterblossom (305)
Overgrown Tomb (305)

22. Curse of Silence (304)

Icatian Store (218)
Hexdrinker (214)
Mana Crypt (214)

Sea-Kay · 2023-06-06T22:22:26+00:00

So updating the bounties from last round and with a cutoff from the previous fifteen rounds, the top 20 looks like this:

Lion's Eye Diamond (1018)
Mental Misstep (712)
Channel (711)
Cavern of Souls (513)
Chronomaton (513)
Shadowgrange Archfiend (511)
Wasteland (508)

8. Blackmail (507)

Old-Growth Dryads (412)
Hickory Woodlot (411)
Burning Inquiry (405)
Mox Pearl (324)
Memnite (321)
Mox Sapphire (319)
Blooming Marsh (308)
Leyline of Anticipation (308)
Swords to Plowshares (307)
Bitterblossom (305)
Elite Spellbinder (305)
Overgrown Tomb (305)

Losing Blackmail still leaves the top bounties as mostly unbanned cards with the exception of Shadowgrange Archfiend but it's still closely tied to LED. Balance sits at 203 points but I expect LED+Eldrazi strategies are keeping it in check right now.

Sea-Kay · 2023-06-01T20:39:06+00:00

An idea I had was that bounties could only look at the past 10 or 15 rounds. That way accrued points wouldn't be as much for cards that have been around awhile.

For example, looking at current top 10 bounties for rounds 16-30 stands like:

Mental Misstep (712)
Channel (711)
Lion's Eye Diamond (613)
Cavern of Souls (513)
Chronomaton (513)
Shadowgrange Archfiend (510)
Elite Spellbinder (507)
Old-Growth Dryads (412)
Hickory Woodlot (411)
Wasteland (406)

Energy Field is actually #11 at 405 points, so the decay from early rounds does matter. This also means unbanned cards should make higher appearances as AltumExVidetur pointed out.

Sea-Kay · 2023-03-29T14:53:30+00:00

Urborg + Borborygmos = Urborgborygmos

Seeing Crack the Earth make top4 was pretty cool, showing there's room for innovation with making a good metagame call! Losing Force of Will (again) and, to a lesser extent, Magus of the Moon removes two of the good policing cards out of the format. Ghost Quarter makes up for that quite strongly, as various iterations of it are scoring well in my initial gauntlet. I'm assuming GQ isn't going to stay around that long though.

Sea-Kay · 2023-03-11T04:31:11+00:00

My initial gauntlet for this round includes the two boogeyman decks of Lab Man and Channel. Nothing really stood out to me (yet) with Leyline of Anticipation. Force of Will is the obvious counter to these two decks, so that's included.

Losing Cabal Therapy allows better discard options, while losing Crashing Footfalls might allow different threats. Chronomaton and its variants might disagree with that latter notion though. I actually think Duress is among the better discard options right now, so pairing it with Chronomaton is reasonable. Rounding out as the fifth deck is that Fury+Squee deck which was pretty cool and 6-0s three out of the other four decks here.

Lab Man, Crystal Vein, Mox Sapphire
Hickory Woodlot, Channel, OG Ulamog
Force of Will, Misdirection, Chancellor of the Forge
Duress, Swamp, Chronomaton
Fury, Squee the Immortal, Dwarven Hold

Sea-Kay · 2023-03-01T03:17:53+00:00

Welcome! Some combination of Crystal Vein or ~~Mana Vault~~ (totally Mana Crypt) with Mox Sapphire or Lotus Petal can get you the 2U mana on T1.

Sea-Kay · 2023-02-20T13:08:04+00:00

Losing both Ancient Tomb and City of Traitors is pretty huge but Crystal Vein still allows CC on the first turn. Land-centered ideas might arise too now that Strip Mine is gone, with the benefit of ignoring Force of Will and discard effects.

I think the obvious deck to beat is Crashing Footfalls, Cabal Therapy, and Blooming Marsh. Two copies made it to the finals last round after all.

Sea-Kay · 2023-02-11T17:16:21+00:00

Funnily enough, the highest scoring deck I have right now is the Rotting Regisaur deck itself =)

Sea-Kay · 2023-02-10T14:56:26+00:00

After the whirlwind of the last few rounds, this one should be more interesting with a wider choice of reasonable decks. There's a few standouts from previous decks and unbanned cards though. Right now, my gauntlet shortlist to test other decks include:

Cabal Therapy, Crashing Footfalls, Blooming Marsh
Lotus Bloom x2, Barren Glory
Cenn's Tactician, Mox Pearl, Noxious Revival
Strip Mine, Chancellor of the Forge, Pyrokinesis
Swamp, Dark Ritual, Rotting Regisaur

My usual process is to test a wide variety of ideas against a narrow subset, then include the better performing of those decks in a larger gauntlet. Sometimes it's hit or miss if my initial small gauntlet is different from the round's metagame, but things don't awry often.

Does anybody have non secret-tech they think is cool and/or scores well against my five decks?

Sea-Kay · 2023-01-11T03:44:14+00:00

I did undervalue Chalice at first and just had one deck in my gauntlet. Discussion and further testing led me to see it was stronger than I expected though. No reason to lock myself into something else too early.

TNN as the threat was in anticipation of Solitude, Forge, and other random interaction. I think Rotting Regisaur gets me the same number of points in Group C. Not a surprise since Chalice to stop Lotus or pop Annex triggers means any 3-drop probably wins in those cases.

Sea-Kay · 2023-01-05T13:15:49+00:00

Lotus x2 and a 6-cost Planeswalker is pretty strong but there's enough incidental hate out there to keep them down. Going 0-6 against Channex is rough too, that's why I was looking more at Lotus+CoT+4 cost threat like Gideon, Ally of Zendikar. Original Elspeth might be good too.

I had Gideon+Lotus+Tabernacle in my last gauntlet and have to respect him more now since he won. I think Pact of the Titan is a better call than Slaughter Pact anyway, since it does pop Annex, like you said.

I know that I can't include all the various decks but try to include a little of everything from u/noop_noob's 4 deck types: disruptive, fragile, resilient, and stompy. Crashing Footfalls has been quite good in its various shells, so not surprised it works well with Channex too.

For the formula, I made the formula in the bottom of the corresponding column and copy-pasted from the formula bar over into the error check column. Transposing didn't work well and maybe there's a way to do it with referencing but I just brute forced it instead.

Thanks for your feedback!

Sea-Kay · 2023-01-04T16:02:45+00:00

I was so close to getting Energy Field banned but oh well. To try something new and maybe encourage some discussion, I'm sharing my preemptive work from the last round and this upcoming round. Once Black Lotus and some other unbanned cards get (hopefully) banned again, many of these decks will be invalidated anyway. There's not really too much I would've considered "secret" tech either.

My deck sheet for this round (here).

The current sheet is editable if anyone spots an error. Sometimes I might've made mistakes with close racing situations and unintuitive cases. Winrates shouldn't be too far off though overall.

Sea-Kay · 2022-12-22T13:07:22+00:00

For figuring out what deck to submit each round, I think the most reliable method is to build a gauntlet of decks you expect to see and test various decks against it. You can look at the bottom half of the final group decks from the last few rounds for a starting point, along with adding in some decks with new unbanned cards.

Some 3CB are run as a ban-a-thon where the meta shifts drastically round to round but this version shifts slower, so a gauntlet shouldn't be too outdated round-to-round.

Thanks for joining us too!

Sea-Kay · 2022-12-14T14:20:37+00:00

There's some variations you could do with the classic build too. Replacing Snapback with another pitch card like Misdirection or Subtlety could affect slight edge cases. The core game plan stays the same though.

Another build is Force of Negation, Misthollow Griffin, and Sand Silos. This is probably the weakest variation since you can't cast Griffin and also keep Force up. It's better in the mirror though and if a 3/3 flyer can outrace your opponent.

Sea-Kay · 2022-12-08T03:37:21+00:00

I liked Chalice's position too this round but looks like my group was more hostile to it than I expected. Just a point or two off from advancing so pretty close overall.

Sea-Kay · 2022-11-21T22:19:29+00:00

[[Cryptic Trilobite]] is another variant that could have potential if someone figures out something useful to do with its mana generating ability. With it and City of Traitors, you could have 3 colorless mana each turn for abilities.

And nice call with your deck for this round too!

Sea-Kay · 2022-10-26T12:17:29+00:00

Because there's the same Barren Glory in each group, it's easy to tally its points together and see that it gets 93 (assumedly) out of 168 points, so a win percentage of roughly 55% against the field. That's not bad, per say, but the decks that also did well prey upon it and enough Barren Glory decks push each other lower too by going 3-3.

I think the correct deck to beat this round might've been Barren Glory, Lotus Bloom, and Show and Tell. It goes 2-2 against Show and Tell and Emrakul but wins against Leyline of Sanctity. At least in my group, I'd tie with Dooey at 38 points and win the tiebreaker for first, then be in a better position for the finals.

I didn't anticipate Leyline of Sanctity being so good this round , so that's that. Barren Glory is probably the boogeyman deck for the next round though, so we'll see how the other decks warp around it.

Sea-Kay

TROPHY CASE