so i played another game of 3-player standard free for all Arena, and it was the most fun game of mage wars ive had in a long time. It was EPIC! What you guys are all saying about how whoever stays out of the fighting most effectively wins doesn't really do the format justice. There's a lot of strategy and tactics and bluffing and temporary alliances involved, and trying to make your opponents overextend themselves is not the same thing as "staying out of the fighting". It is very skill-based, and very fun, and when someone wins a game in the format they actually do have to earn it. It's not like the best player is always going to lose right away because the other players gang up on him. The best player is going to do what it takes to win against two opponents, not just one. If you immediately try to come at both your opponents at once big and scary and threatening, and they decide to team up against you, it's your own fault for overextending yourself and showing your hand.
We were on the standard version of the map Triumvirate (same as the domination version of the map but without the orbs or sslaks). I was playing wizard, my two opponents were using druid and adramelech warlock respectively. Naturally I would prefer it if the warlock took out the druid's treebond instead of me, since he had fire and i didn't. And the sooner he takes out the tree the better.
the Warlock had a strange opening. R1 was regrowth belt followed by an idol of pestilence. I opened with a battle forge in my starting zone (the one that isn't a corner) and a wizard tower right in the center of the Arena. The druid opened with vine tree and i dont remember what the other spell was but it might have been a facedown enchant or something.
The Adra Warlock moved on zone to the left, putting him in range of my wizard tower, and casting ignite on it. It was a very smart move, since he could do some damage to it for cheap and the druid would have to deal with it instead. Initially the warlock was going to make my wizard take down the tree instead, but i had other ideas. I cast chains of agony on the warlock, teleported him two zones to the left, and then had my tower cast jet stream on him in order to try to push him into the tree's zone. Unfortunately for the warlock, the druid had cast a wall of thorns in front of his tree. Fortunately for the warlock i failed the push roll on the jet stream. But now he was kinda trapped. He had no armor. There was a wall of thorns protecting the vine tree to his left. There were two vine snappers and a thornlasher in the zone above him, and if he moved right he would risk setting off the spiked pit trap terrain. Not to mention he was still in range of my wiz tower. He decided to stay where he was and summon a fire elemental. The next round the fire elemental moved before i could jet stream it through the wall of thorns. I wanted the tree to die quickly, so instead of sending the elemental through the thorns first, i had my tower jet stream the adra warlock instead. He instantly took something like ten to fifteen damage or so. However, I didn't want him to die just yet. His fire was too useful against the druid's plants. So I took a calculated risk. I wouldn't kill the adra warlock right away. Doing so much damage to him gave me bargaining power over him. I could kill his mage fairly easily at that point, but I didn't want to. If he wanted to stay alive against the druid, he needed my help. Even after the fire elemental had attacked the wall of thorns, it had miraculously stayed alive. In order to ensure that the warlcok and the elmeental stayed alive long enough to destroy the treebond, i moved down into the druid's kill zone (which was right next to the zone with my tower) and teleported the elemental into the druid's starting corner. Then I cast fogbank to block los. Since the druid was also in his kill zone with me and it had a spiked pit trap terrain that had already been set off, the trap did not attack me and it still hindered him. However, I took a lot of damage from druid's plants, since i only had two armor and the voltaric shield. Since i used my mage's quickcast and full action for fog bank and teleport i had no actions left for rhino hide and all of my armor equipments gave only one armor each. The druid had too much mana for repulsion cloak to make a difference. So instead, I deployed a staff of storms, hoping to use it on one of the dice rolls for electrify the next round. However, the fire elemental attacked and destroyed the vine tree in one hit (it already had 3 damage from adra warlock's melee attack earlier in the game) and the druid moved down to attack his own wall of thorns to get at them. The Wall of thorns died, and the warlock started attacking the druid with attack spells, bringing his damage over 20. Now the druid had the most damage, and the warlock had the least. The next round I decided to switch to an alliance with the druid. Unfortunately the druid conceded. This wouldnt have been a problem if he hadn't waited until AFTER the planning phase to do it! Fortunately my spell choices were at least a little flexible. They were a regrowth (which i was going to use on myself) and a teleport (which i was going to use to get the adramelech warlock into the druid's kill zone. The druid was all the way across the arena by this point (he had teleported himself) and so was fairly safe as long as he agreed to ally with me. But he had conceded before I got the chance to teleport the warlock to his kill zone. When the druid died it brought all her creatures with her. Fortunately, despite the fact that I had almost twice as much damage as teh warlock (he had 9 i had 16) I had a bit of a board advantage. I had a bunch of equipment, a battle forge enchanted with reinforce, and not quite dead yet wizard tower that I could replace. His fire elemental was almost dead, and he had no other creatures. However, he had taken some actions and mana to destroy the druid's tree as well as to do a ton of damage to the druid. And I had more channeling. It could have been anyone's game at that point, but we were unable to continue because after the druid conceded we got the game over bug that wouldn't let us do anything else. Resetting the game wouldn't have helped because at one point the warlock's deck was edited while we were waiting for the druid's player to get back from something he was doing afk. if we had taken a screenshot and reset we would have not been able to continue where we left off. It was late, and so we agreed to have a rematch another day.
3-player Standard Free-for-all is now one of my favorite formats, and I highly encourage everyone to play it. It's really fun.
