Quote from: dexmark on June 10, 2017, 09:37:19 AM

I have been Mage Wars since the very beginning. I have multi-core sets, multi-copies of expansions and others.

From my experience, Arena rocks more than Academy as you have positioning and you can toss creatures all around the place.  It does run a little long and this is why we sometimes reduce the life of mages by 10 health points.

When you play more and you got a hold of Battlegrounds, you would not go back to Arena as the concept of terrain + board control + getting victory points token on capture and hold (can't remember the name of the token - V'tarr orb?) for each turn speeds up game play. 

The terrain factor is very fun. It changes your style of play. Would you let your opponent control that tile next turn that can produce those creatures or would you go for the creature guarding the tower? That tile that produces creatures can get annoying and you will get swarm immediately if you do not contest it. Battlegrounds will change your game play as you will have to split your army sometimes to accomplish different task. 

It's either you win by victory points or KO.  This battlegrounds also can support multi-play game play.  So me and my playmates always play Battleground map from now on.  Also due to the tile map, you can always change the look of the map at any given time.

How did the starting life reduction affect the balance and diversity of your local metagame?

The basic idea:
This thread is not about Temple of Light + Hand of Bim-Shalla being a strong combo – it is about how to enhance this combo to become even stronger. Many temple builds rely on a solo-mage or a single strong creature, which is buffed with HoBS and Battle Fury for burst damage. The weakness of this type of builds is that you can prevent the damage quite mana efficient with different ways of crowd control (e.g. tanglevine, teleport, walls, daze, stun, restraint, defence rolls etc). So the idea of this build is to find a way which makes it very hard for your opponent to prevent the damage or in other words: We are looking for reliable damage sources.

Success rate:
To catch your interest, let me emphasize that from over 40 games I played with this build it had a 100% success rate (and in the majority of these games I never had more than 15 damage)! I know, it sounds unbelievable, but still its true. This is not because I played against morons – me and my strongest rival played over 70 games against each other and if I don’t use this build my success rate against him is roughly 50%. So we are quite at the same level and we both played against many different builds and more than 15 different human players via OCTGN with a good success rate even without this special build.
Considering all this, the reason for the outstanding performance of this build has to come from somewhere else than player skill .

The core cards of the build are:
-   6 Hand of Bim-Shalla
-   2 Temple of Light
-   3 Gremlins (if you can afford them, take 4)
-   2 Battle Fury
These cards work with every mage (although I have my favourites) and even if you add some important meta cards (e.g. seeking dispel, dispel, teleport, maybe a couple ballistae in the future) you still have enough spellpoints to combine this strategy with a second for flexibility.

The Opening:
The following example assumes that you have a Channeling of 10, but the first three rounds work also with channeling 9.

Round 1 (20 Mana):
HoBS + Gremlin = 12 Mana

Round 2 (18 Mana):
HoBS + Gremlin = 12 Mana

Round 3 (16 Mana):
HoBS + Temple of Light = 14 Mana

Round 4 (12 Mana):
HoBS + Battle Fury

In round 4, this build has the potential to generate a total of 22 damage dices divided into 4 rolls from which 3 have piercing 1 and one has a high chance to daze/stun (5 dices from ToL, 3 from the Gremlin without buffs, 14 from gremlin buffed with HoBS and Battle Fury). BTW in round 4 this build has 2 mana left, which can be used to give the gremlins fast (assuming channeling 10).
This damage output is quite high, but other builds achieve this as well. The important point is that it is really difficult for the opponent to prevent the damage. Walls don’t work against Gremlins. Tanglevine and other forms of crowd control are very inefficient against this build as well, because you need to control both gremlins and the mage at the same time! If you don’t, the free creature is buffed with 4 HoBS and a quick casted Battle Fury without you having the chance to interrupt this (to tell the truth, if the mage wants to attack with Battle Fury in Round 4, he can’t cast the fourth HoBS).
On the other side, it is quite difficult to lower the damage outcome of this build by focusing on either the conjurations or the gremlins. HoBS and ToL both absorb good amounts of damage in respect to their mana cost. Attacking gremlins is really horrible since they are cheap but have a nice defence and enough life and armor to survive a hit from a level 2-3 creature. And if the gremlin survives the HoBS is a really efficient way to heal them up (contrary to other forms of healing, there is no randomness involved in using HoBS).

To hopefully start a nice discussion, let me end with this:
My friend and I played many games via OCTGN and in RL against each other and against other players. We played against all common types of builds (e.g. solo-mage, swarm deck, curse deck, solo-mage temple deck, mana denial etc.), but we never came across a build that is a real threat for the one I discussed here. If you don’t believe me, try the opening I posted above and let me know how it worked .

you may not be in range to cast jinx on turn one but that is one good strategy to do.  you could also throw down cards like force hold and tanglevine to keep them from moving as well.