Good luck to the Gen Con players!

[reddawn]

Kind of disappointed to see a straw-man argument coming from you Tac. That's obviously not what I'm saying here, and you're just blowing it out of proportion. 

I'm saying that, for ALL mages, the ability to pump out armor from a Battleforge with no profitable way to interact with it is not ok and is way too safe of a play.  It's just that this is most pronounced in the case of the Wizard because he has the most access to free actions.  We have cards like Destroy/Purge Magic, why can't we have cards that do the same to Equipment??

I personally have won against such Earth Wizard builds multiple times, and via tournament rules even against Charmyna recently, and yes it has everything to do with direct damage, poisoned bloods and deathlock, but for mages who do not have as easy access to direct damage as the Warlock, and with very very few piercing abilities/cards AND the inability to profitably interact with all the free actions and equipment a Battleforge can produce, it's much more of a problem. 

[zot]

also, the battle forge is very susceptable to being destroyed very quickly. forcehammer can one shot it. i personally like using geyser against it. the hydro +3 makes it even more vulnerable. during the qualify rounds i lost my forge due to a one shot kill from a forcehammer. i got one cast out of it.

[reddawn]

I've had several Forcemaster use Force Hammer on my Forge and not once did it ever die with just that spell.  The armor and hp value on it is such that 8 dice is really no big deal, much less a 6 dice attack, and is totally punishing if you don't kill it with the first spell. 

I think that actually destroying the Battleforge is less of a problem than not being able to efficiently deal with the equipment, though.  Hopefully we will see equipment equivalents of Puge Magic in NvD.  Maybe that's what Armor Ward is for..

[sIKE]

@Tacullu64

The response was really about the current tie breaker system and how BF + Armor effect that out come. Of course everyone can armor up. Why not everyone drop a BF in the corner sit there and suit up...

@zot

Thanks for the ideas on dealing with BF, I like to carry Surging Wave in my books and the dice results are the same as Geyser.

[zot]

for tourney play, sitting in corner with the forge was the play against the agressive players. it helped to mitigate early damage. of course the forge will generally take two hits or more to go down. sometimes three or four. just that if you go after it and can take it out, you can disrupt the turtle build up who may be very dependent on that strategy. they would then need future actions to get that precious equipment into play instead of whatever they would have done otherwise. why dissolve armor if you can help prevent the deployment in advance?

[Tacullu64]

@reddawn. Forgive me if I overreacted, but the tone of this conversation was making me very nervous. It reminded me of some of the threads about HoB and ToL after turbo priestess won her first tournament. I don't think any of us were entirely satisfied with how that turned out, not even those advocating nerfing the cards. I would hate to see a "Wizard" hunt followed by more errata.

@sIKE. This is going to sound like the pot calling the kettle black because I was shamelessly speculating about the tie breaker favoring the Warlock,( although in my defense, I did on at least two occasions suggest the current tie breaker be given more time). We only have 2 points of data on tie breaker results. We should have at least 100 to 300 tie breakers under our belt before we can make a reasoned decision on the subject. Arcane Wonders has more data but who nknows how much. All we have is what zot gave us.

[reddawn]

No problem, Tac. No one is trying to take away the Wizard's win here (at least, I'm not).  The Wizard players, and the players on this forum in general are top notch. I've personally learned a lot from my playing on OCTGN, and I'm in no way saying the wins are undeserved, or that the Wizard deserves some kind of punishment for that.

What I AM saying is that I would like to see a few things:

1. More ways to deal specifically with conjurations and equips, regardless of mage

2. HoB made Holy Mage only, because in terms of theme and balance, it just doesn't make much sense otherwise

3. Re-assessing the Wizard's Tower after the cardpool expands from the NvD release

I imagine 1 & 3 will be solved with NvD, and perhaps 2 as well if there is significant anti-conjuration tech.  My main problem is that equipment in general is very difficult to profitably attack right now, but I have confidence that will change in NvD, if the art on Armor Ward is any indication of that. 

[Fentum]

What I'm reading in this thread sounds like we want to get rid of control builds because we don't like playing against them. Remember this is the first tournament won by a wizard compared to 2 by warlocks and one by turbo priestess, and warlocks have finished second in every tournament they didn't win.

Not sure where that is from but I certainly want to keep control builds (and many others) viable options. I love the variety of books that I come up against.

[Koz]

A few thoughts on some things being discussed. 

1. Tie breaker.  I still believe that the tie breaker favors aggro, specifically Forcemaster/Warlock.  I was talking to the guy that won the tournament at Gencon and we were discussing strategies and whatnot.  He also feels that the tie breaker favors aggro, it's just that he was able to win most (all?) of his games within the time limit and therefore the tie breaker didn't come into play.  If your Voltaric Shield and Regrowth Belt are able to keep you in the game long enough to win within the time limit, it doesn't matter if your opponent did more overall damage or not, because they died first.  So, it would seem that the tie breaker isn't really an issue if you build your book to win in the allotted time, which is how it should be. 

2. HoB/ToL Errata.  I was watching a lot of the tournament games over the weekend, including the final 8 players on Sunday.  Do you know how many HoB/ToL I saw being played in any of the games I watched?  Zero.  Now that might just be an issue of the card being errata'd so recently that people are just staying away until they can digest and test the changes.  However, I've played in many, many CCG's and lived through many, many errata's, and in my experience when you see cards go from "played too much" to "not played at all" then it's because the errata's went too far.  We'll have to wait and see to be sure I guess.  I also didn't see any Battle Fury's played either, but that would be more easy to miss if I wasn't watching for that particular play, but the Temples would have stayed on the table, so it was obvious they just weren't being played.

3. Earth Wizard "Control Builds".  I keep seeing the Earth Wizards labeled as "control", but I'm not sure that's accurate.  Again, I watched several of these games and I'm not seeing the "control" aspect of the builds.  To me, Daze/Stun lock builds are control.  Mana drain is control.  Enfeeble/Cripple/Weak builds are control.  But casting Hurl Boulders, Iron Golems, Force Pushes into Wall of Thorns and Wizard Towers don't seem like control builds to me, they seem more like "these are all awesome spells" builds to me.  We really need to work on those definitions of builds...   

[Tacullu64]

@koz. I wasn't at Gencon and there haven't been many spellbooks spoiled yet so I can't speak to these specific builds, but you may be a little narrow in your definition of control builds. I am currently working on two articles discussing the general nature of control builds so I'll expand on my statement there. I would throw out for discussion the thought that Earth Wizard kill box might be MW version of a combo build.

[Koz]

Well, like I said, we need to really get those definitions of builds down.  I guess we have to put the build into SOME sort of category, and it certainly doesn't fit into aggro or swarm.  Combo doesn't really fit either.  I don't know, but it seems like we're just making control a catch-all category for what doesn't fit in the other, more clearly defined, descriptors.  But maybe that's what we have to do. 

[sIKE]

I would agree that Griz-Wiz build is a combo build. There is a lot of board control that goes on with the Wizard tower, along with a small mid-level creature swarm(agro). Other than attack spells (that are actually cast by the mage and not the tower) and the occasional Zap the Earth Wizard himself does not apply a lot of the damage on the opposing mage. The agro is mid-game and the control is early game.

I have found it my challenging and satisfying playing the games against this type of build. Many times I have been dismayed to find how badly I loose. But in all it has made me a much better player.