I guess, from my stand point, I play 1-2 games daily of Mage Wars. Seeing the same old is not a bad thing, it's good to test against builds that consistently win. It gives you a good control to test against, perhaps. The Hypothesis is that this build is effective at doing X against any given mage (after all, consistently spread across various degrees of difficulty is key). As well, testing against different people with very likely similar builds gives you data. Usually when playtesters in particular talk about "consistent" results, they are speaking about the games it has won and lost, with the win ratio being a much higher majority. This, however, is a rare build. It's what I refer to as an ego build, or, more gently perhaps, a build that is best suited for it's user. You see that a lot with playtesters, as they, as we like to call, "go extremely deep" and end up with weird, strange, and fantastical combinations, often mixes and mash-ups of decks seen from other players in the past. For instance, you can the influence my THC Stone Wiz had on his build, from the Sniper to the tangle vines. It's what is added that makes it important.
Now, from your perspective, it truly is a puzzle without a sort of "primer" to go along with the build. You are kind of thrown in the fire with nothing but a small vial of flame retardant. How could one possibly escape? You see, unlike most books that hope to plan something during gameplay, which is to say during the action stage, this build hopes to build to an effective strategy way before gameplay even takes place. It's the kind of playing in which you have to hit certain checkpoints to know you are proceeding correctly. Do I have 2 crystals out round 3? IS my sniper in the correct position round 4? Is my spider in restraining distance round 4? As well, it takes some amount of logic to pull off correctly. Certain times, I'm going to want to put out spider before sniper to stop them from getting to sniper as easily. Other times I can cast sniper without fear. And yet other times, I want to use Golem to guard for me while I set up the kill, which is transfusion/null/crush/rot. 4 actions that are strategically handled throughout the game so as to give the opponent no outs.
As to your thoughts on how it fares to aggro, I agree. IT gets kind of fuzzy there, which is why he should include Supper Cloak.
This post probably doesn't help anyone at all, ever, but it sure was fun to string thoughts out like that. It's kind of like laying in a lazy river.
