Eastern PA,NJ, MD & DE Mage Wars Tournament - January 25th 2014

[ringkichard]

Got a little bit of a late start, but I'm on my way! Lets do this!

[ringkichard]

I want to thank Tom for another great afternoon of Mage Wars! Thanks to The Games Keep for hosting us, and thank you to Arcane Wonders and Not Just Another Gaming Podcast for prize support! I see that they're engaged in a kickstarter-style website hosting fund drive right now, so I encourage anyone in the local area to check them out, and I hope they can make it to the next tournament sometime in March, maybe. Best of luck to The Games Keep as they move locations, and thank you to everyone who came out in the snow for a great time and sporting matches!

My big takeaway from my games tonight? Cloak of Shadows is the real deal, and my Wizard Teleport Ambush book had a miserable time trying to go off against Necro under tournament timing. I couldn't be more pleased!

[Lord0fWinter]

Will we be getting a full tournament report, along with who won and what types of books people were using?

I'd be very interested in hearing how everything played out and I'm glad it went well!

[wtcannonjr]

I want to second the thanks Kich noted above.

I was one of the 3 Tom's that showed up playing my first Necromancer book and found 2 other Necro's at the tournament. It was a nightmarish blast!

ROUND 1
My zombie Necro book faced a holy Priest book. Tom J started with a handicap since his friend had built the book for him. So he wasn't fully aware of its contents and this hindered him some. He cast a BattleForge and charged forward with his Mage while equipping and enhancing him into a force of light and fire. He made short work of my Zombie Brute and I had to cast some Walls of Bones to dance my Necro out of range. I had him cornered and was getting ready to unleash a zombie horde when the Divine intervened and swept the Priest across the board to my Necro's zone to unleash his 8 die holy Light attack against my unarmored mage. Fortunately I had a Drain Soul spell bound to a wand and was able to cast this one twice before the 90-minute mark ended the match. This lead to a 12-point shift in the new Life minus Damage tie-breaker we were testing from Arcane Wonders and proved to be the biggest factor in the Necro's win.

ROUND 2
I made some adjustments to my game plan for this round as I learned a bit from playing my first timed match. I wasn't able to set up the Altar of Skulls in Round 1 so I opted to try the Idol of Pestilence first in this match. This proved to be the biggest factor in defeating the Beastmaster and his swarm of fast Falcons and Foxes. His Lair was cast in his Near Center zone and I hid in the shadows in my Far Center zone. I cast 4 Walls of Bones to force his creatures to take the long way around to reach the Idol and I kept it guarded with a Zombie Brute and Shaggoth. By the time his level 1 creatures could attack the Mage or Idol they were wounded and died quickly with a counterattack. I retreated the Necro behind a 3-walled 'fortress' and continued to cast zombies from my Book of the Dead. When he finally knocked down one of the walls I was able to quickcast another in its place and that led to 3 other level 1 creatures eventually dying from the Pestilence oozing from the Idol. His lair summoned a Mountain Gorilla which was able to climb over the wall, but I had sufficient zombie guards (without Pest) and crawlers in the zone to kill him in one round even though he reached Rage 3 by the end of the attacks. I made a mistake at the very end when I forgot to guard my mage first and cast a Zombie Frenzy as his full action. This allowed his nearby Timber Wolf to enter the zone and damage my unarmored Mage while he played a Heal spell on his Mage to remove most of the pestilence damage. Without the Timber Wolf blocking his Mage I was able to frenzy enough zombies against his Beastmaster to achieve another Modified Win under the tournament tie-breaker rules. It was a great 'battle of the swarms' and if we continued it could have ended differently given what I suspect was additional healing spells in the Beastmasters book.

ROUND 3
This turned out to be a mirror match with my zombie Necro facing a skeleton Necro. My zombie's lost. I took an early curse when I didn't put on my Cloak of Shadows soon enough and spent some actions removing it with a dispel on a wand. He built up a skeleton army of 2 Knights, 2 Death Fangs, and 3 Sentries while I brought out Shaggoth, a Flaming Hellion and 4 Crawlers. My second costly mistake came when he charged his Mage into the zone with my horde and I didn't recognize that he was getting in range of my now cloaked mage to teleport him. When I quickcast my Wall of Bones I had a choice between blocking LOS to his Mage and leaving both of our armies and his Mage on the other side OR placing the wall between both of our armies with both of our Mages adjacent. I choose wrong as he had planned a teleport and wall combo that left him on his side of the walls with his army in range and me teleported to face it. I believe this was the turning point of the match and my Necro was never able to recover from this position. We danced around a bit casting walls, guarding, and summoning but without a Teleport or Eagle Claws boots in my spellbook I struggled to get enough damage going to recover. My Necro didn't come prepared for the in-close fighting that Tom L. was casting and he was able to finish him off on the last turn of the game. I was testing a spellbook without Teleport and learned a few lessons here. It was a fantastic match even though the Skeleton horde took down the Zombies this round.

This was my first tournament play and I thought the new Tie-breaker worked well to balance both damage producing strategies and healing strategies. However, as I suspected, I am not a fan of the card game tournament format where you bring any mage spellbook and can face off against any mage spellbook. In my view this adds too much variability to the tournament path a player faces and tends to create more 'general' spellbook designs since a player must contend with an increasing option of opponent mages to counter. For example, by this time next year there will be 4 new mages that a spellbook design must potentially counter. I will continue this point in the Tournament Forum when I have the time.

Congratulations to Tom Lynch for his tournament victory!

It was a pleasure meeting and battling with the other players who braved the snow to make the tournament.

Hope to see you IN THE ARENA again soon!

[tarkin84]

Thank you for your report!

[Lord0fWinter]

Yes, thank you for the report! Glad to hear the necromancer did well, he has quickly become one of my favorite mages to play

[FrostByte]

However, as I suspected, I am not a fan of the card game tournament format where you bring any mage spellbook and can face off against any mage spellbook. In my view this adds too much variability to the tournament path a player faces and tends to create more 'general' spellbook designs since a player must contend with an increasing option of opponent mages to counter. For example, by this time next year there will be 4 new mages that a spellbook design must potentially counter. I will continue this point in the Tournament Forum when I have the time.

I have to respectfully disagree with you.   While you are right about it pushing more towards general spellbook designs,  in my experience,  it doesnt push them towards generic spellbook designs.  Ive played my share of Ccg and tcg tournaments and for whatever the current ban lists havent had at yet is all you will see.  Sure you might see a spike in a certain mages with certain card releases but currently there is really only one mage that doesnt stand a chance.   This currently leave 7 viable options all with there own unique playstyles along with what ever build that person believes will work for them.   

[tom]

Will we be getting a full tournament report, along with who won and what types of books people were using?

I'd be very interested in hearing how everything played out and I'm glad it went well!

The tournament report is coming, I promise. I just need to get a few minutes to write it up! Please stay tuned!

[patrickconnor]

You ROCK Tom! Thanks for sponsoring the event. And thanks to the Games Keep for hosting.

[tom]

Wow, this past Saturday was such a great day of playing Mage Wars!  Six bold Mages braved yet another winter snow storm to come out and try to dominate in the arena.  I would like to thank them for making this tournament a truly enjoyable experience.  I also need to thank Karl at the Games Keep for allowing us to use his store to run the event.  He has a great store with an insane selection of games.  If you are ever in the West Chester area you need to check it out!  Another big thanks goes out to the guys at the Not Just Another Gaming Podcast (NJAGP).  They are a podcast about boardgames, RPGs and geek culture.  The guys sent us a ton of prizes to give out at the event.  They gave us so much stuff that I had to save half of it for the next event!  Go check out their podcast!  Now!  Finally, I want to thank Arcane Wonders for supporting the tournament by sending out a gigantic batch of promo cards.  Still got a ton of them left over for the next event too!

Here is a list of the players, their mages and the final standings:

1st  Tom L. (tom): Necromancer 13 points
2nd Rich (ringkichard): Air Wizard 7 points
3rd Tom C. (wtcannonjr): Necromancer 6 points
4th Tom J. (not on forum): Priest 5 points
5th Doug (not on forum): Necromancer 5 points
6th Ed (Roundman): Beastmaster 4 points

Here are the matchups and results:

Round 1
tom (necromancer) v. ringkichard (air wizard): tom modified win
wtcannonjr (necromancer) v. Tom J. (priest): wtcannonjr modified win
Roundman (beastmaster) v. Doug (necromancer): Roundman modified win

I was a little disappointed that none on these matches finished on time.  I am pretty sure all six of us were playing non-agro builds and that led to all of us timing out.  I know my match and one of the other matches was one turn away from finishing though so it wasn’t too bad.

Round 2
wtcannonjr (necromancer) v. Roundman (beastmaster): wtcannonjr modified win
tom (necromancer) v. Tom J. (priest): tom win
ringkichard (air wizard) v. Doug (necromancer): Doug modified win

This round saw the first full win.  Not sure how close the other two matches were to finishing.

Round 3
wtcannonjr (necromancer) v. tom (necromancer): tom win
Roundman (beastmaster) v. ringkichard (air wizard): ringkichard win
Doug (necromancer) v. Tom J. (priest): Tom J modified win

Finally we get two full wins.  I think by this point the players knew to pick up the pace a little bit and were more familiar with their spellbooks.


My experience at the tournament:

Round 1
Ringkichard and I have played each other twice before this.  We were each 1-1 going into the game so we had joked that this was the big grudge match.  Our match started out slow with a build-up of forces.  Ring spent his time pumping out 2 hydras, an ooze from his Gate to Voltaire and a wizards tower.  I spent my time putting down skeletal knights, some skeletal sentries, some deathfangs, Mort, a Deathlock and Idol of Pestilence.  The two most important factors in the game were my Cloak of Shadows and an untimely advance of one of Ring’s hydras.  The cloak prevented Ring from easily pulling my necromancer away from my horde of skeletons and into the hydra pit.  Once it became apparent that that wouldn’t work, Ring decided to advance his hydra into the zone separating our creatures.  He did it early enough in the turn so I was able to swarm it with skeletons.  I think he was counting on the hydra’s counterstrike to deter me from attacking.  Unfortunately for him I didn’t care all that much because I figured Mort would be able to repair most of the damage done by the counterstrikes.  At the end of the turn I had killed one of the hydras and wounded the other.  From there, the skeleton’s just chased down the wizard and took shots at him whenever they could.  The game ended in a modified win but I do not remember the difference in life totals at the end.  It was an awesome game and a wonderful confidence builder because I know that Ringkichard is such a great player.

Round 2
This round I played my buddy Tom J.  He is relatively new to the game and was playing with a spellbook I put together for him so he wasn’t too sure of how to play it.  Despite those disadvantages he gave me a very good fight and managed to get me down to about 10 life when his priest finally succumbed to the hordes of undead.  The highlight of the game for me was when he summoned Selesius, the East Wind in my start zone on turn three or four.  Didn’t expect that and it definitely sent me into panic mode.  Luckily I was able to weather the storm by hiding  behind my skeletal knight and using my other minions to chip away at his health.

Round 3
So it came down to the two undefeated necromancers.  My entire strategy of poisoning the enemy and wearing him down over time has been thrown out of the window.  I decided to take a page out of the wizard’s book and try to form a pit of creatures and plop wtcannonjr’s necromancer in the middle of it.  The problem was that he had the same anti-teleport protection from the Cloak of Shadows that I enjoyed.  Both of us started the match with nearly identical openings until we began summoning creatures.  His book was based around zombies while mine is based upon skeletons.  I think in the end this favored my mage a bit more because he couldn't use bloodthirsty against my creatures and I was able maneuver around more easily due to his inability to double move.  The turning point in the game was the turn my necromancer used the final action of the round to move into the zone between our 2 mages despite it being occupied with several of his zombies.  On the following round I had initiative, but wtcannonjr cast a wall of bones separating me from my legion of skeletons during the first quickcast phase.  I countered by teleporting his necromancer to the zone next to my skeletons then I stepped out of the zombie pit and cast my own wall of bones to stop his zombies from pursuing me.  After being separated from his creatures I just had to run him down with the skeletons.  It did take me a while to finally kill him as wtcannonjr had some clever plays that blocked off my pursuing creatures and I learned a couple of new tricks to watch out for.

Here are some pictures of the event:

Well, I will try to add these if I can figure out how to post them!
You can view the photos over on BGG.


If you want to see my Necromancer’s spellbook, take a look at this thread.

[Gizzu]

Congratz Tom, your report rocks!!!

CYA
G.

[tom]

Congratz Tom, your report rocks!!!

CYA
G.

Thanks!

[sIKE]

Looks like you had some really good games. Very nice report thanks!

[aquestrion]

Is drain soul a mage cast card?

[labartels]

wow missed another one- I hope i can get to the next event! Nice report of the event. I am glad everyone had a good time. Thanks for posting the pics on BGG.