Congrats on your win! Great write up!
Few things I noticed.
First of all, why would you use four mana crystals in a super aggressive attack spell strategy? You could just save the mana. This whole concept of "mana flow" that you're talking about seems rather iffy and murky, and looks more like a psychological trick to make you think you have more mana advantage in the early game than you actually do. You actually DO have less mana to spend in the early game if you cast crystals than if you don't. That is a mathematical fact. I'm guessing it only feels like more because people don't save their mana as much when they have less in the first place. Probably since they don't want to waste actions. The mana crystals are not useful if the game ends before they pay themselves back. If you win before the crystals pay themselves back, then that means you could have just not cast anything the first two rounds and you would have 20 more mana by round 5 then you would have with the crystals, and 10 more mana by round 6 than you would have with the crystals. Which means any games that you won before round 7 using your super aggressive attack opening would have won even more easily if you had not cast anything at all for the first two rounds, unless you take into account the psychological factor of tricking your opponents into thinking you're going long game.
Thanks! I agree in the opening turns that this is true of course, but the problem becomes when your opponent decides to interact with you, which is every game. In a perfect world you walk up to them and destroy them after opening up cheetah speed to get in their face potentially on round 1. The reality is that because investments exist, if your opponent uses them and you are unable to get through their life total for whatever reason(i.e. Jinx, armor, guards, heals) there's almost zero chance of you winning at that point barring taking SO long in the planning phases that you go to time after you light them up. The problem becomes that defenses and more specifically heal
drastically skews the probability of them taking the game.
How many of your opponents played a super-aggressive early game strategy? From the looks of the write up the answer is 0. Every single one of your opponents seems to have either played for the mid game or the late game. Did any of your opponents even try using a battle forge? A wizard spellbook entirely devoted to super aggro attack spells using wizard's tower, huginn and no mana crystals would have been able to get an action advantage against you earlier.
I feel like you didn't read the report? Or maybe have a different definition of aggro? 1 big strategies in general are very aggressive. A bear on turn 2, was my opening opponent. Forcemaster getting in your face with Invisible Stalker is in the same boat. All attack spell Warlock with curse and spells from T2 onwards. Finally, my last round opponent had me turning on Voltaric Shield on T2. As I also said, my Priestess opponent did use a Battle Forge. Finally, the spellbook you describe was pretty much Attack Wizard that I built, but it was unable to do all the things needed due to lack of mana flow. Even without opening Mana Crystal.
Jinx only helps you if you already have an action advantage, since it costs you 1 quick action and causes the opponent to lose 1 quick action. Jinxing an opponent who already has an action advantage over you actually can hurt you more than them (although it might depend on exactly what spell was countered.)
Of course...? You're playing Wizard, you ALWAYS have action advantage.
9 channeling mages not viable? This again? And the reasoning you give seems to be...because they don't have enough actions.
...
I think I should point out that a lot of the reason that the forcemaster has 10 channeling instead of 9 is probably because of the upkeep costs that a lot of mind spells have.
It's two points actually, yes they don't have enough actions. Their familiars are squishy and their spawnpoints are average at best. The best being Pentagram, but you run into the problem of pretty mediocre dark living creatures. The best is typically Battle Forge, but that doesn't really put you ahead unless you combine it with something else that grants passive advantage(a creature spawnpoint) or use it to become very aggressive though perhaps auto attacking. The most important however is that no one else has anything like Wizard's Tower.
Also, there are ways to deal with enemy action advantage.
For instance, the Warlock uses enfeeble and agony to great effect. Sure you can dispel them, but that costs you a quick action, and meanwhile he can smash your face in. Sure if the game goes long enough you'll have enough action advantage that he won't be able to do that, but in the meantime he is rolling more dice against you per round than you are, and it could take at least a couple rounds if not several rounds for you to gain the upper hand.
I would totally ignore these effects, MAYBE using Dispel on enfeeble if it became annoying enough. I would most likely use Huginn for that. Neither would impact my gameplay much, as I don't need to move often due to Wizard's Tower and Jinx being 0-2.
I think I heard somewhere that about half of the participants this year played wizards. This is starting to look like a ridiculous self fulfilling prophecy. "Oh look! Wizard won a tournament! Wizard is overpowered! Half of the players bring a wizard because he is so powerful! Oh look! Wizard won a tournament! Wizard is overpowered! Even MORE players bring wizards next year. And the more times he wins, the more convinced people become that wizard is overpowered and the more people who decide to play the wizard, so the more chances wizard has to win. Even if he is slightly overpowered, people really need to stop making it look worse than it actually is. If a Mage is overpowered in Mage wars that doesn't mean they can't be beaten, it means that they over-centralize the metagame due to their own power (and NOT merely because of the perception that they're overpowered.)
It was only 5/17 for starters, and they had the highest records. Wizard played against non-wizard for most matches and Wizard won more often than lost. This has held true for three years. As such, you can conclude Wizard has the best overall matchups. It's not a self fulfilling prophecy, it's empirical data.
Assume you don't take tournament evidence into account, just look at the cards. I think it's obvious. He has 10 channeling, great defense on stat card, an answer to incorporeal built in, at cost spell book points to all meta spells and at cost access to another school of his choice(making him the most versatile), has the best spawnpoint, 2nd best familiar, and most important a card that
NO OTHER mage has...Wizard's Tower.
You're probably a more talented Mage wars player than I am, but I think you could benefit from some more exposure to the global metagame to improve your theoretical understanding, particularly when it comes to aggro mages. You've recently started playing on OCTGN, right? I think I played a game against you at some point, but I'm not sure. I might be confusing you with Halewjin. Not sure I spelled that right...
Anyways, I want to say again, congratulations for winning the tournament!
Thanks again! I will be the first person to say that I make my fair share of play mistakes that's for sure. I haven't really played on OCTGN recently, I mostly just used to play with Charmyna. I will totally agree that there is always room to improve and you can learn a lot from people that play differently than yourself. I do feel however that the game is still at a point balance wise where it's possible to find a best book. Once again, not unbeatable, but will win 80-90% of the time.
I do also think however that people need to recognize that there are just bad and unplayable cards. Look at Magic, some cards are factually just better than others and the competitive community acknowledges that fact. The problem stems from however that it's a lot easier to tell in Magic. I see a lot of time people saying things like "Well, this card is good because I used it this one time and it worked really well for me." or "This card can be good in X, Y, Z situation while god comes down and grants that it be so." There are going to be bad cards, and that's okay. It's fun to use those cards when derping around, but if you're playing competitively people need to acknowledge that Sardonyx is just the worst card in the game.
