As requested here is a breakdown of last night's game. At the table we had a Warlord, Priestess, Warlock and the Necro (me). We did wind up playing 2v2, which to be honest, I was a little disappointed. I would have changed some things in my book had I known that we were going to do that. Still, it was fun and we did well. The Warlock and necro worked together to basically wall off the warlord while we ganged up against the priestess. After four hours of play we basically had the priestess down to 9 health, Warlock with only 7 damage, and my necro with only 2 damage, and the warlord at full health. I think the challenge we had was the guy who played the warlock (my teammate) is very inexperienced (not that I'm a master by any means), but he made some really poor decisions early on in my opinion. Had he been more aggressive in the beginning, I think we would have had the priestess out of the game much earlier. Still, it was a long game, and I think it wet some appetites for Domination. I know some think 4 hours is a long game, but after gaming for 12 hours on Saturday and gearing up for a 1V1 game of Axis and Allies Global next weekend (about 15 hours of playtime), 4 hours of Mage Wars is nothing to me so long as everybody is having fun.
We finally decided to call it a night at 10:00 since everybody has this stupid thing called work the next morning. We agreed to a draw. Even though the Priestess had the most damage, she refused to concede no matter what time it was, thus in the interest of sanity- a draw it was. Still, the necro deck is pretty nasty. I threw out 4 archers along with the armory and a Fortified Position enchantment to secure my mage's spot while sending melee creatures to the front-lines.
If you'd had more time and the Priestess was knocked out first, would you have called the game at that point, or would it have been 2-on-1 against the fresh Warlord? i.e. Was your win condition the first kill or annihilation of both members of the opposing team? I think the former is preferable to the latter, as 2-on-1 is hard to come back from. But if playing to the first kill, then some sort of lifebond between teammates might be a good idea.
We probably would have called the game had the Priestess gotten knocked out- just in the interest of time, but also because we did such a nice job of holding the Warlord back that he would have had a mess to deal with that even if we did have time, I think he would have conceded at that point. I will say, I do hate the Warlord's sniper though.
