Kharne, Horned Demon - Team Games

[Pyrion]

Hello everyone!

I recently played a Team Game of Mage Wars Academy (2 Beastmasters vs. 1 Warlock and 1 Wizard). The two Beastmasters together had 7 creatures. Then at the end of a round where the Beastmasters had initiative the Warlock brought Kharne to the table and suddenly the Beastmasters where facing an 11 dice creature that killed one of them with one attack at the beginnig of the next round because they had already some damage on them.
In my opinion something like this should not be possible in Academy. I don't see any problem in 1 vs. 1 games either in Arena or in Academy but in Academy Team Games Kharne kind of destroys the game balance. A simple fix for this problem I could imagine would be a dice limit for the effect similar to the one of Gloranna.

I'm not sure if this topic was already discussed here and I might also overlook something.
What do you guys think about it?

[Sailor Vulcan]

You guys had a lot of creatures out. Surely you could have spared some of them to guard against kharne's attack? The packleader's cloak would help here too. Alternatively you could have tried staggering kharne since he's a lv2 creature. Also, how much attack power did your team have collectively with all your animals combined? I bet that kharne isn't OP and your team was just outplayed.

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[Pyrion]

I wouldn't call it outplayed. What can you do if your opponent plays Kharne at the end of the round where you have the initiative. He's the one who will go first in the next round. If you have guards out he can simply play a Panther Stealth on Kharne and he may ignore them. He is still easy to kill but one attack is still insane. Additionally my example was just one that I encountered in a real game. Imagine Team Games with 3 or more people in one team. Kharne will get to 20 and more dice very easily and is therefore able to oneshot a mage. I'm aware of the fact that those games with such a high amount of players aren't played very often but in my opinion all possible cases should be handled by the rules.

[Sailor Vulcan]

I wouldn't call it outplayed. What can you do if your opponent plays Kharne at the end of the round where you have the initiative. He's the one who will go first in the next round. If you have guards out he can simply play a Panther Stealth on Kharne and he may ignore them. He is still easy to kill but one attack is still insane. Additionally my example was just one that I encountered in a real game. Imagine Team Games with 3 or more people in one team. Kharne will get to 20 and more dice very easily and is therefore able to oneshot a mage. I'm aware of the fact that those games with such a high amount of players aren't played very often but in my opinion all possible cases should be handled by the rules.

If you're summoning a swarm, you should have expected kharne from the getgo and planned accordingly. There are a lot of things you probably could have done, but it depends on what your strategy is and how you build your books. It could also be that you weren't killing your opponent fast enough. By the time you have all those creatures out your opponent should already have taken a decent amount of damage from the critters you already summoned in previous rounds. It might be worth considering using an attack spell or two as a finisher, rather than relying on your animals alone. If you try to finish with two animals, you can only use one at a time and then you have to wait for your opponent to make a move before using the other animal's attack. But an attack spell can be used with your quickcast innediateky after an animal attacks.

Perhaps you didn't make that particular mistake. Perhaps  it was something else. It's hard to say what mistakes your team made without more information about the things that happened earlier in the game which lead to that point.

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[Zuberi]

You are correct that Kharne is incredibly good in team games, to the point that every team game has to specifically play around him both in how they construct their books and how they play. And there isn't really much you can do if they time the summoning/attack correctly with regards to initiative, like you said.

I could see a houserule for team games that limits Kharne to only getting melee +1 for each enemy creature that ONE of his opponent's has. That way he benefits from whichever opponent has the most creatures at any given time, but won't ever be anything more to worry about than he is in 1v1 games. No matter how big the teams or FFA match is.

[silverclawgrizzly]

It's not so much that Pyrion seems to have been outplayed, more that they encountered something they hadn't seen before. I have to believe a suitable counter can be formulated before the next team match