Nyobari said:

Gotta throw in the same thing I've said to everyone that makes a (nothing personal here) boneheaded suggestion like that. It doesn't matter one whit what YWNE's symbols are. You play it on your opponent's turn, and it's probably the only card you play that turn. Big whoop.

Concealed Shallow Swipe had Fire/Life/Water but will forever remain one of the best control win conditions ever printed.

Ah another day another argument. While I can see what the op is saying I think its more of a rant about hilde tbh. Agro is indeed coming back strong but aside from agro and control we also have specialty decks as well.

I agree that hilde is more of a control deck she only runs 8 attacks and the rest of the cards are assets, foundations and actions. To me this sounds like a deck that tanks till it can kill its opponent which in turn sounds like a control deck and not an aggro deck. Aggro is all about throwing attacks until your opponent dies and doing it fast!!! Right now my aggro deck is a promo temujin. The deck runs 24 attacks and starts chucking them out as soon as he gets a proffesional soldier out (usually turn 1 or 2 and yes he wins games). As for the splits coming back I dissagree but im not a fan of split cards so my opinion does count for much. Also There are already quite a few cards that are like launcher its just that they are not as good as launcher. Some of algols attacks have amazing stats for aggro like his 4/2 2L6 throw. Sending that out turn 2 with a fof hurts anyone. Granted its no launcher but its still a good card. Typically I like attacks in the 4 diff range for aggro cause its easily spamable.

As for turn 3 kills alot of pple are doing turn 2 kills :/ I agree with you though that its time for UFS to step away from the grey wars and back to what it is meant to be, a big bloody brawl worth of all the fighting games its made of. I personally think that FFG is going in the right direction atm to do this.

Edit: Also we need less life gain. Life gain is important yes but we shouldnt have something that can gain 7-8 health in one comit coughbattleprowesscough.

Rockstar,

I think you totally misunderstood my comment. It aggravates me becuase I have notoriously terrible luck. I can totally appreciate aggro and am totally for it being in the game. Some level of it, I would even go so far as to say is vital to the game. No one wants to sit there in a stalemate all game. Whenever people see us play at the local card shop, the M:tG players all comment on how fast-paced UFS is. Trust me, I've made a deck of only attack cards, I like aggro just fine.

I just appreciate a bit of defense (not so much control). Too much control is a pain in the ass. Ability, cancel, ability, cancel, etc, etc...done? OK, here's my one attack, played as a reversal, pumped to ridiculous damage now that you've expended your cards and abilities and have progressive difficulty.

What I'm referring to is how Player A would attack, player B would block it and player A would play another attack which would either be blocked or deal damage, and then move on to the next attack. The game used to be like that. Attacking and blocking...that's the lost art I enjoyed more. The balance of only having so many cards in hand: how many will I attack with and how many will be used to block? Remember blocking because you couldn't get vitality back, or if you could it was a couple ticks for a cost?

I'm not saying I want the game to revert to the old ways completely, I'm all for progression and new stuff. I just don't think it says anything about talent or ability to luckily draw into what you need, hard check the costs, and be fortunate enough for your opponent to only have low or mid blocks in hand, while your pumped up attack is high. It's going all in. Grats to anyone who can do it and get away with it. Be prepared to get your face stomped if it doesn't work though. It's just not calculated in the least and anyone can do it. I just don't have the luck to pull it off.

Sorry, I started rambling, dude. But no, don't get me wrong, all games have a luck element, I just don't like that element to be the deciding one for me personally.

See the thing about the old aggro decks was they weren't reliant on luck all the time. They were generally designed to support an attack string on the 2nd turn that could at least take off half of your opponent's health as long as the opponent doesn't block every single attack, and KO on a good draw even with a block or two... but there was careful play behind it too, judging whether going for the throat was worth it or not after the 2nd attack or so, gauging by your opponent's opening turn how well they might be able to block, and figuring your maximum damage potential based on your hand.

Also, knowing to abort and resume building if you check badly on the first attack helps.

There's more behind playing an aggro deck than OMG DID I CHECK FOUR 6's IN A ROW?! like some people seem to suggest...

edit: though admittedly that's what aggro decks need to do CURRENTLY because they're so weak.

~ahem~

As a constant player of Hilde I would just like to insert my opinion that my version of Hilde (Good/Order) is combo/control. Perhaps those that are referring to her as an aggro character have faced off against Fire versions, but in my opinion the perfected build of Hilde should be played similar to Concealed Shallow Swipe decks of old.

I would also like to point out that she is as fragile as a shot glass at a rock quarry. The only problem is that people are so self centered on their own decks that they many completely forget to look ahead to the environment and prepare properly. There is seriously so much crap spread out amongst so many symbols (and with many overlaps) that stops Hilde absolutely cold that it's almost suicidal to play her in any sort of high tier competitive play.

The banning of Olcadon's Mentoring really, and I mean REALLY, hurt her as an archetype. Losing the ability to sit behind your wall of Amy/Assassination Arts/etc etc etc and pick apart the opponent's staging area until there is nothing they can do to stop you significantly cripples the deck to the point of making it hazardous to play.

And as to Tagrineth saying that UFS needs to grow a pair, I would also like to disagree.

I think the Player Base needs to grow a pair.

Tagrineth said:

Agreed. Two completely different animals altogether...as your edited comment supports.

Archimedes said:

you gotta work with the cards you're dealt.

Ahem...

Two of my recent decks were Fire Leona (which lost twice, ever... And it was thrown against Order/Evil decks primarily)And most recently Earth Sigfried (which has picked apart a monster mill deck). I can safely say neither of those two decks had any shred of control in them (well except Manifest Destiny in Leona) so believe you me, aggro exists.

Keep in mind, enhance negation on a stick doesn't really exist anymore. Yes there's Evil Doer Destroyer and No Memories, but EDD is unique, and most decks don't run NM. Even if they do, most cards in an aggro deck have an enhance on them, and most attacks have built in enhances... So I mean, your opponant has to pick and choose which damage/speed pump they wanna negate.

As a newer player the latest round of ban's and errata's excite me. My player base is all new players and we play more aggro then control. I am astonished how people can get turn 1 or 2 ko's when it takes us at least 3 turns before our first serious attacks go out due to the control checks. At the same time most of our games last 30 minutes plus. The thing about aggro in this game is that the idea of foundations kills the ability for the game to go fast without limiting foundations or effects. The main reason I say that is the whole proccess of checking in and off itself makes a person focused on what allows you to make the check instead of pulling off the attack. This also makes any abilities that mess with such mechinism stronger then the attack itself. That is why we have grey wars because the cc hax and foundation tapping is stronger then aggressive play. If a person was capped at 20 foundations in their staging area then I can see the game being more agressive. But thats not happening. I would see if you were limited to 2 cc hax a turn and 4 foundation hacks a turn that the game would be a lot more agressive. But that isn't going to happen. As long as players have the ability to out control the flow of combat then attacks will be secondary. Control has to be capped. At the same time damage pumps, damage reduction, and life gain also have to be capped. Without caps the problems everyone is complaining about will continue. Battle Prowless can stall because most decks kill conditions are 7 difficulity +. So why not run a deck with a difficulities above 4 or 5. The reason why this doesn't happen is because of the grey wars and you would have to pack more attacks in your deck. This happened when I played my friends ZI Mei deck. Nothing in the deck above a 4 check. Nothing! I could only heal max 4 from his discard pile with my Seigfried. But I had other heal cards. My friends Zi Mei deck did over 200 points of damage to me in our 40 min game but because I had 3 different sets of heal cards he could never kill me. That shouldn't have happened. THere should be a cap of how many heal cards I can have in my deck.

In all honesty people want things to be better. They are getting better. But it has to be decided by the player base if they want to deal with or without a world of caps on effects. Caps forces some people to play decks that hit the average mean and only play symbols that hit those means. It may force players to go duel or tri symbol as well. No caps means we will see insane ohko, excessive grey war fighting, and insane healing. Damage reduction in my opinion isn't that bad because their are a lot of good damage reduction cards that have cost or conditions. The ones that don't need to go.

Protoaddict said:

I am a big proponent of this as well. The very nature of the game goes against aggro, which is why aggro has to work so much harder than control to win. Aggro needs attacks to win, but that makes it more unstable with lower CCs. Control rarely worries about that as they run minimal attacks (low CCs) to win.

Aggro needs 4 or 5 check attacks (as was suggested above) to be able to be at the same level as control.

Oh, and for aggro to be truly viable in the current environment, Battle Prowess needs to go. 6-8 life for a commit will usually nerf a kill turn unless the kill is one attack.

Another potential idea....keyword being potential.

Create 8hs characters, but only with more aggro based symbols. Even if it means giving them 2 (pulled off fine with Elena, who would be awesome if she had 8 hs)...or dare I say it, one symbol.

DaiAndOh said:

I like this idea. Give me my 8hser with the Infinity symbol please!

DaiAndOh said:

DaiAndOh said:

I like this idea. Give me my 8hser with the Infinity symbol please!

Edit: I am joking, of course.

Having an 8 HS dosent encourage you to use more than 4 attacks and grey everything else though. IF anything it encourages it because you know you can get more cards than others. Even with one symbol, if that symbol was lets say order, what would prevent it from just being gill. The secret lies in creating cards that work to counter the inherent short commings of aggro based decks. Heres another idea:

3 difficutly 4 control

1 mid 2 damage

Life - Fire - Water

After you play another attack, discard this card from the card pool and draw one card.

Oh look a poke attack that control wouldnt bother with but aggro decks would run because they could use it to chip or bait blocks without exhausing resources so they dont lose the game for attacking on thier oppenents turn. Its also very vulnerable to reversals so it has a downside as well. A perfectly designed card to encourage aggro.

Yesterday, at our local games store, we had a tournament. An enthusiastic aggro player, although somewhat on budget, I decided to try making an aggressive deck with easy to play attacks (i.e 3/4 difficulties), with a character who could easily pump up the damage : Siegfried. One problem I encountered was : how to survive the first turns if things went wrong? Obvious answer : include some reduction/life gain. I ended up including 4 Battle Prowess, 4 Holding Ground and 4 Narcissistic. I had around 20/22 attacks. However, at the tournament, I never managed to kill earlier than turn 5. Why? Because of the weakness of the attack cards, the unavailability of any other damage pumps than my character (I AM on budget, remember? My only other damage pumps were Savage Fighters and to a much less extent Memories of a Nightmare which had other uses). One of the games, against a pure aggro deck which in the first match had managed to pull off a T2 Kill, took in the second match at least half an hour to end. Against an aggro deck, with supposedly an aggro deck (what I intended it to be, anyway).

Aggro players are NOT given the cards they need. You want to play a lot of attacks? Oh, too bad, the checks on good attacks are so bad they mess up your game. You want slightly better checks? Jeez, how WEAK can an attack get?!?!?! Foundations are much easier to play and have such powerful effects by themselves you hardly need any attacks. I wonder what would happen if you gave foundations the rotten checks while giving attacks slightly better checks (I'd say CC3 on foundations and CC4 on attacks)? It sounds stupid but the way the game's going, I wouldn't mind trying if it could make it fun to play again.

There's also another thing which spoils the fun : the cost of those overpowered cards. I'm not talking in terms of difficulty or anything, but in terms of real money. The promos are extremely hard to get where we are (France), the only way to get them is win the tournaments or order them on CoolStuff. But for those cards which truly just about win games by themselves, the prices are really sky-high (eg : Midnight Launcher at 16$, Knight Breaker at 40$... Even Fight or Flight at 4$!). If you haven't got those cards and play against people who do, who ends up winning the promos? Those who've already got them, who can afford them! I ended up quitting Magic because it ended up being a rich people's game, and I don't want UFS (which I really love as a fighting game fan) to turn out the same.

Another rant, joining what was said earlier : TOO MANY BLOCKS. For another tournament, a Licence Only Event, I built a Ninon Promo Air Aggro deck. It currently has 100% blocks. After a few modifications, it might get to 93% blocks, maybe even as low as 80% blocks. For an aggro deck. Isn't that a lot for a deck which is supposed to kill T2-3?

Well, I ended up forgetting half of what I wanted to say. Here's my rant anyway, hope the point of it is clear enough ^^

I think some people may not realize that the risk of running a low check is (or should be) part of the cost of a great attack. It doesn't take any thought to include an amazing card with the perfect check for it's type. i.e. only one non-split attack has ever been printed with a check higher than 3, making 3 checks the best around. Why wouldn't you run chain throw, unless you absolutely need a block on every card?

You should have to think about how to make your deck. Supposedly that's part of the reason Olcadon was banned. It was an auto-include for almost any deck, the only restriction being how many the player could actually get ahold of.

But I digress, as has been mentioned before, it is both the players and games "fault" that aggro is stunted. Could there be more aggro support? In some ways. I do however believe (again, not trying to step on anyone's feet) that due to the nature of aggro and trying to kill first/second turn, whilst still not failing checks, that some of that mentality can get a bit disillusioned. What I'm saying is, if you want to kill that quick, you should be paying the cost, not waiting for your slightly-more-risky-than-running-a-foundation, 3-check attack. I'm talking 1 checks and (heaven forbid) zero checks?!? I promise you, that true aggro players would still have run the pre-errata Feline Spike with a zero check. Hindsight is 20/20, and I know people will deny it, but it's true. The card is THAT good.

Now the OTHER reason: it's not just the game's fault, per se. It comes down to the players working with what they have, not complaining that there's not enough options. There's just not enough "cushy", comfortable options. I'm sorry those aggro options aren't all 5-6 speed for less than 4 difficulty and a check higher than 2.The fact is, as long as everyone has the control/gray wall mentality, if aggro doesn't go for broke, it's just goign to get washed out, with all those great blocks and defensive recursion.

We're talking about a gradient here, folks. It used to be all aggro, then it shifted to where it is now, heavy control. It CAN shift back, but not until the mentality changes. Remember what got us to this point? People were constantly winning first and second turn. The losing side was like, "uh, glad I showed up for nothing". 3 minute games. The answer? Better defense to slow the game down. The result? People are afraid to play aggro as all their attacks are going to get blocked completely or they're gonna get reversed with something more vicious, that even if they block will leave them in wide open on their defensive turn. The result of that? Build up more defense. The result of that? 50 minute games.

Seriously, Aggro isn't really hard to do. Even "good" Aggro where the deck is properly built and tuned to kill early and often.

I think it starts with the mindset of the player, tho', i really do. I think the Aggro player needs to go into a match convinced that if he cannot kill by T3, he will porbably lose. It's really a different focus than a Control player, or even a Hybrid player, because either of the aforementioned are looking to build a wall that can completely shut down what the other player is going to try to do BEFORE looking to drop their kill cards. An Aggro player, however, wants to build with one or two key cards dropped on T1, and then either have or draw into their main attack card so they can bring the rain (sorry, Transformers Movie quote, had to do it) BEFORE their opponent has set up.

Obviously, it's not going to happen every game, and so the Aggro player really has to accept losing as a potential outcome. They can't be afraid of losing, or get mad at it.

I don't think Aggro needs better attacks, although i won't complain should FFG produce more awesomeness, so long as it isn't more Kitty Kills You type jank. Try playing the 3 Rites as they can easily be pulled off T2 (just need to pass three 5-checks). Launcher + Breaker isn't terribly hard to pull off T2 either, although i realize the scarcity of Breaker and 3rd Rite makes it less common. I think a solid attack line up could include:

Zi Mei's Wheel Kick (S:3 is never bad...unless your oppnonent has played a Torn Hero or two).

Pommel Smash (Choice commital is always awesome)

Mark of the Beast (multiple hate, and a potential 8-dmg attack, checks a 3 and isn't hard to pass)

Senkyutai (probably my favorite kill card right now. best with momentum, but that Static Text is fierce!).

These are just a couple ideas...i think we'll see start seeing a return of older BIG attacks, such as Makoto's finisher (and Makoto is a serious and seriously underused character, imho) in conjunction with Fight or Flight. I think Astrid's Odin's Wrath attack will start seeing play as well.

I'm also looking for Combo shenanigans like TransPlans to be played more frequently, becuase they aid in players achieving their Kill Conditions earlier.

I agree that i think the playerbase needs to experiment more with aggro. We have been dealing with grey wars for so long and remember people fear change so were all afraid to try something new. The truth is though aggro can really dominate atm with characters like Zi mei and promo temujin. To tell the truth I dont think I even have a conrol deck atm cause im having so much fun playing aggro.

decks that can turn 2 off the top of my head.

ibuki (can turn 1)

hilde (though she is not really aggro.)

felicia (can t1 with six check spike.)

leona

yang

ukyo (i done it. though most games he is t3-5.)

siggy (needs to get lucky because of six handsize)

ivey (same as above)

donny

promo blanka (scary)

thats just off the top of my head. all of these decks i have seen turn 2 multiple times. believe what the title says. we need to get some balls.

Also Tira, she can t2 pretty easily with mutiple-4 Menuette Dance (and formerly multiple-3 Spike).

On what momentum?

She could definitely do it with mutliple Midnight Launcher too...

@trane: How does Yang do it? All I can think of is something like Nisho Kyaku -> commit 6cc foundation -> commit Yang -> KFT discarding 6cc -> Cobra Blow for 22H25, and that's just dreadful tbh

Wafflecopter said:

Natural Leader/ KoF2006/ White Magic/ Professional Soldier/ Clean Freak/ Family Heirloom/ Family Tradition/ Flaming Mid-Section Club Cruncher/ La Superba/ Military Combat Arts/ Solitary Assassin/ Super Fire Wheel/ The Girl Dancing with the Devil.

Pretty sure just running the 4+ checks would allow you to generate 4 momentum during your second turn rather easily.

Wafflecopter said:

Fire throw -> The Price of Foolishness -> some other attack -> Yang -> Cobra Blow

There's actually quite a few ways for him to do it.

Protoaddict said:

thats the way it normally goes. yang is just so much fun if your willing to run an ungodly amount of 2 checks.

trane said:

it depends on what you mean by ungodly....like 12 or so is enough for any yang deck to function normally yeah its alot but it really isnt that many if you think about all the cheap foundations it would play

you can run the ragnar throws for attacks and even just run cobra blow as your 2CC and maybe some other 2CC attack though i really dont think you need it