Considering a deck build designed to go for Modified wins. Has anyone given this a try yet? I did a few searches and din't find anything about it so figured I'd ask. The new rules make it a little potentially a little random but outside that could it be a functional strategy?

Modified wins might be enough for a local event, but definitely not for a major, Kotei level, event.

Even then, imagine a 3-round store event.
You get three wins, all modified, and end on 18 points.
Player 2 gets 2 full wins and, and a mod loss (against you). They'd be on 20 points.

Again, at a local event, the three wins might be enough to claim victory.
But Koteis are points based, so in the example above, player 2 could progress into later rounds instead of you.

You could go 7-0 and still not hit the point cut off of 53 points. 7 mod wins is 42 points.

Then there's the whole negative play experience you'd be intentionally creating for your opponents (via stalling, wasting time and overall standing in the way of the progression of the game.)

The time limit exists due to the tournament framework of 7 rounds in one day (you can't expect people to participate in a tournament for 10+ hours, hence the time limit). It shouldn't be used intentionally to win. 75 minutes is more than enough time for this game to end naturally.

This is not a viable strategy and shouldn't be considered.

Never suggested stalling or wasting time. I've been looking into defensive wins and with what I have seen this far it is quite difficult. The one avinue I hadn't persued yet was defending to time. Did not mean to suggest anything distasteful. Just exploring all the options.

Unfortunately, if your intent is to get a modified win on tiebreaker points, you're heavily incentivized to play slower than you potentially could, and even if you choose not to, unless you play lightning fast (actively making it harder for you to reach your goal), your opponent might suspect you were doing so. It's a pretty negative area all around.

I think if you're playing a defensive deck, your overall strategy is to honor them out via decking, which is also hard to do, but you could at least play quickly and try to do so for a full win. Either that, or find some combo shenanigans so that you can play defensively until you have a couple blowout turns to steal the game.

6 hours ago, Joe From Cincinnati said:

you can't expect people to participate in a tournament for 10+ hours, hence the time limit

Apparently, you haven't played at Stahleck in earlier editions, when each format was played in a single day, resulting in a minimum of 12 hours of melee for day 1 finalists and a minimum of 13 hours of joust for day 2 finalists (both excluding meal breaks, but with untimed finals). But to be honest, I'm glad they split the joust top between days 2 and 3. Also, I'm quite sure the Paris Grand Kotei (and probably all other Grand Kotei) involved at least 10 hours of play in each of Day 1A and Day 1B.

In general playing not to lose is a bad idea, and that's what modified wins are.

Bring on the 10+ hour tournaments!

But more seriously, I understand that just because I wouldn't mind too much doesn't mean even longer tournaments would be a good thing.

So you want to design a deck with the goal to break more provinces than your opponent and/or have more honor? Why not go for one more province?

Why would you want to do that to yourself, let alone others?

It does happen. However, you can only go so far with that strategy. Time limits (at least at Worlds) get longer for the top 16, and then are unlimited in the final. At Worlds, 6 unmodified wins gets you 36 points, and that's not enough to advance to Day 2.

Also, it's hard to have more points than your opponent if you aren't breaking provinces.

Serious NPE, though.

46 minutes ago, Duciris said:

Also, it's hard to have more points than your opponent if you aren't breaking provinces.

Yeah, the points heavily favor breaking provinces. Though it's possible if you can prevent your opponent from breaking yours while staying more honorable and keeping the favor.

If you can somehow get around the repeated power of ring effects, you can definitely garner card advantage by letting opponents win, but always buffing up to prevent the break. But, yielding rings to your opponents is pretty hard to swallow. You'd need to, like, Talisman of the Sun to Pilgrimage every conflict XD

As mentioned, the problem is losing out on the Ring effects, which help push you ahead of your opponent. Without several repeatable sources of Ring triggers on defense, it'll be quite tough.

Crab/Unicorn KoE. Pilgrimage and Defend The Wall. Talisman to whichever circumstance you need (defend to not lose or defend to win).

That seems like an assumption. You can poke rings as long as you find a farmable province without committing to a break yourself. This could force your opponent to overcoming on defense while you stop their attacks with your bigger characters.

The real issue is that if you are not pressuring them with breaks you give your opponent all the time in the world to build up to one big conflict where they push through.