Just a quick post to share my experiences at the Regionals for W:I held here in Minnesota at the FFG Event Center.

We had 12 players, several of whom came all the way from Ohio (amazingly), and another 1 or 2 from Iowa, with the final 2 of us being from Minnesota. (Bad showing by us Minnesotans. Boo!) Everyone seemed very friendly, very nice, good sportsmanship all-around. So that was great!

I agonized for the past 2 weeks on what deck to play. I was pretty certain that nearly everyone would be playing some form of Skaven/Orc, Skaven/Dark Elf, or straight Orc. I was not at all wrong. There were 4 Dark Elf decks (of various pedigress - I believe most had some Skaven in them, too). The other 8 were all Skaven/Orc of various mixtures. Sigh. I had tried putting together a nasty little 2/3rds Dwarf, 1/3rd High-Elf deck that (if it started strongly enough) but it just couldn't win consistently enough vs. any kind of Orc/Skaven/Dark Elf rush decks. I then tried a Sniping Dark Elf/Chaos deck but it also flopped most of the time. Again, double "sigh." So I conceded to conventional wisdom and just decided to stick with the Skaven/Orc deck build (suggested by Clamatius but further tweaked by me late last night). However, I took so long to playtest a variety of decks that I never really sat down to properly tweak my Skaven/Orc deck and had at least 4-5 useless cards for the tourney environment that slowed my deck down in close matches.

Here's my deck list:

SUPPORTS:

• 3x Contested Village
  
• 3x Warpstone Excavation
  
• 3x Choppa
  
• 2x Dark Elf/Orc Banner
  
• 1x Fellblade
  
• 1x Basha's BloodAxe
  

TACTICS:

• 3x Pillage
  
• 3x Innovation
  
• 3x Chillwind
  
• 2x We'ze Bigga!

UNITS:

• 3x Spider Riders
  
• 3x Clan Mulder's Elite
  
• 3x Deathmaster Sniktch
  
• 3x Greyseer Thanquol
  
• 3x Clan Rats
• 3x Snotling Pump Wagon
• 3x Lobber Crew
• 2x Poison Wind Globadiers
• 2x Rat Ogres
• 1x Grimgor Ironhide

I included Grimgor because I had this irrational fear of running into some annoying unit-less Bolt Thrower deck. I figured at worst it could be a Development if need be. It ended up just being a wasted card, imho. I should have had 3x We'ze Bigga! and not added Fellblade or Basha's Bloodaxe. They were all useless in these games, unfortunately, as you will see when you read further down. Snif.

On a hugely positive note though, I briefly spoke with Steve Horvath (VP at FFG and Head Marketing guru - he loves W:I, which is a good thing) and he reassured me that the forces of Order will be getting a huge boost and he used the word, "Soon." So take that for what it's worth.

The tourney itself was a 3-round event with the top 4 finishers playing each other in single-elimination. Ties were exactly that, "ties" worth 1 point. Which was kind of weird. I'm not terribly fond of this 50-minute format for best 2 of 3 games as it's just not quite enough time AND it really hurts Order decks or ANY deck that isn't a Rush deck. That really needs to be addressed. My thoughts about this issue is that people should make sure they have enough time to play in a tournament so that the matches can have more time (1.5 hours would make more sense and be more fair, I think). Yeah, that's a lot of time - I don't really care - tournaments take time, people need to deal with it (JUST MY OPINION).

--------------------------------

ROUND #1 - Anyway, I was matched up with a very polite young lady from Ohio who informed me that she was pretty new and may need to re-read some of the cards so she'd know what she was doing. I believed her but her deck was a pretty tight, nasty Skaven/Orc deck (slightly better tweaked than mine but very similar) so I'm wondering if she really built it herself or not. I do not say that as some sort of insult - it's just difficult to believe that if she was that new, that she would be so keenly aware of how the meta has shaped up. Hard to say. Either way, good player, good deck. She won the first game despite my very strong start (resources & card-wise). I was a bit too nervous (always am during my first matches) and totally overlooked her ability to burn a zone late in the game. Sigh. 2nd match I won by racing to a very fast start. And she won the 3rd game due to a great start as I recall. My record: 0 wins, 1 loss.

ROUND #2 - Played a really nice guy (can't recall his name, sorry bro) from Iowa City. And guess what type of deck he was running? Yep, another Orc/Skaven with a splash of Dark Elf (much like me). However, I got a strong start in our first game and some good timing helped me nab a close victory. Our 2nd match was much closer but in the end I JUST squeaked out a victory and won the best of 3 with the 2 victories. Really good sport and a friendly match. My playoff hopes were still alive if I could pull off a win in my final match. My record: 1 win, 1 loss. A win in my last game would probably get me into the final 4 playoffs.

ROUND #3 - Played another fellow from the Ohio group (again, forget his name, sorry man if you're reading this). Good guy, knew his stuff and unfortunately for me he had a deck (still another Orc rush mixed with some Skaven) that had just enough tweaks against my deck to give him the edge if he had some lucky draws, which unfortunately he did. He was running an Orc deck with a tiny splash of Skaven (Clan Mulder Elite). The first game saw him get an incredibly lucky draw with 2x "We'z Bigga!" and the "Boar Boyz," sigh. So by his 2nd turn he was already drawing 6 cards. It was basically the game right there. He was also one of those players who really did seem to just simply get good draws when he needed them (with one exception, beneficial to me). After he won our 1st match (the deal-breakers were the Boar Boyz start-up and Foot of Mork cards), our 2nd match was going much better for me (though he drew that same combo again - 2 We'ze Biggas and Boar Boys (gah!) and I had his Kingdom burned with 2 damage on his Battlefield before he tossed out a Troll Vomit and reset us both to Zero in every zone. Lucky for me (as I mentioned above, my only truly good fortune in this round), my only card draw was Greyseer. So 3 turns later, helped by some crappy draws on his part (like I said, this was my good luck game in some respects), I nabbed a victory in Game 2. However, despite a fairly decent start in Game 3, the tide turned again (Foot of Morks and 3 out of 3 Warpstone Excavations drawn after only 3 turns for him!! He won after about 6-8 turns and I was out. Final Record: 1 win, 2 losses.

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Post Mortem - I realized that in a super Rush environment - like the current gameplay environment - every single card is critical and my clunky tweaks to the core Skaven/Orc deck slowed me down WAY too much. In my defense (and this made me feel better) I had ended up having to tweak my main deck super late at night and was just really tired. Bad idea, obviously. I'm also somewhat hindered by having only 2 people to really play with and even then it's usually only once a week. The Ohio group has a great small group of players to play with and test out their decks. I really need to get more games in with a better variety of players, also. That's just a huge advantage. Don't get me wrong, I did a ton of playtesting on my own (playing deck against deck) along with playing my main W:I gaming buddy a tiny bit and I play probably as much as most people but it's the variety of opponents that I really need to face at this point.

One neat little thing was that FFG handed out these wooden printed Damage/Power symbols to all the attendees, it was pretty neat. They also gave us these cool League Booklets with Achievements to strive for (I got "Win 1 game with an Orc Capital board" signed off, for example). I'll post a picture of mine once I get some extra time (probably later tonight or tomorrow. All in all, it was really exciting but also disappointing in the actual variety of decks played at this tournament (Skaven/Orc, or Skaven/Dark Elf...no Order decks at all). I really hope that Arcane Fire shakes things up and/or the next Cycle of Battlepacks.

Lots of fun though and despite the steep, steep cost for this tournament - a whopping $25 - I'd love to play in another one of these.

One last note - after losing the last game and being knocked out of contention for making the playoffs, I had to jet - didn't have the time to really stick around if I didn't have any matches left so I have no idea who won but I'd guess it was some kind of...wait for it...Skaven/Orc deck, most likely. Sigh.

I can tell you the lady you played is a very good player. She has played many other CCgs and has done well at them as well. She is new to the game and does not know all the cards, but she knew the meta game because she plays with our play group.

Intersting stuff wytefang, thanks. Being in columbus, OH i guess i'll see all those rats at the regional in fairborn as well...i just hope that they'll be WH:I's Milli Vanilla by the time GenCon comes around. Good to hear the heads-up from the VP...maybe we'll finally get the neutral order-only epic spell 'Rat Poison -

Action: Destroy all Skaven cards in play. Then search through all opponents' decks and remove all Skaven cards. Then you may run all Skaven units through target shredder and then place on top of a stack of all cards named Forge and light on fire. Then you may laugh at target opponent"

please tell me that one of the achievements in the Booklet of Achievements is "win a match against a Skaven deck with an Order Capital Board"

cerebralcortex said:

cerebralcortex said:

I believe it - I was just commenting on how weird it was that she mentioned not knowing a lot of the cards but then her entire deck was a perfectly crafted Orc/Skaven deck. Something didn't quite add up there. She either got lucky with her build (doubtful - she seemed pretty sharp) or she either learned enough of the Orc/Skaven cards to make that deck but only those cards (which seems odd) OR someone helped her build it (again, I'm doubtful that was the case but it's the only other thing I can think of to explain the tightly crafted deck she had despite being ostensibly new to the game).

She was a GREAT person to play with, either way. I just get pretty leery at the tourney scene if someone claims to be "new" because it's usually a set-up of some sorts to get your guard down (yeah, I'm kind of paranoid that way, LOL).

Artemus Maximus said:

Hhehehehe...and I don't recall there being an Achievement for killing Skaven with an Order deck. There might be.

Thanks for the writeup!

I must confess I'm a bit sad that only 12 people showed at the mothership. I'm a bit surprised that all of them had Skaven decks - normally you have a solid percentage of people who have their "pet" archetype (e.g. Dwarves, whatever) who won't play anything else regardless of how strong their pet archetype is. But, as I have said many times at this point, I'm pretty convinced that Skaven are the best deck.

You are also completely correct that your changes weren't exactly optimal. There's no way that a Skaven/Orc deck ever casts Grimgor - in fact, pretty much no competitive deck can cast him. Maybe a pure Orc deck can muster the 5 loyalty, but 6 resources is a hell of a lot for that kind of deck - and Orc control doesn't really exist yet, you don't have enough tools to do it. I don't like the relics even with Chillwind in the deck, either. Corrupting the unit in a fast deck is a huge downside and it means you're pretty much depending on having Chillwind in hand to play them. We came to this conclusion after testing Warp Lightning Cannon, and the relics do a similar thing really. The Daemonsword is playable in Chaos control though, it's decent.

Winning a single game against Skaven with an Order board is totally doable and I've done it many times. I would bet cash money that you aren't winning a tourney against that many Skaven with an Order board though, the math is most definitely not on your side.

And as for Orc/Skaven being the winner, I would expect that to be the default, but DE/Skaven would not be that improbable. I won maybe 8 out of 10 games on Thursday with DE/Skaven vs. Orc Skaven just because I'm better at drawing Deathmasters - I even almost pulled out a game vs. first turn double Warpstone to Quest. Did I mention that Warpstone Excavation is too good? It's too good.

Oh, I totally knew that Grimgor was a far-fetched change but honestly, it was late at night and I was pretty tired and burned out from working on my deck so much the past week or so. Figured that if I got ahead but things were close enough, I could really ice things. This morning as I wrote out my deck list, I started to realize that I was in trouble. Sigh.

At least I caught things almost in time. Heh.

lol that reminds me...last weekend I was up late, had a few beers, and did some deckbuilding around 3 in the morning. The next day went to play, grabbed my black chaos deckbox and had a nice surprise. I start drawing Bloodsworn, Offering of Blood, Blood Frenzy, Dark Zealot, Dark Visions, Malus Darkblde...apparently i made a deck out of all cards that have either "blood" or "dark" in their name. Realized later that roomate was watching There WIll Be Blood that night, which seemed to be the inspiration lol.

Thanks for the report Wytefang, it was really nice to read it (now someone start Invasion Battlereport Magazine ;D). The deck variety indeed seems bit sad, I've managed to make empire deck which can stand ok against orc/skaven, but they still get higher ratio against it (played about 5 games so not sure yet). I'm usually playing only with my girlfriend but with the summer coming I'm intending to host invasion league in local game shop. I'm hoping that somekind of big tournament (nationals) would be held around here also (I'm living in Finland).

I was also really suprised with the 50min time limit - I had pondered quite long time (while sleeping *ahem* I meant studying in the university) what would be the best time limit and the 1,5h would seem best. Let's hope the metagame changes for more variety with the new battlepack cycle in the summer.

Thanks for the post!

I have a few questions as the TO of one RC still to come...

1) You said, there were ties. Does that mean that in case the game didnt finish before the 50 minute mark and the score was 1:1 (possibly 0:0), they just called time and the game was a draw? No time-out, no added turns etc.?

2) As you write, ties were for 1 point. Win was then for 3 points and loss for 0?

Thanks for your answers.

lord nekrah said:

waves to a fellow Finn

lord nekrah said:

I'm generally a fairly speedy player, but a 3-game session of W:I takes around 75-90 minutes normally. Granted, my decks aren't rush decks that win in 4-5 turns, so that might have something to do with it.

MichalKP said:

Yes, that was my understanding. I think they didn't want to go the route of counting damage up to resolve the current game as a win or loss because they were worried about people stalling if they knew they could win once they were ahead and time was running out. So they give 1 point for tie.

If there are multiple people tied when they're ready to make the cut for the playoffs, they use SOS (strength of schedule) to determine tie-breakers. I'm not sure what they'd do after that if they still had a tie.

Good luck with your regional!

I dont know, but this is almost exactly what I expected. Being that I am Mr. 50 cards. My line of thinking is as follows, people who play pet decks are not usually competative players and probably would rather not shell out the $25 to play in a tournament. The ones who are willing to pay the entry fee to play are more competative and are playing to win. So they will play the "best" deck even if it isn't the faction they think is the "neatest".

I would like to know about deck sizes at the tourney though. Anyone running more than 50? 55? 60? and if so, how did they do compared to the ones running fewer cards? I assume since they were all rush, they tried to be as close to 50 as possible.

Twenty-five bucks for a 3-round tournament with wooden buttons as pirze support is a travesty.

As I think I've mentioned a few times(!), 3-game/50-minute rounds are just not going to work for the long haul. If an entire tournament full of Orc and Skaven decks has matches going to time, just try to imagine a healthy meta with 50% Order decks. I'm hoping for 1-game/30-minutes for GenCon, but if the turnout is going to be in the 20-30 range, 3-games/75-90 minutes would be acceptable.

I agree that the time is going to to an issue. I think after time is called there should be a rule of giving each player maybe three more turns. This would not help over all, but would help for the close games that are in there third game.

cyberfunk said:

I agree. I was pretty disappointed and annoyed at the high price. The trophy was nifty but clearly inexpensive (plastic) and the winner got a fairly bland-looking pin (also) with the faction of his choice on it. I believe that the winner does get FREE GenCon (but I already have my Press Pass for GC so I wasn't that concerned with that potential prize) - however it's not really that you get a free pass to the event but that you get the cost of a GenCon badge ($75) in free product at the FFG booth. So that's a bit misleading - still it's free game money, so hard to really grumble about that.

Regardless of the price it WAS a fun time, I thought and I liked the fact that Steve Horvath and James Hata were there. Shows that they care about the game and it's tournament scene. I also like the pamphlet for the W:I League Acheivements - cool stuff.

Did they have to make alot of rulings on the ground or was it pretty smooth sailing since everyone is pretty much playing the same deck?

I can't even recall anyone asking a rules question to be honest. I don't think there was very many questions at all, probably for the reason you have suggested.

Hiya,

I ended up getting second in this event (I was one of the Iowans). I was playing DE/Skaven and the winner played Orc/Skaven. I won the first game of the finals match and he won the last two (curse you best of 3!). All three of our games were very close. It was pretty sad to see that all of the decks were either orc or dark elf decks, hopefully order will be getting a little boost soon, they are pretty close but just not quite there yet. It was a really fun event and everyone was a great sport. By far the most interesting deck I played against was the other DE deck that made it to the semifinals. We had many cards in common of course, but he had some interesting stuff in his like Shrine to Nurgle, Seduced by Darkness, Altar of Khane and Invoke Khane's Wrath. My deck was much more boring DE/Skaven. Here is the list that I played:

3-Clan Molder Elites

3-Clan Rats

3-Greyseer Thanquil

3-Deathmaster Sknitch

2-Gutter Runner

2-Rat Ogre

2-Poison Wind Globadiers

3-Dark Initiate (This definitely should have been Walking Sacrifice Instead)

3-Shades

3-Vile Sorceress

3-Har Ganeth

3-Chillwind

3-Dark Visions

3-We Need your Blood

2-Sack Tor Anderias

3-Innovation

3-Contested Village

3-Warpstone Excavation

The winner got the capital board/trophey (super cool IMO), a full set of the pins (which fit into the trophey so that you could use it as any race), a special playmat, an uncut card sheet, and an art print. The rest of the top 4 got the standard playmat, the pins, an uncut sheet and an art print.

Hi,

Wytefang

I didn't received your deck list, after you asked my help... but it seems you had a fine deck out there.

It supprises me that you didn't find a use for the Fellblade and/or Basha's Bloodaxe. Both seems good. Maybe the corruption part means too much in a rushy enviroment. (both many skavens gets corrupted anyway to use Fellblade, at least in theory)

It's sadden me that it was a full-skaven enviroment, but don't suprise me even a little.

Vitamin T

Congratulations ! I like your decklist, hovevwer it supprises me you don't run Call the Blood when you use Globadiers. I also misses Mortella... she is too slow in the enviroment ? BTW, why do you think that Walking Sacrifice would be better, just to absorb damage ?

Cain

Vitamin T said:

I am running something similar at the moment but I am curious about the Dark Initiate/Walking Sacrifice. Is it just for the easy loyalty symbol for Visions/Sorceress. If you are just running one of the deck search cards would Chittering Hirde not have been better?

Congrats Vita!!!

I'm bummed, I was really hoping to make the final 4 (as we all were). LOL So what did the winner have in his deck? I'm curious what he looked like (trying to recall who was who)...could you describe him a bit, apperance-wise?

Grats on 2nd place though!!

ODDS BODKINS!!!! $25 US?!?! Are you sure that's not pesos? And here I was afraid that people would scoff at my $18 fee, and $13 if you preregister. We won't have a trophy, but we'll have the Champ-itol Board and playmats and pins and art and all of that. Plus, for only $7 more you get a Battle Pack of your choice for the sealed event. That's right, sealed event! The Vortex format is a one-of-a-kind rules set that doesn't require you to bring/buy a whole core set. I sent a description of the whole event (Main plus all FOUR side event formats) to FFG to put on the site, per their request, so as soon as I see it up, I'll let everyone know. In the meantime, check out the 'W:I Regionals Orlando' thread for an overview. And if anyone would like to take a Spring Break in sunny Florida, maybe take in some theme parks as well, come on down May 15-16 and we'll make absolutely certain you have the time of your life (so far)! Guaranteed (but not "or your money back". We're not charging enough to make that work, y'know?).

I truly cannot to wait to report to you guys on the side events! It's some good stuff, fo' rizzle.

While the registration fee for this event was steep at $25, this fee allowed you to play in any of the LCG events that they had going all weekend. If you played Invasion, Game of Thrones, and Call of Chuthulu it would be a very good deal. Even if you only played invasion they had three events, the regional championships, a draft event, and a 3 on 3 event. Unfortunately we couldnt stay for the other two events.

"I am running something similar at the moment but I am curious about the Dark Initiate/Walking Sacrifice. Is it just for the easy loyalty symbol for Visions/Sorceress. If you are just running one of the deck search cards would Chittering Hirde not have been better?"

The Initiate/Sacrifice slot is mostly used to sacrifice to Lobber Crew and provide loyaly to play a first turn vile sorceress for minimum cost. The Initiate can eventually give you a good 1 hammer for 1 cost value, but often will not do so for a few turns. I had at least three games against Orcs in which I played a turn 1 initiate & Sorceress and they played a lobber crew on their turn that they had to sac to kill my initiate. The Sacrifice would have been far better for several reasons, if the main role of this unit was to take lobber crews, then Walking sacrifice pretty much makes it unusable. You also can get the loyalty out of the sacrifice and spend the resource on something else letting you do things like turn 1 contested village and Vile Sorceress or play a sorceress and a clan molder on turn one with an innovation. One of the coolest plusses to the Sacrifice is the combo with Har Ganeth. If you dont have any enemy targets for it you can always bounce your own Sacrifce to draw a card and then play it for free.

As far as Chittering Horde vs Dark Visions I didnt do enough testing to determine for sure which one would be better. I frequently used Dark Visions to grab a turn one warpstone excavation or an early innovation or a we need your blood/chillwind. The most common pick was Deathmaster so more testing would probably be a good idea.