Here we go guys, inspired by recent news in our community, we present the most recent 2 Champs and a Chump! It may still be a little bit before it shows up in iTunes (dunno why Apple is so slow) but in the meantime, let us know if Fox improved his story telling abilities at all this time around.

There was a thread not so long ago discussing power creep, and someone put forward the idea to limit the number of chapter cycles you can build your deck from. So you get to pick, say, two or three cycles and can only use cards from those (plus core set and box expansions). I'm not sure if I like it, but I have a feeling this is something FFG might explore. Their current deck-building contest might be a sort of test with regards to the viability of this.

Also, I started Minecraft a couple of weeks ago, so I echo the props. Wickedly fun game!

I need to apologize as I don't have time to listen to it this morning, but since power creep seems to be a topic I thought this would be a good place.

I much prefer an environment where all houses are very good to an environment where 1-2 house are very good, 1-2 are ok, and the rest are just meh. I feel that it was very much like this post core set and then again after the release of each house box. While i think there is still some disparity I think it is a lot better now then it was about a year ago.

My hope is that the creep allows the standard to be set for all houses and then the expansions do things like the targ box and the next CP cycle and just find different ways to make the houses good (i.e. dragons or maesters) without having to rely on those new things (like stark's box) or revert back to old things (like Greyjoy).

Saturnine said:

My thoughts exactly. Well, that would kill this game.

Lars, I'm not quite sure what you mean about reverting back to old things with Greyjoy...

Decent discussion on Heir to the Iron Throne. I agree that the agenda (1) opens up a lot of deckbuilding possibilities for several houses, and (2) may put Bara at the top of tier 1. I think the first is a very positive outcome, and although I'm a little anxious about round-1 wins out of Bara, I don't mind Bara rush getting a boost in joust in general.

One area where Heir + Bara really worries me is with the Fury plot. We did some experimenting with Heir a couple weekends ago in DC, and based on those games, it's going to be *very* difficult for Targ to recover from a round-1 Bara Fury plot. (Martell is a bit more resilient, since Burning/Cyvasse helps prevent power challenges when it counts.) Stealing two characters, even if only for a phase, gave Bara carte blanche to claim tons of renown for a round, making a round-2 win pretty easy against Targ. (Targ's card pool has some potential countermeasures, including the event that auto-wins power challenges, but these didn't seem sufficient to truly slow Bara down.) I will be *very* surprised if the boost Targ receives with Targ box sufficiently mitigates this...Targ would have to receive A LOT of challenge-phase control/burn to be able to slow the Bara Fury juggernaut.

In terms of melee, I honestly just really hate this agenda. Our experimenting with the agenda in melee was pretty ridiculous...multiple Bara decks at the same table typically resulted with a round-1 or round-2 win. (If only one person played Bara, the other three could hold that one person back long enough for one of them to eek out a win, but it seems to me the incentive will be for more people to play Bara.) I will be surprised if there aren't multiple Bara decks at every melee table after Heir is released.

Hahaha, were there not multiple Baratheon decks at every table already?

Turn 1 Forgotten Plans
Turn 2 Valar
Turn 3 Wildifre

Thats my anti-bara rush plot machine

Kennon said:

going back to winter (at least in joust). its still the strongest build for them.

Kennon said:

So, does anyone have any thoughts on the new, revised Fox's Frisky Frolics vs. Dobbler's Dating Disaster?

Kennon said:

Well, since you asked, I could do without both, but if I had to pick, Dobbler's Dating Disaster hands down. He can tell a coherent story (while the other struggles with forming a complete sentence).

I won't be as harsh as Saturnine, but I agree that Dobbler's stories are more interesting and better told. It's likely just where I am in life...the college-era hangovers and crazy stories are (thankfully) a thing of the past.

I wouldn't put too much weight into my response though...if 80% of the content weren't related to AGOT, I likely wouldn't listen to the podcast, no matter how well Greg told his stories. (Actually, I really got a kick out of the fact that the first solution Greg though of for the "fly on the face of his date" was machine-gun drogon. I think I've had similar moments with other cards....)

Rogue30 said:

I don't think so - it would be only for competative play (200 people worldwide? 500?), and most of them would probably still play IMHO.

It would probably reduce the #, but history lesson time: if the original rotation didn't kill the game (latest 3 blocks only)...or the move to LCG (which was done horribly, basically trying to make it 100% a multi-player game at one point)...then I doubt this would.

Although, I would always listen to another scenario where there wasn't huge power creep or low sales due to no reason to buy cards that are just worse than the other 2,000 (3,000? 4,000?) cards in print at whatever time they really have to make a decision.

I agree with Rings on this. Also, although this competition is restricted to one block, FFG wouldn't have to be so restrictive. Competition could consist of limits to any number of blocks, though perhaps more than 1-2 would get confusing.

Any restrictions would make competitions more complicated in terms of checking deck lists, etc., but that's true with rotation too. Maybe I'm cynical, but I think some sort of restriction (rotation, etc.) is more a matter of time than anything else. I honestly just don't see any way of doubling the card pool over the next 2-3+ years without some form of restriction. Without some form of deckbuilding restriction, competitive play will eventually feel very strange...with many deck types becoming so fast that the challenges phase matters less and less (whereas combos/powerful control matter more and more).

rings said:

You got a point here. However I think that tournament scene (even if it's OCTGN only) has big impact on game popularity (see Italy and Spain for example).

Twn2dn said:

In that case (decks winning on turn 2 these days), do we need "rotation" immediately? Does it mean designers lost control of the game or does it mean this game without rotation is impossible to maintain? This subject returns like boomerang at this boards. Is this a real problem or some people just don't believe it can work without rotation? Well, just saying, because everything was already said in this subject.

@Rogue: I think what some people are responding to is a perceived trajectory toward faster, tighter decks. If you compare certain points in the last 2-3 years, you see game outcomes decided earlier and earlier in the game. Where there were no games that ended in less than 3 rounds 3 years ago (or it was at least very rare), you're now saying such speed is common? I don't think that's true, but if it is, it only further evidences this point. (Keep in mind, games don't have to be ending faster to be going faster...a control deck still takes time to win. The important question is "how long does it take to get the critical control components out?")

A faster game isn't inherently bad, but it feels like a different game. A faster game accentuates the importance of early rounds, especially the setup and rounds 1-2. That in turn makes the deck list more important, and player skill during the game less relevant. In theory, this could make innovative decks more powerful, but it seems to me that real innovation and creativity is more often taking a backseat to efficiency and speed. (A big part of this is that there's not much combo in the environment at the moment.)

I don't think we're at the point in the trajectory where games have become so fast that there's little player skill involved, but I do think it's a (mostly) linear progression toward that future development. So would you prefer to ignore this potential (arguably negative) outcome and just hope for the best? Or do you think it makes sense to periodically reevaluate the state of the game to see (1) if the trajectory has continued in that direction, and (2) if it has, what types of solutions would prevent an undesirable outcome?

Twn2dn said:

Reevaluation is good, but why in form of talking about rotation? I think rotation/limiting is a surrendering. I prefer banning singular cards. (Preventing is possible only with better playtesting.)

Rogue30 said:

I would think banning singular cards is not a solution to the problems inherent to an ever-increasing card pool. I think the concern is not about the increasing likelihood of broken combos, which a singular ban would address, but about the general spirit of the game, i.e. the balance between the average power/efficiency of cards, the coherency and distinctiveness of House themes, and the preservation of older themes/mechanics while introducing new ones.

I think FFG has tried to follow a strategy to avoid rotation as much as possible by introducing a succession of non-overlapping, linear themes. Mechanics like Summer/Winter, Shadows (by which I mean all of the cards that key off of cards in Shadows, not just the Shadows crested cards which can slot more easily into many different decks), House Dayne, Wildings, Maesters, etc. each gobble up big chunks of deck space. It is perhaps possible to make a good deck that combines two themes (maybe a House Dayne Summer deck or a Wildlings Winter deck...) but hard to do much more than that. Because of this, a lot of the newly released cards clump together into new decks rather than just slotting into existing decks to make them more powerful/redundant. If two chapter pack cycles in a row had focused on a theme like seasons or shadows, that theme would probably be dominating the others right now.

That said, FFG does make some general purpose cards with each release and, as those accumulate, it becomes more and more possible to support new strategies with cards from a variety of chapter pack cycles. Also, powerful combos are bound to slip through the cracks now and then, but those can probably be kept in check with selective bannings.

Personally, I think it's only a matter of time before FFG announces some kind of rotation policy for major tournaments. I hope they go with a set of deckbuilding rules that leaves all chapter pack cycles legal (like pick three cycles or something) because that would hold true to the "no rotation" policy that they started the LCG with and would in some ways make the environment more diverse and interesting than having everything be legal all at once (I have been wishing that Magic would support this format for a while). I think it might be a long time before FFG needs to deal with rotation given the way the environment has developed so far. However, if they want to keep the game accessible to newer players and keep veterans buying new cards, I think it is something they will have to address (the other option is power creep, but I think once power creep reaches the level of blatantly obvious many veteran players get turned off and quit).

Rogue30 said:

Mainly since no gaming company ever has pulled off non-rotation. Well, except Yu-Gi-Oh, and that is mainly due to the fact that they have a hefty banned/restricted list (they have a list of banned cards, 1X per deck cards, and 2X per deck cards), and they blatently want power creep to seperate 10 year-olds from their allowances. Plus, they expect their games to be over in 10 minutes max. Again, I am not in favor of rotation at this time, but just the theory that it HAS to happen someday.

Good point by Schreck on the fact that they are using sub-themes to get around the issue somewhat. Unluckily there is two problems with that (that Vs. really went through). First, they are very hard to balance and we get stuff like the Bannerman, or what we saw in Ironmen vs. Clanman (which are played?). Second, that you still are printing cards, and it is pretty impossible to playtest too huge a card pool to make sure the synergy isn't broken or an NPE. Even if only 5-6 cards (per cycle, per house) are pretty powerful on their own...then you get to the power creep vs. no one wants the cards argument.

I think something will need to be done one day to keep the card pool in line. In the spirit of the LCG, I hope it comes down to a deck building restriction, and not a hard rotation of cards out of the game.

Some thing could be done with that dumb little "F" on every card. Do we really need to know that every card is fixed?

I dunno... start calling this card pool the "F" card pool. After the Targ, Lanni, (hopefully) Martell, and (hopefully) GJ delux expansions, start making cards with a "G" on them, for a "G" card pool. Eventually there will be an "H" card pool. Then create some rule that says you can only play with 2 consecutive card pools, and the core set. If we're lucky, we'll run into problems with the "S", "L", "B", and "T" from the core set 20 years from now.

That's a ton of cards to build a deck from, you can keep power creep in line, every card will always be legal, and best yet, it is amazingly easy to look at the cards in someone's deck to make sure it's a legal build. Just an idea.

I think this sort of thing is not only important for the health of the game, it is also important in terms of accessibility for new players. Jumping into a card game with a gigantic card pool full of cards you may never be able to get your hands on is a turn off.

Just my 2 cents..... again....

Deathjester26 said:

This is why rotation of some kind has to happen at some point. We'll reach a place where the barrier for entry is just too high for someone wanting to get into the game, so we have to keep that manageable.

I like certain aspects of the "build a tourney deck from only X Blocks" restriction, but I'm not sure how much that helps new players who are getting into the game. Some people wouldn't think anything of that extra parameter, while others would see it as an unnecessary hassle, thinking it better just to go play a game where they could buy a current pack of cards and know it was legal for X more years. It's an option, but not one without its own flaws and pitfalls, not the least of which is another layer of complication lots of new players won't like.

I agree that we don't need to do anything right away, but I can't see us continuing indefinitely without some sort of rotation or more heavy tournament deckbuilding restrictions.

Maybe instead of rotating, FFG institutes a new tournament type? Right now we have LCG and Legacy. Legacy is rarely played at the tournament level, but I know people who still play it for fun. I could see them introducing the following:

LCG tourneys - all LCG cards are legal except for specifically banned cards

LCG block tourneys - either specifically named block tourneys (King's Landing Cycle tournaments) or choose-your-own-block tournaments like the promo event

Legacy

Enjoyed the episode overall. Would be happy not to hear anymore of Justin's drunken adventures.

The conversation about power creep was interesting, but somewhat ironic. Alec's Lannister kneel deck that won GenCon last year was not based on power creep, but rather the overpowered cards Lannister has had since the beginning of LCG. And Will stated that he stopped playing Lannister shadow kneel because he was bored, not because the environment had evolved to make the deck obselete. Lannister hasn't gotten a "power card" since Alchemist's Guild Hall and has since seen it errata'ed. No one I know has moved Lannister out of the top 2 in Joust rankings. I would argue that instead of "power creep", we are seeing other Houses get the level of card synergy Lannister has always enjoyed in LCG. So now that theoretically there are 4 competetive houses/builds in the environment there must be power creep so we need to look for rotation and/or selective bannings. ~Maybe someday Targ and Greyjoy will see power creep too so they can become competetive in Joust.

I also find it interesting that we are worried about the NPE factor of a first turn win, but completely ignore the NPE factor of playing out a game for 20 minutes that was decided by plot 3, but the heavy control deck need another 4-6 plots to get to 15 power. ~Nothing is near as fun as playing 5 plots, knowing you can't win, but also knowing your opponent can't win any faster.

The only formats that will matter in the competetive environment is whatever formats FFG includes in the overall World Championships at GenCon. Everything else will be ignored by the community.

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