guitalex2008 said:

Thank you.

On the Chinese Boxing thing - it locks it for four turns ("your" turn, their turn, your turn again, and then their turn; as it readies on the next turn, you can't count that). Additionally, if you're having that much trouble with Juni's Spiral Arrow + Tenacious...run some E or F negation...

Spike is also prolly the first card to ever deserve a 1cc though.

tannerface said:

not even close. Enlightenment (superbanned) and Reversal (lol at OHK) are waaaaay ahead in the 'deserving 1cc game'

GouHadou said:

Argument could be made for Lunar Slash.

MegaGeese said:

In block three there are very few cards that will stop forms or enhances. Of which most dont matter much with orders super commital effects.

Homme Chapeau said:

That would be punishing you for blocking. This is punishment for specifically blocking. Has anyone concidered what happens when multiples of these are used? this attack gets +4 speed if you block the next gets +8? This is along the same lines of red gi. Its a situation that just gets worse with the more of them out.

heres a senario:

I throw a darkness blade and use 2 mind over matter. with that i have a low 9 for 10 damage and commited 2 cards in your staging area. Now you can take 10 and block easier or you can block and have the next attack get +8 speed. The next attack can be a feline spike or high plasma beam. high plasma beam with 11 speed is no ones friend.

rulemonkey said:

Reply to me if you want, but at least reference my post. In NO single instance did I mention anything other than Wingless Aeroplane, which penalizes you for NOT blocking.

rulemonkey said:

There are currently two cards that negate enhances directly (No Memories and The Evil-Doer Destroyer). There are three cards that deal with Form abuse (Bringing the Master to His Knees, Oral Dead, Instant Success, and Total Global Domination). You can also prevent cards from being removed from the card pool (The Ruler of the Shadows), counter-commital tech (Dormant for Millions of Years, if they're using Chinese Boxing, can commit Tenacious), and there's also blocking (American Made and Strife's Patronage for speed pump, Destiny, Evil Plans, Charismatic, and Ayame's Scarf stop control hacking) and damage reduction (Rejection, Amy's Assistance, Government Sponsorship - tons of cards do that).They span basically every symbol, so there's nothing to keep you from stopping this lockdown whatsoever.

O, and I didn't even mention Chester's Backing or Bitter Rivals...

GouHadou said:

Fair enough. First attack to deserve a 1cc?

tannerface said:

I dunno - the following attacks had a 1 control check, and in their day, they were pretty freakin awesome:

Blazing Cadenza
Devil Reverse <Lock Down deck of much hate>
Nova's Combo - I think deserved the 1 for how it was costed.
Ryu's Tatsumaki

I think those were all well costed with a 1 check.

Antigoth said:

I remember blazing cadenza into shadow banishment or glass slipper was so much fun or playing devil reverse turn one was an unber YWNE.

While I do have some gripes with the game, I've begun to accept UFS and its situation for what it is, and so I move on. Once you get over your personal feelings on a subject, you can consider it with an objective outlook. From that point, you can start making real decisions about your future as opposed to agonizing over the present and past that cannot be changed. In the 9th Grade, I was in a "lite" business class. One of the class' assignments was to create a pamphlet on entrepreneurship. Through the process of research, I came across a business fundament that stated that truly successful businesses (and entrepreneurs) make decisions proactively instead of reactively. I now believe that the fundament of proactive over reactive decision-making is also essential to success in life.

While that diversion supports my causation of "making real decisions about [a person's] future," I wanted to clarify my position on a huge gripe that I have had with UFS since FFG acquired it: I have seen too many major decisions from FFG made reactively to the past, present, or near future of UFS. I attribute many past and current predicaments on that style of decision-making; if FFG ever wants the quality of UFS to improve, I feel that they should actively pursue and expedite goals that strengthen the game's fabric. Namely I see a bottleneck in staff workload distribution, which is to say that the game's current staff needs assistance from assistants. Once that is well underway, I truly believe that FFG should get in touch with its UFS players to instill confidence in them and to find new ways (through observation) to improve the game. For the record, I have observed some recent official developments that suggest proactive decision-making.

It seems as though I was inspired to write a mini-article when I considered cards that punish non-lethal attacks and the similar concept of deterring a player from attacking. I'll point out that I typed the above to justify this post in this thread after I typed the below.

rulemonkey said:

...and that's without even adding the obligatory Fight or Flight to the equation. Mind Over Matter is one of the few new cards that I find competitively functional with a good range of viable builds. Living Shadow, Criminal Past, and Kazama Ninja Arts also fall under that category to varying degrees. If you ask me, those cards in your Staging Area can, in their own ways, deter your opponent from playing attacks:

a) Living Shadow punishes DOT (damage over time, a.k.a. attack strings over multiple turns) by presenting your opponent with losses often more disadvantageous to them than LS's cost is to its user (card presence/advantage > non-lethal damage), or an ultimatum that can substitute playing your own attacks. The card gets really boss when you attack your opponent's hand/card draw and momentum stack/momentum generation through other routes.

b) Criminal Past punishes your opponent by forcing them to either (greatly) increase their attack's damage as their first enhance or allow their played attack to "equate" to a minimized overall vitality loss. Not only does CP cap or at least restrict your opponent's damage potential, but CP also grants its owner the decision to play a full block from their hand. Other pros to CP include the figurative "negation" of speed bonuses and CC hacks where blocking is concerned.

The result of having even a single ready CP in play when your opponent would attack is that you force them to play your game: they must evaluate (and sometimes agonize) over damage-minimized, guaranteed, "partial" blocks from CP and low risk, no damage, potential, full blocks from your hand. If your opponent doesn't consider this predicament and just continues on with their routine stratagem, you as the player of CP gain an immediate advantage in terms of maximum vs. actual damage potential, which leads to a dominant, game-winning board position. Furthermore, if your opponent does recognize their predicament but fails to conceptualize or materialize an answer/counter-stratagem to your two-pronged defensive, then they will react instinctively, regressing from their pre-conceived game plan to a one-dimensional coping tactic such as purely defensive resource accumulation.

Ultimately, that scenario highlights CP's ability to widen or to create a gap in field presence and playing freedom, which allows CP's owner to assert a dominant position. The card's mere existence in a player's Staging Area forces their opponent into dividing their attention and resources, possibly leading to a fatal misplay. Of course, that case study assumes certain ideal UFS match-ups and opponents, and, as experience has shown me, field presence Control mind games can get terribly complicated and both players are susceptible to fatal misplays when the ball drops.

*Owww! The construction of that paragraph has caused and was achieved through a migraine.*

c) Kazama Ninja Arts essentially eliminates an attack's printed speed at the cost of committing a Foundation (itself). While KNA isn't helpful against F-Spike's multiple copies, KNA makes blocking a viable option in trying times. The card is just plain convenient, completely nullifying some deck's ability to inflict near-fatal damage.

Any card that forces your opponent to play differently than they would prefer, LS, CP, and KNA being exactly that, should not be taken lightly. They possess veritable significance as cards that require your opponent, even skilled opponents, to further divide their anti-control tech (Chester's, commit effects, negation, Olcadan's, etc.), which allows you to gain the upper hand in some control battles by forcing an extra Control effect through. I'll take this moment to annunciate that I have observed a consistency in UFS where two competitive decks often allot the same number of cards to control/anti-control solutions; consequently, both players often end up neutralizing (i.e., committing) each other’s control/anti-control solutions with the only exceptions being real luck in UFS *shock-horror*, discrepancies in player skill, and misplays.

ctr2yellowbird said:

No offense meant. That was an awesome post, but I think it's going to go over far too many people's heads.

ctr2yellowbird said:

Off what symbol spread? Here's the possibilities. You've mentioned Fight or Flight, Darkness Blade and Feline Spike/High Plasma Beam

Only symbol that goes through those cards is Water. Let's see the possible spreads :
All/Water - Rare, and not all that good at the same time.
Good/Water - The ONLY possible and likely viable way to do so, but I'm not convinced that Good is actually good, even in a dual-symbol deck. I've always considered Good to be somewhat the ***** symbol of UFS, it's heyday being OAM/Rolling Storm at one point and after that doing absolutely nothing. I can see Chaos being awesome now. Good? Not so much.
Fire/Water - A spread that doesn't get a lot of support with cards that seemingly don't go together, with the exception maybe of ::Alex::.

So yeah. Perhaps a viable strategy, but the fact that you have to sacrifice your entire deck for it, run from 4-8 1CC with NO 1CC support in sight, makes this a bit iffy. Screw the "a bit", make it a lot iffy.

aslum said:

he broke my brain and showed everyone how awesome Criminal Past was in the same post. That made me very sad...

Although I guess since it wasn't mentioned, it also forces your opponent to play damage pump E:s before they're ready. The best example of this is an Earth Fweem deck. It relies on E commits after the fact to get the damage up to where you want it to be. With Criminal Past out, you're basically stating "do it's E or else I lose 2 vitality and it's completely blocked". That's not even adding off of earth losing the vitality with criminal past then gaining it back with Battle Prowess.

but yeah, use of big words on the internet may cause readers to become confused and angry, subsequently bashing their keyboards and spouting gibberish.

Oh, and as for All/Water not being good, Juni?

quarzark said:

Yah I forgot about her. Guh that deck is beyond dumb. It's better through Order/Water though.

While I never really intend to highjack any thread, I do it all too well... Truth be told, thread-jacking is a communal process. Anyway, I seem to has caused a stir, so I feel obligated to respond now. If anyone wants to right this thread, be my guest.

@Aslum: That's OK. When I get a good idea, I like to roll with it and cultivate it. I've been told that I should write by a few people who I respect, but I often fall short in finding the inspiration or motivation to write my own articles. Therefore, when I develop some fully fleshed out ideas, I would rather explore them to their fullest than let them fade away. I just find that a written record is much more useful than any other and that I would rather share my ideas than keep them to myself.

Anywho, I like your quote snippet. It reminds me of the titles that I would expect to find in so-called scholarly essays, yet, for something communicating such advanced concepts, those titles often fail to deliver any useful, easily-decoded, or direct information about the essay's content. The vaguest title that I have used thus far on a university paper was Experience as Integral to Ambiguity, a paper which I admit was poorly written. I like the contradictions and oxymorons of everyday life because their irony effects some lip-curling on me.

@Man Hat: For some reason, I thought that Dhalsim would have had Good and that Mind Over Matter would also have Good. I guess I was thinking about the wrong Dhalsim, lol. Still, the combo of MOM, FoF, D-Blade, F-Spike, and HPBeam only requires a two symbol split (Good and Water), which is arguably worth the trouble for an end game strategy. However, I admit that a quick search shows me a lack of strong Good/Water or Death/Good (only D-Blade, MOM, and FoF) options in Block 3, so a third symbol is probably required to tie in the first two symbols. Woops...

@quarzark: Why were you sad? I did mention the part about the opponent using an early damage bonus in my first sentence on CP.

Lemme check, the most challenging words that I used were: entrepreneur(ship), causation, bottleneck, proactive, ultimatum, stratagem, conceptualize, materialize, one-dimensional, nullifying, veritable, and discrepancies. Hmm... OK, I was a bit mean, but to be frank, the only words that other people should have had problems with were proactive and causation. Papers become difficult to read not through the use of "big words" but instead through the unusual application of those and simpler words. For the record, I meant to say that LS, CP, and KNA create a stigmatizing effect on the opponent, but I forgot.

Ever since I became a university student, I have significantly lowered my standard on challenging jargon. Be thankful that I am not one of my professors, or else you'd have seen: predation, ambivalent, routinize, pedagogic, dogmatism, and a slew of other eye-stabbingly annoying words. Those examples were just the words that I remember hearing during lectures off the top of my head.

@thread: Just chillax. What FFG does with UFS is much less important than what you do with UFS.

ctr2yellowbird said:

I disagree. I think what the players do is the most important thing. We can't do that w/out the support of FFG, and proper application of the game, and therein lies the problem.

ctr2yellowbird said:

'cause I was hoping CP would slip under the radar until late April so I could play it at my regionals unnoticed . Also, I just totally missed that, but yes, you did mention early damage bonuses.

and the big words thing was me making a joke. If I was being serious I might have instead said your diction would confuse the average internet reader, or at least cause them to tilt their head then re-read your post. The Dhalsim you're thinking of is 5-dot.

ctr2yellowbird said:

@Man Hat: For some reason, I thought that Dhalsim would have had Good and that Mind Over Matter would also have Good. I guess I was thinking about the wrong Dhalsim, lol. Still, the combo of MOM, FoF, D-Blade, F-Spike, and HPBeam only requires a two symbol split (Good and Water), which is arguably worth the trouble for an end game strategy. However, I admit that a quick search shows me a lack of strong Good/Water or Death/Good (only D-Blade, MOM, and FoF) options in Block 3, so a third symbol is probably required to tie in the first two symbols. Woops...

Nah, Dhalsim's main two symbols are Death/Void rather than Death/Good. But yeah I get the strategy, but I wonder if it's : a) viable in a high level environment - b) able to come out frequently.

ctr2yellowbird said:

aslum said:

I think you're deluding yourself.

ctr2yellowbird said:

WOW. I love when people use the word ambivalent. I don't get to hear it enough =D

Also - yes, you SHOULD write.

quarzark said:

Me, too. Criminal Past was one of my favorites from the moment I saw it. It's so ridiculously awesome. Well worth that 3 difficulty. But it makes you wonder why it has a 5 check, when Hulking Brute's two-card draw is a 4.

Hey guys, check out all these big words I know!

MegaGeese said:

Honestly, I'd dare say it's because it could lend itself to moar abuse but when I look at Criminal Past... ugh. If I rework my Rainbow Mika deck in a monoEarth (which is more tempting by the minute because No Memories is NEVER on the table/in your hand when you need it.) I'll definitely include Hulking Brute/Huge Wrestling Army. Criminal Past's cost though... with 26 vit, it leaves me open to a one shot kill of not-so-epic proportions.

Attack, drop a foundation, draw like MAD, hand turn to opponent and proceed to reversal into your finisher like WRESTLER WHO NEVER EXISTED.