9 carrion pigeons – Daze / Island / Leyline of Singularity / Karakas / Meddling Mage Didn't you once say a basic rule of 5CB is that you have to be able to do something on turn 1? Karakas and Daze definitely count, but a faster Mage would have helped.
Listed as 1-4, should be 0-6
mg needs to get stack on the table in order to tie going first, since I can bounce Eater at will. In order to get Stack to stick, he either casts it before or after attempting Chalice for 2. If before, I cast Daze. If he attempts Chalice, I Daze that and play Mage naming Stack on my next turn.
Either this was just an oversight or you were thinking that Chalice for 0 stops Daze's ACC, maybe?
Ugh. It would really be nice to win a game of mafia once in a while...
I have to applaud Loran and AI for pulling off the win via sheer balls. But at the same time a lot of things irritate me. For one, AI was scummy scummy scummy the whole damn game and completely vanished when the spoltight was off of him. Loran started out looking town, but immediately got scummier once he was "confirmed". Yet, nobody bothered to use any kind of investigation on either of them. Gah.
And along those lines, I'm going to call "bastard mod" on one thing: giving BT a potion called "Poisonous Poison" that has the effect of giving night talk. That was the primary reason I felt BT's claim may have been a lie and why I decided to use my one-shot investigation on him. If it hadn't been for that, I would have investigated AI.
I'm also frustrated in how my polyjuice potion plan worked out. Clearly the way to maximize the town's investigative power was to make a polyjuice every night and pass it. The problem was it left the possibility of passing it to mafia (which happened once), and it meant I had to trust others to use it wisely, which no one did. If I had kept them to myself the number of investigations would have been halved, but again AI would have been caught.
I'm not sure I would have made a different call on the last day, because Raf's pish against me/SB was full of so many obviously wrong arguments I probably would have read it as a desperate push against the only other possible player to lynch. But.... HOW THE HECK DID NO ONE KNOW HOW OBVIOUS IT WAS THAT BELLATRIX LESTRANGE WAS IN THE GAME? Snape's death scene made it abundantly clear who did it. Grrrr.
In general, I really did not like how many items had the effect to randomly changed hands when you use it. Granted, it goes a long way to quash breaking the setup and creates an interesting risk/reward tension but it results in a lot of chaos and immensely increases the information advantage the mafia has.
In general I'm happy with the way I played despite how things works out. The only mislynch I really feel bad about was JodoYodo; that was just sheer stupidity from the town. As far as Xyre's lynch went, by the time his lynch was nearing I was pretty convinced he was town but frankly I think he painted himself into a corner and created a situation where it was going to be him or me.
Second of all, it is probably not completely obvious from the design notes Axel provided, but most items were not meant to pass randomly; merely in a manner the town couldn't readily decipher. A couple of them pass randomly, but not many of them. It was my intention in design to make people work to try to figure out how items passed, but the almost instant assumption by most players that items passed randomly combined with the fact that few items actually got used enough for anyone to be able to suspect anything else made that harder than I expected.
Third of all, I need to apologize for not making the "primary user" mechanic more obvious from the start. Axel and I talked about it; ultimately, I went the way I did in the PMs because I didn't want the game to feel too much like Hats Mafia Redux, which was running in Day 1 at the time, and was looking to be seriously abused by the fact that everyone knew their Hat. The fact that so few items were passed during the game was probably a direct result of this attempt to be conservative on my part, and it crippled the town's access to all its best abilities, so I screwed up there.
Fourth of all, yeah, I disappeared for 6 months, hey! Sorry about that. I will probably never play a game of mafia again.
Fifth of all, my thought on this game. 1) Look at the comments the game has garnered since it ended: no one seems at all interested in the flavor, or the game balance, or anything; they're all just talking about how ballsy the mason claim was. I am incredibly disappointed that the game was entirely decided by something that had nothing to do with my design. That's obviously very self-centered of me to say, but the fact that the game was decided by the same mason claim that two scum could have made in any game, seems very much a shame to me. I know it had to happen sometime, but it destroyed so much of what I had tried to put into this game that it felt like I had wasted several dozen hours of my life on what was going to turn out to be a very dull and simplistic game. 2) I made the game with the hope that people would actually be interested in their roles, and went to an extraordinary amount of effort to make sure that people were excited and interested in what was going on with their roles and in the game. So the fact that by the time I disappeared, 1/3 of the players had already replaced out is depressing.
As far as I can tell, nobody make any special effort to learn about the setting or what was going on with their roles, and all the usual suspects got lynched who normally do, with the exceptions of DYH and CC, who both got lynched because they didn't put even their normal amount of effort into the game (CC, I don't know why, and DYH, because he was sulky about having to make a cryptoclaim).
All in all, this game took me from adoring mafia to hating it; I can't imagine ever wanting to play with people who spare so little thought for the game that they don't even bother to experiment with the rules or do anything other than the same completely formulaic, thoughtless approach to the game they always have. And I certainly can't imagine ever wanting to design a game for people like that.
Yeah, it's late. I'm probably going way overboard with whininess. Props to Axel for keeping the game going, and props to SB, who put more thought into the game than any other player. If I offend anyone, know that I don't really mean any of it, and that I'm not talking about you anyway.:p
The one thing that I saw a lot of teams misevaluating in this draft were the nonbasic lands. In cube, you always ends up with tons and tons of playable spells. Lands are very high picks because they will always make your deck, while awesome spell X, unless it's really awesome, is just going to go in a corner with the other cards that have to be cut, because lets face it, they're all awesome. Additionally, nonbasic lands also allow you to play all of your colors much easier by giving you so much flexibility.
That said, I think that this was a large success and it was a lot of fun watching the draft occur. Thanks to Shepherd for making it possible!
We wanted to fraft bouncelands highly, but almost any other mana fixer didn't seem worth the time once we figured we were only going one color. I spent more time fighting to get into another color than anyone else on my team, and even I rarely saw much merit in prioritizing mana fixing over many of the awesome black spells we were seeing.
Also, with sooooo many spells with massive color commitments in them, this was not a format that wants to let you dip into three or more colors, IMO. You'd have to draft a truly enormous number of mana fixers to make a third color attemptable, and by then, you've used up an awful lot of high picks on something that won't necessarily help you win. I wouldn't want to try a lot of colors in this format under almost any circumstances.
Couple of things. First, the vote wouldn't automatically be double. Second, there is a limit to the ability. And third, what about the two days we waste going through with the plan?
They'd only be wasted if neither of you are scum, and even in that worst-case scenario, the consequence is not particularly bad (net loss of one townie via a second nightkill, plus one townie confirmed), especially considering that we have a couple of good vig targets (velict, possibly LfR?).
Your vote would only need to be double towards the endgame anyway, if you can confirm that you're town.
Sorry, just catching up, guys. There are way too many people in this game to keep track of. I was pretty convinced that DC was Tilde until I realized Tilde was in the game. Anyway, if anyone's curious to lookin on this, DC's non-gimmick is someone who uses single quotes rather than regular ones, italicizes long segments of text frequently, and uses tags habitually and expertly. Anyway, I don't really see much merit in that case.
I'll admit that I haven't read everything as thoroughly as I'd like so far, but I'm not quite understanding why bat thinks that Zionite is likely to be scum, when mafia are among the most likely players to have realized there was a night last night. Making the argument that a scum could have failed to notice does nothing to improve this case, unless you can show that a scum is more likely to have failed to notice than a townie, which is obviously false. That is the only point against him, isn't it?
I'd even go so far as to say that Cyan's comment on the scum's knowledge of this point is a tell against Cyan (though an obviously minor one). It's very easy to want to use information as scum to make yourself look particularly observant and helpful, especially when there's a good chance that it won't make any difference, like here. Especially for a player like Cyan, who has a known tendency not to check his facts before giving them, the fact that he put the facts together first seems somewhat more likely to happen as scum than as town.
Still doing some study, though. I'll have more thoughts later.
For the record, I hardly ever post on weekends, and there wasn't anything much to comment on at the end of last week. I don't really feel like I deserved a prod for the game moving slow, and threatening to replace me for not checking the thread for one day that I normally would not have seems a little over the top.
Anyway, it looks like velict hasn't posted recently, which is what is really slowing the game down; I'd still be happy with that lynch. However, I disagree that albi's having claimed is necessarily harmful: following his plan wouldn't be a means of confirming him, it would be a means of confirming spot, who would have a double vote to make up for losing albi.
I like the idea of a confirmed-town double-voter, personally. Even if albi is lying, we end up trading 1-for-1, which isn't a bad deal either. I don't really see a drawback here.
Of course, DD is climbing up my scumdar, too. I wouldn't object to some pressure there, either.
Library played correctly is a ridiculous card, and definitely much better than a Tidings. Most cube players agree that Sol Ring is P1P1 in pretty much every cube, and many of the same people have came to the conclusion that Library is just as ridiculous.
That really depends on the composition of the cube, don't you think? Obviously if you can draft a deck that can keep its hand full, then Library is amazing. I tend to disbelieve that it's a really probable thing in this cube, though.
Say it's a colorless land with no particular benefit maybe 80% of the time, and the other 20% it's a Honden of Seeing Winds for 1 mana per turn. Is it a good card then? Yes. Is it a first pick? Probably not, unless it's a pretty mediocre pack. Deck composition could make it more reliable, but in this cube, not by much.
Another problem with the card is that it can screw up mediocre players a lot more than it can help good players. Holding cards in hand for the benefit of getting more cards in the future is a great way to lose a lot of the time. The times when that would not be the right play if you didn't have Library but is if you do are not that common at all, so will only rarely benefit the player who can recognize those moments, but making the wrong decision either way will make a poorer player's game worse, every time, and it will likely happen a lot.
You can still play spells... you can play one a turn. If you choose to activate the library, you'll just be a land down. You're drawing two cards a turn and playing one land, so if you don't want to discard, you'll have to play spells.
That's not what it does at all.
If it isn't in your opening hand, odds are that it will never do anything at all. It's a fine card, because it's really good if you get it in your opening hand, but you shouldn't pick it highly when the effect is so conditional. I'd pick Tidings over it, assuming I were in blue.
I'm curious if anyone has played against Team B at all? I don't have access to Apprentice or MWS, but I'd be interested to hear how our deck performed.
Thought it lacks the first-turn Stack, I've really taken a liking to this build. It just has so many things it can do, and all of them are really powerful.
vs.
9 carrion pigeons – Daze / Island / Leyline of Singularity / Karakas / Meddling Mage
Didn't you once say a basic rule of 5CB is that you have to be able to do something on turn 1? Karakas and Daze definitely count, but a faster Mage would have helped.
Listed as 1-4, should be 0-6
mg needs to get stack on the table in order to tie going first, since I can bounce Eater at will. In order to get Stack to stick, he either casts it before or after attempting Chalice for 2. If before, I cast Daze. If he attempts Chalice, I Daze that and play Mage naming Stack on my next turn.
Either this was just an oversight or you were thinking that Chalice for 0 stops Daze's ACC, maybe?
First of all: Unctuous Unction, and Unctuous Unction.
Second of all, it is probably not completely obvious from the design notes Axel provided, but most items were not meant to pass randomly; merely in a manner the town couldn't readily decipher. A couple of them pass randomly, but not many of them. It was my intention in design to make people work to try to figure out how items passed, but the almost instant assumption by most players that items passed randomly combined with the fact that few items actually got used enough for anyone to be able to suspect anything else made that harder than I expected.
Third of all, I need to apologize for not making the "primary user" mechanic more obvious from the start. Axel and I talked about it; ultimately, I went the way I did in the PMs because I didn't want the game to feel too much like Hats Mafia Redux, which was running in Day 1 at the time, and was looking to be seriously abused by the fact that everyone knew their Hat. The fact that so few items were passed during the game was probably a direct result of this attempt to be conservative on my part, and it crippled the town's access to all its best abilities, so I screwed up there.
Fourth of all, yeah, I disappeared for 6 months, hey! Sorry about that. I will probably never play a game of mafia again.
Fifth of all, my thought on this game. 1) Look at the comments the game has garnered since it ended: no one seems at all interested in the flavor, or the game balance, or anything; they're all just talking about how ballsy the mason claim was. I am incredibly disappointed that the game was entirely decided by something that had nothing to do with my design. That's obviously very self-centered of me to say, but the fact that the game was decided by the same mason claim that two scum could have made in any game, seems very much a shame to me. I know it had to happen sometime, but it destroyed so much of what I had tried to put into this game that it felt like I had wasted several dozen hours of my life on what was going to turn out to be a very dull and simplistic game. 2) I made the game with the hope that people would actually be interested in their roles, and went to an extraordinary amount of effort to make sure that people were excited and interested in what was going on with their roles and in the game. So the fact that by the time I disappeared, 1/3 of the players had already replaced out is depressing.
As far as I can tell, nobody make any special effort to learn about the setting or what was going on with their roles, and all the usual suspects got lynched who normally do, with the exceptions of DYH and CC, who both got lynched because they didn't put even their normal amount of effort into the game (CC, I don't know why, and DYH, because he was sulky about having to make a cryptoclaim).
All in all, this game took me from adoring mafia to hating it; I can't imagine ever wanting to play with people who spare so little thought for the game that they don't even bother to experiment with the rules or do anything other than the same completely formulaic, thoughtless approach to the game they always have. And I certainly can't imagine ever wanting to design a game for people like that.
Yeah, it's late. I'm probably going way overboard with whininess. Props to Axel for keeping the game going, and props to SB, who put more thought into the game than any other player. If I offend anyone, know that I don't really mean any of it, and that I'm not talking about you anyway.:p
Yeah.
We wanted to fraft bouncelands highly, but almost any other mana fixer didn't seem worth the time once we figured we were only going one color. I spent more time fighting to get into another color than anyone else on my team, and even I rarely saw much merit in prioritizing mana fixing over many of the awesome black spells we were seeing.
Also, with sooooo many spells with massive color commitments in them, this was not a format that wants to let you dip into three or more colors, IMO. You'd have to draft a truly enormous number of mana fixers to make a third color attemptable, and by then, you've used up an awful lot of high picks on something that won't necessarily help you win. I wouldn't want to try a lot of colors in this format under almost any circumstances.
They'd only be wasted if neither of you are scum, and even in that worst-case scenario, the consequence is not particularly bad (net loss of one townie via a second nightkill, plus one townie confirmed), especially considering that we have a couple of good vig targets (velict, possibly LfR?).
Your vote would only need to be double towards the endgame anyway, if you can confirm that you're town.
I'll admit that I haven't read everything as thoroughly as I'd like so far, but I'm not quite understanding why bat thinks that Zionite is likely to be scum, when mafia are among the most likely players to have realized there was a night last night. Making the argument that a scum could have failed to notice does nothing to improve this case, unless you can show that a scum is more likely to have failed to notice than a townie, which is obviously false. That is the only point against him, isn't it?
I'd even go so far as to say that Cyan's comment on the scum's knowledge of this point is a tell against Cyan (though an obviously minor one). It's very easy to want to use information as scum to make yourself look particularly observant and helpful, especially when there's a good chance that it won't make any difference, like here. Especially for a player like Cyan, who has a known tendency not to check his facts before giving them, the fact that he put the facts together first seems somewhat more likely to happen as scum than as town.
Still doing some study, though. I'll have more thoughts later.
Zzzzz.
That's because we haven't lynched Xyre or Cyan yet.
Sorry, catching up from the weekend. I'll have more to post in a bit.
Anyway, it looks like velict hasn't posted recently, which is what is really slowing the game down; I'd still be happy with that lynch. However, I disagree that albi's having claimed is necessarily harmful: following his plan wouldn't be a means of confirming him, it would be a means of confirming spot, who would have a double vote to make up for losing albi.
I like the idea of a confirmed-town double-voter, personally. Even if albi is lying, we end up trading 1-for-1, which isn't a bad deal either. I don't really see a drawback here.
Of course, DD is climbing up my scumdar, too. I wouldn't object to some pressure there, either.
Assuming no, Vote Cyan.
That really depends on the composition of the cube, don't you think? Obviously if you can draft a deck that can keep its hand full, then Library is amazing. I tend to disbelieve that it's a really probable thing in this cube, though.
Say it's a colorless land with no particular benefit maybe 80% of the time, and the other 20% it's a Honden of Seeing Winds for 1 mana per turn. Is it a good card then? Yes. Is it a first pick? Probably not, unless it's a pretty mediocre pack. Deck composition could make it more reliable, but in this cube, not by much.
Another problem with the card is that it can screw up mediocre players a lot more than it can help good players. Holding cards in hand for the benefit of getting more cards in the future is a great way to lose a lot of the time. The times when that would not be the right play if you didn't have Library but is if you do are not that common at all, so will only rarely benefit the player who can recognize those moments, but making the wrong decision either way will make a poorer player's game worse, every time, and it will likely happen a lot.
If it isn't in your opening hand, odds are that it will never do anything at all. It's a fine card, because it's really good if you get it in your opening hand, but you shouldn't pick it highly when the effect is so conditional. I'd pick Tidings over it, assuming I were in blue.
I'm curious if anyone has played against Team B at all? I don't have access to Apprentice or MWS, but I'd be interested to hear how our deck performed.