Keybearer Journal
Volume 4: "Clash of the Titans" Round One By Special Guest, Jaffer Batica
Hello Kingdom Hearts Community!
Welcome to the recap of Round One of our "Clash of the Titans" mini-tournament. For those of you that don't know: after the "Curse of the Heartless" tournament wrapped up, we asked for deck lists of the winning and interesting decks to be sent to us so that we could recreate the decks here in the office and play them against each other.
We received twelve decks:
Deck #1: Dan, from the Diversions tournament in Newbury, Ohio
Deck #2: Brian, from the Rutland Collectibles tournament in Rutland, Vermont
Deck #3: Ethan, from the Comic Carnival South tournament in Indianapolis, Indiana
Deck #4: Nathan, also from the Comic Carnival South tournament
Deck #5: Patrick, from the Gator Games tournament in San Mateo, California
Deck #6: A player who I am choosing to call "The Phantom" because we didn't catch his name, from the Citadel Game Store tournament in Groton, Connecticut
Deck #7: Stevan, from Parts Unknown (a province of Atlantis, I believe)
Deck #8: Chris, from New Zealand
Deck #9: Michael, undefeated man of mystery, also from Parts Unknown (maybe he's Stevan's neighbor in Atlantis)
Deck #10: Keith, from the Dr. No's Comics & Games tournament in Marietta, Georgia
Deck #11: Sarah, also from the Dr. No's Comics & Games tournament
Deck #12: Jonathan, from the Little Shop of Magic tournament in Las Vegas, Nevada
Because these decks were constructed to work with the "Curse of the Heartless" variant , we thought it only fair that we do the same and play by the alternative rules. Most of the decks, all of them really, could play well enough under any conditions.
So, given that "Curse of the Heartless" favored an "aggro" play-style, most of the decks favored the battle strategy: that is, relentlessly challenging your opponent until he or she runs out of Heart Points. Of the decks we received, seven of them used the new Level 3 Riku from A Darkness Awakened. One more deck used the Level 2 Riku promo player card. This is unsurprising, given Level 3 Riku's Attack value of 7 and his ability to wield the deadly Soul Eater.
The remaining four decks fell into the racer category: that is, decks that aimed to get to thirteen levels worth of worlds as fast as possible. These decks used Sora: two merman promo Soras, one Level 1, and one Level 2. These decks concentrated on heavy card draw by way of Bambi, Cid, and Bouncy Wilds, as well as lots of HP raising cards like the Cures and Tinker Bell to hold off an assaulting battle deck.
Because of the importance of the world cards in "Curse of the Heartless," the players took special care to select worlds that would help their overall strategy. While the Light side worlds provided a bonus to Attack and Support values, the battle decks tended to favor Dark side worlds, as more damage could be done in a challenge there:
Riku + Soul Eater + Dark location = –3 HP
Yikes! On the other hand, Atlantica was also a popular choice because Attack cards cannot be played there. Even though it is a Dark world, it limits the the effectiveness of Attack-heavy battle decks.
The tournament, which we are playing in our break room over lunch, is a modified Swiss tournament – that is, three rounds of Swiss pairings, then cutting to the top four, which from there goes to single elimination.
The pairings for the first round were:
Deck 1* vs Deck 12 [battle vs racer]
Deck 2 vs Deck 11* [battle vs battle]
Deck 3 vs Deck 10* [battle vs racer]
Deck 4* vs Deck 9 [battle vs battle]
Deck 5* vs Deck 8 [racer vs battle]
Deck 6 vs Deck 7* [racer vs battle]
(Winners of each match are marked with an asterisk.)
I was pretty surprised to find that, despite the heavy battle deck orientation, the winner's circle, at least for the first round, included two of the four racer decks. The merman Sora promo player card might have contributed to the merman sora promo card.
While an Attack value of 5 isn't exactly world-shaking, it is a slight improvement over Level 1 Sora's Attack value of 4 and allows a player to deal with small things like Bouncy Wilds without too much extra assistance. The main feature of merman Sora is the starting HP of 7, which goes a long way towards surviving the initial attacks of a battle deck. Hercules and Peter Pan were also good, solid choices to help keep the world cards clear.
For me, one of the most interesting combos to arise so far has been Deck 11's "Broom-rush." The deck has 12 Brooms in it (good trading!) and, coupled with Donald Duck, can provide a smashing attack in both battles and challenges. Also, Gravity and Simba seem to strike less fear when, if you have to get rid of a friend, you can choose a Broom and have several more still available.
That's it for this update. It's been a pretty exciting couple of games so far and we'll keep you posted with more tournament updates and more in-depth analysis soon. Keep shuffling!
