Hearthstone runs a ranked constructed ladder each month. I had no chance at all of getting to the top of the ladder in previous months because I simply don't own very many cards. Hearthstone is a game that put a lot of power into the really rare cards. You rarely want to fill a deck up with legendaries since they tend to be higher up on the curve but if you don't have any at all you basically have no late game. It's certainly possible to play a deck that tries to win early and then gives up if it gets stopped but enough people are playing decks that beat those kinds of decks that it's not likely to work to get up to the very top of the ladder. Even if it was, those decks still require a bunch of specific cards and chances are pretty good that I don't have them!
Part of the problem is I didn't really play the game until recently and the packs awarded in draft prizes are exclusively the new set. So I actually have almost a complete set of Goblins vs Gnomes commons, most of the rares, a few of the epics, and I even have 3 of the legendaries. But for the classic set I have 44 commons total and would need 188 to have a complete set of commons. The more rare stuff is really out of reach!
There are three potential solutions to the problem. The first is to pay a bunch of money to buy packs. It's pretty clear this is what Blizzard is hoping I'll do! The second is to get even better at drafting since you can spend the same currency you use to join a draft to buy packs of the classic set. But I'd probably need to pay 40 drafts worth of gold just to come close to having the commons! The third option is to use the crafting system to selectively acquire specific cards that I need. I earn a non-negligible amount of dust by drafting since I have no use for any of the GvG commons other than blowing them up. You can also win 'foil' cards when you do really well in a draft and those blow up for lots of dust! (I imagine many people want the foil cards because they're cool but with a limited collection I'd rather keep 2 copies of a normal version and blow up the foils.)
I've been browsing around decklist sites recently and I've watched a few people who stream constructed and have tried to keep an eye for decks that seem competitive, based mostly on GvG cards, and cheap to fill out the stuff I don't have. I finally found a deck that seemed pretty reasonable. It only runs a single legendary and I've picked up enough dust to be able to buy exactly one legendary. It uses almost exclusively GvG cards because it's a tribal deck based on the new tribe (mechs) introduced in that expansion. It's also a pretty fast beatdown deck trying to win quickly before people with real decks can take control of the game. The one legendary adds in some substantial reach to finish off a game and is pretty crucial to the deck. What he does is gives you a fireball spell card each time you cast any spell with him in play. A lot of the mechs give you 1 casting cost spells when they die and he only costs 7 mana so in the late game it's entirely plausible to play him and immediately pick up 3 new fireball spells. That's 18 points of direct damage to throw out over the next couple turns... If you're close to winning that should seal the deal!
Will this deck be good enough to get to legend rank on the ladder? I have my doubts, but it's worth a shot. I suspect a key to getting to legend is actually having a variety of decks so you can swap up to beat the people who happen to be online at any given time, but that's sure not an option for me at this point in time.
Saturday, January 31, 2015
Friday, January 30, 2015
Tons of Drafts
I haven't actually recorded the gameplay for any Hearthstone drafts recently but I have finished 27 drafts now via the HearthArena website. I guess that means I've managed to 'go infinite', at least in the short term, especially since I have enough gold left to draft 6 more times. In that span I haven't hit a 0 win, 7 win, or 9 win draft. I have had 2 10s, an 11, and 2 12s. Overall I've won a little over 66% of my games, which is way better than I thought I'd do but still worse than the really good people.
I feel like I really should stream some drafts so I can replay my losses. Unfortunately my desktop appears to be dead and I doubt my old laptop can handle streaming. I suspect the issue is catastrophic hard drive failure so I probably need to get a new hard drive before I can get it running again. Possibly all I need to do is reinstall Windows? Either way I'll need to find my Windows disk in storage before I can do much of anything.
One thing I find interesting from my stats is success rates against the different classes. More than a quarter of all my opponents have been mages, and I beat them at about the same rate as my average. Against priests on the other hand I'm under a 40% win rate. I wonder why I'm having such trouble beating priests... Are they just secretly really good? Or are priest decks just well suited to fight the decks I tend to draft? (Which would be aggressive decks full of 2 drops...) My most recent reasonably successful deck was a 10 win deck from yesterday where I went in the other direction and played a ton of expensive things. Including 4 things that cost 8! 3 of them were 8/8 taunters and the other was Kel'Thuzad. The number of times people conceded to Kel'Thuzad was pretty silly. If you don't immediately have a hex or polymorph he pretty much wins the game on the spot. Especially if you've got a big taunter keeping them from just attacking him down! The best part of that deck was actually the 2 innervates which let me start the game with a turn 1 yeti several times. I only drafted druid that one time out of all 27 drafts... I should try to pick druid again soon because it was such an interesting and fun change of pace.
I feel like I really should stream some drafts so I can replay my losses. Unfortunately my desktop appears to be dead and I doubt my old laptop can handle streaming. I suspect the issue is catastrophic hard drive failure so I probably need to get a new hard drive before I can get it running again. Possibly all I need to do is reinstall Windows? Either way I'll need to find my Windows disk in storage before I can do much of anything.
One thing I find interesting from my stats is success rates against the different classes. More than a quarter of all my opponents have been mages, and I beat them at about the same rate as my average. Against priests on the other hand I'm under a 40% win rate. I wonder why I'm having such trouble beating priests... Are they just secretly really good? Or are priest decks just well suited to fight the decks I tend to draft? (Which would be aggressive decks full of 2 drops...) My most recent reasonably successful deck was a 10 win deck from yesterday where I went in the other direction and played a ton of expensive things. Including 4 things that cost 8! 3 of them were 8/8 taunters and the other was Kel'Thuzad. The number of times people conceded to Kel'Thuzad was pretty silly. If you don't immediately have a hex or polymorph he pretty much wins the game on the spot. Especially if you've got a big taunter keeping them from just attacking him down! The best part of that deck was actually the 2 innervates which let me start the game with a turn 1 yeti several times. I only drafted druid that one time out of all 27 drafts... I should try to pick druid again soon because it was such an interesting and fun change of pace.
Thursday, January 29, 2015
Hospital Adventure
Earlier this week I went out to my brother's place to play board games on his birthday. We were starting in on a 3 player game of Dominant Species (hoping that it wouldn't be as painfully long as the 6 player game I'd played previously) when we got some bad news about my dad's health. He needed to go to the hospital so off we went to corral him into a car and drive him over. Now, I'd just switched antidepressants because of the side effects of the first one I tried and the new one had been causing me to not have much energy and to get light headed if I stood up for too long. So while standing in the stairs at my dad's place I felt like I was going to faint. I ended up going back to my brother's couch and took a little nap/passed out.
This isn't such a strange occurrence for me. I've fainted sporadically for my whole life. Mostly when seeing my own blood or when having blood drawn or getting needles... But I know when the fainty feeling is coming on and I now know how to deal with it. In grade 2 I didn't know how to deal with it and ended up cutting my head on a rock when I collapsed but since then I've always been able to protect myself as I go down.
Anyway, by the time I was back on my feet they were off to the hospital. Not too long after that my mother came by and told me I really should go to the hospital too for support. I wasn't feeling faint anymore so I couldn't see any reason to disagree, so off we went. I showed up, talked a bit about my coat zipper being broken, and started to feel light headed again. There weren't any chairs in the emergency room but there was a stool so I tried sitting on that. It didn't help. During this time a nurse came by and told us we were really only supposed to have one visitor at a time. My brother and his fiancee wanted to go eat anyway and I figured a food court would have a bench I could collapse on so we left my sister with my dad and went to find food. Unfortunately I didn't make it...
As we were getting to the door out of the emergency room I realized I'd passed the point of no return and was definitely about to faint. So I said as much and then went to lie down on the floor. I didn't make myself clear (unsurprisingly) and Monica tried to catch me to stop me from lying down. Certainly a good idea if I was falling out of control! But since I was still somewhat in control and was just trying to get down safely it meant I ended up fighting her help. The end result was I ended up falling through the emergency room door instead of lying down nicely before it. Right beside a group of nurses/medics. Who were a little alarmed to see someone who was unnaturally pale collapse onto the floor through a door! I tried to fend them off but by that point I was pretty much out cold.
I woke up to find myself on a stretcher with a bunch of people yelling questions at me and trying to take off my clothes. DO YOU KNOW YOUR NAME? WHAT DAY IS IT? WE'RE GIVING YOUR WALLET TO YOUR SISTER! I pieced together what had happened but it didn't much matter. They weren't going to let me go without doing their best to figure out what went wrong with me.
On the one hand this is something I've always done, my doctor has never been concerned about it, and I felt like I was being a bother having them run tests on me likely wasting their time, my time, and my family's time. (Especially since they should have been focusing on my father who was actually hurt!) On the other hand maybe there was something bad about my health and one of these tests would clue me into something serious that might be dealt with by catching it now. So while I felt silly I let them do what they wanted. And they sure wanted to do a lot... Cardiogram, chest x-rays, blood tests, urine tests, more blood pressure tests than I can count, reflex tests, strength tests... Even an IV!
Annoyingly my father managed to get himself checked out and ran off in the middle of his tests. Possibly because everyone else was stretched between the two of us instead of just being with him. So not only was I not any help at all, I was probably actively detrimental by showing up. Boo!
Anyway, all my tests came back clear. The doctor said she'd normally want to keep someone who fainted overnight for observation but she couldn't actually see anything wrong with me and was willing to accept my story that I've just always been someone who faints. New medication, stressful situation, historical precedence... Whatever it was, it didn't seem like anything was actually wrong with me so she let me go. The one thing they did find that was a little out of the ordinary was that I was a little dehydrated so they pumped me full of water from an IV before letting me go. Dehydration is a typical side effect of my new drug and I hadn't been able to drink much while being poked and prodded so not much surprise there, really.
Even though nothing came up I am still happy they went through the effort. They might have caught something serious, and all it really cost me was 5 hours of my time and some extra travel/worrying for my mother. And who knows what for my father since he ran away from his own tests...
This isn't such a strange occurrence for me. I've fainted sporadically for my whole life. Mostly when seeing my own blood or when having blood drawn or getting needles... But I know when the fainty feeling is coming on and I now know how to deal with it. In grade 2 I didn't know how to deal with it and ended up cutting my head on a rock when I collapsed but since then I've always been able to protect myself as I go down.
Anyway, by the time I was back on my feet they were off to the hospital. Not too long after that my mother came by and told me I really should go to the hospital too for support. I wasn't feeling faint anymore so I couldn't see any reason to disagree, so off we went. I showed up, talked a bit about my coat zipper being broken, and started to feel light headed again. There weren't any chairs in the emergency room but there was a stool so I tried sitting on that. It didn't help. During this time a nurse came by and told us we were really only supposed to have one visitor at a time. My brother and his fiancee wanted to go eat anyway and I figured a food court would have a bench I could collapse on so we left my sister with my dad and went to find food. Unfortunately I didn't make it...
As we were getting to the door out of the emergency room I realized I'd passed the point of no return and was definitely about to faint. So I said as much and then went to lie down on the floor. I didn't make myself clear (unsurprisingly) and Monica tried to catch me to stop me from lying down. Certainly a good idea if I was falling out of control! But since I was still somewhat in control and was just trying to get down safely it meant I ended up fighting her help. The end result was I ended up falling through the emergency room door instead of lying down nicely before it. Right beside a group of nurses/medics. Who were a little alarmed to see someone who was unnaturally pale collapse onto the floor through a door! I tried to fend them off but by that point I was pretty much out cold.
I woke up to find myself on a stretcher with a bunch of people yelling questions at me and trying to take off my clothes. DO YOU KNOW YOUR NAME? WHAT DAY IS IT? WE'RE GIVING YOUR WALLET TO YOUR SISTER! I pieced together what had happened but it didn't much matter. They weren't going to let me go without doing their best to figure out what went wrong with me.
On the one hand this is something I've always done, my doctor has never been concerned about it, and I felt like I was being a bother having them run tests on me likely wasting their time, my time, and my family's time. (Especially since they should have been focusing on my father who was actually hurt!) On the other hand maybe there was something bad about my health and one of these tests would clue me into something serious that might be dealt with by catching it now. So while I felt silly I let them do what they wanted. And they sure wanted to do a lot... Cardiogram, chest x-rays, blood tests, urine tests, more blood pressure tests than I can count, reflex tests, strength tests... Even an IV!
Annoyingly my father managed to get himself checked out and ran off in the middle of his tests. Possibly because everyone else was stretched between the two of us instead of just being with him. So not only was I not any help at all, I was probably actively detrimental by showing up. Boo!
Anyway, all my tests came back clear. The doctor said she'd normally want to keep someone who fainted overnight for observation but she couldn't actually see anything wrong with me and was willing to accept my story that I've just always been someone who faints. New medication, stressful situation, historical precedence... Whatever it was, it didn't seem like anything was actually wrong with me so she let me go. The one thing they did find that was a little out of the ordinary was that I was a little dehydrated so they pumped me full of water from an IV before letting me go. Dehydration is a typical side effect of my new drug and I hadn't been able to drink much while being poked and prodded so not much surprise there, really.
Even though nothing came up I am still happy they went through the effort. They might have caught something serious, and all it really cost me was 5 hours of my time and some extra travel/worrying for my mother. And who knows what for my father since he ran away from his own tests...
Wednesday, January 28, 2015
Bridge Match 3 - Board 54
Board 54 - Dealer East - EW Vul
Opponents convention card: Bridge World Standard
Opponents playing strength: Good
My hand: ♠ 8 6 4 ♥ 9 7 2 ♦ A 3 ♣ K T 9 6 5
West opens 1 club in 3rd seat. Partner bids 1 diamond. East bids 1 spade. With no real red suit to speak of I can't really bid here, so I pass. West bids 1NT which gets passed around to me. I wonder if 2 clubs would make sense as a bid here... They're not playing doubleton club so probably not? Sure, let's play 1NT.
Partner leads the T of diamonds.
T-J-A-7. Partner should have at least 5 diamonds for his overcall which means I should really return a diamond and hope he has an entry somewhere else. 3-4-K-6. 9-Q-2 of hearts-2. Declarer shifts to hearts. 4-7-A-6. And then to spades. 9-2-3-4. I don't like when the 9 wins a trick... And another. T-Q-K-6. Declarer then cashes a heart and 3 spades. Partner didn't keep a 5th diamond so he has to give them the A of clubs at the end. Making 3.
There are a wide variety of results this time around. EW played all the contracts with 3 people making 4 spades, 1 person going down 1 in 4 spades, 1 person is 2 spades making 4, 2 people in 1NT making 4, and us in 1NT making 3. This means we get 12 MPs! Mostly because declarer screwed up and gave us an extra trick for no reason, but I'll take it.
Jack agrees with me all the way!
Ranking after board 54/60: 8/16 with 51.06%
Opponents convention card: Bridge World Standard
Opponents playing strength: Good
My hand: ♠ 8 6 4 ♥ 9 7 2 ♦ A 3 ♣ K T 9 6 5
West opens 1 club in 3rd seat. Partner bids 1 diamond. East bids 1 spade. With no real red suit to speak of I can't really bid here, so I pass. West bids 1NT which gets passed around to me. I wonder if 2 clubs would make sense as a bid here... They're not playing doubleton club so probably not? Sure, let's play 1NT.
Partner leads the T of diamonds.
| NORTH ♦ T | ||
| EAST ♠ A K 7 5 3 ♥ 8 5 4 ♦ Q J 6 ♣ 7 2 | ||
| SOUTH ♠ 8 6 4 ♥ 9 7 2 ♦ A 3 ♣ K T 9 6 5 |
| West | North | East | South |
| Pass | Pass | ||
| 1♣ | 1♦ | 1♠ | Pass |
| 1NT | Pass | Pass | Pass |
T-J-A-7. Partner should have at least 5 diamonds for his overcall which means I should really return a diamond and hope he has an entry somewhere else. 3-4-K-6. 9-Q-2 of hearts-2. Declarer shifts to hearts. 4-7-A-6. And then to spades. 9-2-3-4. I don't like when the 9 wins a trick... And another. T-Q-K-6. Declarer then cashes a heart and 3 spades. Partner didn't keep a 5th diamond so he has to give them the A of clubs at the end. Making 3.
| NORTH ♠ Q 2 ♥ Q J 6 ♦ K T 9 8 5 ♣ J 8 4 | ||
| WEST ♠ J T 9 ♥ A K T 3 ♦ 7 4 2 ♣ A Q 3 | EAST ♠ A K 7 5 3 ♥ 8 5 4 ♦ Q J 6 ♣ 7 2 | |
| SOUTH ♠ 8 6 4 ♥ 9 7 2 ♦ A 3 ♣ K T 9 6 5 |
Jack agrees with me all the way!
Ranking after board 54/60: 8/16 with 51.06%
Tuesday, January 27, 2015
Bridge Match 3 - Board 53
Board 53 - Dealer North - NS Vul
Opponents convention card: Bridge World Standard
Opponents playing strength: Good
My hand: ♠ 2 ♥ 9 8 7 2 ♦ 7 6 3 ♣ A 9 7 6 4
West opens 1 spade in 4th seat. Partner doubles and East bids 2NT which is alerted as a constructive raise. My hand is not great, but we probably have a double fit. And I do want partner to know what suit to lead. So I bid 3 clubs. West bids 4 clubs showing a control in clubs for spades. East retreats to 4 spades and that's where they stay.
Partner leads the Q of clubs.
This shouldn't be a Rusinov lead since I bid the suit, but I bet Jack thinks it is. I'm pretty sure West has a void here, but I guess it could be stiff king? If it is then popping the ace sets up the jack on dummy anyway, so I play low. Q-2-7-7 of spades. Then they start taking tricks and never stop. Making 7.
Every table had 13 tricks taken in spades. 2 tables bid up to a small slam, 3 stopped in 5 spades, and 3 stopped in 4 spades. So we get 9 MPs here.
Jack doesn't like my 3 club bid and wants me to pass. He then wanted me to win the A of clubs on the first trick. Which makes no sense, since he had the KQ. Either he should lead the Q and be happy with my duck or he should lead the K to remove the ambiguity. Leading the Q and yelling at me for ducking is stupid.
Ranking after board 53/60: 9/16 with 50.4%
Opponents convention card: Bridge World Standard
Opponents playing strength: Good
My hand: ♠ 2 ♥ 9 8 7 2 ♦ 7 6 3 ♣ A 9 7 6 4
West opens 1 spade in 4th seat. Partner doubles and East bids 2NT which is alerted as a constructive raise. My hand is not great, but we probably have a double fit. And I do want partner to know what suit to lead. So I bid 3 clubs. West bids 4 clubs showing a control in clubs for spades. East retreats to 4 spades and that's where they stay.
Partner leads the Q of clubs.
| NORTH ♣ Q | ||
| EAST ♠ A 8 6 4 ♥ K 4 3 ♦ K T ♣ J 8 3 2 | ||
| SOUTH ♠ 2 ♥ 9 8 7 2 ♦ 7 6 3 ♣ A 9 7 6 4 |
| West | North | East | South |
| Pass | Pass | Pass | |
| 1♠ | Double | 2NT1 | 3♣ |
| 4♣2 | Pass | 4♠ | Pass |
| Pass | Pass | ||
| 1Constructive raise | |||
| 2Control in clubs for spades | |||
This shouldn't be a Rusinov lead since I bid the suit, but I bet Jack thinks it is. I'm pretty sure West has a void here, but I guess it could be stiff king? If it is then popping the ace sets up the jack on dummy anyway, so I play low. Q-2-7-7 of spades. Then they start taking tricks and never stop. Making 7.
| NORTH ♠ K T ♥ Q J T 6 ♦ 9 5 4 ♣ K Q T 5 | ||
| WEST ♠ Q J 9 7 5 3 ♥ A 5 ♦ A Q J 8 2 ♣ | EAST ♠ A 8 6 4 ♥ K 4 3 ♦ K T ♣ J 8 3 2 | |
| SOUTH ♠ 2 ♥ 9 8 7 2 ♦ 7 6 3 ♣ A 9 7 6 4 |
Jack doesn't like my 3 club bid and wants me to pass. He then wanted me to win the A of clubs on the first trick. Which makes no sense, since he had the KQ. Either he should lead the Q and be happy with my duck or he should lead the K to remove the ambiguity. Leading the Q and yelling at me for ducking is stupid.
Ranking after board 53/60: 9/16 with 50.4%
Monday, January 26, 2015
Bridge Match 3 - Board 52
Board 52 - Dealer West - All Vul
Opponents convention card: Majeure cinquième
Opponents playing strength: Advanced
My hand: ♠ A Q J 8 ♥ 7 2 ♦ A K 8 ♣ K 7 4 2
Partner opens 3 hearts in 2nd chair. Unfortunately it looks like I'm the one he preempted. I have a 17 count and stoppers in all the other suits. If partner has any outside entry, or a solid heart suit, then 3NT should be a good place. 4 hearts is probably a good place too, especially if partner doesn't have an outside entry. Would he know to pull out of 3NT if he has noentry? I hope so. I bid 3NT, he pulls to 4 hearts, and everyone passes.
East leads the J of diamonds.
Well, it turns out Qx of diamonds was an entry but he couldn't have known that. I have 2 club losers, 1 spade loser, and 1 heart loser. I can pitch one of those on my 3rd diamond though, so we're all good. Actually, I can possibly take lots of extra spade tricks too? And it's actually safe to finesse into West's hand since he has to lead up to my club K. At least, it will be safe after I draw trump. So my plan here is to win this trick with the Q, draw trump, and see what happens. If they take 2 club tricks then I'll just pitch my second spade on diamonds.
Hmm. East actually shows out of hearts on the first trick. So West has AT93. Which means I have another trump loser. West then cashes the A of clubs, setting up my K. Then he throws me back into my hand with a diamond. Which actually means I can cash out. Pitch a spade on the next diamond, then draw trump, lose one more heart, and be up.
Making 4.
Everyone played 4 hearts. 3 of us made, 3 went down 1, and 2 went up 1. So we get 8MPs on this hand.
Jack disagrees with my 3NT bid. He says it isn't bad, but that we should play 4 hearts because we have a fit. That's fair, but I do think starting with 3NT opens up the chance of getting a top board (with +10 points for playing in NT) as long as partner's on the same wavelength.
Ranking after board 52/60: 9/16 with 50.14%
Opponents convention card: Majeure cinquième
Opponents playing strength: Advanced
My hand: ♠ A Q J 8 ♥ 7 2 ♦ A K 8 ♣ K 7 4 2
Partner opens 3 hearts in 2nd chair. Unfortunately it looks like I'm the one he preempted. I have a 17 count and stoppers in all the other suits. If partner has any outside entry, or a solid heart suit, then 3NT should be a good place. 4 hearts is probably a good place too, especially if partner doesn't have an outside entry. Would he know to pull out of 3NT if he has noentry? I hope so. I bid 3NT, he pulls to 4 hearts, and everyone passes.
East leads the J of diamonds.
| NORTH ♠ T 3 ♥ K Q J 8 6 5 4 ♦ Q 6 ♣ 9 8 | ||
| EAST ♦ J | ||
| SOUTH ♠ A Q J 8 ♥ 7 2 ♦ A K 8 ♣ K 7 4 2 |
| West | North | East | South |
| Pass | 3♥ | Pass | 3NT |
| Pass | 4♥ | Pass | Pass |
| Pass |
Well, it turns out Qx of diamonds was an entry but he couldn't have known that. I have 2 club losers, 1 spade loser, and 1 heart loser. I can pitch one of those on my 3rd diamond though, so we're all good. Actually, I can possibly take lots of extra spade tricks too? And it's actually safe to finesse into West's hand since he has to lead up to my club K. At least, it will be safe after I draw trump. So my plan here is to win this trick with the Q, draw trump, and see what happens. If they take 2 club tricks then I'll just pitch my second spade on diamonds.
Hmm. East actually shows out of hearts on the first trick. So West has AT93. Which means I have another trump loser. West then cashes the A of clubs, setting up my K. Then he throws me back into my hand with a diamond. Which actually means I can cash out. Pitch a spade on the next diamond, then draw trump, lose one more heart, and be up.
Making 4.
| NORTH ♠ T 3 ♥ K Q J 8 6 5 4 ♦ Q 6 ♣ 9 8 | ||
| WEST ♠ 6 2 ♥ A T 9 3 ♦ 7 3 2 ♣ A T 6 5 | EAST ♠ K 9 7 5 4 ♥ ♦ J T 9 5 4 ♣ Q J 3 | |
| SOUTH ♠ A Q J 8 ♥ 7 2 ♦ A K 8 ♣ K 7 4 2 |
Jack disagrees with my 3NT bid. He says it isn't bad, but that we should play 4 hearts because we have a fit. That's fair, but I do think starting with 3NT opens up the chance of getting a top board (with +10 points for playing in NT) as long as partner's on the same wavelength.
Ranking after board 52/60: 9/16 with 50.14%
Sunday, January 25, 2015
Bridge Match 3 - Board 51
Board 51 - Dealer South - EW Vul
Opponents convention card: Majeure cinquième
Opponents playing strength: Advanced
My hand: ♠ T 8 4 ♥ 9 3 ♦ J 7 6 ♣ A Q T 9 7
West opens 1 diamond in second seat, partner doubles, and East bids 1 spade. I've got something worth telling partner about so I bid 2 clubs. It gets passed back around to East who bids 2 diamonds. Which gets passed out.
Partner leads the 4 of clubs.
4-3-A-2. I can play more clubs and try to run dummy out of trump but that feels wrong. I can draw trump first? Or I can hope from the bidding that partner has good hearts and wants me to return them through declarer. That sounds like a plan. 9-5-K-7. Partner cashes another heart. A-8-3-2. And then he hooks me up with a ruff. T-J-6 of diamonds-4.
Ok, it feels like declarer should have the Q of hearts still, so I want to get into partner's hand for him to pound through another heart for me to ruff. (Or at least force dummy to ruff high and maybe get a trump promotion for partner.) Clubs is really the best bet for having that happen, and I want to make sure partner takes the trick, so I lead low. 7-K-8-6. Oh well. Declarer draws two rounds of trump and then plays a spade to partner's ace. And then declarer is up. Making 2.
One NS pair made 3 clubs. 1 EW pair went down 1 in 3 diamonds. 5 made 2 diamonds, and 1 made 2 diamonds up 1. So we get 6 MPs for being in the big tie in the middle. I wish Jack followed the law since he really should have raised my 2 club bid to 3 which was the winning play on this board.
Jack disagrees with my pass over 2 diamonds. He wants me to bid 3 clubs on my own. I don't think it's my position to be making that bid. There's no reason to assume his double of 1 diamond actually shows 4 clubs. It's much safer for me to bid clubs once and then let him take over if he likes clubs.
Ranking after board 51/60: 9/16 with 50%
Opponents convention card: Majeure cinquième
Opponents playing strength: Advanced
My hand: ♠ T 8 4 ♥ 9 3 ♦ J 7 6 ♣ A Q T 9 7
West opens 1 diamond in second seat, partner doubles, and East bids 1 spade. I've got something worth telling partner about so I bid 2 clubs. It gets passed back around to East who bids 2 diamonds. Which gets passed out.
Partner leads the 4 of clubs.
| NORTH ♣ 4 | ||
| EAST ♠ K Q 8 7 2 ♥ J 8 7 ♦ K 9 5 ♣ 6 3 | ||
| SOUTH ♠ T 8 4 ♥ 9 3 ♦ J 7 6 ♣ A Q T 9 7 |
| West | North | East | South |
| Pass | |||
| 1♦ | Pass | 1♠ | 2♣ |
| Pass | Pass | 2♦ | Pass |
| Pass | Pass |
4-3-A-2. I can play more clubs and try to run dummy out of trump but that feels wrong. I can draw trump first? Or I can hope from the bidding that partner has good hearts and wants me to return them through declarer. That sounds like a plan. 9-5-K-7. Partner cashes another heart. A-8-3-2. And then he hooks me up with a ruff. T-J-6 of diamonds-4.
Ok, it feels like declarer should have the Q of hearts still, so I want to get into partner's hand for him to pound through another heart for me to ruff. (Or at least force dummy to ruff high and maybe get a trump promotion for partner.) Clubs is really the best bet for having that happen, and I want to make sure partner takes the trick, so I lead low. 7-K-8-6. Oh well. Declarer draws two rounds of trump and then plays a spade to partner's ace. And then declarer is up. Making 2.
| NORTH ♠ A J 3 ♥ A K T 6 ♦ 8 4 ♣ J 8 5 4 | ||
| WEST ♠ 6 5 ♥ Q 5 4 2 ♦ A Q T 3 2 ♣ K 2 | EAST ♠ K Q 8 7 2 ♥ J 8 7 ♦ K 9 5 ♣ 6 3 | |
| SOUTH ♠ T 8 4 ♥ 9 3 ♦ J 7 6 ♣ A Q T 9 7 |
Jack disagrees with my pass over 2 diamonds. He wants me to bid 3 clubs on my own. I don't think it's my position to be making that bid. There's no reason to assume his double of 1 diamond actually shows 4 clubs. It's much safer for me to bid clubs once and then let him take over if he likes clubs.
Ranking after board 51/60: 9/16 with 50%
Friday, January 23, 2015
The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
Tomorrow will feature the second race in the series of three being put on by the speedrun racing site SpeedRunsLive. The whole thing is flying under the banner of 'get yourself speedrunning' and I was really hoping these races would exist to help bootstrap people into speedrunning, but it turns out that isn't really the case. Anyone can create a race in SRL for pretty much any game as long as they have an opponent lined up so the only things that actually seem special about these races are that they have a scheduled start time and there's a stream running with commentary on the top players.
What I was hoping would happen would be that there'd be a lot of information easily available to let people know what sorts of things they should be doing in these games. A 'cheat sheet' if you will of the core tricks to the game and a sample route to follow. The Mario 3 one eventually had a route put up in a pastebin document. It was a good start, but there was no mention that such a thing existed on the website or in the main IRC channel. Or if there was I sure didn't see it. I only found out it existed when I joined the race specific channel an hour before it started and the link was in the topic. I didn't set aside any time to practice but part of that was not knowing what I should even be practicing. If I'd had that document in advance I'd have been more encouraged to at least do a trial run.
I have done some research and practice for the Zelda race. It's much shorter than the Mario 3 race (it only covers the very start of the game up until you get the Master Sword which is right after the 3 pendant dungeons) which is nice. But I wasn't sure what I could or should be doing. The rules for the race are rather cryptic to the uninitiated:
Rules: S&Q allowed. Glitches banned: EG, YBA, OoB.
Ok... What is S&Q? What is EG? YBA? OoB? What run should I watch to model my game after? Are they abiding by those rules?
S&Q it turns out is the 'Save & Quit' option in the game. This lets you essentially teleport to any of the starting locations in the game which is rather convenient once you've finished a dungeon. Instead of walking to the next dungeon you warp back to your house and take the shorter route. It's not clear to me why people would run without using this option but apparently people do.
OoB stands for Out of Bounds. EG stands for Exploration Glitch. YBA stands for Yuzuhara's Bottle Adventure. All three are ways to skip past large chunks of the game. OoB is clipping through walls to take shortcuts. EG is an extreme form of OoB where you end up getting onto another layer entirely. This lets you walk anywhere on the map. Different dungeons and stuff are all actually just on one big map in memory (or two?) so with this glitch you can pretty much walk to anywhere you want as long as the destination has a way to end the glitch (a cliff of some sort to jump down I think). YBA is a crazy glitch where you use a potion in a bottle on a screen transition to rewrite stuff in memory to do all kinds of crazy things. Like getting the flute well before you should have it, which lets you warp to places you shouldn't be able to reach.
So basically they're banning all the things that let you skip parts of the game. Sort of like how in Mario 3 they banned the warp whistle but still let you use p-wings and clouds to skip/cheat your way through individual levels. With a whistle you skip entire worlds in one action and that's not good for a nostalgia run. In Zelda they ban all the weird glitches but they let you warp back to your starting point. That only cuts out some boring running around on the world map.
I couldn't find any routes for this category anywhere so what I did was watched a bunch of different videos people had posted for categories that sounded like they could be this one. They had enough similarities that I got a pretty good idea of what I'd need to do. Because you aren't using any crazy glitches you need to do the dungeons in order. You need the running boots from dungeon one to knock down the book to enter dungeon two. You need the gloves from dungeon two to pick up a rock on the way to dungeon three. Then the only thing left to do is run into the forest and pick up the sword. I saw one guy who went and got an optional ice rod to help kill the bosses but most people skipped that. It seemed like the only optional thing most people did was pick up the heart from a chest in the sanctuary you take Zelda to at the start of the game.
There are still all sorts of tricks to cut frames out by walking on some diagonals and people plan out specific arrow usages so they know how many pots they need to pick up. I'm a bad aim so I need to pick up all the arrows I can find!
I did a test run this morning and got done in a little over an hour. Real people finish in 23 minutes (or maybe less now... who knows how good the people I watched actually are) so this was already a better ratio than my Mario 3 run. And I got lost lots, and got knocked out of the third boss fight several times. I expect to do much better in the actual race.
And maybe they're intentionally making it hard to find this stuff. That's what speedrunning is... Find different tricks and glitches from a wide variety of sources and watch the people who claim to be good to see what they do. Try to copy it. When you're good enough to do what they do then you can tinker with ways to make it faster by doing different things. Which you either find yourself through insane amounts of trial and error or you find by watching other people in the hopes they stumble across something new.
I'm definitely going to get up in time for the Zelda race tomorrow. But after how much effort it took this week to find what I needed to do in a game I understand I feel like trying for the Sonic one next week is probably crazy. Maybe I could show up and expect to come last? I don't want to show up and end up forfeiting though, so that may well come down to if I think I'll be awake for 6+ hours after it starts.
I may even practice more in the morning... I didn't get any ranking points for coming 91st in Mario 3, but I feel like I could probably do well enough in Zelda to get some ranking points. Assuming as many random new players show up as last time, anyway! I don't think ranking points really do anything but they're a number that I could make get bigger, so I must make it bigger!
What I was hoping would happen would be that there'd be a lot of information easily available to let people know what sorts of things they should be doing in these games. A 'cheat sheet' if you will of the core tricks to the game and a sample route to follow. The Mario 3 one eventually had a route put up in a pastebin document. It was a good start, but there was no mention that such a thing existed on the website or in the main IRC channel. Or if there was I sure didn't see it. I only found out it existed when I joined the race specific channel an hour before it started and the link was in the topic. I didn't set aside any time to practice but part of that was not knowing what I should even be practicing. If I'd had that document in advance I'd have been more encouraged to at least do a trial run.
I have done some research and practice for the Zelda race. It's much shorter than the Mario 3 race (it only covers the very start of the game up until you get the Master Sword which is right after the 3 pendant dungeons) which is nice. But I wasn't sure what I could or should be doing. The rules for the race are rather cryptic to the uninitiated:
Rules: S&Q allowed. Glitches banned: EG, YBA, OoB.
Ok... What is S&Q? What is EG? YBA? OoB? What run should I watch to model my game after? Are they abiding by those rules?
S&Q it turns out is the 'Save & Quit' option in the game. This lets you essentially teleport to any of the starting locations in the game which is rather convenient once you've finished a dungeon. Instead of walking to the next dungeon you warp back to your house and take the shorter route. It's not clear to me why people would run without using this option but apparently people do.
OoB stands for Out of Bounds. EG stands for Exploration Glitch. YBA stands for Yuzuhara's Bottle Adventure. All three are ways to skip past large chunks of the game. OoB is clipping through walls to take shortcuts. EG is an extreme form of OoB where you end up getting onto another layer entirely. This lets you walk anywhere on the map. Different dungeons and stuff are all actually just on one big map in memory (or two?) so with this glitch you can pretty much walk to anywhere you want as long as the destination has a way to end the glitch (a cliff of some sort to jump down I think). YBA is a crazy glitch where you use a potion in a bottle on a screen transition to rewrite stuff in memory to do all kinds of crazy things. Like getting the flute well before you should have it, which lets you warp to places you shouldn't be able to reach.
So basically they're banning all the things that let you skip parts of the game. Sort of like how in Mario 3 they banned the warp whistle but still let you use p-wings and clouds to skip/cheat your way through individual levels. With a whistle you skip entire worlds in one action and that's not good for a nostalgia run. In Zelda they ban all the weird glitches but they let you warp back to your starting point. That only cuts out some boring running around on the world map.
I couldn't find any routes for this category anywhere so what I did was watched a bunch of different videos people had posted for categories that sounded like they could be this one. They had enough similarities that I got a pretty good idea of what I'd need to do. Because you aren't using any crazy glitches you need to do the dungeons in order. You need the running boots from dungeon one to knock down the book to enter dungeon two. You need the gloves from dungeon two to pick up a rock on the way to dungeon three. Then the only thing left to do is run into the forest and pick up the sword. I saw one guy who went and got an optional ice rod to help kill the bosses but most people skipped that. It seemed like the only optional thing most people did was pick up the heart from a chest in the sanctuary you take Zelda to at the start of the game.
There are still all sorts of tricks to cut frames out by walking on some diagonals and people plan out specific arrow usages so they know how many pots they need to pick up. I'm a bad aim so I need to pick up all the arrows I can find!
I did a test run this morning and got done in a little over an hour. Real people finish in 23 minutes (or maybe less now... who knows how good the people I watched actually are) so this was already a better ratio than my Mario 3 run. And I got lost lots, and got knocked out of the third boss fight several times. I expect to do much better in the actual race.
And maybe they're intentionally making it hard to find this stuff. That's what speedrunning is... Find different tricks and glitches from a wide variety of sources and watch the people who claim to be good to see what they do. Try to copy it. When you're good enough to do what they do then you can tinker with ways to make it faster by doing different things. Which you either find yourself through insane amounts of trial and error or you find by watching other people in the hopes they stumble across something new.
I'm definitely going to get up in time for the Zelda race tomorrow. But after how much effort it took this week to find what I needed to do in a game I understand I feel like trying for the Sonic one next week is probably crazy. Maybe I could show up and expect to come last? I don't want to show up and end up forfeiting though, so that may well come down to if I think I'll be awake for 6+ hours after it starts.
I may even practice more in the morning... I didn't get any ranking points for coming 91st in Mario 3, but I feel like I could probably do well enough in Zelda to get some ranking points. Assuming as many random new players show up as last time, anyway! I don't think ranking points really do anything but they're a number that I could make get bigger, so I must make it bigger!
Thursday, January 22, 2015
What People Watch
For the last week or so I've been putting a lot of thought into what people actually want to watch. I had a couple 'random' people show up to watch me stream Binding of Isaac. I'm not very good at that game. I like playing it, and I win some of the time, but I'm nowhere near as good as the people I've seen who are doing speed runs or no reset hard mode Eden streaks. One of the guys I watch can recite the exact stats of every item when he picks it up! I struggle to remember approximately what most of the things do. I wouldn't want to watch me play Isaac, not compared to some of the other options that are out there. Yet one of those random people came back on a later day looking for more.
Recently I had an article linked to me about YouTube revenue stats. The top earner last year brought in almost 5 million dollars just from ad revenue. She has 3.5 million subscribers and her videos have almost 4.8 BILLION views. What does she do in these videos? Open Disney branded children's toys. The description sounded pretty banal to me so I went and watched one of them. It really was just a set of hands working to pull a toy set out of the packaging. The commentary assumed a certain level of familiarity with Disney movies and toys but seemed to do a good job of explaining the bits. She even made some extra dresses for some of the dolls out of Play-Doh.
I don't get it. But then I realized that in order to watch that video I had to mute a stream I was watching of some guy who was good but not great at HearthStone. I'm sure a lot of the people interested in watching dolls get taken out of the packaging wouldn't find an online CCG to be terribly compelling. And probably a fair number of the people who watch The Bachelor or Monday Night Football wouldn't understand what the doll packaging people or the Hearthstone people find compelling about their chosen content either. Heck, my mother watches people make stuff with looms!
This isn't to say that the people who like watching Disney toys get unboxed are bad in any way. It's just that I personally don't understand the appeal of it. I never in a million years would have thought to tape myself opening boxes and then make millions of dollars each year. Now there's absolutely a ton of other work that went into this particular lady's success I'm sure. Marketing and production values and having a consistent brand image and a ton of work setting stuff up. For that matter I don't understand how someone can just play Final Fantasy games and get paid a reasonable amount of cash but that's exactly what the two guys in the Final Fantasy Month did. In that case they've actually been averaging more than 10 hours a day every single day for almost 2 months now... So if they make 6k doing it that's a fine thing. Not millions, but also not needing to eat just noodles every day. But even then... I was watching these guys play but I still didn't pay them any money. I didn't watch any ads. I'm not sure what they could do to have me want to throw some money their way. But plenty of other people did!
I guess what I'm trying to say is I don't understand people at all. I have a hard enough time trying to understand why I want to watch the things I want to watch. Trying to figure out what other people will watch is an unfathomable mystery...
I've been told a couple times now that I could probably get a reasonably popular stream going if I worked at it. What would need to be worked on is certainly a matter of debate though. Do I need to be willing to talk to most of the people in chat? Some of them? Any of them at all? Would I need to be a jerk? My brother seemed to think that getting up to legend status in Hearthstone would bring in lots of people. Keeping them would be a different matter, but at least that would be an initial hook.
But if I don't know what other people want to watch then how would I actually make a plan to broadcast something they want? Copy someone else's model maybe? Try a whole bunch of things and hope something randomly sticks? Just do stuff I'd want to see? But even if I could figure out what I personally wanted there's no reason to assume many other people would want the same thing. And even if they did... Someone who thinks like me isn't going to be generating any revenue for anyone anyway.
I don't have any solutions here, but I'm going to keep running things over in my head as I watch other people. Hopefully just going through the process of typing things out will have put some of these ideas in a better order for my brain to sort out while I sleep.
Recently I had an article linked to me about YouTube revenue stats. The top earner last year brought in almost 5 million dollars just from ad revenue. She has 3.5 million subscribers and her videos have almost 4.8 BILLION views. What does she do in these videos? Open Disney branded children's toys. The description sounded pretty banal to me so I went and watched one of them. It really was just a set of hands working to pull a toy set out of the packaging. The commentary assumed a certain level of familiarity with Disney movies and toys but seemed to do a good job of explaining the bits. She even made some extra dresses for some of the dolls out of Play-Doh.
I don't get it. But then I realized that in order to watch that video I had to mute a stream I was watching of some guy who was good but not great at HearthStone. I'm sure a lot of the people interested in watching dolls get taken out of the packaging wouldn't find an online CCG to be terribly compelling. And probably a fair number of the people who watch The Bachelor or Monday Night Football wouldn't understand what the doll packaging people or the Hearthstone people find compelling about their chosen content either. Heck, my mother watches people make stuff with looms!
This isn't to say that the people who like watching Disney toys get unboxed are bad in any way. It's just that I personally don't understand the appeal of it. I never in a million years would have thought to tape myself opening boxes and then make millions of dollars each year. Now there's absolutely a ton of other work that went into this particular lady's success I'm sure. Marketing and production values and having a consistent brand image and a ton of work setting stuff up. For that matter I don't understand how someone can just play Final Fantasy games and get paid a reasonable amount of cash but that's exactly what the two guys in the Final Fantasy Month did. In that case they've actually been averaging more than 10 hours a day every single day for almost 2 months now... So if they make 6k doing it that's a fine thing. Not millions, but also not needing to eat just noodles every day. But even then... I was watching these guys play but I still didn't pay them any money. I didn't watch any ads. I'm not sure what they could do to have me want to throw some money their way. But plenty of other people did!
I guess what I'm trying to say is I don't understand people at all. I have a hard enough time trying to understand why I want to watch the things I want to watch. Trying to figure out what other people will watch is an unfathomable mystery...
I've been told a couple times now that I could probably get a reasonably popular stream going if I worked at it. What would need to be worked on is certainly a matter of debate though. Do I need to be willing to talk to most of the people in chat? Some of them? Any of them at all? Would I need to be a jerk? My brother seemed to think that getting up to legend status in Hearthstone would bring in lots of people. Keeping them would be a different matter, but at least that would be an initial hook.
But if I don't know what other people want to watch then how would I actually make a plan to broadcast something they want? Copy someone else's model maybe? Try a whole bunch of things and hope something randomly sticks? Just do stuff I'd want to see? But even if I could figure out what I personally wanted there's no reason to assume many other people would want the same thing. And even if they did... Someone who thinks like me isn't going to be generating any revenue for anyone anyway.
I don't have any solutions here, but I'm going to keep running things over in my head as I watch other people. Hopefully just going through the process of typing things out will have put some of these ideas in a better order for my brain to sort out while I sleep.
Wednesday, January 21, 2015
Hearthstone: Creature Positioning
One of the weird parts of Hearthstone for someone coming from Magic is how the positioning of your creatures can end up mattering. I did a draft today and one of my opponents played a card that did 5 damage to a creature and then 2 damage to each adjacent creature. (Creatures stand in a line so there's only one dimension that really matters.) My creatures happened to be set up in such a way that only one of them died as a result while another lost a divine shield and the third took non-lethal damage. But if I'd put them down in a different configuration I could have actually lost nothing at all. If the one with divine shield had been in the middle then he'd have shrugged off the 5 main damage and the other two had enough health to take 2 damage each and live.
Note that auto-summoned creatures (like from a paladin or shaman hero power) are always put on the very right. If a creature summons another creature at some point (when it dies, when it comes into play) then it seems like the new creature gets positioned directly to the right of the primary creature, not on the far right of your field.
It got me thinking... What cards actually exist that care about the way you position your creatures? What should I be playing around from other people when I don't care about my positioning myself? And what could I actually care about from my end? It turns out there are only 11 cards that I could find that care at all about creature positioning. 4 are harmful from the opponent, 7 are beneficial from yourself.
First, the harmful ones. Hunter has the explosive shot I mentioned earlier (5 damage to something, 2 to the adjacent things). Mage has cone of cold which does 1 damage to a creature and the 2 adjacent creatures and freezes them. Rogue has betrayal which makes a creature do damage equal to its power to the two creatures beside them. And then everyone potentially has access to the legendary card for reaper 4000 that deals combat damage to a creature and any adjacent ones.
I think the legendary can be safely ignored unless it comes into play. Frankly, if he's actually able to attack you're probably screwed since 3 of your creatures are eating 6 damage! I guess if you wanted to play around him you'd put your biggest creature in the middle (so the foe reaper takes maximum strikeback damage) or try to spread out your really important creatures so there are at least 2 other creatures between them as a buffer. For one turn. Since he's sure killing them! But the other three are class specific and each class only has one spell that cares so it should actually be easy to play your creatures in such a way to minimize the impact of those spells should your opponent have them. It seems like the sort of thing you need to think about for awhile instead of blindly tossing guys down and eventually it will become second nature.
For explosive shot it seems like the idea is to minimize the impact of the splash damage. This can be done by sticking the bigger creatures on the outside. He really wants to shoot your 5/5, and if the 5/5 is on an edge then they only get 2 damage instead of 4. Alternatively you could try to clump all your weak things together. That way he likely has to use the main damage on a weak creature, minimizing the impact of the big shot. This is mostly the same thing as above. Big creatures on the outside, little ones on the inside. Divine shield on particularly juicy targets if you have the choice. Note that explosive shot is a rare so you're less likely to see it than other options.
For cone of cold you don't much care about the damage. Your primary concern is what creatures are getting frozen (and therefore what is your opponent going to be able to get away with in the next turn). So if you have 2 important creatures you want them to have at least 2 junky things between them. In draft the important creatures tend to be the bigger ones, so by default you're again looking to have the big guys on the outside and the small ones on the inside. Divine shield positioning doesn't help here I don't think. Cone of cold is a common.
For betrayal you want to be keeping an eye on relative damage/health numbers between adjacent creatures. Ideally you want creatures to not be able to kill the ones beside them, or to really overkill them. The primary creature doesn't take any damage at all so in one sense putting your big guys in the middle means they're less likely to take damage. Unless you put 2 big guys beside each other, and then one can punch the other. So once again you probably want the bigger creatures on the outside. Betrayal is also a common. But I know from experience with the card that it's really awkward to use. You should still play around it because why not?
One thing I haven't mentioned yet is making your creatures untargetable. Creatures in stealth or ones with an ability saying they can't be targeted make fantastic creatures to put in the middle. If you find yourself in a position where you probably can't lose unless they have explosive shot and you have a stealth spare part you may want to put it on the lynchpin of your line.
On the other hand you have the creatures that care about your own setup. Some of these are pretty mediocre, others are really good. The key thing to keep in mind is the buff creature will go between the two creatures they're buffing so you want the crucially buffed creatures to be together. You also want to make sure you keep creatures on both sides if they have a continuous effect. This is particularly important for shamans and paladins, and is handled by playing real creatures on the left and letting new totems/recruits go on the right.
Wee spellstopper is a mage epic that keeps adjacent minions from being targeted. She can still be targeted though, and if the enemy has one of the above spells it's a little unfortunate since she's presumably protecting important creatures that you don't want splashed into!
Flametongue totem is a shaman specific basic card (which I think means common in drafts) that gives adjacent creatures +2 power. It's really powerful and setting up your board to make optimal use of it seems really important. One trick to keep in mind is if you attack with a buffed creature and it dies then the line shifts together and a new creature gets buffed. This can let you trade up a lot of creatures really efficiently! Especially since shamans can end up with a bunch of 0/2 totems in play. Having them all turn into 2/2 bombers can be really good!
Dire wolf alpha is a general common which does the same thing as flametongue totem, except it only gives +1 power. It's still really good and everything kept in mind for flametongue is important here too. Another trick is that you can buff up 0 power creatures to allow them to attack... Like a nerubian egg! Dire wolf alpha gets a lot more important for your deck if you have eggs.
Void terror is a warlock rare that destroys the adjacent creatures when it comes into play in order to absorb their stats. I have no idea how to make optimal use of this guy. You do destroy the creatures so any deathrattle effects will proc immediately. Temporary buffs (power overwhelming, abusive sargeant, dire wolf alpha) get counted as well, and then the void terror can get the dire wolf's buff for itself!
Sunfury protector is a general rare that gives adjacent creatures taunt when it comes into play. So it cares about your setup only on the moment when you play it. You want to taunt up creatures that you want to take attacks and avoid taunting up creatures you're trying to protect. So having your board be egg, flesheating ghoul, egg is a terrible idea. If you have sunfury in your deck you want to be mindful of keeping prospective taunters together.
Defender of argus is a general rare that works the same as sunfury protector except it also gives +1/+1 on top of the taunt. So there's more to keep in mind because you need to balance who you want to buff with who you want to get attacked.
Finally there's ancient mage which is a general rare that gives adjacent minions spell damage when it comes into play. I'm really not sure why you want to do this. But if you actually have a plan for spellpower then you want to get these buffs onto harder to kill creatures and off of taunters. So clump your tougher non-taunters together I guess.
Note that auto-summoned creatures (like from a paladin or shaman hero power) are always put on the very right. If a creature summons another creature at some point (when it dies, when it comes into play) then it seems like the new creature gets positioned directly to the right of the primary creature, not on the far right of your field.
It got me thinking... What cards actually exist that care about the way you position your creatures? What should I be playing around from other people when I don't care about my positioning myself? And what could I actually care about from my end? It turns out there are only 11 cards that I could find that care at all about creature positioning. 4 are harmful from the opponent, 7 are beneficial from yourself.
First, the harmful ones. Hunter has the explosive shot I mentioned earlier (5 damage to something, 2 to the adjacent things). Mage has cone of cold which does 1 damage to a creature and the 2 adjacent creatures and freezes them. Rogue has betrayal which makes a creature do damage equal to its power to the two creatures beside them. And then everyone potentially has access to the legendary card for reaper 4000 that deals combat damage to a creature and any adjacent ones.
I think the legendary can be safely ignored unless it comes into play. Frankly, if he's actually able to attack you're probably screwed since 3 of your creatures are eating 6 damage! I guess if you wanted to play around him you'd put your biggest creature in the middle (so the foe reaper takes maximum strikeback damage) or try to spread out your really important creatures so there are at least 2 other creatures between them as a buffer. For one turn. Since he's sure killing them! But the other three are class specific and each class only has one spell that cares so it should actually be easy to play your creatures in such a way to minimize the impact of those spells should your opponent have them. It seems like the sort of thing you need to think about for awhile instead of blindly tossing guys down and eventually it will become second nature.
For explosive shot it seems like the idea is to minimize the impact of the splash damage. This can be done by sticking the bigger creatures on the outside. He really wants to shoot your 5/5, and if the 5/5 is on an edge then they only get 2 damage instead of 4. Alternatively you could try to clump all your weak things together. That way he likely has to use the main damage on a weak creature, minimizing the impact of the big shot. This is mostly the same thing as above. Big creatures on the outside, little ones on the inside. Divine shield on particularly juicy targets if you have the choice. Note that explosive shot is a rare so you're less likely to see it than other options.
For cone of cold you don't much care about the damage. Your primary concern is what creatures are getting frozen (and therefore what is your opponent going to be able to get away with in the next turn). So if you have 2 important creatures you want them to have at least 2 junky things between them. In draft the important creatures tend to be the bigger ones, so by default you're again looking to have the big guys on the outside and the small ones on the inside. Divine shield positioning doesn't help here I don't think. Cone of cold is a common.
For betrayal you want to be keeping an eye on relative damage/health numbers between adjacent creatures. Ideally you want creatures to not be able to kill the ones beside them, or to really overkill them. The primary creature doesn't take any damage at all so in one sense putting your big guys in the middle means they're less likely to take damage. Unless you put 2 big guys beside each other, and then one can punch the other. So once again you probably want the bigger creatures on the outside. Betrayal is also a common. But I know from experience with the card that it's really awkward to use. You should still play around it because why not?
One thing I haven't mentioned yet is making your creatures untargetable. Creatures in stealth or ones with an ability saying they can't be targeted make fantastic creatures to put in the middle. If you find yourself in a position where you probably can't lose unless they have explosive shot and you have a stealth spare part you may want to put it on the lynchpin of your line.
On the other hand you have the creatures that care about your own setup. Some of these are pretty mediocre, others are really good. The key thing to keep in mind is the buff creature will go between the two creatures they're buffing so you want the crucially buffed creatures to be together. You also want to make sure you keep creatures on both sides if they have a continuous effect. This is particularly important for shamans and paladins, and is handled by playing real creatures on the left and letting new totems/recruits go on the right.
Wee spellstopper is a mage epic that keeps adjacent minions from being targeted. She can still be targeted though, and if the enemy has one of the above spells it's a little unfortunate since she's presumably protecting important creatures that you don't want splashed into!
Flametongue totem is a shaman specific basic card (which I think means common in drafts) that gives adjacent creatures +2 power. It's really powerful and setting up your board to make optimal use of it seems really important. One trick to keep in mind is if you attack with a buffed creature and it dies then the line shifts together and a new creature gets buffed. This can let you trade up a lot of creatures really efficiently! Especially since shamans can end up with a bunch of 0/2 totems in play. Having them all turn into 2/2 bombers can be really good!
Dire wolf alpha is a general common which does the same thing as flametongue totem, except it only gives +1 power. It's still really good and everything kept in mind for flametongue is important here too. Another trick is that you can buff up 0 power creatures to allow them to attack... Like a nerubian egg! Dire wolf alpha gets a lot more important for your deck if you have eggs.
Void terror is a warlock rare that destroys the adjacent creatures when it comes into play in order to absorb their stats. I have no idea how to make optimal use of this guy. You do destroy the creatures so any deathrattle effects will proc immediately. Temporary buffs (power overwhelming, abusive sargeant, dire wolf alpha) get counted as well, and then the void terror can get the dire wolf's buff for itself!
Sunfury protector is a general rare that gives adjacent creatures taunt when it comes into play. So it cares about your setup only on the moment when you play it. You want to taunt up creatures that you want to take attacks and avoid taunting up creatures you're trying to protect. So having your board be egg, flesheating ghoul, egg is a terrible idea. If you have sunfury in your deck you want to be mindful of keeping prospective taunters together.
Defender of argus is a general rare that works the same as sunfury protector except it also gives +1/+1 on top of the taunt. So there's more to keep in mind because you need to balance who you want to buff with who you want to get attacked.
Finally there's ancient mage which is a general rare that gives adjacent minions spell damage when it comes into play. I'm really not sure why you want to do this. But if you actually have a plan for spellpower then you want to get these buffs onto harder to kill creatures and off of taunters. So clump your tougher non-taunters together I guess.
Tuesday, January 20, 2015
Even More Hearthstone Drafting
Last week I streamed a third Hearthstone draft and actually managed to include both video and audio for the entire thing. It was a warlock draft where I went 'classic aggro'. This seems to be a deck type I naturally lean towards as 3 of the 6 drafts that I've logged on the Heartharena site have turned out as classic aggro. I went 5-3. I want to get better so I figured I could do two things to try to figure out what went wrong with the deck. If winning 62.5% of my games can be considered 'wrong', anyway! I can replay the losses to see if I made any mistakes or if I felt I needed different cards in those matches, and I can feed the draft through Heartharena a second time, always pick the recommended card, and see what I could have had.
The first loss was against a mage where I saw several minor misplays in terms of what cards I was playing and when I was trading. Things were still going pretty well, and he had a blizzard to somewhat stabilize. Then I made a brutally bad play with recombobulator. I swapped out my frozen 4/3 instead of my terrible 1/7. It turned the 4/3 into another 1/7 leaving me with a post-blizzard board of 1/8 taunt, 1/7, 0/1 stealth, and 3/2. Life totals were 30 for him and 16 for me. We both had 4 cards in hand, but I had that board and he had nothing. 2 of my cards were spare parts, 1 of his was a spare part. But I was still ahead in cards. He goes +2 cards on his turn with arcane intellect and a 4/2 that killed my 3/2. I go up 2 cards on my turn with hero power and a 3/3 that killed his 4/2. He played a 5/5 and a 2/3 taunt. I felt by this point that he didn't have flamestrike since he had a couple decent spots to play it thus far. So I went all in and went up to 6 creatures on board. He cast a topdecked flamestrike and that was pretty much that. (Hearthstone orders the cards in each players hand so I knew the flamestrike was his most recently draws card.) And then he had 8 points of burn/charge damage to finish me off. I died with doomguard in hand, which I never played because I didn't want to discard 2 cards. I was also playing all my spare parts as fast as I could for some reason...
Bottom line? I made plenty of mistakes that degraded my position turn after turn. Which put me into a position where I had to overcommit to the board and I got blown out by a sweeper. A topdecked sweeper to be fair. So I was a little unlucky. But if I play well I don't need that luck at the end.
My second loss featured me throwing away some removal killing an imp master that was down to being a 1/1. I also burned my coin to degrade my own board with void terror. He had a flametongue totem to power his board up to kill my 6/4 terror and I rarely started my turn with a creature in play to attack the totem. I did have a 50/50 shot one turn to kill it and get back in the game but my bomber killed something other than the totem or the taunter which was holding off the one 3/3 I managed to stick on the board. The taunter being a totem which he was only 25% to pull out. So really I had an 87.5% chance of stabilizing the game and maybe I win from there. But I failed those rolls and got blown out by flametongue totem.
Bottom line? I've noticed I have a problem dealing with flametongue totem and the randomness of some of the cards is a little frustrating.
My third loss really, really brought that last point home. One turn I had a pair of 4/3s that give me a random 2 drop when they die. He killed them and was left with a 2/3 on his board afterwards. My random creatures? A 1/1 with no game effect and a 1/1 that drew me a card when it died.
I just took a look and there are 67 minions that cost 2. 45 of them have 2 or more power, though 1 can't attack so he doesn't count. Of the smaller creatures 13 of them have abilities that let them contribute at least 2 damage to the fight. All told, 6 of the creatures might as well be blanks, 34 deal with a 2/3 on their own, 24 of them are worth 2 damage, and 3 are worth 1 damage. I hit 2 of the 3 that are worth 1 damage.
Put it all together... You're a little under 92% to be able to at least deal with a 2/3 when you get a pair of random 2-drops.
Ok, fine... Hit the 8% there. Moving along... A few turns later I played a bomb lobber with 2 targets in play. A 1/3 and a 3/5 taunt. Bomb the taunter and I get to murder my opponent. I bombed the 1/3. I still got to kill the 3/5 taunt but I had to choose where to put 3 damage. On my 3/3, killing it, or on my 4/5 windfury. Which brings it in range of a few priest kill spells. I knew how powerful 4 power creatures were against priest, and I know how powerful windfury is against an empty board... But I chose to keep the 3/3. He had a spell that did 2 to a target. I then went for a recombobulator on my 3/5 for 5 with him having a 3/5 on the other side of the board. 20 of the potential options deal with a 3/5 and live. 10 of them die to a 3/7 without killing it. 21 of them trade. I hit a 6/3, which was parity. This isn't exactly bad luck since I turned a loss into a trade, but I sure could have used a kill. In retrospect, why recomb this turn? I could have waited for him to attack his 3/5 into my 3/5 and then recomboed. I guess I like having the 3/2 in play, but I had a different 3/2 I could have played that turn at the cost of 3 life.
Finish things off with missing an attack where he was practically guaranteed to make the same trade I did, lifetapping with a nearly empty deck when that 2 life was critical the next turn, and misplays of both doomguard and void terror, and him having double holy nova by turn 7. I had him to 1 in the end. Getting 1 more damage from any source... Slightly better luck, one fewer misplay and I win.
Ok, what changes would Heartharena have made with my deck? It would have dropped the second blood imp, the second mortal coil, annoy-o-tron, the tinkertown tech, baron rivendare, booty bay bodyguard, and windfury harpy. It would have added in power overwhelming, voidwalker, murloc tidehunter, youthful brewmaster, jungle panther, tinkmaster overspark, and stranglethorn tiger. It would have lowered my low curve even lower and would have given me a card to combo with the void terror. Brewmaster with my 2 lobbers and kodo would have been a good draw early or late. And while overspark is a pretty bad legendary it turns out rivendare is abysmally bad. There were even a couple times when turning my opponent's only creature into a 5/5 would have been an upgrade!
How about what I took over what? At pick 4 I took windfury harpy over murloc tidehunter. The harpy was really good against priest (except I misplayed it) but otherwise I was never happy to draw it or play it. There would be times I would be happy to play the murloc. (Basically only turn 2 (maybe 1), but every game will have a turn 2 and not many games will be against priest.)
At pick 9 I took annoy-o-tron over yourthful brewmaster. I think I was thinking my deck was pretty slow at that point (thanks windfury harpy) so having a cheap drop to absorb two attacks would be nice. But when it comes right down to it I'm rarely sad to see my opponent play an annoy-o-tron. A little annoying, especially if my board is all 2/1s, but rarely does it swing cards or tempo in any big way. Brewmaster is a bigger body early and comboes with kodo and recombobulator which I already had.
At pick 12 I took booty bay bodyguard over voidwalker. It's a little weird, but a 5/4 taunt is actually much worse than a 3/6 taunt. You'd think having the same total stats should mean they'd be pretty comparable but the 5/4 dies to flamestrike and it's pretty easy to trade up against. It dies to a 4/2, or a 3/2 plus a ping. The 3/6 gets to hold off a lot more stuff, especially 3/2s, 3/3s, and 4/3s which are pretty common sizes. So taking the bodyguard is consigning my deck to having a mediocre expensive card. That's not good. The 1/3 taunt for 1 is fairly mediocre too, but it's a mediocre play that I can play with other creatures.
At pick 13 I took a second blood imp over jungle panther. I drew both imps a couple times and it was not good. Normally an imp and a creature means the creature gets a health. With 2 imps and a creature there's only a 25% chance you'll even get a benefit from the second imp, and a similar 25% chance you'll lose the benefit of the first imp! So the second imp adds no extra value, it just adds variance. An imp late is pretty bad, and any deck capable of killing the first one can probably kill the second one too. (AE pings) Jungle panther is a 4/2 stealth for 3 and I've been very much undervaluing stealth as a mechanic. I've been watching a lot of Hafu's drafts and she values stealth pretty high. And I can see why that would be. The games I lose I sometimes find myself playing creatures that just get traded off over and over again. It would be nice to get something to live in order to attack, say, a flametongue totem.
Pick 19 was mortal coil #2 against stranglethorn tiger. See above for my undervaluing of stealth. I've started putting a higher value on the tiger and it's been working out pretty well. The second coil cycles (assuming there's something with 1 health) and it's cheap so having extra ones is quite fine, but the tiger is just stronger I think.
Pick 20 was the legend debacle. I really do think the tinkmaster is too random, but baron was worthless every single time I drew him.
Pick 21 was tinkertown vs power overwhelming. In my deck the website agreed with the tinkertown, but for the other deck it was drafting it prefered power overwhelming. I guess losing the annoy-o-tron really decreases the chances of a turn 3 powered tinkertown. And I never even thought that I could use power overwhelming on a creature, kill something, and then eat the creature with void terror to get the +4/+4 permanently. I had someone do that to me in another draft and it was a huge problem. And it actually gives void terror a decent play.
So what can I take from this draft? I need to value stealth higher. I need to value mediocre expensive drops lower. (And I guess by extension, raise my valuation on good expensive things so I have a late game.) I need to figure out how to play doomguard and void terror. I have work to do on squeezing maximum damage out of each attack. And there are cards with a lot of randomness to them, I need to accept that and deal with the current board state, not lament the fact I just hit the 8% lottery.
I have done 3 drafts since I rewatched those games. I got 5 wins, 3 wins, and 11 wins in those drafts. Sadly the 11 win draft was done offline since I didn't feel like streaming but still wanted to draft. It turns out having 2 flamestrikes, 2 fireballs, 2 polymorphs, a flamecannon, a frost bolt, good creatures, and a legendary that has some impact on the game is good!
The first loss was against a mage where I saw several minor misplays in terms of what cards I was playing and when I was trading. Things were still going pretty well, and he had a blizzard to somewhat stabilize. Then I made a brutally bad play with recombobulator. I swapped out my frozen 4/3 instead of my terrible 1/7. It turned the 4/3 into another 1/7 leaving me with a post-blizzard board of 1/8 taunt, 1/7, 0/1 stealth, and 3/2. Life totals were 30 for him and 16 for me. We both had 4 cards in hand, but I had that board and he had nothing. 2 of my cards were spare parts, 1 of his was a spare part. But I was still ahead in cards. He goes +2 cards on his turn with arcane intellect and a 4/2 that killed my 3/2. I go up 2 cards on my turn with hero power and a 3/3 that killed his 4/2. He played a 5/5 and a 2/3 taunt. I felt by this point that he didn't have flamestrike since he had a couple decent spots to play it thus far. So I went all in and went up to 6 creatures on board. He cast a topdecked flamestrike and that was pretty much that. (Hearthstone orders the cards in each players hand so I knew the flamestrike was his most recently draws card.) And then he had 8 points of burn/charge damage to finish me off. I died with doomguard in hand, which I never played because I didn't want to discard 2 cards. I was also playing all my spare parts as fast as I could for some reason...
Bottom line? I made plenty of mistakes that degraded my position turn after turn. Which put me into a position where I had to overcommit to the board and I got blown out by a sweeper. A topdecked sweeper to be fair. So I was a little unlucky. But if I play well I don't need that luck at the end.
My second loss featured me throwing away some removal killing an imp master that was down to being a 1/1. I also burned my coin to degrade my own board with void terror. He had a flametongue totem to power his board up to kill my 6/4 terror and I rarely started my turn with a creature in play to attack the totem. I did have a 50/50 shot one turn to kill it and get back in the game but my bomber killed something other than the totem or the taunter which was holding off the one 3/3 I managed to stick on the board. The taunter being a totem which he was only 25% to pull out. So really I had an 87.5% chance of stabilizing the game and maybe I win from there. But I failed those rolls and got blown out by flametongue totem.
Bottom line? I've noticed I have a problem dealing with flametongue totem and the randomness of some of the cards is a little frustrating.
My third loss really, really brought that last point home. One turn I had a pair of 4/3s that give me a random 2 drop when they die. He killed them and was left with a 2/3 on his board afterwards. My random creatures? A 1/1 with no game effect and a 1/1 that drew me a card when it died.
I just took a look and there are 67 minions that cost 2. 45 of them have 2 or more power, though 1 can't attack so he doesn't count. Of the smaller creatures 13 of them have abilities that let them contribute at least 2 damage to the fight. All told, 6 of the creatures might as well be blanks, 34 deal with a 2/3 on their own, 24 of them are worth 2 damage, and 3 are worth 1 damage. I hit 2 of the 3 that are worth 1 damage.
Put it all together... You're a little under 92% to be able to at least deal with a 2/3 when you get a pair of random 2-drops.
Ok, fine... Hit the 8% there. Moving along... A few turns later I played a bomb lobber with 2 targets in play. A 1/3 and a 3/5 taunt. Bomb the taunter and I get to murder my opponent. I bombed the 1/3. I still got to kill the 3/5 taunt but I had to choose where to put 3 damage. On my 3/3, killing it, or on my 4/5 windfury. Which brings it in range of a few priest kill spells. I knew how powerful 4 power creatures were against priest, and I know how powerful windfury is against an empty board... But I chose to keep the 3/3. He had a spell that did 2 to a target. I then went for a recombobulator on my 3/5 for 5 with him having a 3/5 on the other side of the board. 20 of the potential options deal with a 3/5 and live. 10 of them die to a 3/7 without killing it. 21 of them trade. I hit a 6/3, which was parity. This isn't exactly bad luck since I turned a loss into a trade, but I sure could have used a kill. In retrospect, why recomb this turn? I could have waited for him to attack his 3/5 into my 3/5 and then recomboed. I guess I like having the 3/2 in play, but I had a different 3/2 I could have played that turn at the cost of 3 life.
Finish things off with missing an attack where he was practically guaranteed to make the same trade I did, lifetapping with a nearly empty deck when that 2 life was critical the next turn, and misplays of both doomguard and void terror, and him having double holy nova by turn 7. I had him to 1 in the end. Getting 1 more damage from any source... Slightly better luck, one fewer misplay and I win.
Ok, what changes would Heartharena have made with my deck? It would have dropped the second blood imp, the second mortal coil, annoy-o-tron, the tinkertown tech, baron rivendare, booty bay bodyguard, and windfury harpy. It would have added in power overwhelming, voidwalker, murloc tidehunter, youthful brewmaster, jungle panther, tinkmaster overspark, and stranglethorn tiger. It would have lowered my low curve even lower and would have given me a card to combo with the void terror. Brewmaster with my 2 lobbers and kodo would have been a good draw early or late. And while overspark is a pretty bad legendary it turns out rivendare is abysmally bad. There were even a couple times when turning my opponent's only creature into a 5/5 would have been an upgrade!
How about what I took over what? At pick 4 I took windfury harpy over murloc tidehunter. The harpy was really good against priest (except I misplayed it) but otherwise I was never happy to draw it or play it. There would be times I would be happy to play the murloc. (Basically only turn 2 (maybe 1), but every game will have a turn 2 and not many games will be against priest.)
At pick 9 I took annoy-o-tron over yourthful brewmaster. I think I was thinking my deck was pretty slow at that point (thanks windfury harpy) so having a cheap drop to absorb two attacks would be nice. But when it comes right down to it I'm rarely sad to see my opponent play an annoy-o-tron. A little annoying, especially if my board is all 2/1s, but rarely does it swing cards or tempo in any big way. Brewmaster is a bigger body early and comboes with kodo and recombobulator which I already had.
At pick 12 I took booty bay bodyguard over voidwalker. It's a little weird, but a 5/4 taunt is actually much worse than a 3/6 taunt. You'd think having the same total stats should mean they'd be pretty comparable but the 5/4 dies to flamestrike and it's pretty easy to trade up against. It dies to a 4/2, or a 3/2 plus a ping. The 3/6 gets to hold off a lot more stuff, especially 3/2s, 3/3s, and 4/3s which are pretty common sizes. So taking the bodyguard is consigning my deck to having a mediocre expensive card. That's not good. The 1/3 taunt for 1 is fairly mediocre too, but it's a mediocre play that I can play with other creatures.
At pick 13 I took a second blood imp over jungle panther. I drew both imps a couple times and it was not good. Normally an imp and a creature means the creature gets a health. With 2 imps and a creature there's only a 25% chance you'll even get a benefit from the second imp, and a similar 25% chance you'll lose the benefit of the first imp! So the second imp adds no extra value, it just adds variance. An imp late is pretty bad, and any deck capable of killing the first one can probably kill the second one too. (AE pings) Jungle panther is a 4/2 stealth for 3 and I've been very much undervaluing stealth as a mechanic. I've been watching a lot of Hafu's drafts and she values stealth pretty high. And I can see why that would be. The games I lose I sometimes find myself playing creatures that just get traded off over and over again. It would be nice to get something to live in order to attack, say, a flametongue totem.
Pick 19 was mortal coil #2 against stranglethorn tiger. See above for my undervaluing of stealth. I've started putting a higher value on the tiger and it's been working out pretty well. The second coil cycles (assuming there's something with 1 health) and it's cheap so having extra ones is quite fine, but the tiger is just stronger I think.
Pick 20 was the legend debacle. I really do think the tinkmaster is too random, but baron was worthless every single time I drew him.
Pick 21 was tinkertown vs power overwhelming. In my deck the website agreed with the tinkertown, but for the other deck it was drafting it prefered power overwhelming. I guess losing the annoy-o-tron really decreases the chances of a turn 3 powered tinkertown. And I never even thought that I could use power overwhelming on a creature, kill something, and then eat the creature with void terror to get the +4/+4 permanently. I had someone do that to me in another draft and it was a huge problem. And it actually gives void terror a decent play.
So what can I take from this draft? I need to value stealth higher. I need to value mediocre expensive drops lower. (And I guess by extension, raise my valuation on good expensive things so I have a late game.) I need to figure out how to play doomguard and void terror. I have work to do on squeezing maximum damage out of each attack. And there are cards with a lot of randomness to them, I need to accept that and deal with the current board state, not lament the fact I just hit the 8% lottery.
I have done 3 drafts since I rewatched those games. I got 5 wins, 3 wins, and 11 wins in those drafts. Sadly the 11 win draft was done offline since I didn't feel like streaming but still wanted to draft. It turns out having 2 flamestrikes, 2 fireballs, 2 polymorphs, a flamecannon, a frost bolt, good creatures, and a legendary that has some impact on the game is good!
Monday, January 19, 2015
Mario Race Result
Saturday had the first of SpeedRunsLive's series of open races trying to give people an easy way into the speedrunning scene. I only ever got around to practicing world one, but I'd played the game 18 years ago or so... How hard could it be, really?
Well, I gameovered several times in worlds 2 and 3, so things sure weren't looking good. Oddly enough as soon as I got to world 4 it suddenly got easy. I recognized most of the levels! I suspect what happened is I'd always get a warp whistle in world 1 when I played the game as a kid. Use it right away, jump to world 4! But this race was warpless, and I really didn't have a good handle on worlds 2 and 3. I muddled through though!
Anyway, I got through worlds 4 through 7 without too much trouble and had built up quite the stash of items to use powering through world 8. Unfortunately Bowser's castle was tricky, Bowser himself used a brand new mechanic, and my thumb was starting to get sore from holding down the run button for 3 hours! It took me 45 minutes to beat the last level but eventually I did! (For comparison the 6 fastest people were done the entire game in under an hour...) All told my race was sub-4 hours! Woo!
The race ended up getting a whopping 140 people. 39 of those gave up without beating the game, and I managed to finish in front of 10 people. 91st place of 140 isn't too bad all things considered, but it is a little unfortunate that I wasn't even slower. The website had links to everyone's stream who was still going. When there were 10 people left I guess people didn't care so much as I only ended up with 3 viewers plus my sister in the same room when I beat the game. The last few people were getting 30+ viewers pretty much solely thanks to being slow but persevering!
It almost makes me want to really suck in one of the next two races. But the competitor in me thinks that's incredibly stupid. Doing a race when I'm naturally slow and bad is a fine thing to do. Intentionally doing worse than I could? That's just not in my genes. Of course I've never played a Sonic game so my best at Sonic 2 could well be the worst of anyone who shows up...
Or maybe not... The guy who finished in 101st place in Mario 3 took a little over 19 hours. That's a crazy amount of dedication to not giving up! I popped in to watch him from time to time and he sure was playing the game and trying to win. He just wasn't doing a very good job of it. But he did finish higher than the 39 forfeits, so that's something!
Next up... Zelda: A Link to the Past, up to the master sword. This is a game I've actually played a fair bit so I hopefully won't be needing to figure out puzzles from scratch like I did in Mario 3. Emulators are fully allowed too (well, ones on the list of approved emulators anyway) so anyone capable of streaming really can join in.
Well, I gameovered several times in worlds 2 and 3, so things sure weren't looking good. Oddly enough as soon as I got to world 4 it suddenly got easy. I recognized most of the levels! I suspect what happened is I'd always get a warp whistle in world 1 when I played the game as a kid. Use it right away, jump to world 4! But this race was warpless, and I really didn't have a good handle on worlds 2 and 3. I muddled through though!
Anyway, I got through worlds 4 through 7 without too much trouble and had built up quite the stash of items to use powering through world 8. Unfortunately Bowser's castle was tricky, Bowser himself used a brand new mechanic, and my thumb was starting to get sore from holding down the run button for 3 hours! It took me 45 minutes to beat the last level but eventually I did! (For comparison the 6 fastest people were done the entire game in under an hour...) All told my race was sub-4 hours! Woo!
The race ended up getting a whopping 140 people. 39 of those gave up without beating the game, and I managed to finish in front of 10 people. 91st place of 140 isn't too bad all things considered, but it is a little unfortunate that I wasn't even slower. The website had links to everyone's stream who was still going. When there were 10 people left I guess people didn't care so much as I only ended up with 3 viewers plus my sister in the same room when I beat the game. The last few people were getting 30+ viewers pretty much solely thanks to being slow but persevering!
It almost makes me want to really suck in one of the next two races. But the competitor in me thinks that's incredibly stupid. Doing a race when I'm naturally slow and bad is a fine thing to do. Intentionally doing worse than I could? That's just not in my genes. Of course I've never played a Sonic game so my best at Sonic 2 could well be the worst of anyone who shows up...
Or maybe not... The guy who finished in 101st place in Mario 3 took a little over 19 hours. That's a crazy amount of dedication to not giving up! I popped in to watch him from time to time and he sure was playing the game and trying to win. He just wasn't doing a very good job of it. But he did finish higher than the 39 forfeits, so that's something!
Next up... Zelda: A Link to the Past, up to the master sword. This is a game I've actually played a fair bit so I hopefully won't be needing to figure out puzzles from scratch like I did in Mario 3. Emulators are fully allowed too (well, ones on the list of approved emulators anyway) so anyone capable of streaming really can join in.
Sunday, January 18, 2015
Bridge Match 3 - Board 50
Board 50 - Dealer East - NS Vul
Opponents convention card: Majeure cinquième
Opponents playing strength: Advanced
My hand: ♠ K 8 7 3 2 ♥ A Q 7 6 ♦ A 5 ♣ 8 4
I open 1 spade in 2nd seat. Partner responds 2 diamonds. I bid 2 hearts. He jumps to 4.
West leads the T of spades.
Well, that sure was an interesting bid on partner's part... Why are we playing in our likely 7 card fit when he has a 7 card suit of his own? On the plus side I have 3 obvious losers in the black suits and 11 obvious winners in the red suits. Unless hearts split 5-1 or worse. So there's not a whole lot to say here... They'll take as many black tricks as they wants and then we win.
West puts me to as much of a test as he can. They take the opening spade trick, then 2 clubs, then lead another club. If East had only 2 clubs and West has 4 hearts they could be setting up a trump trick here. Do I have any play to stop it? Ruffing high on board loses a trick to any 4-2 split. Ruffing in hand loses a trick to any 4-2 split. So I need to ruff low and hope East has a club, or East has 3+ hearts.
He had a club. But I'm not yet out of the woods. I don't have a way to draw trump exclusively here. My only play is to draw two rounds from board and then play a diamond to my hand to draw two more rounds. This loses big when one of them has a diamond void but I don't see any way around it. No one has a diamond void. They made me think a lot more than I thought I'd need to, but it was all for naught. Making 4.
4 hearts is a solo top board. 2 tables made 5 diamonds. 1 table went down 1 in 5 diamonds. And 4 tables went down 2 in 3NT. This means picking hearts, strange as it seemed at the time, meant we got 14 MPs instead of 12 if we'd played 5 diamonds or 4 if we'd played 3NT. Good job partner! We're down so taking volatile risks like this makes a ton of sense.
Jack agrees with me all the way!
Ranking after board 50/60: 9/16 with 50.14%
Opponents convention card: Majeure cinquième
Opponents playing strength: Advanced
My hand: ♠ K 8 7 3 2 ♥ A Q 7 6 ♦ A 5 ♣ 8 4
I open 1 spade in 2nd seat. Partner responds 2 diamonds. I bid 2 hearts. He jumps to 4.
West leads the T of spades.
| NORTH ♠ Q ♥ K J 4 ♦ K Q J T 8 4 3 ♣ J 9 | ||
| WEST ♠ T | ||
| SOUTH ♠ K 8 7 3 2 ♥ A Q 7 6 ♦ A 5 ♣ 8 4 |
| West | North | East | South |
| Pass | 1♠ | ||
| Pass | 2♦ | Pass | 2♥1 |
| Pass | 4♥ | Pass | Pass |
| Pass | |||
| 1Forcing | |||
Well, that sure was an interesting bid on partner's part... Why are we playing in our likely 7 card fit when he has a 7 card suit of his own? On the plus side I have 3 obvious losers in the black suits and 11 obvious winners in the red suits. Unless hearts split 5-1 or worse. So there's not a whole lot to say here... They'll take as many black tricks as they wants and then we win.
West puts me to as much of a test as he can. They take the opening spade trick, then 2 clubs, then lead another club. If East had only 2 clubs and West has 4 hearts they could be setting up a trump trick here. Do I have any play to stop it? Ruffing high on board loses a trick to any 4-2 split. Ruffing in hand loses a trick to any 4-2 split. So I need to ruff low and hope East has a club, or East has 3+ hearts.
He had a club. But I'm not yet out of the woods. I don't have a way to draw trump exclusively here. My only play is to draw two rounds from board and then play a diamond to my hand to draw two more rounds. This loses big when one of them has a diamond void but I don't see any way around it. No one has a diamond void. They made me think a lot more than I thought I'd need to, but it was all for naught. Making 4.
| NORTH ♠ Q ♥ K J 4 ♦ K Q J T 8 4 3 ♣ J 9 | ||
| WEST ♠ T 5 ♥ 9 5 2 ♦ 9 7 2 ♣ A Q 7 6 2 | EAST ♠ A J 9 6 4 ♥ T 8 3 ♦ 6 ♣ K T 5 3 | |
| SOUTH ♠ K 8 7 3 2 ♥ A Q 7 6 ♦ A 5 ♣ 8 4 |
Jack agrees with me all the way!
Ranking after board 50/60: 9/16 with 50.14%
Friday, January 16, 2015
Bridge Match 3 - Board 49
Board 49 - Dealer North - None Vul
Opponents convention card: Majeure cinquième
Opponents playing strength: Advanced
My hand: ♠ A K J 9 ♥ T 9 5 ♦ A T 8 5 ♣ J T
I open 1NT in third seat. West doubles and partner redoubles. I have no idea what Jack thinks we're playing. Redouble here by him should be to play. My hand is pretty good for a weak NT, so I'm happy here if he is. West also passes and we get to play 1NT redoubled! Woo!
West leads the ace of clubs.
Well, it turns out partner's bid was the start of a scramble using some system I don't know or don't remember. I think North's hand should bid 2 clubs here since his hand is such garbage and he actually has a 5 card suit. Without a 5 carder he should pass and let me redouble for him to start scrambling. Anyway, we are obviously dead in the water here, and I can't fathom this being anything but a bottom board. I hope to maybe take 5 tricks.
Juh? East goes and SHOWS OUT on the first trick. West has a 6 card club suit! But if he tries to set it up I actually get 2 club tricks. And then he cashes two more clubs. I now have 2 club tricks to go with my 2 spade tricks and 1 diamond trick. Endplaying west to give me the J of spades seems impossible now, but I should be able to finesse a diamond for a 6th trick. West cashes a heart and then leads a low diamond. This is pretty much screaming that he doesn't have the K, but I lose the ability to finesse diamonds if I don't take it now. So I try it, and East has the K. Now I have another finesse into West's hand. On the plus side he has shown up with 13 of his 14+ points. Anyway, I don't actually have an entry to board to get at those clubs. They have at least 4 tricks they can cash. Maybe more if East has a running heart suit. So my max is 5 tricks. I can only cash out for 3 tricks, so I might as well throw someone in and see what happens.
But first I cash a spade in case something funny goes on. Both of them show in. East has already pitched 2 spades so they only have 2 spades left between them. If West started with Qx I can actually take 3 more tricks here. And I really don't see any reasonable plays for tricks. I cash the K and West drops the Q! Woo! I even have a low spade left in hand as an entry to board! So I have 7 tricks here, but I don't have the communication to get at them. But down 1 is way better than I was expecting and they sure will cash more than 3 tricks if I give up the lead. There is one line of play that lets me make... If West's last 3 cards are diamonds and he has the J9 I can throw him in. He'll get 2 diamond tricks but then will be forced to lead a club or a diamond back. How likely is that to be the layout? Could West really be 2-1-4-6 with the stiff A of hearts? It would explain his switch away from hearts... East would have to be 4-6-3-0 for this to be the case. I guess that's not unreasonable. Is down 1 redoubled going to be worth any MPs at all? No, I actually can't see how it would be. What NS pair is going to score worse than -200? They set 3NT off the top with the spade split. But EW can make 4 hearts I think. (We get a diamond and 2 spades and nothing else.) But would they play in a 7 card fit instead of NT? I don't think so. Which means -200 should be a bottom. And I have nothing to lose by going big? Actually, under my assumed layout the same result happens if I cash out and lead a low diamond off board. West can take a club and 2 diamonds? That's not the same at all. But I can find a layout where he only gets 1 diamond. Ok, I run that. East has the J of diamonds so no plan works. Except, it turns out, the play that East is terrible. He pitched a heart and kept a low diamond so he's forced to give me the last trick in hand. 1NT REDOUBLED MAKING! SUCK IT!
1NT redoubled is unsurprisingly a top board. Perhaps more surprising is the fact that 4 EW pairs made it to 4 hearts with 2 more in 3 hearts and 1 in 3 clubs. 2 of the 4 heart contracts went down, the other 2 made, so even 1NTXX-1 would have been worth 4 MPs. Cashing out was definitely right.
Jack disagrees with my pass. Because I have enough strength to bid 2 clubs. I don't understand that comment. The implication is I should pass with a weaker hand. Which is fine if his redouble shows strength, but when it shows garbage this whole thing is off. Jack also disagrees with my pitch at trick 11. I guess since 1NTXX was a top board I really should have pitched my spade. There was no way I was scoring it. And maybe someone had 3 diamonds left and would be forced to give me one?
Ranking after board 49/60: 10/16 with 49.13%
Opponents convention card: Majeure cinquième
Opponents playing strength: Advanced
My hand: ♠ A K J 9 ♥ T 9 5 ♦ A T 8 5 ♣ J T
I open 1NT in third seat. West doubles and partner redoubles. I have no idea what Jack thinks we're playing. Redouble here by him should be to play. My hand is pretty good for a weak NT, so I'm happy here if he is. West also passes and we get to play 1NT redoubled! Woo!
West leads the ace of clubs.
| NORTH ♠ 9 7 2 ♥ J 4 2 ♦ Q 2 ♣ 9 8 5 4 3 | ||
| WEST ♣ A | ||
| SOUTH ♠ A K J 5 ♥ T 9 5 ♦ A T 8 5 ♣ J T |
| West | North | East | South |
| Pass | Pass | 1NT | |
| Double1 | Redouble2 | Pass | Pass |
| Pass | |||
| 114+ points | |||
| 2Clubs OR hearts and a second suit | |||
Well, it turns out partner's bid was the start of a scramble using some system I don't know or don't remember. I think North's hand should bid 2 clubs here since his hand is such garbage and he actually has a 5 card suit. Without a 5 carder he should pass and let me redouble for him to start scrambling. Anyway, we are obviously dead in the water here, and I can't fathom this being anything but a bottom board. I hope to maybe take 5 tricks.
Juh? East goes and SHOWS OUT on the first trick. West has a 6 card club suit! But if he tries to set it up I actually get 2 club tricks. And then he cashes two more clubs. I now have 2 club tricks to go with my 2 spade tricks and 1 diamond trick. Endplaying west to give me the J of spades seems impossible now, but I should be able to finesse a diamond for a 6th trick. West cashes a heart and then leads a low diamond. This is pretty much screaming that he doesn't have the K, but I lose the ability to finesse diamonds if I don't take it now. So I try it, and East has the K. Now I have another finesse into West's hand. On the plus side he has shown up with 13 of his 14+ points. Anyway, I don't actually have an entry to board to get at those clubs. They have at least 4 tricks they can cash. Maybe more if East has a running heart suit. So my max is 5 tricks. I can only cash out for 3 tricks, so I might as well throw someone in and see what happens.
But first I cash a spade in case something funny goes on. Both of them show in. East has already pitched 2 spades so they only have 2 spades left between them. If West started with Qx I can actually take 3 more tricks here. And I really don't see any reasonable plays for tricks. I cash the K and West drops the Q! Woo! I even have a low spade left in hand as an entry to board! So I have 7 tricks here, but I don't have the communication to get at them. But down 1 is way better than I was expecting and they sure will cash more than 3 tricks if I give up the lead. There is one line of play that lets me make... If West's last 3 cards are diamonds and he has the J9 I can throw him in. He'll get 2 diamond tricks but then will be forced to lead a club or a diamond back. How likely is that to be the layout? Could West really be 2-1-4-6 with the stiff A of hearts? It would explain his switch away from hearts... East would have to be 4-6-3-0 for this to be the case. I guess that's not unreasonable. Is down 1 redoubled going to be worth any MPs at all? No, I actually can't see how it would be. What NS pair is going to score worse than -200? They set 3NT off the top with the spade split. But EW can make 4 hearts I think. (We get a diamond and 2 spades and nothing else.) But would they play in a 7 card fit instead of NT? I don't think so. Which means -200 should be a bottom. And I have nothing to lose by going big? Actually, under my assumed layout the same result happens if I cash out and lead a low diamond off board. West can take a club and 2 diamonds? That's not the same at all. But I can find a layout where he only gets 1 diamond. Ok, I run that. East has the J of diamonds so no plan works. Except, it turns out, the play that East is terrible. He pitched a heart and kept a low diamond so he's forced to give me the last trick in hand. 1NT REDOUBLED MAKING! SUCK IT!
| NORTH ♠ 9 7 2 ♥ J 4 2 ♦ Q 2 ♣ 9 8 5 4 3 | ||
| WEST ♠ Q 5 ♥ A 7 ♦ 7 4 3 ♣ A K Q 7 6 2 | EAST ♠ T 8 4 3 ♥ K Q 8 6 3 ♦ K J 9 6 ♣ | |
| SOUTH ♠ A K J 5 ♥ T 9 5 ♦ A T 8 5 ♣ J T |
Jack disagrees with my pass. Because I have enough strength to bid 2 clubs. I don't understand that comment. The implication is I should pass with a weaker hand. Which is fine if his redouble shows strength, but when it shows garbage this whole thing is off. Jack also disagrees with my pitch at trick 11. I guess since 1NTXX was a top board I really should have pitched my spade. There was no way I was scoring it. And maybe someone had 3 diamonds left and would be forced to give me one?
Ranking after board 49/60: 10/16 with 49.13%
Thursday, January 15, 2015
More Hearthstone Drafting
Sthenno commented on my Hearthstone win odds post about how some streamers he watches would find 8 wins to be a bad result. The HearthArena guys claimed to be averaging 8.5 wins per draft so these claims don't seem terribly out of line. Which means that at least some people are winning at or above 74% across all opponents and decks. That goes way against what I thought was possibly the highest people could be expecting. I was going off of a baseline that 60% was exceptionally good since I recalled LSV and Randy talking about career win percentages during the Vintage Super League commentary and LSV said something about being at 60%. I just looked into it more and his career win percentage is 63.25%. Something has to give here. So I've been thinking about it a fair bit the last few days and came up with some ways that LSV can win significantly less often in his matches than these people are in their drafts.
One thing I did learn while watching her was her mulligan strategy. She straight up explained it when someone asked her about it! She only cares about the first few turns, so she pretty much exclusively throws back anything that costs more than 3. And she takes having the coin into account and plans on using it early in her mulligan strategy. So she might keep 2 3's going second but likely only the best 3 going first. (For those who don't know, in Hearthstone you draw your opening hand of 3 or 4 cards and then can individually mulligan cards by once shuffling any of your cards into your deck and then drawing back up.)
I want to distill that down to some numbers. Pretend the determining factor in who wins a game is having a 2-drop or not. Now I want to look at someone who mulligans everything that isn't a 2-drop against someone who mulligans only 2-drops. (Who wants a 1/2 in their hand when you could dig for a FLAMESTRIKE?!?) So (as I'm wont to do) I mocked up a spreadsheet.
Assuming both players have 7 2-drops then we have the 'win' odds at 41%-6% if player 1 wants the 2-drop and 46%-3% if player 2 wants the 2-drop.
But wait... Why do both people have equivalent decks? Isn't the person who mulligans for 2s more likely to have also drafted 2s? Looking at my 3 recorded decks I've had 4, 5, and 6 2-drops across them. And I was at least aware that I needed to fill my 2 slot. This will not be true for everyone. So let's compare someone with 8 2s against someone with 3 2s. In this case player 1 has a 72%-2% edge and player 2 has a 75%-1% edge.
Hitting your 2 drop isn't a guaranteed win by any stretch, but it does feel like it's going to increase your chances. Getting the first creature in play means you get to start make the decisions on trading creatures or attacking the other player's life total. I can remember one recent game where my opponent played a 3/2 untargetable on turn 2 and then was able to kill or trade with every creature I played while hitting me for 3 until I was dead. If I'd played a 2 power creature on turn 1 in that game I have a much better chance of winning that one.
- LSV's stats are only for games played at the Pro Tour or in a Grand Prix. Hearthstone drafts are against anyone who cares to sign up. I'm sure LSV would actually win more than 63% of his games at FNM!
- Magic matches are best of 3 or best of 5. Hearthstone games are one and done. This actually works out as a factor in the other direction. Someone who won 63.25% of their best of 3 matches would only rate to have won 58.93% of their games. This is assuming a consistent game win percentage across events and game numbers. With sideboarding in Magic I would guess a good player would actually have a higher win percentage in games 2 and 3 than in game 1. Which would actually shift the game 1 number even lower and that's the one most similar to Hearthstone.
- Magic is inherently more volatile than Hearthstone. Hearthstone decks are smaller so you're less likely to get screwed out of a certain kind of card (spot removal/board clear/cheap weenies). Magic also has the land system. I don't care how good LSV is, if he never draws any lands I will be able to beat him! The same is true in Hearthstone to a limited extent if you consider someone who only draws 7 drops all game. They'll be dead before they get to play any of them. Of course if their deck actually has that many 7 drops in it they probably should be losing!
- An individual good deck in a Hearthstone draft will contribute more to your win percentage than a bad one will. Look at someone who goes 12-0 and then 3-3. Their win percentage is over 83% with one awesome deck and one mediocre deck. A similar situation in Magic at the Pro Tour would see a player go 4-0 with the awesome deck and 2-2 with the mediocre deck. Which is a 75% win rate. Even ignoring the silliness with 12 win decks not getting to keep playing... An 11-3 deck contributes 14 games to your denominator while a 0-3 deck contributes only 3 games to your denominator.
- LSV's numbers have been tracked by a consolidated system that pretty much guarantees their accuracy. Numbers self reported by individual players could be fudged. I don't even mean maliciously. I was guessing my own overall game win rate at below 50% but since I didn't keep track of anything there's no reason for anyone else to trust this assertion. Oh, and I watched one of the streamers Sthenno mentioned yesterday and she took actions to fudge her numbers. She drafted a really terrible deck but instead of playing it out she just retired it. It's not clear if she isn't counting that draft in her numbers at all or if she just isn't letting her really bad decks count but either way her stats are inflated because of this practice. She has the gold on hand to draft 20 times without any prizes at all so if she wanted to take a chance on drafting the nut murloc deck she could just retire all the bad ones and obliterate people with the good ones.
One thing I did learn while watching her was her mulligan strategy. She straight up explained it when someone asked her about it! She only cares about the first few turns, so she pretty much exclusively throws back anything that costs more than 3. And she takes having the coin into account and plans on using it early in her mulligan strategy. So she might keep 2 3's going second but likely only the best 3 going first. (For those who don't know, in Hearthstone you draw your opening hand of 3 or 4 cards and then can individually mulligan cards by once shuffling any of your cards into your deck and then drawing back up.)
I want to distill that down to some numbers. Pretend the determining factor in who wins a game is having a 2-drop or not. Now I want to look at someone who mulligans everything that isn't a 2-drop against someone who mulligans only 2-drops. (Who wants a 1/2 in their hand when you could dig for a FLAMESTRIKE?!?) So (as I'm wont to do) I mocked up a spreadsheet.
Assuming both players have 7 2-drops then we have the 'win' odds at 41%-6% if player 1 wants the 2-drop and 46%-3% if player 2 wants the 2-drop.
But wait... Why do both people have equivalent decks? Isn't the person who mulligans for 2s more likely to have also drafted 2s? Looking at my 3 recorded decks I've had 4, 5, and 6 2-drops across them. And I was at least aware that I needed to fill my 2 slot. This will not be true for everyone. So let's compare someone with 8 2s against someone with 3 2s. In this case player 1 has a 72%-2% edge and player 2 has a 75%-1% edge.
Hitting your 2 drop isn't a guaranteed win by any stretch, but it does feel like it's going to increase your chances. Getting the first creature in play means you get to start make the decisions on trading creatures or attacking the other player's life total. I can remember one recent game where my opponent played a 3/2 untargetable on turn 2 and then was able to kill or trade with every creature I played while hitting me for 3 until I was dead. If I'd played a 2 power creature on turn 1 in that game I have a much better chance of winning that one.
Wednesday, January 14, 2015
Super Mario Bros 3
The 'get yourself speedrunning' thing is starting up this weekend with Super Mario Bros 3. You can play either the original NES version or the remake on the SNES in the Super Mario All-stars cartridge. I have the latter for my SNES, so that seemed like the obvious way to go.
Earlier this week I decided I wanted to practice a little. I have no illusions about being able to win, but I would like to have a chance to beat some of the other rookies. I also wanted to test my streaming setup to make sure I could play properly in the capture card window since I don't have a splitter. So I unpacked my SNES and hooked everything up.
The power adapter I have (not an official Nintendo version but some cheap replacement I bought after someone stole my NES and all my wires out of the MathSoc Exec office) doesn't have a very long wire, and I didn't see an easy way to plug it in while still being able to play at my desk. My mother had an extension cord lying around so I figured I'd just use that. So I plugged it in, turned on the power, and the red power light blinked on and then off.
Weird... I gave it a second try but it didn't even blink on this time. I did hear a weird popping sound, however... And then the room smelled like burning and it started to get smoky. I didn't think things through properly and grabbed the wire to unplug it. That certainly worked, but both the extension core and the adapted box were pretty hot. I got a weird burn thing under the nail on my right thumb from it. It did stop the smoke from continuing to fill the room, which was good.
Anyway, I no longer have the ability to power up my SNES. If it even works at all after this debacle. My hope is the adapater was set up to protect the system and that's why it blew. And I still don't know why the extension cord broke it. Maybe it can't handle the power needs of a power brick? I don't know. I'll need to find another power thingy, but I won't be able to do so by Saturday.
The SRL website does talk a little about when you're allowed to use an emulator. The one I use for my SNES Saturday posts is on their allowed list, and they say people using emulators have to stream or they'll get banned. Well, I can do that! So I'm going to try to use an emulator... And that meant I could practice!
I figured the right idea would be to pull up the speedrun from AGDQ since they ran the warpless category there. So I'd get a proper route and see what tricks the guy was using and could try to copy them. Try being the operative word there... I can't use the p-meter extension trick very well (probably a problem with my 'thumbo' control strategy) and I certainly can't memorize the timing for all the jumps and such even if I could do it. But I went stage by stage on the first world to try things out.
I have a new appreciation for how crazy these speedruns are to pull off consistently. It's not like you can just know how to run and jump and then wing it! You really need to know the exact layout of everything in every zone to know what you can jump off of. In stage 1-6 the guy skipped the entire slow moving platform aspect by doing an 'impossible' p-meter charge, jumping off into space, bouncing off of a flying Koopa, and then juking back to hit a small platform you can't possibly see until it's too late. Confuse the timing from any two levels and you die and blow your run.
I pushed through trying to copy the run and ended up being able to clear all of world 1 without dying. (Well, I did 18 runs and got deathless runs only twice... And actually gameovered on most of them!) My time was a little under 4:30. The AGDQ guy did it in around 3:40. I sure don't think I can get any better though! Not without actually figuring out the p-meter trick. And I can't imagine I'll remember any of this stuff by tomorrow, let alone after doing this for 7 more worlds.
I'm also not sure if I should be actively trying to avoid extra lives from matching 3 of a kind at the end of levels like good people do. I feel like getting 4 extra lives is probably more important for me than shaving off 6 seconds every 3 levels. I also wonder if I should be doing the mushroom houses and spade levels to get extra lives and consumables or if those are just wastes of time. Obviously they're wastes of time for competent players. I guess one issue is I consistently failed to get anything out of the spade level in world 1. So I'd probably just be spending time for nothing at all, and that has to be wrong!
Earlier this week I decided I wanted to practice a little. I have no illusions about being able to win, but I would like to have a chance to beat some of the other rookies. I also wanted to test my streaming setup to make sure I could play properly in the capture card window since I don't have a splitter. So I unpacked my SNES and hooked everything up.
The power adapter I have (not an official Nintendo version but some cheap replacement I bought after someone stole my NES and all my wires out of the MathSoc Exec office) doesn't have a very long wire, and I didn't see an easy way to plug it in while still being able to play at my desk. My mother had an extension cord lying around so I figured I'd just use that. So I plugged it in, turned on the power, and the red power light blinked on and then off.
Weird... I gave it a second try but it didn't even blink on this time. I did hear a weird popping sound, however... And then the room smelled like burning and it started to get smoky. I didn't think things through properly and grabbed the wire to unplug it. That certainly worked, but both the extension core and the adapted box were pretty hot. I got a weird burn thing under the nail on my right thumb from it. It did stop the smoke from continuing to fill the room, which was good.
Anyway, I no longer have the ability to power up my SNES. If it even works at all after this debacle. My hope is the adapater was set up to protect the system and that's why it blew. And I still don't know why the extension cord broke it. Maybe it can't handle the power needs of a power brick? I don't know. I'll need to find another power thingy, but I won't be able to do so by Saturday.
The SRL website does talk a little about when you're allowed to use an emulator. The one I use for my SNES Saturday posts is on their allowed list, and they say people using emulators have to stream or they'll get banned. Well, I can do that! So I'm going to try to use an emulator... And that meant I could practice!
I figured the right idea would be to pull up the speedrun from AGDQ since they ran the warpless category there. So I'd get a proper route and see what tricks the guy was using and could try to copy them. Try being the operative word there... I can't use the p-meter extension trick very well (probably a problem with my 'thumbo' control strategy) and I certainly can't memorize the timing for all the jumps and such even if I could do it. But I went stage by stage on the first world to try things out.
I have a new appreciation for how crazy these speedruns are to pull off consistently. It's not like you can just know how to run and jump and then wing it! You really need to know the exact layout of everything in every zone to know what you can jump off of. In stage 1-6 the guy skipped the entire slow moving platform aspect by doing an 'impossible' p-meter charge, jumping off into space, bouncing off of a flying Koopa, and then juking back to hit a small platform you can't possibly see until it's too late. Confuse the timing from any two levels and you die and blow your run.I pushed through trying to copy the run and ended up being able to clear all of world 1 without dying. (Well, I did 18 runs and got deathless runs only twice... And actually gameovered on most of them!) My time was a little under 4:30. The AGDQ guy did it in around 3:40. I sure don't think I can get any better though! Not without actually figuring out the p-meter trick. And I can't imagine I'll remember any of this stuff by tomorrow, let alone after doing this for 7 more worlds.
I'm also not sure if I should be actively trying to avoid extra lives from matching 3 of a kind at the end of levels like good people do. I feel like getting 4 extra lives is probably more important for me than shaving off 6 seconds every 3 levels. I also wonder if I should be doing the mushroom houses and spade levels to get extra lives and consumables or if those are just wastes of time. Obviously they're wastes of time for competent players. I guess one issue is I consistently failed to get anything out of the spade level in world 1. So I'd probably just be spending time for nothing at all, and that has to be wrong!
Tuesday, January 13, 2015
HearthArena
I did two Hearthstone drafts yesterday but it turns out I'm a little incompetent at this whole streaming thing. The first draft I did with my microphone off so while I can replay the draft and games to see what happened I can't know what I was thinking at the time. OBS crashed between drafts and when I restarted it an hour later to do my second draft I didn't check to see what scene it was on. (I assumed it was on the last one used. Turns out it was on the top one in the list. But SolForge wasn't open, so nothing at all was getting captured.) So while I had my voice for the second draft I didn't have video until more than halfway through when I realized what was going on. No one was watching so from a streaming standpoint it wasn't too bad (and if people had been watching they would have told me about both issues pretty quickly I would hope), but it again makes reviewing the draft impossible and the play for most of the draft useless. Oh well. Live and learn!
I did find a website, HearthArena, that has some interesting arena related features. The big thing is that Hearthstone drafts don't have any time pressures on them. (You don't draft with other people like in Magic, instead you just pick 1 card from 3 options over and over again.) This means it's pretty easy to get outside help if you wanted to. Call up a buddy, ping them on Skype or something. Ask a hard question about what to take. A couple of guys with pretty good arena records got together and built a website to be your buddy. They assigned values to every card for each class and then wrote some algorithms to modify the value of the cards based on what you've already picked and what you probably need for your deck. It also justifies any value changes to a card so you can see why they they're thinking what they're thinking. It's really cool...
It also feels a lot like cheating. I've been doing a lot of arena reading the last couple days and it seems people are in agreement that play skill matters a lot more than draft skill when it comes to getting a really good record. You certainly can't be drafting badly by any stretch, but even if you were drafting perfectly you'd probably struggle to win a lot. I can buy that argument. I also think a lot of drafting does come down to algorithmically making decision while the play has lots of probability and psychology to it on top of raw numerical skill. So a draft buddy feels like cheating, but I don't think it actually is cheating.
My bigger concern would actually be trusting that these guys know what they're talking about, and that the algorithm they wrote properly accounts for different factors. Absolutely for someone starting out it would help tons, but blindly following it once you know what is going on is probably suboptimal. Especially since a lot of the choices will come down to playstyle concerns, and someone who falls in a different default spot on the tempo--control spectrum will have different correct choices than the website. On the other hand they claim an 8.5 win average (~74% win rate, which is bigger than anything I considered putting in my table yesterday) and have lots of streams to somewhat back their claims up.
What I used it for yesterday was to redo my draft after I was done to see what it thought about my choices. I wanted to do this for both drafts but the lack of video in the second one made that impossible. I still put the draft into the website, but with the first two cards alphabetically competing with the card I took. This took away drafting advice but still let me see what they thought about my deck as a whole.
My first deck was a paladin deck that the website termed as 'classic aggro'. I wasn't really sure how I was going to actually win games since I only had one thing that cost more than 7 and therefore was pretty screwed in the late game. So I guess aggro is a pretty good idea for what I had to be. I went 4-3 with the deck. My losses were to a mage who had board control the whole game and got off a big topdecked flamestrike with 8 power in play on his side, a druid with a lot of huge taunt dudes, and to having my turn 5 sludge belcher stolen with a mind control tech while I had an imp master, an imp, and a nerubian egg for a complete blowout. I may well have been able to avoid the last loss by going up to 2 or 3 guys instead of 4 on turn 6, but the other two felt like matchup blowouts. Oddly enough 6 of my 7 opponents were mages.
The website mostly agreed with my picks but it had a few big ones that it disagreed with. At pick 4 (after taking a 5, a 7, and a 4) I took a frostwolf warlord over a mechanical yeti. I was thinking that as a paladin the warlord was going to be pretty good. But in retrospect a 4/5 for 4 is actually pretty good too, and I was already leaning pretty expensive as it was. I agree. The very next pick I took a fen creeper over a mad bomber. I like taunts and my deck seemed pretty slow so I thought I would mostly be on the back foot and therefore wanted more taunts to try to stabilize. I was also worried that the bomber would just kill my tokens. I think I definitely overvalue those tokens and the bomber would have been a better choice. Later on it disagreed with both of my undertaker picks. I had 4 deathrattlers in my deck and 18/16 picks to go when I took them. I disagree with the website and think undertaker is really good early and is a 1 drop that is actually ok late game too. Assuming you get enough deathrattlers. Which luckily are pretty good in general so putting a preference on taking them wouldn't have been bad anyway.
My second deck was a rogue deck that I didn't think looked very good. I didn't know how I was going to win games. I actually had lots of draft options that I wanted to see what the website had to say, but I can't because I'm bad at things. The site did say that the cards I ended up with make a tempo deck. My cards seemed good in general, but that 4 slot is really full. At any rate, I managed to go 6-3 with the deck. I can't talk about my first loss since I can't see it... But both of the last two I lost because of a backbreaking legendary card. Oh well!
10-6 is way better than I was expecting heading into these drafts. For my next one I hope to have both video and sound at the SAME TIME! *gasp*
I did find a website, HearthArena, that has some interesting arena related features. The big thing is that Hearthstone drafts don't have any time pressures on them. (You don't draft with other people like in Magic, instead you just pick 1 card from 3 options over and over again.) This means it's pretty easy to get outside help if you wanted to. Call up a buddy, ping them on Skype or something. Ask a hard question about what to take. A couple of guys with pretty good arena records got together and built a website to be your buddy. They assigned values to every card for each class and then wrote some algorithms to modify the value of the cards based on what you've already picked and what you probably need for your deck. It also justifies any value changes to a card so you can see why they they're thinking what they're thinking. It's really cool...
It also feels a lot like cheating. I've been doing a lot of arena reading the last couple days and it seems people are in agreement that play skill matters a lot more than draft skill when it comes to getting a really good record. You certainly can't be drafting badly by any stretch, but even if you were drafting perfectly you'd probably struggle to win a lot. I can buy that argument. I also think a lot of drafting does come down to algorithmically making decision while the play has lots of probability and psychology to it on top of raw numerical skill. So a draft buddy feels like cheating, but I don't think it actually is cheating.
My bigger concern would actually be trusting that these guys know what they're talking about, and that the algorithm they wrote properly accounts for different factors. Absolutely for someone starting out it would help tons, but blindly following it once you know what is going on is probably suboptimal. Especially since a lot of the choices will come down to playstyle concerns, and someone who falls in a different default spot on the tempo--control spectrum will have different correct choices than the website. On the other hand they claim an 8.5 win average (~74% win rate, which is bigger than anything I considered putting in my table yesterday) and have lots of streams to somewhat back their claims up.
What I used it for yesterday was to redo my draft after I was done to see what it thought about my choices. I wanted to do this for both drafts but the lack of video in the second one made that impossible. I still put the draft into the website, but with the first two cards alphabetically competing with the card I took. This took away drafting advice but still let me see what they thought about my deck as a whole.
My first deck was a paladin deck that the website termed as 'classic aggro'. I wasn't really sure how I was going to actually win games since I only had one thing that cost more than 7 and therefore was pretty screwed in the late game. So I guess aggro is a pretty good idea for what I had to be. I went 4-3 with the deck. My losses were to a mage who had board control the whole game and got off a big topdecked flamestrike with 8 power in play on his side, a druid with a lot of huge taunt dudes, and to having my turn 5 sludge belcher stolen with a mind control tech while I had an imp master, an imp, and a nerubian egg for a complete blowout. I may well have been able to avoid the last loss by going up to 2 or 3 guys instead of 4 on turn 6, but the other two felt like matchup blowouts. Oddly enough 6 of my 7 opponents were mages.
The website mostly agreed with my picks but it had a few big ones that it disagreed with. At pick 4 (after taking a 5, a 7, and a 4) I took a frostwolf warlord over a mechanical yeti. I was thinking that as a paladin the warlord was going to be pretty good. But in retrospect a 4/5 for 4 is actually pretty good too, and I was already leaning pretty expensive as it was. I agree. The very next pick I took a fen creeper over a mad bomber. I like taunts and my deck seemed pretty slow so I thought I would mostly be on the back foot and therefore wanted more taunts to try to stabilize. I was also worried that the bomber would just kill my tokens. I think I definitely overvalue those tokens and the bomber would have been a better choice. Later on it disagreed with both of my undertaker picks. I had 4 deathrattlers in my deck and 18/16 picks to go when I took them. I disagree with the website and think undertaker is really good early and is a 1 drop that is actually ok late game too. Assuming you get enough deathrattlers. Which luckily are pretty good in general so putting a preference on taking them wouldn't have been bad anyway.
My second deck was a rogue deck that I didn't think looked very good. I didn't know how I was going to win games. I actually had lots of draft options that I wanted to see what the website had to say, but I can't because I'm bad at things. The site did say that the cards I ended up with make a tempo deck. My cards seemed good in general, but that 4 slot is really full. At any rate, I managed to go 6-3 with the deck. I can't talk about my first loss since I can't see it... But both of the last two I lost because of a backbreaking legendary card. Oh well!
10-6 is way better than I was expecting heading into these drafts. For my next one I hope to have both video and sound at the SAME TIME! *gasp*
Monday, January 12, 2015
Hearthstone Drafting
I've been playing a fair amount of Hearthstone lately. Playing random constructed games for quest completions while watching AGDQ was a decent thing to be doing last week. And then when I earned 150 gold I'd go and do a draft. Unfortunately I feel like I've been doing a bad job of drafting. Nothing ever seems to really work out. I'll draft a fast deck and get beat by a midrange deck. I'll draft a midrange deck and get beat by a stupidly slow deck full of late game fatties. I'll draft the fatties and die on turn 6.
I want to work out what I could be doing better, but there are two problems here both related to drafting while watching AGDQ. I haven't been streaming my drafts since I don't want to be rebroadcasting sounds from a different stream, and I haven't been concentrating exclusively on the draft or the games because cool stuff would keep happening on the stream I'm watching. Basically, while constructed seems like it was a fine thing to do the drafts feel like a waste in retrospect. I think the best thing to do here is to steadfastly refuse to partake in a draft unless I'm streaming it, at least for the next little while, so I can go back and revisit things afterwards. I'd also like to start keeping track of stats so I know if I'm actually doing bad or not.
The reason it feels like I've been doing bad is I've had a couple of 0-3 drafts recently, on top of a fair number of 2-3 and 3-3 results. But when I stop to think about it more... The overall expected result of a draft is a little under 3 wins. Everyone who signs up for a draft wins some games, but they all contribute 3 losses before they get eliminated. This means for each person that signs up there are 3 wins added to the pool of available wins. Except every now and then someone will go 12-0, 12-1, or 12-2. Those drafts end without providing the full 3 wins to the pool. Overall everyone still expects a 50% record in the long run (every game has exactly one winner) but that means the real expected result isn't 3-3 but more like 2.99-2.99.
And then I think a little more and realize that I've had a 5-3 draft and a 7-3 draft recently to go with those two 0-3 drafts. Which is above average! (Barely!) Super small sample size I know, but my gut feeling that I'm sucking is also based on a super small sample size.
Of course I'd like to think I'm pretty good at games. So being barely above average, if that's actually where I am, is still something I shouldn't be happy with and should be able to fix. I don't believe Hearthstone is just flipping coins, so there has to be an edge to exploit in there somewhere. I just need to actually work at finding it.
I didn't want to draft this morning while a little sleepy but I also wasn't tired enough to go to sleep. So I built a little spreadsheet to work out the odds of different results based on different overall expected win percentages. I can change a couple cells to alter my assumptions and get new numbers. It's got me thinking... Should your win chance change as the draft progresses? On the one hand if your deck is 4-1 then it's probably pretty good. But on the other hand you're now playing against other 4-1 decks, and they're probably pretty good too. Win to get up to 5-1? Your deck rates to be better, but again so do theirs. Lose and fall to 4-2? Your deck rates to be worse, but again so do theirs.
This means assigned a fixed win chance seems reasonable. On the other hand your deck doesn't actually change whether you win or lose at 4-1. It may rate to be worse in the long run but your deck doesn't exist in the long run. Even if you expect to win 75% of the time if you end up with a win you 'got lucky' and did better than expected. If you lose you 'got unlucky' and did worse than expected. But your opponent's decks aren't fixed. They're a nebulous group of potential opponents and it is entirely reasonable to think any given deck of yours is more likely to beat a 4-2 opponent than a 5-1 opponent. (The 'Swiss gambit', as it were.) So it's entirely reasonable to assign a sliding scale of win chance based on current record. How big a scale is the question... 2% per win? 5% per win? (This would mean a 60% deck that got lucky enough to go 11-0 would only have a 5% chance of winning the 12th game which seems absurd.) Should they have different scalings? Especially if your base win chance is high I'd expect a loss to increase it more than a win would decrease it.
I want to work out what I could be doing better, but there are two problems here both related to drafting while watching AGDQ. I haven't been streaming my drafts since I don't want to be rebroadcasting sounds from a different stream, and I haven't been concentrating exclusively on the draft or the games because cool stuff would keep happening on the stream I'm watching. Basically, while constructed seems like it was a fine thing to do the drafts feel like a waste in retrospect. I think the best thing to do here is to steadfastly refuse to partake in a draft unless I'm streaming it, at least for the next little while, so I can go back and revisit things afterwards. I'd also like to start keeping track of stats so I know if I'm actually doing bad or not.
The reason it feels like I've been doing bad is I've had a couple of 0-3 drafts recently, on top of a fair number of 2-3 and 3-3 results. But when I stop to think about it more... The overall expected result of a draft is a little under 3 wins. Everyone who signs up for a draft wins some games, but they all contribute 3 losses before they get eliminated. This means for each person that signs up there are 3 wins added to the pool of available wins. Except every now and then someone will go 12-0, 12-1, or 12-2. Those drafts end without providing the full 3 wins to the pool. Overall everyone still expects a 50% record in the long run (every game has exactly one winner) but that means the real expected result isn't 3-3 but more like 2.99-2.99.
And then I think a little more and realize that I've had a 5-3 draft and a 7-3 draft recently to go with those two 0-3 drafts. Which is above average! (Barely!) Super small sample size I know, but my gut feeling that I'm sucking is also based on a super small sample size.
Of course I'd like to think I'm pretty good at games. So being barely above average, if that's actually where I am, is still something I shouldn't be happy with and should be able to fix. I don't believe Hearthstone is just flipping coins, so there has to be an edge to exploit in there somewhere. I just need to actually work at finding it.
I didn't want to draft this morning while a little sleepy but I also wasn't tired enough to go to sleep. So I built a little spreadsheet to work out the odds of different results based on different overall expected win percentages. I can change a couple cells to alter my assumptions and get new numbers. It's got me thinking... Should your win chance change as the draft progresses? On the one hand if your deck is 4-1 then it's probably pretty good. But on the other hand you're now playing against other 4-1 decks, and they're probably pretty good too. Win to get up to 5-1? Your deck rates to be better, but again so do theirs. Lose and fall to 4-2? Your deck rates to be worse, but again so do theirs.
This means assigned a fixed win chance seems reasonable. On the other hand your deck doesn't actually change whether you win or lose at 4-1. It may rate to be worse in the long run but your deck doesn't exist in the long run. Even if you expect to win 75% of the time if you end up with a win you 'got lucky' and did better than expected. If you lose you 'got unlucky' and did worse than expected. But your opponent's decks aren't fixed. They're a nebulous group of potential opponents and it is entirely reasonable to think any given deck of yours is more likely to beat a 4-2 opponent than a 5-1 opponent. (The 'Swiss gambit', as it were.) So it's entirely reasonable to assign a sliding scale of win chance based on current record. How big a scale is the question... 2% per win? 5% per win? (This would mean a 60% deck that got lucky enough to go 11-0 would only have a 5% chance of winning the 12th game which seems absurd.) Should they have different scalings? Especially if your base win chance is high I'd expect a loss to increase it more than a win would decrease it.