summon relics are cancer

I always run Naturalize as it is a pretty versatile spell. I didn't change my deck at all for the purposes of beating him. Without the spell I know I'd have no chance.

 

is ethereal pool funnier to play vs? is seasong leviathan combo funnier? or maybe its about persons. i might find funny to play against ethereal pool because I have to think outside the normal game's flow, and you might find it obnoxious. I might find boring to play vs frost amp because its always same runes, someone else might find it funny because you have a match of skill vs skill with bgs without gimmicks. Its a lot about the personal taste.

 

it is funny playing against ethereal pools because everyone who uses them is terrible

 

test mine (im bad , but i think i optimized it to be a competitive bg. in right hands it might be run at 2000+ elo)

 

Looking at 3 and 4 might be a my favorite option.

The AoE of barricade could being adjusted from AoE 3 to AoE 2 seems interesting, it would give large unit counter play option.

 

Link?

 

Naturalize is versatile? It's 25 nora to dmg aoe summons correct?

 

20 for AoE 15 magic damage to summons AND relics. Removes user-created terrain (like lava or water) too. (The latter is a bug, to ane xtent)

 

Trip complete: Final tally after 40 games of 29-11. One of those losses was a disconnect but I'll count it the same. About half the games were vs competitive players/decks.
For comparison, I did a similar 40-game run with skeletons in April and went 33-7 with that deck. It's possible that both runs need another 20 games to get a true sense of their power, but for now I will say that they are in the same tier.

So the quick version of "is it balanced" is: probably not, but it depends. The deck itself gives you a ludicrous margin for error UNLESS your opponent is running a counter. Before playing it, I thought that the deck would do well vs tight, phalanxy styles but that is actually where it underperforms. The games that I lost basically fell into two categories: I got rushed and found myself down before I could get a bursticade off (saving nora for a bursticade turn and then going 2-3 turns without drawing the pieces when they could have an impact) or facing thick "clutter" type decks with summons and 2x2s with tight 2-3 space positioning.

At the same time, many of my wins were rushes as well. In those games, it acted like drown at midfont and gave me a huge advantage that carried me through the game. The deck's success has a huge draw-luck factor to it but that factor is generally in the bursticade player's favour. It's worth noting that I played pretty sloppy during the whole run: the deck's damage output is based on your opponent's positioning and there really isn't much time to calculate kills. I just dropped them and hoped it worked. There were a lot fewer clean kills than I expected before I started, maybe 60-70%. At the same time, getting clean kills wasn't a factor at all in whether I won or lost games. I won loads of games where I left champs with 5hp because it shuts down a response and the target dies a turn later.

At the end of the day, the thing that I dislike the most about the deck is that reinforces the existing meta. ST and ST splits are strong against it. Spirit of the Mountain is strong against it. Most fun/semicompetitive decks will lose to it unless they are packing hard counters like sever summons.

 

Nah, I just treated bursticade as a little module. There were very few extra relic sources (architect and NCP) and just the two yeti spirits for frost amp. But the combo did win games I should have lost because my opponent transfiged and the combo killed them in 2-3 turns.

 

It's not that bad. Just makes it a bit more analytical since you have to think about cooldown of their combo and nora/positioning tradeoffs more.

Which is what you should be doing in any game, but when vs an unorthadox deck it becomes important to actually think about these things rather than just relying on muscle memory.

I found that i actually had to slow my playstyle a lot rather than rush in there 1v1 - a bit like fighting oldschool FS. Then use champs that maximise the tradeoff from his kills (for example, K'lzik will spawn a lot of spiderlings from a bursticade which makes it a pretty good trade). Also don't treat the maps the same way as usual -- widen the playing area rather than put multiple champs in choke points.

Also, be aware that because they are using at least 4 slots for the combo that they will be down 4 of the staple non-champs, so i could be reasonably confident there wouldn't be a snowblind up, for example.

In my first game vs @davre with this deck, he stomped me since it caught me completely offguard, but i haven't lost to a bursticade deck since.



Which is why a lot of decks like this get hate, they surprise people while doing the same things they always do, and force people to not be lazy and actually change their tactics.

But they always seem to go away pretty soon after coming in fashion as people get bored of them. I don't think it is nerf-worthy.

 

It is worth noting that davre is not using Mason Spire or other champs that create the Baricades and is just playing a variation of the deck. Most people dont have an issue with the burstcade damage part but the persisting relics that make progressing the game difficult.

 

*was. I played 40 games to get a sense of the deck's potential and weaknesses. You won't see me playing this until after it's modified to a normal power level.

Full credit to you for playing well, but there is a substantial deck/matchup factor as well. As I mentioned earlier, you're looking at somewhere between 50-80% instakills with bursticade. During a reasonably long game, the bursticade player is going to make 1-2 plays that leave a champ alive, but helpless. While spending 60+ nora to not kill something is normally a "mistake" that would be "punished" by counterplay, the relics and impeding snow mean that most decks can't punish that kind of mistake with field-based counterplay. 7 of my losses came from 3 players (went 1-2 vs Badger, 1-2 vs Xirone, and 1-3 vs Nepy). Badger was the only FFUD player that I played against, and he was easily able to punish the non-kills with retribution and sacrifice for a value swing that's hard to recover from. Xirone had naturalize and was able to effectively punish the non-kills by eliminating the relics/snow and making regular plays with his champs on the turn after the bursticade, and Nepy got his wins through rushing, high efficiency champs, and blanket-counters such as spell aegis on cyclops ritualist.

There is definitely a positional "get-gud" element that can prevent the instakill aspect of bursticade. This includes:
Pushing key champs 2 spaces from the font node so that it blocks a relic summon.
Keeping champs 2-spaces apart to block relic summons (I think diagonal is better than straight here but not sure on that one)
Deploying 2x2s out front (this one depends on deck composition, obviously).

After that though, not every deck is going to be able to punish the missed kills unless they are running, and drew/fielded, specific countermeasures such as sever summons, sac/ret, reinforcement, etc.
Also, these decks have tons of space. None of the bursticade decks that have been fielded in the last two weeks have been optimized so we shouldn't take for granted that any of the decks' flaws are because bursticade limits deck space.

 

I did play against another guy running it with lodestone builder. He never really got going with the mason's spire tactic, so difficult to say which is better after a few games.

True enough, but there are tons of decks that have bad matchups and even if you run a well rounded deck you'll occasionally knock into something that seems designed to shut you down.

It's like with the shrine rush thread, everything can't have a fair chance against everything while deck building remains meaningful, what matters more is the overall win-rate of a deck.

 

Expect that you don't have to dedicate much to both the shrine rush deck or the bursticade deck. You just add a few runes in, and you can counter entire faction archetypes.

 

IS and ST both have some shrine rush synergy, don't go on temping me with a good time.