Excellent post, both regarding FW and quick games. With regards to FW - I think the problem is rooted in the faction bonus combined with cheap champs. Skeletal berserker <30 nora and when he dies, bring on the nora/dmg bonus! Back he comes a few turns later. This is true of so many FW champs, they recycle so damned fast because of the cost/bonus combination. With regards to time - I mostly agree and actually enjoy long games against other factions. However, there is no real fun in the game vs attrition. You just face a sea of cheap champions, which you can't punch through - at the same time some Cuellar / Serkan is boosting their backside up to release a power fart! So it's around 1 hour doing the same thing, until they decide to set foot outside their deployment zone! On small maps, you may stand a chance - but on bigger map?
I dont mind playing a 400 hour game now and then, but I run into FW about 50% of the time, which is annoying.
@JazzMan1221 Well said, I've been dying to put something similar down on paper, but work has been eating up all my time. Glad to see there's still more of the 'old guard' of gamers hanging around.
Disagree on this one point. Forsaken Wastes provides no particular archetype that Pox otherwise lacks, FW is just the best version of it.
Do all factions have late-game decks? What do you see as good examples of late game decks for each faction? The main ones I can think of off the top of my head are De'lim and Draksar.
Honestly, I think late-game and early-game are mediocre terms, especially in Pox. I'd consider most synergy-decks as late-game though, the more the better. Weird distinction, but FW plays for a long game, not the late game. They have plenty of incremental benefits and want to eek those out, but they want the field to look mostly like it does early on, when few champs are out. Time is only roughly correlated with stuff in Pox.
Okay, then do you see long game being a reasonable goal for non-FW decks? And which ones do you see as being able to most effectively take advantage of it?
Yes, but it's harder. Running out of champs can be a problem, depending on the deck. I think IS/SP constructs with Reclaim Mats actually does a pretty good job, and plays for a long, low-resource game. Probably some Spell Seal setups as well.
I could also seeing it work for decks that work off a pretty large supply of summons, as they supply meat without necessarily exhausting their rune dock. Like they can still suffer real and painful losses, but if you are losing non-runes while there are losing runes you have a reasonable chancce of grinding out advantage there eventually. Of course IS/SP constructs and FW decks are the best example of these, but I suspect you could do something similar with De'lim as well.
It's not really about supply meat. That's the thing. There just needs to be some sort of incremental benefit, and some way to cancel resources and slow down the opponent. Raw HP is one way to do that, but it isn't the only way; aggressive spells, for instance, fill a similar role.
To be one hundred percent fair, you actually could have won your game handily once you had taken midfont. If you had made that last aggressive push to get to the shrine and kill the culler instead of poking/focusing on the walls of meat it would have been game over.
Maybe not this specifically, but this in general I think is one of the most infuriating points to playing against a long-game(Late game) strategy. There's always that ONE point where the scales skew beyond recovery, that one decision to push here instead of there, and it becomes more and more glaringly obvious as the game moves to conclusion. That's what attrition minded players live for.
Attrition is part of the game, and I get that FW is supposed be annoying to play against. But all this global Bane Shift which its part of... I felt forced to take backlash for UT, and if you run into chopping block on large maps... Well I start crying. As I'm getting more experienced you start learning how to deal with stuff. But do realize that when you run into this stuff when you are just starting pox... It feels unfair that they have several global spells and relics where the rest is mostly confined to aoe