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| Guild Ball |
BIG (Bristol Independent Gaming) just ran BIG Balls, a 16 player Guild Ball tournament which was the kick-off of their ‘tides’ series of tournaments for 2016. Tides is the title for their in house ‘best of the best’ format which encourages people to attend all 4 tournaments across the year and the best overall performer across the lot wins a shiny cup and far more importantly vast amounts of internet fame (and everyone knows internet fame is the best kind).
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| BIG Balls - yup that was the event picture... |
On a wet and pretty miserable Saturday morning 16 brave and intrepid coaches rocked up with intent of challenging for the rights for their guild to be proclaimed top dog and to settle some scores along the way. The mix of guilds was reasonably decent: 2 Alchemists, 2 Brewers, 2 Butchers, 2 Engineers, 2 Fisherman, 4 Masons, 1 Mortician and 1 Union, so all 8 teams currently available represented but of the current season 2 coaches available only one was present in the form of Corsair. Hopefully once they’re all released come April we’ll see a lot more of them hitting the table.
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| BIG Stock - Season 2 available now! |
I decided in advance I was going to take an all Alchemist team. They’ve been touted as one of the weaker guilds, which I honestly don’t understand, and a look at the rankings site seems to back this up but I really enjoy playing them and as I’d just finished painting up Venin especially I wanted to get them on the table. I’d hoped for a chance a painting award but this was scuppered early when they said no painting awards at this event.
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| Guild Ball - Venin |
One poor soul was a touch late in arriving (we won’t mention the hangover) so I’d said pair me up with him so everyone else can get cracking and that saw me being paired up against the one union player at the event. Normally I’m ok with this having played with union myself but I know they’re tough and was rather out of practice going into this so was going to be a tough start to the day.
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| My missing round 1 opponent Ben |
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| Round 1 gets going |
James with Masons - I think James ended up in second last place but the game was super tight all the way through as I was able to blind a chunk of his team on one or two turns (old blind rules being played as not sanctioned and update only came out the day before). Again I got into a good position on this then made a few subpar decisions which made it harder work than it should have been but he played a tight & solid game throughout. 12-11 win.
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| Oli on left about to do horrible things to Jun's team |
Oli with Masons - Played Oli twice now and both times have been horrendously tight and cagey games, he knows the masons inside out and seems to have built a bunch of the 'tricks' that people are now starting to roll out with them. There was one play on this which I won't spoil but dear god it's horrible! His objective is normally to get a massive momentum lead to get first turn each round and then have chisel activate late and pound someone into the ground. I was able to break the cycle one turn by popping Midas's legendary and getting a couple of take outs which brought the game back to 6-6 but couldn't get my hands on the ball to threaten his goal which was the only way I was going to win. In the end honour just went nuts beating people into the ground and I went down to 6 take outs ending at 8-12.
Simon with Engineers - Typical engineers with Rage causing loads of damage early on and repeatedly knocking people down to stop me getting into him but once I got there I was able to overpower his team. His mistake in this one was putting Velocity forward close to Midas where even with def 6 some turns weight of dice meant I could build momentum and got the first go in the critical turns. This was the one game where Midas actually performed to his "captain fantastic" billing banging in a goal and doing 3 takeouts to more or less solo the scoreboard! 12-6 (I think).
My take-aways from the tournament was I played 3 games with Venin and while he's solid really felt I didn't get much out of him, I suspect a Union player would have done much better and in the last game I dropped him for mercury (ranged threat back at engineers is useful) and in that last game felt the balance of the team was far better. There is a way I could play Venin as my central holding player I suppose by going early putting up the armour buff, plus the damage bounce if appropriate and just tanking people that come after him but I hate things which dictate my activation order so would prefer an inbuilt always active damage soak model (if only Fangtooth was an option!).
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| Guild Ball - Alchemists |
For future though I can see my 8 strong team having Decimate and Mist in it over the 'lesser' Alchemist players. Yes they all want loads of influence to be effective but they can actually do something all the time where Calculus and Mercury often just spectate anyway. With the changes to blind I'm really down on Calculus, blind is now to help prevent goals but then so is Compound and Venin kinda feels like a sweeper type role too. All in all I think I need someone to just stand in midfield and control the pitch so I'm actually drawn to Avarise for that, having tried him in the past with Alchemists he was really useful so think I’ll need to play a bunch of games with him to work out team balance.
Potentially the team I’m leaning towards is:
Midas, Flask, Vitriol, Avarise, Compound, Mist, Decimate, Hemlocke
But it just feels so wrong, it’s clearly not playing an Alchemist playstyle it’s just picking the good players which are available to the team and dropping everything which is condition focused that are meant to be the Alchemists ‘style/gimic’. But apparently when smoke comes out that will more or less result in me completely flipping and taking all of those players, so maybe it’s a good thing to do it now while I can!
