This Sunday 1/22/23 at 10am CST I will be streaming the new video game HatMania, by the creator of one of my favorite card games Mindbug, on my twitch channel: twitch.tv/tomsepicgaming
“HatMania is a retro top down multitasking platformer with a twist. To successfully guide two companions through a treacherous dungeon, you must split your attention and navigate both their fates at the same time.” This will be my first time playing it. (I might go into it early to make sure I know the controls ahead of time though, haven’t decided.)
Mindbug is a 2-player card game where each player has the opportunity to steal exactly 2 of their opponent’s 10 cards throughout the course of a game.
On your turn, you either attack with a creature you have in play or play a creature from your hand. When you play a creature, your opponent has a chance to use one of their two mindbugs to steal that creature and treat it as if they played it themself. Mindbugs do not replenish so figuring out what to play when and when to mindbug your opponent is incredibly interesting. I highly recommend the game. (I just bought enough base sets and expansions to have 5 full sets to gift to people.) [Review by Tom Vasel from the Dice Tower]
According to FedEx, my Epic Guardians of Gowana (Jungle) kickstarter is set to arrive by end of day tonight. Assuming they don’t lose it (again), I am planning on going through all of the new cards and giving my initial impressions on them Sunday May 23rd. I have seen some spoilers, and there are a few spicy ones already. After that, I’ll spend a ton of time deck building. I’ll also be more than happy to work out any suggested ideas from chat and/or give feedback on any decks. HOWEVER, I make no guarantees that my suggestions will be worthwhile because I already know I have no idea how to effectively play some of the new cards (which excites me greatly).
I’ll probably start around 8am CDT with breaks to eat some ramen and play in the Dark Draft weekly at 11am CDT.
March 2021 Constructed Monthly
I said I would put this tournament up on Youtube because there were some great games, and I have finally started doing so. The first game is up now, and I’ll post the next game at 7pm Saturday, Tuesday, Thursday until I get knocked out, followed by a deck explanation video. The deck is midrange (obviously) but also combo, built around Mist Guide Herald and a card I considered trash tier for a long time (until Duels).
So, I am in the process of buying my first home (ideally a Condo in Minnesota). It has been monopolizing a lot of my energy recently, and I haven’t been able to keep up with my regular Duels ratings. I am officially putting them on hold, as well as my weekly streams on Twitch until I have purchased a place. However, I will continue to stream the monthly tournaments on the last Saturday of every month at 10am CST. (I might have that time wrong.) If there are other tournaments on the app, I’ll probably also stream those.
In the meantime, I’m still open to challenges on the app, any format: TomEpicGamin
Falling in love with Legends of Runeterra, spending $100 on it, and then just no longer playing it, with about half my purchased coins and 40,000 gems unspent (in a non-predatory monetization system with a lot of free-to-play benefits where I never felt like I had to spend money) — even though the client looks and feels great, they keep putting out fresh content, the development team is open/active in their communities/responsive to critiques, there are 10k tournaments every two months, there’s an excellent limited format where you rogue-like upgrade your deck between games with elimination being two consecutive loses and an entry consisting of two runs, there’s actual interesting lore-based champions that pull me deeper into the game and the surrounding universe, they pay for survey feedback ($5), and there are desirable cosmetics (another thing I never particularly cared about before Runeterra) — just served to illustrate how much more I enjoy Epic’s gameplay.
Similarly, since Hearthstone came out with battlegrounds I’ve played 302 hours, but I haven’t played a single game of “Hearthstone” since, and I haven’t missed it once (although Duels intrigues me). Tried to get into Magic Arena, one skipped weekend due to a vacation, and I effectively forgot about Arena for a while, and when I remembered, I had no desire to go back. Tried to get into Eternal with Pluck U to chase the 50K world championship, game just wasn’t particularly fun to me.
In general, I’ve just come to the conclusion that I actively dislike the standard resource model for most 2-player dueling card games and their implications (missed resource drops, playing on a curve especially for midrange, exponential power differentials between resource-costs, etc.). Runeterra is far and away the best of these because they address a bunch of these issues, but some of those core issues remain.
I vastly prefer Epic’s resource system where every card costs 1 or 0, each of those is largely balanced against the other cards of that cost (with some outliers), and the only thing determining what cards I want to play is the game state not the game turn. I can manipulate the game state much more easily than the game turn, and I love setting up decks and plays that manipulate the game into a state where this one card is better than all other cards, even though they all cost the same. Games are able to play out with so much more variation because of this. Dark Draft as a heads up draft format is phenomenal as well.
Further, the spoilers for the new kickstarter sets look awesome, and they got me super excited, as well as the fact that Pantheon is going to start to be added on the app on Tuesday Nov 3. Therefore,
Weekly Streamed Saturday Twitch Challenges
Every Saturday at 1pm CST/CDT I want to play at least a best of three against someone in any epic format on the app (excluding on the day of a Monthly which I’ll stream starting at 11am ET). I will also stream it on twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/tomsepicgaming (if you would like to remain anonymous, I will cover your Epic username.)
During the best of three, I can either do my usual talking through all of my plays by myself or we could hop into a discord/skype call that I’d broadcast. I can also actively focus on providing feedback or refrain from it as much as possible while still explaining my plays. (While also interacting with chat of course!)
For formats, the default would be Dark Draft, but I will happily work with the challenger on any format they would want to do including but not limited to: Random 30, Beginner, full Constructed, Constructed using only some sets, singleton Constructed (30, 45, or 60), Burn/Health Gain lessConstructed, other custom ban lists, we each start with the same 33 cards from an alignment and then finish building from there but can’t add any more of that initial alignment, anything we can think of.
First match will be against Atlanta, Dark Draft on November 7, 2020. I will then break out those games into individual videos which I’ll post on my
New YouTube Channel
I wasn’t able to get back into my original Youtube channel after Youtube changed stuff, so I finally gave up and just created a new one: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeqfbtXRAGMdm8e06tvS9-w/videos. I am planning on posting a single-game video every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 7pm CST/CDT. I have preloaded it with the January 2020 Constructed Monthly, and my tutorial campaign run through. I plan on adding all of my highlighted games from Twitch so far. Including the Saturday streams, I will also be putting out content on the blog the rest of the week.
Card Ratings Finally Continued
I recently updated my Constructed Tiered Card Ratings as well as completely overhauled my Dark Draft Card Ratings. Going forward, I will be posting one new card review every Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday at 7pm CST/CDT. To see them you can either subscribe to the blog or check out my most recent posts page: Game Reviews, Strategy Articles, and More. Seeing as how I’ll be flooding out a lot of smaller content, I do not plan on cross-posting to the Epic pages on Facebook (Fan Page, Digital), Reddit, or Board Game Geek as I have in the past, outside of potential major articles. (Feel free to post to any of those if you would like to discuss anything here with that particular community.) Also, I do not plan on actually posting anymore big articles on here for awhile, aside from one which will go up before November 20th, unless a massive wave of motivation hits. I might do some stub articles on stuff I want to put out there but don’t have the energy/full-understanding to do as thoroughly as I’d like though (Aggro-combo human token decks).
Here’s the first rating in the new style (I have a couple more written out going in alphabetical order, but I found this one was particularly interesting):
Images used with permission from White Wizard Games. These are not the final card files and are subject to change.
I actually think this card is quite powerful, and I’ve been consistently impressed by it. It’s a “boring, vanilla,” airborne/ambush champion, but those stats are actually terrifying. Aerial Assassin at minimum trades with all playable airborne champions (except Sky Serpent), and it survives all of the 7 or less attack ones like Draka’s Enforcer, Angel of the Gate, Ice Drake, Strafing Dragon, Little Devil, etc. It also survives all 0-cost removal (barring bounce: Hasty Retreat, Vanishing, Disappearing Act which are all devastating), in addition to 7 damage removal which is getting to be a more important break point (Fires of Rebellion, Whirlwind, Flames of Furios). On the attack, that 9 airborne offense effectively demands a 1-cost answer as there are not many 0’s that can effectively mitigate it, since there aren’t airborne tokens to chump block (thankfully).
Further, in Dark Draft, I’ll frequently attempt to plop this down in front of a turn 1 Little Devil, Guilt Demon, or blitzing 1-cost airborne champion with 7/8 stats or lower to go for the block. This is especially true because on-turn fast targeted-removal is not valued particularly highly right now, so while they may have a slow reestablishing follow up, which isn’t ideal for me, the odds that they can remove my blocker before I eat their 0-cost champion is fairly low. Even if they do, it will frequently force them down to 3 cards in hand turn 1. If I’m holding a 0-cost buff, to counter a potential buff from my opponent, I’m even more likely to try for this play. (Erase and Banishment are the utter fail cases for this though so be aware.)
In constructed, this was a solid and necessary addition to my Sage, Kark-Hunting list. A lot of the other ambush champions that I could use for off-turn gold-punishers were either just too small and unimpactful or didn’t have reliable, in-built evasion, making them too bad/inconsistent. Against Kark, you have to push big damage early, to prevent the turbo Kark win, and you need to apply constant champion-based persistent pressure to prevent them from stabilizing into card draw. This did both, as an off-turn gold-punisher. However, if you can’t reliably play it as an off-turn gold punisher, you can’t draw enough cards to maintain a reasonable hand-size, or you need either more immediate or long term value to win, this probably isn’t your card. If Alignment doesn’t matter and burn is super prevalent, Angel of the Gate is probably better, but Angel’s 7 health is definitely a liability so if your deck is more aggressive than midrange/control, Aerial Assassin might still be better.
The threat of this card is so-high that I try to do everything I can to avoid spending my gold first on my turn if I know my opponent has it in hand and I don’t have an effective answer, similar to (but not quite as much as) Rift Summoner and Thought Plucker.
Conclusion
I feel pretty good about this schedule, but I’d be happy to hear any comments, concerns, hype, etc. if anything comes to mind. Nothing is set in stone so it can be adjusted if there is a reasonable reason.
This Thursday May 21st stream at 7:30pm CDT on twitch.tv/tomsepicgaming will be Duels constructed testing with Pluck U captain and my competitive card game mentor Tom Dixon.
My current decks include an
AoE bounce deck built around the tribute deal 2 damage 0-cost champions: Bouncing Lightning
Human tokens aggro combo deck (duels gives a lot of fuel)
Messing around with Evil tokens, first draft had too many holes. Either an update to my constructed monthly winning MGH tokens list or possibly an event based version
My constructed monthly winning Sage untargetables list, currently the only change being +3 Dissapearing Act, possibly swapping in Transmogrify
I’m also working on an anti-war, anti-bounce Wild list, but it doesn’t have much if any duels in it
“Images used with permission from White Wizard Games. These are not the final card files and are subject to change.”
The beta version of the Epic Card Game app just added the cards from the upcoming Epic Duel Decks. I have verified that they are in there (by checking the deck builder), but I have not looked at the text of any of the new cards yet. Aside from a few cards they spoiled before and a few that might be in the campaign, this is the first time most of the these cards have been seen before.
This Thursday at my usual stream time 7:30pm CDT on https://www.twitch.tv/tomsepicgaming, I am going to go through them and give my first impression reviews. Come join in the discussion! Seeing as this is a full day away, I welcome you to review the cards ahead of time to form your own opinions on them and see how they match up to my own, or if you want to discover them at the same time that works too. Hopefully there’s another Dark Eyes equivalent. Eventually, once I’ve had a chance to mess with them a bit more, I’ll write up reviews for them to add to the rest.
I’ve also roughly edited out the most interesting game from my last Dark Draft Arena stream:
This is a video of the building of the random 60 deck we started a 7 game win streak with on Sunday and the first game afterwards (list below). I am planning on continuing the run this Thursday at 7pm CDT.
Going forward, I am moving my start time up on my Sunday stream from 2pm CDT to Noon CDT, to make it a bit easier to watch for European fans. Thursday schedule will remain the same.
Hey, just wanted to give a quick update that the Epic Digital Monthly is at 11am CDT today, not 10am CDT. I will be streaming it live at https://www.twitch.tv/tomsepicgaming
After seeing multiple requests for advice on the Epic Digital campaign generally and Mission 11, Zombie Horde, specifically, I streamed myself running through the campaign.
So far I’ve edited together our multiple games against the Epic Digital Campaign’s 11th mission, Zombie Horde. Watch me underestimate it and lose the first game. Then analyze, adapt, and crush it in (most) of the remaining games. [Zannos is a crazy strong card.] Attempt 1: 00:00 Attempt 2: 12:40 Attempt 3: 18:52 Attempt 4: 21:50 Attempt 5: 36:44 Attempt 6: 44:22 Attempt 7: 46:14
Thursday March 26 from 7pm to 10pm CDT. Not sure what specifically I’ll be streaming. Possibly the random 30 arena or constructed testing for the Digital Monthly this Saturday
Saturday March 28 starting at 10am CDT. Digital Monthly (Constructed) Go until we get knocked out (or win)
Sunday March 29th starting at 2pm CDT. No plans for this as of yet
Let me know if there is anything anyone would actively like to see, open to requests!
Streaming today at 7pm CDT. We are going to open by building a deck from this Random 60 pool. I have not yet looked through it (aside from what I couldn’t avoid seeing when taking screenshots of it). So, feel free to build your own version, debate with me on my card choices during the stream, and see how your final version compares with mine.
