Well, I guess the logic is that, if your opponent was able to survive up to that point while playing crappy Abyssian arcanysts, then s/he likely deserved to win, right?
The health pool is a very poor way to estimate who is winning. In this case, you were only very slightly ahead of board, but you knew that Death Knell was coming. You should have either closed the game earlier or had more board to survive.
Well, I dont think they deserved it- I answered ALL of their threats while dealing damage. They were 2/6 and I still 7/23 with a Grove Lion on the field when they hit 8 mana as P1- the only thing that allowed them a win was a strupid strong Knell. Just because I was aware it was coming doesnt mean its not unfair. Like, of all cards from all factions that could’ve turned the game around in their favor, I can only think of a flashed Juggernaut, which I, then again, think is also unhealthy for the game.
This means that you were playing a reactive game against a deck which is slower than yours. This very likely leads to defeat.
Based on the information you provide, I guess you were playing Vaath. Even slower Magmar decks can do enough damage to burst down Abyssian before Knell comes out, so I suspect something was not done totally right from your side. Or your opponent just got lucky, which may just happen in any game, but I don’t see enough arguments in your posts to complain about Knell in general.
I agree that there are some pretty OP cards right now, but just throwing my 2 cents in about Death Knell. I think of it as a Variax(Game ender, but not on the turn it is played)
It takes your entire turn unless you wait until 9 mana then you can also cast a void pulse or something.
Nothing it summons can ever deal damage or have rush(Trinity Wing lesson of something is the only exception) until the next turn.
If you ramp DK in early you probably aren’t getting more than 2 or 3 summons at the most. Nocturne is very MEH and abyssian doesn’t have access to many low cost arcanysts you will play.
Deck must be built specifically with Arcanyst Synergy in mind.
Yes it is extremely strong when you get a semi-decent DeathKnell but compared to many other win conditions it doesn’t seem all that OP to me. It is pretty slow and you have to build your deck around it(either slightly to get a good effect or completely to have mind blowing game winning plays.) Sunset Paragon and Lightbender are both excellent tools for anyone having problems against the card.
Lava Slasher is OP no doubt about it. BUT I am glad that Magmar has an OP card that doesn’t promote going full face retard.
Ehh, I almost don’t care how slow knell is, I don’t like it from a design standpoint similar to how I still hate Variax. It wins by taking a value-oriented tribe and smashing even more value into it so that even with transformations you can only delay the inevitable. Sometimes in card games in control matchups it’s important to recognize which player has to be the aggresor. Arcanyst lilith makes itthat decision easy for you since it takes the frustration of endless value from a blue conjurer and steps it up to the next level.
Now, while I really don’t like death knell in terms of design, I think blue conjurer and circulus are the cards I dislike the most out of the set. Not being able to get any sort of card advantage while they’re on board, as a continuing effect, feels pretty ridiculous, not to mention the RNG from conjurer ibeing stupid too. EMP is another I was very disappointed to see, since it’s a ridiculous no-fun-allowed card that increases duelyst’s use of dispel as a catch-all. But I think CP mainly intended it to be a safety valve against the new arcanysts (and maaaybe blood echoes sarlac, if n case that ever became a thing), so I’m still more annoyed at arcanysts.
Honestly I’m still playing this game, it can still be fun, but I’m not going to do the s-rank climb this month, Partially due to reduced available time and competition from other games, but also because I didn’t like most of the design of AB.
To be fair, the design of Death Knell is completely different than Variax. You need a very specific deck to succeed and you need to prepare a setup, so you cannot ramp it.
I don’t think specificity is a good excuse for what I see as bad design. Whether or not you ramp into infinite value is completely beside the point. Infinite value engines of this strength reduce the nuance of playing for and against value in control vs control matchups. And it simply feels stupid to play against since such decks can pretty easily recover from plays like pandomonium spear ghost lightning. Blue conjurer by itself is not as bad as, say, hearthstone’s jade mechanic, but in concert with everything else attached to arcanysts I’d venture to say it’s almost as bad. Death knell definitely has that very mana-cheaty-not-much-you-can-do-about-it feel. And I actively play both games.
Anyway, that’s my opinion, there were a bunch of people in the old variax thread who thought it was ok just because it was slow but I disagreed with them too.
I see your point and I agree with you in general, though not specifically on Death Knell. It’s horrible to have a control deck which makes all the other control decks useless, because it generates infinite value. In this respect, the possibility of ramping out Variax is relevant, because you get the possibility of getting the strongest effect in the game before other control decks, which is a win-win formula.
Death Knell is strong, but slow, just like other late game bombs like Silithar Elder. This makes the fight fair.
The entire point of control decks is to play passive in the early and survive until they can play their wincon and obviously win. If their wincon doesn’t have enough impact to win at this point, even when they are behind to some degree, then its not a wincon, its trash. Reaching 8 Mana in a tempo heavy fast paced game like duelyst is certainly not an easy thing to do, especially not as player one. So if your opponent gets to play his wincon, which doesn’t even win on the spot in case of variax or death knell and you still can’t manage to finish him off, then in all honesty, it’s an absolutely deserved victory for him.
His game plan worked out and won him the game, that’s how it’s supposed to be. The fact that you were ahead on board/life at this point means little, given your opponent played an lategame focused control deck it would mean complete failure on your end if he was equal/ahead in the early/mid game.
However, given how close the game was, you should really ask yourself if you couldn’t have done 6 more damage if you had played differently instead of just blaming Death Knell for your loss. For example, what if you hadn’t used that saberspine earlier to kill a Manaforger or what ever? You could have saved it as a finishing tool but you didn’t, was the minion you killed really that important?
This is an unfortunate example of the game’s increasing tendency to obscure/obfuscate feedback. Removing an early Manaforger with a Tiger that lives as a 3/1 so that the other player cannot get discounted spells should almost always be the right play. Using that Tiger to go face for 3 damage should often be the worse play. Instead the feedback received is go face or lose to some unkillable board generator that generates higher value for the more opponent minions you destroy, so next feedback is don’t remove enemy minions because they’ll all be revived come 8 mana.
If he had used the tiger to deny the early mana tile/get cheap spells early on it would have been the correct play, but judging by his statement, this wasn’t the case
Also i am not saying it was the wrong play, i can’t tell since i haven’t seen the game. But if my opponent wins the game on 6 life i should always check twice if i really had no way to do 6 more damage during that game before i call some niche lategame card broken.
And yes, when you play against a deck with more lategame power then your own then the most vital ressource you have to account for is the enemy life total. This has nothing to do with “unkillable board generators” which Death Knell isn’t, this is simple strategy and Matchup knowledge.
Now even you’re providing obscuring feedback!
your reply to me -
earlier reply to ryousen -
Which is it, baharoth?! Just like the game giving mixed signals.
Maybe you should read the posts again, you don’t seem to understand. When you play aggro against control, the most important ressource for you is your opponents aka the control players life total NOT your own life total/board state. It’s completely irrelevant if your general is still a 2/25 in turn 8 when your lategame can’t keep up with his. Having so much life left literally means you wasted damage along the way. And that’s exactly what i wrote up there.
I don’t know baharoth, you’re putting words in their mouth. At what point did they say they were playing an aggro deck? They had a Tiger at some point, that’s not proof of an aggro deck, considering they tell you they had a Grove Lion. That’s a standard aggro minion indeed. As is their assertion that they were removing minions, something an aggro deck is not likely to do.
You’re running off assumptions that are contradictory to any potential evidence exhibited by ryousen. Now I’m happy to agree that in the heat of the moment, ryousen’s probably exaggerating some things, but the gist of it is very different to what you seem to be painting.
Fine, i shouldn’t have said aggro and control, i should have said offensive player and defensive player. Every game, every matchup has one side that needs to be aggressive to win, an one side that needs to be more defensive. Who takes which role is usually decided by how strong their decks are at each stage of the game. But it can also be decided by other factors such as who has the tempo advantage for the moment, by playermentality and so on.
A control deck is usually the strongest in the lategame -> they play defensively most of the time. If your playing against a deck where you know they have the stronger late game, even if your a control deck yourself, you have play offensively to win, you have to play “aggro”. If you play defensively yourself you will just lose in the long run. I assume he played some kind of midrange vaath deck, maybe a Sajj variant, i don’t know and it doesn’t really matter.
If he knows that his lategame can’t deal with a Death Knell then he had to go straight face the moment he saw an arcanyst being played easy as that.
Opponent from ANY FACTION - Player 1 Turn 1 Aethermaster
Baharoth, regardless of what deck he’s playing - “Right, I’m on a clock, lets go face from now”
Read what you said and tell me, is that honestly how the game should be played? If this is how you recommend the game be played, well maybe something is wrong with it.
Edit: (Yes, ANY FACTION - thanks to the design principle violating Blue Conjurer, EVERY ARCANYST deck can have a Death Knell. So your advice now needs to be applied to non-Abyssian decks too.)
We could argue hours and hours whether or not it should be played like that or not, and how the game should be changed to avoid this but it’s moot.
As it stands now, if your opponents lategame is stronger than your own, you have to be aggressive, that’s a simple strategic fact. And it’s not just this game. I’ve been playing RTS and CCG games for about 15 years now and these kind of things you can find in all of them. Personally i don’t really see anything wrong with that but even if i did, it’s just how strategy works. If you can’t beat the enemy on his strongest point, you have to attack his weak spot or you lose. Complaining about that is like complaining about the sun rising. Pointless.
I agree with baharoth. Abyssian is such a lategame-oriented faction with cards like Revenant, Deathknell and Obliterate so it is pretty futile to try to go for the long game. Inevitability is on their side.
Identifying who is to aggressor is a very important part of tactics in card games and here’s a legendary article about the subject: http://www.starcitygames.com/magic/fundamentals/3692_Whos_The_Beatdown.html. It’s about MtG but its fundamentals fit almost any CCG.
You forgot Nightshroud. There was an argument some time ago about RNG of Nightshroud spawning from Death Knell…
Time to stick a million stuns and relocating cards 
.
Transformations should work though since transformed minions can’t be revived.
A great timeless article - unfortunately, Duelyst’s design team have long forgone any principles MtG designers and Mark Rosewater etc. would have advocated in these articles.
It is an excellent read, though. Won’t argue the good intent behind linking it.
(Not directly related - but
isn’t completely true - swarm does aim to (and often does) finish well before both players hit 7 mana)