In Magic: The Gathering there's a concept of recognising when you're not the beat-down. You may have constructed your deck to get a fast start with plenty of cheap creatures aiming to finish an opponent quickly. However if your opponent has a similar deck and gets a better start you need to recognise that your usual aggressive tactics are wrong for this match and play defensively. You need to recognise you're not the beat-down.
Villore Accords met two close-range blaster set-ups in this tournament. We needed to kite, to minimise the time spent doing damage by the enemy blaster boats. We didn't get this.
Even, agonisingly, a situation developed in our second match where a whole bunch of enemy Brutixes etc were chasing but not catching a ship that was about 30km off them not doing any damage. All the pilot had to do was nothing - let his ship coast out towards the edge of the arena dragging the defanged enemy team behind him. Instead he decided to turn around and fly back into the happy wolfpack.
Now the key to this I think is practice. We practiced once or twice a week and our practices were not efficient in terms of matches played per time spent. I'd guess we were about 1.5 matches per hour which is not a lot when a match lasts at most ten minutes.
People were also getting tilted too easily in practices.
Let's now look at some positives. The practices and tournament games was very useful experience and we saw some sigificant improvement in some players. I'd like to mention WubtheCook (our logi) and Malmar (frigate pilot) particularly. Ship fitting was good (Ashley being a supremely gifted pyfa wizard) and doctrine theorycrafting was fine. It's the understanding of how the enemy's doctrine works that we didn't get and that's a very achievable goal for next year.
It was a ton of fun and I was very glad to be allowed to participate after I fell out with my former alliance just days before the cut-off.
Match 1: Villore Accords v United Federation of Conifers
Match 2: Villore Accords v SOLAR Fleet
Neither of the replays show the ECM (and when it landed) we really got some nasty dice rolls in both matches.
ReplyDeleteTrue ECM didn't help but I think our main issue was staying too close to blaster ships. We didn't recognise the enemy win con.
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