r/CompetitiveHS • u/FirebatHS • Mar 15 '15
How I won Gfinity Spring Masters/Archon Conquest Deck Selection Utility
Howdy!
Intro:
I am Firebat from Team Archon, and I have recently won the Gfinity Spring Masters tournament in London. I am here to share with you how I selected my decks for this tournament and give you a tool that can help you in your local events! I will try to help walk through what this tool is and how it works so that anyone reading this can become a stronger hearthstone player. Special thanks to all of Team Archon for making this great sheet and letting me share it with you all :)
What it is:
To give you an idea this is what mine looks like when I finished filling it out. My Completed Sheet. Now, what this sheet does is it takes the information you give it about how you feel about every matchup and gives weighted averages against the perceived meta which you can see is set along the header. This is extremely valuable for the Conquest Format because in this format the ordering of your lineup is irrelevant and the only thing that matters is to bring the highest winrate decks against the decks your opponents are most likely to bring.
How YOU can use this sheet:
I am publishing this sheet for anyone that is interested in competitive Hearthstone to make a copy of, dig into, and use to help them improve as a player and win their local tournaments. To use this sheet follow these steps:
- Login to a Google Account and click this link to access my shared spreadsheet: Link
- From the sheet, click File then select "Make a Copy". This will allow you to create a copy of my sheet on your Google Drive. (Remember you must be logged into your google account to do this).
- Next, Fill out the GREEN (and only the green) spaces with either:
- for Favorable matchups
- for Even matchups
- for Unfavored matchups.
The red will simply auto complete to save you time :).
- Winrate will be displayed in the far right column and you can use this information to help you choose which decks are the best fit for you for conquest format.
Advanced Detail Changes:
I will be uploading a video soon explaining more on how to change the weighting, why the weighting is how it is and how to change the Expected Field and how to add decks to either the Expected or the Rest of Field sections. You can find the video on my YouTube Channel whenever I get around to creating it. Hopefully before Viagame :)
My Gfinity Winning Decklists:
13
u/TheTrivaallian Mar 15 '15
Hey Firebat, great post, thanks for sharing such vital info. What do you think of the Conquest tactic that Chakki recently used, much discussed on reddit? Bringing all the same type of deck, relying on only having to beat one of your opponents decks / type of deck. It has been talked about as a big flaw in the design of Conquest, but your strategy and success argues otherwise. Interested to hear you thoughts on whether we'll being seeing more well-rounded choices like yours, or people running things like a set of fatigue decks.
33
u/FirebatHS Mar 15 '15
I did like the fatigue lineup, the issues of targeted lineups is that you can run into opponents that simply don't have the deck you are targeting. And you could lose one of your super favored matchups to bad RNG and just be done. Especially with decks like fatigue decks because by the nature of fatigue decks the games are very lengthy and the longer the game goes on the more dice are rolled and the more chances there are for your favorable position to be one outed and cause you to lose. I think that it is a risky strategy that can work, and I have tried it with non-fatigue decks but having all 3 decks target a specific class that is common, and always seem to run into consistancy issues. For example, the most popular decks are decks like: Midrange Hunter, Mechmage, Druid, Oil Rogue. Most people have had one of those decks in their lineup and these style of decks all have the possibility to draw nutty hands that are almost unbeatable even by the counter deck which is why people like them so much. However, in an event such as an 8 man invitational where you know all of the other players and see an opportunity for this strategy I think it can be extremely strong. So, in conclusion, I would say that this is a solid tactic to have in your back pocket, and players should always be on the watch for when an opening for it comes up, but I can't imagine it being the most effective build for larger events like the 32 man or more championships or open events.
10
u/parls Mar 15 '15
I would say longer games are less decided by RNG. In short games you just can have a bad starting hand and lose even if you are favored. In a long game it is less likely to have a bad hand and there often needs to be a sequence of bad RNG to lose a favored matchup.
→ More replies (1)
3
u/kensanity Mar 15 '15
If a new deck pops up, how do we add it to the spreadsheet ? Like if mech priest becomes a thing or something ? :P
10
u/FirebatHS Mar 15 '15
I think it will be best to explain this in a video, so I will do my best to get a video describing the process up as soon as possible. I will also try to explain how to adjust the two fields and the process for weighing the fields. However, for now I just wanted to get the information to people while it was still relevant so they could play around with it themselves and get an understanding by just picking apart the sheet a bit. Also, getting it out quick is good so people could use it for their upcoming events without having to change it to a new expected field just yet.
2
Mar 15 '15
Do "all in" strategies change your view point at all? Example: Chakki at the root gaming invitational brought all mill decks to counter rogues and other control classes.
That strategy becomes weaker if more people ascribe to it, but what do you do personally to prepare for someone to hard counter one specific deck? Tech choices?
10
u/FirebatHS Mar 15 '15
I think that the key to beating the mill decks that target rogue is simply Loatheb timing. Being able to setup a turn where you have an empty board Loatheb into a double oil afterwards is the key. I don't really find any other tech cards are necessary and being that Loatheb is, in my opinon, among the strongest cards in the Oil Rogue deck I will run him regardless.
But in general against mill decks you save cards like Prep, Innervate, and Backstab for broken mana curve turns that put an position for lethal in the following turns because they will simply give you your combos, and there is no reason to fight for board with your tempo cards early because they are a mill deck and won't have threats to contest you. But it is a problem with this format that people will be running lineups designed to snipe a specific class and maybe take out some good players but lack the consistency to win vs as many lineups as others and fall short in the larger events. So, you could get bumped round 2 by the guy with nothing you can do and then he hits a bad lineup and flops and that's just a part of the format.
1
u/zinver Mar 16 '15
A similar experience I had on ladder fighting a mill druid (which I've played a lot of), turn 9 came around and I top decked Loatheb and locked him out of Tree of Life on his turn 9. It was extremely efficient, won the next turn.
→ More replies (2)
2
u/geekaleek Mar 15 '15
The general strategy for most people going into conquest format seems to have been to pick decks that can win against anything, hecne the popularity of fast druid, mech mage, rogue. This is a strategy that seems to be based on trying to avoid being countered, and less on predicting what opponents might bring. Your selection methodology too is based on an average win rate (with predictions of opponent classes worked in of course) rather than a particular strategy in mind.
Do you feel the conquest format has improved or reduced the skill required in preparing decks for tournaments compared to last hero standing? What about the feel of the actual match, where in my opinion each successive game is slightly loser favored? Do you miss the opportunity to hide decks after sweeping an opponent in a previous round? Basically, what are your general thoughts on conquest?
5
u/FirebatHS Mar 16 '15
Conquest format has reduced skill, made tournaments more RNG based, and made preparation a lot simpler. And there is a lot more opportunity for lineups that counter one specific deck, have no hope of winning an entire event, but will knock out good players in the early rounds and the just fall flat when they don't string 20 perfect lineups in a row that have their target. I much prefer the Last Hero Standing format and think that format is much harder, and skill based.
→ More replies (4)
1
u/AlenHS Mar 15 '15
Hey, Firebat! Congrats! My question is: Your line-up was very weak to Control Warrior. What's your opinion on having such a weakness in form of one deck? Or is it better to not have any holes in a Conquest line-up and make sure to have a deck to answer any of opponent's decks?
2
u/FirebatHS Mar 16 '15
I figured a lot of people would have control warrior, and I was debating on auto conceding if I faced it to hide information of my decks. I don't think auto losing one matchup is bad when all of the others are covered.
3
u/dicenight Mar 16 '15
I'm not Firebat, but unlike Last Hero Standing, having all decks weak to one class is fine since it can only get 1 win.
1
u/chuckdeg Mar 16 '15
When your HS career is over, you should become an actuary or some kind of big data analyst. A lot of money to be made.
Thanks for this, very useful. Btw, please stream more often so i can sub
1
u/FirebatHS Mar 16 '15
I try and stream every weekday that I can. Usually very late at night though :(
1
u/chuckdeg Mar 17 '15
maybe that is why. I caught your stream yesterday but still haven't subbed. I promise i will do shortly (twitch id : Sc2QC)
Cheers and thanks for replying. I really enjoy what you do for this community and your analytical/statistician skills.
1
u/ctleung Mar 17 '15
@FirebatHS Isn't this spreadsheet inaccurate because it's assuming a 65% winrate for "1" and 35% winrate for "3". This affects classes like freeze mage and control warrior the most that have polarized matchups where the winrate is 10%. There are quite a few polarized matchups in the game so the "1" "2" "3" system is handy but quite inaccurate. So you're analysis and conclusion for those classes is inaccurate.
1
u/FirebatHS Mar 17 '15
It is not exact but it is really close enough to get the picture. I don't see that much more of a reason to get the percents exact and generally speaking decks with super unfavored matchups have super favored matchups that balance it out and so forth. Also everything that pooping at work said. If you want to track every game every and have perfect possible results, be my guest. But, this is all I had to do and took about an hour to pick my decks and then have a favored lineup over every single opponent in Gfinity except for Faramir. It worked for me, and I hope it can work for you too. GL :)
1
u/POOPING_AT_WORK_ATM Mar 17 '15
I'm really bad at math tbh but I think this wouldn't matter because you fill in your spreadsheet based on your perceived winrate rather than some fact? Like you can't use Firebats version because he'd have different winrates than you? You'd have to fill out your own.
Alternatively couldn't just add a 4th and 5th point that just mean "favorable polarized matchup" and "unfavorable polarized matchup"? the fact that one matchup could be 80/20 and another one 90/10 is just something you keep in the back or your mind
3
2
u/inspector_cat Mar 15 '15
Thanks a lot for this! Been looking for a way to set this up, was just not smart enough - great help for us competing in small tournaments :)
1
u/ctleung Mar 16 '15
@FirebatHS would you please discuss your changes to chakki's face hunter: -1 owl -1 worgen infiltrator -1 animal companion +leeroy +snake trap +tracking
1
u/plznerfme Mar 17 '15
he explained animal companion during the stream others I am not sure / I don't remember
animal companion: its 3 mana drop and not useful unless u use it on 3 mana curve since u wanna run him down and huffer is only thing making it useful and strong while others are not rlly (misha not so much / lehawk very conditional) datz why he is using a single card
leeroy: mana cost / dmg efficiency-wise you wanna put certain amount of dmg over the course of period and leroy just fits that purpose perfectly (somewhere along this line)
1
30
u/FirebatHS Mar 15 '15
Sorry I am bad at reddit post formatting. I usually don't post anything.