spoonman

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spoonman on Warcraft
Reactive or Creative?
August 21, 2007

Good day folks I’m spoonman and some of you may recognize me from my highly opinionated posts on various forums. I’ve been playing the Warcraft TCG since the beginning of the year, and I’ve come Top 8 at 2 out of the 3 Regionals I’ve attended (my first one was shortly after I started and at the time I was playing a Rogue deck with 1 or 2 Rares…I still won a game or two though!). Prior to WOW I played Yugimonz for a few years, and back in the good old days of primary school I was a Pokemon Cards pro. I don’t play the Warcraft MMO although I do have Warcraft 2 somewhere on my computer. Introductions aside, I was inspired by a lecture I attended at Uni last week. It was directed at year 11 students (Peer Tutoring course), covering education and ‘learning-to-learn’ propaganda. I’m sure most of you know what I’m talking about. But some concepts struck me as particularly applicable to TCG’s and specifically WOW. The concept I chose to focus on today is reactive vs. creative.

The concept is fairly simple. You can either react to whatever occurs or you can be creative and go out of your way to make things happen. In the lecturer’s examples this was applied to learning and education eg tests, assignments and the like. Applied to TCG’s though, it can be applied to playstyle, deckbuilding, socializing and much more.

Let’s look at being reactive or creative in-game. Is it better to be creating threats for your opponent to deal with, or is it better to react to each threat your opponent puts out? Clearly the position of power is creating threats for the opponent to deal with. We can see this by looking at the Phadalus-dominated metagame: put out dudes until the opponent can’t deal with them any more seems to be the way to go at the moment. Sure Pagatha can give the blue shammy a run for his money, but as far as I know, gas masks aren’t as popular as blue face-paint right now.

Going into a new metagame though, with the release of FOO for competitive play approaching, being reactive or creative is exceptionally relevant. Will you tweak your Phadalus Goodstuff with Draenei junk and untargetable Gnomes, and only change it to react to the new threats that FOO throws aggro’s way? Or will you see possibility in the power of Kiani De’nara, a turn 4 monstrosity who has a certain sinister synergy with the grave…s? Will you nurture the janky deck and create a meta-shaking explosive Kiani Graves monster? Phadalus only became the force it is today because someone had the courage to try out the new blue Shaman that TDP gave us.

In most games though, control will become the dominating force in a metagame once it becomes clear what needs to be controlled (reacted to). In this instance, react becomes the strongest approach…except in WOW where the agro dudes are just too good to deal with coupled with good draw power. This expected trend could of course be thwarted by the creation of a deck that the control decks have no way of dealing with…of course this would be reacting to the domination of control by creating a new deck…

So think about it…but not too hard

Cheers,

spoonman