Inaugural Sentinel Tactics tournament

So, there was totally a tournament today. I see no posts about it, so, uh, maybe y'all want to hear about it?

TLDR: It was super fun! No, really. I'm not just saying that. I was amazed out how polished and professional everything was, and I had a lot of fun playing.

I wasn't volunteering for this event, just attending as an entrant. We arrived a little after doors opened at 8am. Greater Than Games continues to expand, having taken over the adjoining space to their HQ/warehouse. That was only a week ago, so renovations are still to come, but in the meantime, they'd set up lots of beautiful banners as decorations.

After picking up badges in the entry area, we entered into a mid-sized room playing triple duty: The main area had three tables for playing Tactics. In one corner was a production control center, and on another wall was a screen showing the livestream. Around the corner was a small studio space from which the commentators broadcast. In the next room was the main stage, if you will, a table set up with a video rig to show top down shots of the board. During play on the main stage there was not only a judge, but two people manning video cameras to get shots of various angles of the players and board. This allowed the livestream to see the cards players were considering playing, as well as see the actions being taken. The production control center was taking in the three video streams from the main stage, the audio from the main stage, and the video and audio from the commentators, plus adding in some really great game graphics that showed the current status and which actions were being taken. They could pop up visuals of player mats and cards. It was just really, really excellent.

Seven teams had preregistered and three other people showed up to form an eight team. The tournament was organized into a double-elimination bracket. Losing teams went down to a secondary bracket. For the semi-finals, two teams from the top bracket played against the remaining two teams from the bottom bracket. The teams from the bottom bracket would need to win twice to advance to the finals. Then, in the finals, games would be played until one of the remaining teams had lost twice. For each match there would be a coin flip. The winner of the coin flip could choose to either have the first move or have the first pick of characters.

We were randomly assigned for the first round, with one of the matches randomly being put on to the main stage. Our team was put on one of the other tables. My teammates and I had little illusions that we would do wll. We were excited to play, but didn't have much experiene and no practice time together. We'd gotten together to discuss some strategies around which characters we would choose, but had mostly focused on picking those characters that were more straightforward, since we didn't know them very well.

Our opponents won the first toss and drafted first. Ultimately they ended up with Baron Blade, Citizen Dawn, and Legacy. We had Bunker, Beacon, and Wraith.

We got _DESTROYED_. The games are played to three incapacitations, with a 50 minute time limit. We lost 3-0 in 30 minutes. Our team name was 'Happy to be Here', and like I said we had little illusion that we'd do well, but that was ... harsh.

BUT, we learned a lot. The main tactics our opponents, The Gatecrashers, had defeated us with were: Use Citizen Truth to take lots of attacks from the main characters, use Legacy to Buff Baron Blade, and then use Baron Blade to do lots of big attacks.

For the second round we were in the bottom bracket and playing a team that had also lost in the first round, still in the larger room rather than the main stage. We were quite subdued, but at least armed with some new ideas. Our second opponent wasn't much, if any, more experienced then us and we were able to draft the exact team that had beat us in the first round (Blade, Dawn, and Legacy). We won that round 3-0! That was great, but realistically, I still wasn't expecting too much. After all, we didn't have lots of experience, just a couple ideas we'd picked up, and the team we beat wasn't experienced. I started thinking about how many teams _WERE_ experienced, though, and realized that it might not be too many.

Two teams were eliminated after those first two rounds. The teams that won both the first and second round got to take a rest while the remaining four teams with one loss and one win played to see who would make it to the semis. For the third round we were again not on the main stage. We tried to follow the tactics that had won in the second round, but the other team took Dawn. We ended up with Blade and Legacy, and for our third took Bunker. So there we were, facing the puzzle of how to get past Citizen Truth to actually damage the other team. Along with Dawn, the other team has Ambuscade and Absolute Zero. Dawn put up her Citizen Truth defense and the other two covered our starting area with traps and glacial structure hazards. 

Our answer came in the form of Legacy buffing Blade and then Blade unleashing massive attacks against Truth. I was playing Blade and one-shotted Citizen Truth twice. With that defense out of the picture Legacy, Bunker, and Blade piled on a ton of damage. In the end time was called before we anyone got to three capacitations, but we were ahead 2-1 and doing well.

We were in to the semis! To my surprise, we were the little team that could. We had somehow scraped through -- mostly on borrowing tactics from our first round blowout. And then I saw who our semifinal opponent would be -- the same team that had beat us in the first round. As it turns out, both of the teams that emerged from the bottom bracket were the two that The Gatecrashers had beat in the first two rounds, so they had to play one or the other of us. 

All games for the semis and finals were on the main stage, so we finally got to see what it was like there. On the other tables, it wasn't much different than being in the booth at a convention -- lots of background noise from other tables, well run, but not particularly formal. The main stage was a whole 'nother deal. We had precise instructions on where to roll dice and where to put power cards in play. It was a complex orchestration of production that we were mostly free from worrying about, but for which we had to be careful not to cause unnecessary disruptions or difficulty.

We won the draft and took Citizen Dawn. Now we'd get a chance to see what Gate Crashers could do about it. They ended up with Blade, Legacy, and Omnitron. We took Unity and the Wraith. The first round went pretty well for us. Unity sent Swift Bot right up to Legacy and Blade and with some reconfiguration/volatile parts shenanigans, bloodied both of them, with two hits each. I had Wraith use her reach to do three damage to Omnitron. We'd hit all three of them, and left an annoying turret bot creating hazard spaces near them. 

In turn, though, we got to see how the Gate Crashers dealt with the Dawn/Citizen Truth problem: Interpolation Beam. Omnitron simply moved up and then used Interpolation Beam to separate Citizen Truth from the rest of us. Then they put the beat down on Dawn, hitting her for four of her five points. Next it was Dawn's turn and, sadly, we made the decision that probably cost us the match. Dawn used Devastating Aurora to knock out Legacy and Omnitron, trying to buy time to heal. The effect, though, was to let the other team get five HP back while still having Blade knock her out on the next round. We were forever beyond from that point. When the game was called for time, we were down 2-0. It was far closer than the first beat down, but still not particularly close.

The other semi-final match was also won by the team from the top bracket, the Mighty Morphin Chronorangers, so the final would be a best of three series of matches. 

In the first game the Might Morphin Chronorangers took Dawn, but the Gatecrashers got Blade and Legacy. The Gatecrashers also took Omnitron -- their answer to Dawn's protection from Citizen Truth. The Chronorangers also took the Wraith and Ambuscade. The Gatecrashers did the same thing to the Chronorangers that they did to us -- push Citizen Truth out of the way and then just pound away. With Wraith slipping into shadows and Ambuscade using the cloaking device, all three incaps were done against Citizen Dawn. The final score was 3-0.

That was a massive defeat. The previously undefeated Chronorangers were left sitting dejectedly at the table. They hadn't lost the tournament, but they'd been blown out so badly, how would they come back and win not one, but two matches?

The next match, however, had something we had not seen before -- two teams who both knew how to stop Citizen Truth's protection of Dawn. The drafting went: Chronorangers: Blade. Gatecrashers: Dawn. Chronorangers: Omnitron. Gatecrashers: Legacy. Chronorangers: Ambuscade. Gatecrashers: Beacon. The Gatecrashers had Dawn and Legacy and had chose Beacon as their damage dealer, since Blade wasn't available. The Chronorangers had Blade, Omnitron as the answer to Citizen Truth, and Ambuscade. I wasn't quite sure why they kept taking Ambuscade. Sure, he's hard to hit, but how much damage was he doing?

The match started out as most of the previous ones had, with the Gatecrashers setting up Truth to be their protection. As expected, the Chronorangers brought up Omnitron and first separated, then knocked out Truth. Then the game started to get interesting. The Gatecrashers abandoned the use of Citizen Truth and went on the offensive. The board was filled with bruisers and a lot of mobility. The attacks were flying quickly. Along the way Chronorangers unleashed a suprise move from Ambuscade. Instead of filling up a bunch of spaces with traps, they put ALL of the traps and decoys on the same space, next to an enemy, and then moved a _different_ enemy on to the stack, causing all four explosions to hit both of them. It wasn't always super effective, but it sometimes was. This game also saw Blade get pushed into the middle of the volcano. It came down to the wire. The Chronorangers pulled out a win, 3-2, but would probably have lost on the next turn if they didn't. The Chronorangers had now dealt Gatecrashers their first lost, just one game after having their own, first, stunning, demoralizing loss.

Final game. With both teams having seen the Citizen Truth gambit be defeated, how would they react? Chronorangers took Blade. Gatecrashers took Legacy. Chronorangers took Omnitron. Gatecrashers took Beacon. Chronorangers took Ambuscade. Gatecrashers took ... The Wraith?! I did not understand that choice. Why not Bunker and get some great firepower, or even Dawn, who can be deadly on the attack.

As they took their first few turns, it seemed that the strategy was to use Legacy to build up buffs on Beacon and Wraith and then unleash both of them to make big attacks. Unfortunately, Baron Blade got close enough to them in the first round to punish their build up with attack+1 tokens with his oneshot that deals damage to an area using as many dice as tokens. The results were devasting -- two characters down to one or two HP each. The Gatecrashers put up a fight, but never seriously contended from that point on.

Chronorangers had done it -- coming from a loss behind to win two consecutive games and claim the victory. 

The last match finished around 5ish, I think.For reaching the semis we received a small cash prize: $75 for the team. Finalists got $150 to split. Champions got $600!! to split. The top two teams earned the right to compete in the nationals at GenCon next year. There are other qualifying tournaments planned , but I'm not sure if I'm allowed to say anything about that, and I don't know definitive information anyway.

It was a fantastic day. So happy to have played, done better than expected, and seen some really exciting matches. There were eight teams and I counted about 16 staff and volunteers -- about forty people in total. Well done, Greater Than Games.

I would love to hear what  people who watched  games via Twitch thought of what they saw.

Managed to only see the end of the last round, but it was really cool.

Aw man!  That sounded awesome!

Hej Arenson9, Thank you for sharing your experience. Sounds really cool.

Anyone know if there are any plans to upload the final matches to the >G website or Youtube?

I watched some of the matches in the twitch stream (saw your game Andy!) and the >G people in that stream said they would be uploading the matches to youtube later, pretty sure the unedited stream will also be up on Twitch too.

The games that were broadcast were a lot of fun to watch, they had Christopher and Ariel Tuley (I missed the beginning so I have no idea if that is "someone" or just a friend of >G) commenting on the matches, lots of strategy tips from Christopher through out the matches and a fun back and forth between the hosts. There was a very well run graphical overlay that showed the current HP and incaps for the teams, and brought up powers that were being used at crucial points. Multiple cameras and multiple angles got us right into the action and I don't think there was every a problem with the video. Overall it was a pretty professional looking stream.

The only disappointing thing about the matches was the lack of variety in the characters chosen, a lot of the same faces played in most matches, but that could be because there aren't a huge number of characters to chose from right now, expansions might rectify that 'problem', get right on that >G!

Sounds like a great time.  My best chance of being in a tournament would be if they did one at Origins.   Though even then I'd probably still be doing as well as you seeing that I've done skirmishes much.  

I saw some of the live feed on twitch and it was done very well.  The match I saw was your third one where I thought you might demolish them when Unity had her bit explode on the first round and dealt a lot of damage the first round but after that the dice didn't work in your teams favor.   It was neat when they took breaks that they showed strategy tips for some of the characters and it was interesting to see them list interpolation Beam specifically in it since it got used every time Omnitron was used.   I say that because the tip they listed for it inferred that people don't bother with it because it doesn't deal damage.   

Thanks for the write up, I was wondering the whole time what the rest of the event was like. I watched the whole stream pretty much and it was very well put together. There's an exciting future for this game!

I remember arguing that the traps shouldn't be allowed all on one hex for that exact reason.

Glad to see that the event went well.

A few Questions:

1.  Did any team use Operative as their Truth Splitter?  That's how we have rolled it, Operative is usually phenomenal at that.

2.  Any Characters simply not get used at all?

3.  Did dice luck seem to be a big factor in the games, or did it generally balance out?

I hope there are more tournaments, maybe have some at Conventions?  I think a better turn out could be achieved that way.

I'd go for a single ban for each team, just so the game could explore more than the Dawn/Baron/Legacy strategies.  

Would still like to see Traps not able to be put together, just feels cheap.  Esp. when someone uses Champion Bot to make it ridiculous.

Omni/Unity/Ambuscade, that team is really cheap.  I one-shot a team with that combo, caught them off guard with a Rocket Jump Interpolation that threw their 3 characters and Truth on the bombs.  Truth didn't survive the first boom and Legacy was the only one standing when the 4th went off, game over on turn 3.

Operative and Unity were only piicked a couple of times on the streamed games, and sadly no one used that kind of counter strat to break up the Truth meta.  We were even commenting on chat how some of the lesser used characters were great counters to the Truth tank.  By my count, the only chars not used on stream were Visionary, Tachyon and Proletariat

A friend, rather than known in the gaming world, but one with experience in broadcasting.

I failed to mention above that along with the judge and two camera people at the main stage, we also had Jodie with a tablet entering data to control what was displayed in the graphics overlays. The app on her tablet shared data with a server, from which data were drawn to be displayed as part of the stream.

As I understand it, the four person production team consisted of a producer, a person doing sound, a person handling the twitch stream, and a runner to go handle issues that might arise at the main stage or broadcast booth. Everyone at the control center, broadcast booth, and main stage were communicating via mics and headphones. Christopher had an override switch he could use to provide rules info quickly. It was really quite elaborate and impressive.

I'm sure a lot of it was also a relatively small pool of teams that had actively prepared for the tournament. Certainly the two finalists had, but I'm not sure many of the others had prepared overly much. There was a lot of people picking up on tactics from earlier games and using them in later games.

There were fifteen matches played, with eight of those being broadcast on the main stage, so if you saw the whole feed, you saw half the matches. There wasn't a whole buch of difference out on the other tables, though. 

I look forward to hopefully seeing the statistics from the tournament. GtG kept track of every character chosen as well as which ones got incapacitated. Thinking back through the seven games that I saw, Baron Blade was on the winning team for every single one of them. 

1. Not that I saw. Makes great sense. We did face the Operative in our second match and she seemed quite effective at dishing out damage.

2. Visionary, Tachyon, and Proletariat were mentioned and I think that's right. I also did not personally see Ra, but I vaguely recall hearing that he'd been chosen at least once.

3. Big factor? Hard to say. Factor, certainly, but I don't recall thinking that any particular match was significantly tilted because of die rolls. Other opinions may vary.

What is a single ban?

I was going to write up something similar, but we just got home today and I had Dragon Age waiting for me!

I'm Dalton from Mighty Morphin Chrono Rangers, and I agree that there wasn't a lot of variety. I know we didn't do too much to shake that up but we had optimized characters somewhat beforehand. There were plenty of times that I know I wished we had mixed things up more, but I promise as more characters are released we will do so. After Thanksgiving we will be practicing without Dawn for sometime to help us learn a new metagame.

Now that I'm done with that, I just want to say a very sincere thank you to everyone who made it out to play as well as to the staff and volunteers from Greater Than. I've been playing in organized events for years and beyond the unexpected two hour gap, this is easily the best one I've ever been to. This event went very smoothly and all of our opponents were fantastic. With few exceptions, everybody was a great sport. I know we very much look forward to this game's growth especially for a competitive scene!

That sounds awesome! Anyone else from these forums play? Anyone come just to spectate?

I've just now seen some pictures from the tournament and Tachyon was chosen at least once.

Before you start choosing heroes to use, each team would ban one hero from the game, it helps balance out play, force different strategies, and create some very interesting teams when you can block an obvious foil for your strategy.

I like that idea. It would make people think outside the box rather than just repeating what worked in the previous match.

A good team should be able to win with any characters, not just a select few that they've practiced with over and over.

I'm a bit surprised GtG hasn't posted to twitter or the site blog about the tournament results.  

Awesome write up Arenson9. It'll be very interesting to see how the meta game at these tourneys evolves over time!

I mostly went to the tournament to be with friends, but it really jacked up my enthusiasm for the game. I've been thinking a lot since then about the characters and how they match up against each other.

In every game I saw, Baron Blade was on the winning side, but after looking at the Twitch recorded stream, I think (sorry, didn't realize this 'til later and haven't gone back to confirm) that in the very first game Baron Blade was on the losing side.

I was wary of choosing any of the characters with only four hit points, but last night I was reading through Tachyon's cards and saw what she can do with Lightspeed Barage. I don't _CARE_ if you incapacitate Tachyon if it happens after she's incapacitated two opposing characters.

Another thought: The particular board we used for this tournament had little in the way of elevation changes. That means that characters with mobility were a bit unnecessary most of the time. That would suggest  in general favoring other characters over those characters. Assuming everyone's good at something, if the character is good at mobility but mobility isn't important for this match, than other characters are more likely to be good at things that _are_ important for this match.

Silverleaf, you're not saying that you think any three characters should be able to beat any other three characters, are you?

get right on that >G!

Ok!

I'm a bit surprised GtG hasn't posted to twitter or the site blog about the tournament results.

I'll do a write-up today or tomorrow. We've been recovering from this weekend. It was a ton of work, but all worth it. Whew!

More or less than a con?

I truly hope so, otherwise the game's not as balanced as I'd like. If you can only deal with the TruthShield by using Omnitron or the Operative then you might as well be playing Rock Paper Scissors or something.

You could use Absolute Zero too. Or probably a bunch of other ways.

I look forward to reading it.  Glad it all went well.  

I disagree. The analysis of which characters to use to offset the strengths of one's opponent and which characters to use to exploit your opponent's weaknesses is super fun. The complexity of that meta-game is far larger because of the combinations of effects one can achieve with multiple characters. If someone chooses Dawn first, do you pick Omnitron because of its ability to push Dawn away from Truth, or do you pick someone that deals area damage so you can hit Dawn and some other minion at the same time? If you choose Omnitron and then Dawn never bothers playing Truth, what else are you going to do with Omnitron? Was Omnitron also a good counter to some other member of the other team or is Omnitron simply very good in this particular environment? If not, maybe you should have chosen the Operative, who can also deal with the Dawn/Truth combo.

I'm babbling at this point. Suffice to say that I think the fact that different characters match up better or worse against each other is actually super interesting.

The difference between Rock, Paper, Scissors and Sentinel Tactics' meta-game is not just the complexity, but also the simultaneity vs. reaction. Rock, Paper, Scissors is about guessing what your opponent will do. Sentinel Tactics' meta-game is about having a deeper understanding of the abilities of the characters then your opponents have.

I'm right with you, Andy.

Not for long.

You're so funny.

I do what I can, and sometimes what I cannot.

Well actually I'm exaggerating and mostly agree with you that strengths and weaknesses are a good thing, and figuring out how to counter your opponents' threats is a big part of the game and that's awesome.

What would suck would be if it was unfairly difficult for particular characters to face off against others, to the point where (to completely make up an example) it was a complete waste of time taking a team containing Unity against a team containing Legacy because their chances of winning were so small. Obviously this isn't the case with Tactics.

My original point was, I guess, that if your team choice is essentially so restricted by your opponents' picks so that you only have a tiny handful of potential heroes that make sense, that's much less fun and leads to far fewer interesting tactical decisions than if your character pick is wide open.

If you HAVE to take character A, B or C to counter character X, then that's a bit too rail-roady for me, especially in a game with such great story-telling potential.

I think it's helpful to distinguish between skirmish/tournament games and other games. 

From a story perspective, for a scenario I want to be able to take any hero and have a chance at stopping Baron Blade. And I think I do! That doesn't mean, however, that they all have an equal chance. It's the same in SotM – while it may be possible for any three heroes to defeat any villain, it doesn't mean it's equally as easy/likely.

From a skirmish/tournament perspective, if my opponents pick Legacy, who can do a fantastic job of building up piles of Attack+1 tokens, they shouldn't be surprised when I take Baron Blade and attempt to use his action that removes all of those Attack+1 tokens and does an attack with dice equal to the number of removed tokens. That is exactly what happened in the final game of the Finals for this tournament. We had seen the Gatecrashers do the same thing to us in our first round game against with them, so they certainly knew about it. They just missed that possibility while playing in the final game, and it cost them the match, in my opinion.

Yeah!

As much as I like my own versions of characters not yet in Tactics, I'd rather see the official ones than my index cards with stick figures.

As I said on the Twitch chat, I expect Fanatic to own in Tactics (assuming the next set is Prime Wardens based)

My strong feeling is that it will not be Prime Wardens unfortunatley. But Fanatic will no doubt have some great mechanics. 

Like Mobility. Definitivley mobility.

Are you thinking Dark Watch based?  Or a new team?  My assumption on PW is that they are the other big team from the griginal game and cover the remaining heroes from the SotM core set.  I think from a recognition perspective too that is important.

I think Dark Watch is far more likely given the direction of the main story arch so far. Theres apperences by the whole team + Wraith (Nightmist is related to the miststorm I'm certain), theres references to the actual Dark Watch comic series, and a shadowy figure whos putting a villain team together in the RevoCorp building. That has Dark Watch written all over it.

I expect Prime Wardens will come with the 3rd Core Set, as Grand Warlord Voss makes his triumphant return to use the oblivion shards to enslave new forces (like Akash!) This would set up perfect intros for Tempest, Captain Cos, Argent and the rest of the team.

A natural story proggression will trump recognition. Any SotM fan knows the characters anyway and newcomers won't get the recognition part anyway and will just be excited for new characters, whoever they might be.

It should be interesting.  What I wonder is if we'll see heroes introduced in Tactics that aren't in the card game.

I'm still waiting for the West Coast Freedom Five.

What about the Great Lakes Freedom Five?

Do their names also spell out HOMES? Haka, Omnitron-X, Mr. Fixer, Expatriette, and Sky-Scraper.

As always, Foote, your reasoning is totally sound.  It would also give them the opportunity to potentially introduce a Rook City environment.  I'm just hoping the Voss/PW stuff comes sooner because it has nearly all of my favorite characters lore and game wise.

I would guess we will see some brand new characters, but I would also expect to see more characters who were not their own decks in the card game, like Beacon and the Operative

Rook City might be a bit too similar to Megalopolis for the next release.

I would be pretty jazzed about the Tomb of Anubis

Hi guys.  Barry from Gatecrashers here. 

We had a blast on Saturday, thanks to <G for putting on the tourney.  Congrats again to MMCR on their win, here's to hoping for a rematch at GenCon! 

When it came time for the cut to top 4, we were happy to see that both of the teams we had defeated earlier had fought their way back from the secondary bracket and into the semi-finals.  Those rounds after the cut felt like a blur, with the constant back-and-forth of heroes and villains. 

Can't wait to see what <G has in store for the other tourneys and heroes/villains coming down the pipe!

Barry, good to see you on the forums!

Feel like sharing with us your thinking about the characters you chose in the finals? I was surprised by the choice of Dawn in the second finals game and by the choice of The Wraith in the third one.

Hamster Boy!

I would also accept Gauss-Rifle Gerbil.

NightMist is no where to be seen. Tempest, Argent Adept, and Fanatic are seen. This means 3 members of each team are seen.

Prime Wardens can be seen as well.

If the shadowy figure is going to be a very important part of the overall plot, then he will not be appearing very soon. Reason for that? In Sentinels of the Multiverse, we learned of the existance of a cosmic entity with the release of Cosmic Omnitron, which came with the Kickstarter for Infernal Relics. Here we are, two years down the line and 3 expansions later and we still know very little about the entity.

Isn't Nightmist to be seen on one of Proletariat's cards? Defensive Sacrifice or so, the one with the green light / energy effects.

Pretty sure that's The Visionary losing her mind and going all Dark again (check the colour scheme and costume on her Dark Visionary alternate card).

Miststorm = Nightmist. There's no denying it.

That could be the exact issue.  Nightmist IS the miststorm.

I am denying it. The only thing we know NightMist has in common with Miststorm is they deal with mist.

Pretty sure that's The Visionary losing her mind and going all Dark again

Pretty sure it's not.

*smoke bombs*

Pretty sure I'm wrong then.

Perhaps it is Nightmist.

I've got a really good feeling Setback in the next expansion, so I'm thinking that it's Dark Watch.

That would be awesome. :D. It has two of my favorite characters.

YouTube videos have been posted: https://www.youtube.com/user/GreaterThanGames

Yaaay videos!  Now to watch and learn. . .

Now that the videos are up, I suppose it's time to actually write about the event, even though I'm going to post before I watch the vids. So, I'm Pat of the Gatecrashers, the 'leader' in that I found info on the event first, and was serious about getting teammates who were willing and able to practice most days in the lead up to the event. Barry and Colin were champs at getting time to play and talk strategy in the two weeks we had to practice.

With the scenario being set at 50 minutes, first to 3 incaps, we quickly eliminated any character that was vulnerable to a lucky shot or just a couple of small hits. Honestly, my first questions I sent through our communications guy (Barry) were 'Are villains available?' followed promptly by 'Citizen Dawn can actually take a Citizen card into a scramble?' After we played a few games our 'perfect team' became apparent; Citizen Dawn for a solid hitter with a good selection of effects (movement, healing, Truth/other citizen), Baron Blade for superior hitting power & maneuverability, and a third to problem solve. Legacy with his buffs was a primary go-to, but Wraith and Ambuscade were each serious secondaries if the other team had a good target for them.

Once we had our 'perfect team' we spent the rest of the time we had playing against it. Solving for 'the Truth problem' quickly became a thing with us. Given the time constraint, we never really thought of Absolute Zero as a serious choice; without mobility, he just doesn't participate enough at all on tiles that have lots of elevation changes. The Operative was considered as well, but we found she really only shines against 1 opponent at a time, and that costs her an active power slot. We felt she had too many restrictions to work well. Omnitron is the easiest answer for Truth with a no-roll auto push.

That covers most of our prep. As for event day, it was really a good time. As Andy already gave a great overview, I'll just say that I was surprised at the lengths GtG went for this event. The cash prizes were more than tempting, but at the same time I don't think we had a bad play experience over the entire day with any player or staff. Before I watch the videos, I'm prone to saying I'm probably the one who got the most testy about our last game. Because of how the tourney worked, the Gatecrashers only played 3 teams, despite our playing 6 games. That was a little unfortunate, but at the same time, meeting Andy's 'Happy To Be Here' team twice was a pleasure.

So, the only game that I have anything to say on is our last. We were obviously aware of Blade and had a strategy to deal with it... but things did not go well. I take nothing away from the Chronorangers at all – they played very well and their Ambuscade combo was powerful. From memory though, our offensive dice went ice cold very quickly that game. The biggest hit I remember our team getting was 3 damage on Ambuscade (who promptly used his camo-suit to get off the board for a turn, appear in a safe area, and use his Heal 3 one-shot to clear the damage).

Again, Greater Than Games put in a lot of effort and money to promote this organized play and it really shows. They seemed excited about how the finals went and have plans to continue this style of event through 2015's convention season at the PAX events filtering to an invitational at GenCon. I do have some thoughts on the event though; while we practiced on both city and jungle maps at home, it would have been nice to have maps change up, even if just for the semi-finals/finals. Secondly, the scenario being set as it is …. is rough. Sentinels: Tactics is an amazing scenario game. The heroes play like you expect them to from SotM, as do most of the villains; however, with a 'first to 3 incap' scenario, the villains have a seem to strong lead on power. I like the concept of a single-character ban, but I could also see something like 'one villain per side' or marking certain characters as especially powerful and limit those to one per side. A more sweeping idea like 'you cannot choose any character played previously in the same event until you have played every available character' or for less restriction, 'you can't play any character your team played in the last round you played in' would really force some varied play. Those types of restrictions could also reset on Semi-finals and/or Finals games to allow for a little more choice at the top tables... or could not, forcing a choice on playing your best team early or hoping you'll get to a later round to use them.

Well, there's my wall of rambling text. I'll watch some videos now and see if I remember anything correctly about the games I played in, as well as get a chance to watch all the video of games I didn't get a chance to see.

Happy to see your thoughts here, Pat.

1. I think having the game end at 3 incaps is a huge limiting factor on the characters and teams that can be selected. Characters like Visionary and Tachyon are just too much of a liability in a 3 incap game when other characters (like the pervasive Baron) can 1 shot them from across the map, and with only 3 incaps they don't have a chance to really impact the games since they are likely over so quickly after that point. Upping the incap goal to 5 would help this and create more dynamic games and also offset the advantae of first incap by a slight margin.

2.A The idea of selected character bans on a per match basis should be explored. A lot of gaming tournement formats do this to great effect. This would open up the meta game for more diversity.

2.B I don't really have an issue with Truth and the way he was used, but it greatly limits the other teams options as how they choose their team to deal with it. You can make the argument that the meta will sort itself out and I think thats valid, however I think promoting team/character diversity is important and if there are low impact solutions to do that I think they should be considered. A tourney wide ban of just Truth could very well be a low impact option to promote diversity. Dawn would still be a very viable and popular team option without Truth due to her solid damage and utility. Also if character bans ever get implimented (like I firmly believe they should be), she would be an auto-ban by one of the teams in every single game due to Truth. I think the pros would outweigh the cons here. 

3. I really want to play in one of these! They looked like a blast and a lot of credit goes to >G for making the first one really memorable and interesting. I could see this catching steam going forward. They really set the bar high from the start.

I really like the idea of a cycle of characters selected as will as a potential one ban system.  I am also ok with banning Truth.  I'm looking forward to seing this in acton at PAX South next month

I want Truth _not_ to be banned, so that opposing teams will try to use Truth and we can win.

Same thought here.

Was a bit surprised to see no one try Visionary and Unity with Dawn, since +3 to attack rolls with Turret bot, Truth, Foresight and Psychic Maelstrom in play would have crushed several of those teams.

The only rule change I would make was one I proposed in playtesting, and that is not allowing Ambuscade to place multiple traps on one space.  It turns a completely viable character into a gimmick, which is sad.

I did not see all of the other teams, but the sense I got was that the tournament consisted of two teams that had significantly prepared, who ended up in the finals, and six teams that didn't (including my own). 

I think it was just the two teams that had prepared that new about the Truth strategy at the beginning of the day, so for the other six teams, until they faced one of those teams or someone else who'd already lost to one of those two more prepared teams, they didn't even know about Truth, much less had put any time into trying to figure out how to counter Truth. We were lucky in that respect. After getting blown out in our first match by the Truth strategy, we used it to blow out our second round opponent, and when faced with Truth in the 3rd round we at least knew we needed to counter Truth, even if we didn't have the broad understanding of the characters to be able to come up with all the ways we might counter Truth.

It's hard for me to be too proud about making it to the semis, as I suspect that if we had ended up in a different part of the draw we could have easily lost a squeaker in the first round and then been blown out by the Truth strategy in the second, knocking us out of the tournament with no wins.

I have since been looking through the characters, learning more about their abilities. I have been focusing on figuring out how I would counter Baron Blade's strengths. Modulo anything different in the scenario used in the next tournament, I expect that we are going to see a lot of Baron Blade chosen first.

I expect this too. A character ban part can fix this, though I strongly feel that unless you have a great counter to Baron, he will be a lock for one of the teams ban picks.

Omnitron and Wraith provide crucial debuffs that I think are the key to dealing with Baron though. I think Omnitron is a great counter pick to Baron and Dawn.

What Baron Blade brings is a solution to every problem.  He can't solve them all at once, but find the biggest one at the moment and he has a way to remove it.  It made abd makes him a primary candidate for games.  

I don't have much experience with Citizen Dawn, Omnitron, or Ambuscade.

I found Tachyon able to take out any one target but often at the cost of herself.  Use her to take out the biggest power-based threat.

The Operative was good single-target damage and a great hunter.  Find the weak character, pull them from their friends and take them down.  Or pull the tank away and run.

Visionary was amazing support for ranged characters, but get her too close to the fight and she drops fast.

Unity is also great if the fights don't get too close.  I was sad to see her strongest strategies used her promo card.

I found Ra to have lots of attacks but too few dice.  I could reliably deal damage, but never enough to incap.  Probably due to having only 2 actions and a miss on 5's.

Wraith was middle ground.  Good defense and good offense but not crazy strong.  A great skirmisher.

Bunker is tanky and has a ranged solution to lots of problems (more damage based vs. Baron Blade's crazy utility stuff).

Beacon and Legacy filled similar roles with Beacon being a bit less tanky an Legacy being less ranged.

Proletariat is melee and has two actions a round.  This makes him very slow to engage and he definitely doesn't get many chances to aim and attack.

Absolute Zero has great tankiness and survivability, and good utility.  However, his attacks seemed to suffer similarly to Ra's.  

I can see the potentials of Ra, AZ, and Proletariat, but it seems much harder to pull off that potential than with other characters.  I suspect these characters will take more work and study with team selections to really shine.  Until then, they'll likely not show up often in tournaments, IMO.

Proletariat has 3 actions per round + Overwhelm.

I don't use Pro to swarm usually. I don't think that strat works. I like spreading him all over the board so he can be anywhere you need him. Pro has incredible board control and presence and is very hard to kill if positioning keeps him away from AoE. Pair him with other board control style characters like Ambuscade and AbZero and really dictate your opponents movement. That compensates all melee attacks.

Well.  Then I may need more games with him.  But he still didn't show at the tournament, which means there's something there to be studied.

I like Operative vs. Blade a lot, pull him away from your allies, or bitter spiral to double up on his redistributor.  Either way it is fun to be able to just focus him down.  (Poisons are also really good vs. Baron)

Agreed. Anytime you can debuff Blade is going to be huge. Make all his attacks melee so you take away his biggest weapon, the arm cannon. You force him into his armor suit, but then he can't teleport effectivly due to the push. Making him one dimensional instead of multi-faceted is a great strat against him.

Wow.  I'm glad my txtwall generated character discussion... that I'm really wanting to have.

First off, looking over the cards it's quickly apparent that the base character card is pretty close to standardized; mostly characters have 5 hit points, 3 actions, 3 defense, and 2(up) movement.  Innate powers are almost always a basic attack that isn't super bad or super good, and mobility, if the character flies or something.  Stats over or under the norm are very noticible; anyone with 2 actions often makes up for that with powerful active power cards - hazards or team buffs seem to be a common thing.  Low hit points often point to powers that effect enemies w/out the character being actually involved (Unity) or far enough away to stay safe (Tachyon / Visionary).

Blade is possibly the most powerful singular released character in S:T at the moment; he has nearly ultimate battlefield mobility with his t-port card, the ability to gain +1 tokens on his own, and some of the biggest guns in the game.  There's just not a downside to him.

Dawn is a very solid character at her base - mobility, 3 actions, good attacks, and gets +1 tokens for seeing allies fall.  The fact that for the price of 1 of her active powers she can take an entirely seperate Citizen(s) ally card that activates independantly blows my mind.  Truth is awesome for absorbing at least 1 big attack.  That alone makes him worth taking, but if the opponents are hoping for the death of a thousand cuts - getting 1 or 2 pts of damage in... Truth just kicks that strategy in the teeth.  On the other hand, look through those Citizens; the combat team of Assault & Battery is brutal: 8 wounds and big attacks, Citizen Spring for healing (Dawn w/Spring and Legacy w/motivational charge heal all teammates they can see for 3 each round), Blood Sweat & Tears for being a pain in the ass.  The scramble scenario is what makes Truth a huge problem; Dawn bringing a second character into the game is the real imbalance.  Look at any 'good guy' active power and show me one that's close to bringing those Citizen cards to the game, I dare you.  I'll even argue the Citizen add on is better than Tachyon's extra turn card, in that for Tachyon to use it, she gives up 1/4 of her hits, vs Dawn giving up nothing at all except the active power slot.

Ambuscade... is nasty alone, but stupid on a team.  The all the bombs at once trick is cute, but getting to take your playing piece off the board and return it anywhere you like every other activation is almost better than the Baron's t-port card.  Gaining +1 Attack tokens on his own is sweet too.

Proletariate might be the villain that breaks the mold for me.  He's got nice powers, even cute ones, and if the opponent lets himself get massed on by Proletariates, it IS a problem.  The thing is, Proletariate is just too vunerable - he has no defense powers, just a power that lets him take less damage by loosing a body, but that doesn't help much against a serious area attack that can hit 3 or 4 of him at once.

Whoops; one hero to be mentioned is Wraith - her card 'Slip into Shadow,' played well, makes her nearly immune to attack when playing in the cityscape, and pretty close if cover is nearby on the jungle.  It really is almost not worth attacking her if the opponent knows how to position her.

Allright.  Babble done on a handful of cards.  Basically, there was a reason the top 2 teams at this event ran with Blade, Dawn, & someone.  Without some amount of forced change I don't see how the first pick in each list isn't one of those characters until we see a new release.

It isn't just solo characters, you want a team that can use each other's best moves to their advantage.

We saw Ambuscade-Omnitron used well.

My favorite is Beacon-Operative.  Beacon with focused blast and Team up, Operative with Kusarigama.

Really I'm surprised people didn't use Beacon's team-up more, or at least for more than Galvanize.

Team-up is crazy good with a good number of Characters.  

Proletariat with Overwhelm and Beacon with Team up is amazing, getting that much action (nearly) for free?  Awesome.

Ambuscade-Beacon-Omnitron is a hoot. (as in prepare for table flips) since Beacon can let Ambuscade refresh his traps with Team-up, and move, then collision someone into the bombs.  It doesn't work if you don't get the knockback, but when you do, and you pull off bombing people 2 times a round it is table-flip inducing.

There are many more combos.  Beacon is almost universally first pick in our games.

I think a ban on Truth will be unnecessary based on the last tournament, which showed only limited variation in the chosen heroes. I was surprised that Return with the Dawn was not used with more offensive citizens. However, if Truth really proves too powerful in this format, what I would suggest is to have him shield only "Citizens" rather than "Allies", so that he'll have less impact on the board.

Unity.

Also Bolstering Team Up.

Because that power is insanely good.

He really isn't that vunerable though. He only thing that really takes him down is the "death by a thousand cuts" of many 1 damage hits. He has 2 of the best defensive powers in the game that totally reduce hits over 2 damage down to 1 or 0 AND he can heal himself for two by sacking a body. You can overwhelm a dodge action to get as many dodge tokens as bodies. Unless the player makes the huge mistake of clumping them up in a small area, he is rediculously hard to incap and requires a lot of action econemy from the other team to try and do so. Pro should be played spread out over the map, maybe only swarming with 2 bodies to get the extra attack die on Peoples Hammer. So I dissagree with your assesment on that front.

The issue for Pro is that he can't get much damage done at all without leaving himself wide open to be one-shot (or at least in a position where he has to spend a round just healing/duplicating instead of attacking and positioning). He is very squishy because of his multiple bodies. If he keeps one of the two main defense cards in play, he can't have both overwhelm and Tac flanking. If he makes use of Tac Flanking, he sets himself up for AoE. If he Overwhelms Peoples Hammer for burst and Tac Flanking, he cant Overwhelm Dodge. If you try and Peoples Hammer without Tac Flanking, it is really lackluster. Then take into account its all melee attacks and 1 action always has to go to movement to get in range, so you are forced to decide betwen 2 hammer attacks or 1 aimed hammer.

Pro is really good at exerting board pressure and presence, being able to be in many places at once no matter where the opponent is. But he doesn't serve as a major threat to score incaps on his own unless he sheds any and all defensive mechanisms. This leaves him best served as a kinda "cleanup crew", fighting for those last 1-2 HP points to get an incap since he is hard to run from. Opposing teams will be wise to ignore Pro for the most part (due to the reasorce econemy it takes to incap him), and focus fire your other teamates. Bunker and Omnitron make great teamates because they are hard to focus fire effeciently and bring a lot of damage and utility from range (plus they are great picks because Pro really struggles vs both). Beacon or Ambuscade can make a well rounded 3rd to give high damage threats and utility. 

Pro has some bad down sides, and if you want to use him effectivly you have to build your team around his strengths. But he is really well served for a defensive/control type of gameplan. 

Citizens having their own turn and action points really put them in another league however. Unity has to use her own action economy with her bots where Dawn's is effectivly doubled. Citizens are also stronger powerwise on average and have much higher health and defense.

Given all of that, it might be worth looking into counting a Citizen incap as a scenario point in skirmishes for this reason.

Proletariat is great on teams that can force-move targets.  Omnitron, Operative, Baron all give you some great potential.  The big thing is his knockback.

It doesn't require dealing damage to gain the push, so you can overwhelm-Hammer to move their team around.

Operative with Kusarigama+Hidden Blade and Prole with overwhelm is a great way to bludgeon someone. Pull them next to Prole and hit them, then Prole gets to Duplicate, Overwhelm-Hammer for two hits and two activations of Hidden Blade Strike, and then can have one of them sprint to get seperation.

Also Duplicate Overwhelm-Hammer with Sacrifice in play is a great way to trigger Ambuscade's traps. you push someone 2 onto the traps, and the prole that gets hit just leaves play.

I need to find more people to play Tactics with.  So many ideas I need to throw down.

But yeah, Prole-Operative-Ambuscade is fun.  Uprising Scenario #4 is just wicked.