Monday can only mean one thing, right? While for the vast majority "working" is the dominating term, Monday means two more things or us. First of all: Minion Master's Monday. A new blog post and the start in an amazing new week. Secondly, Monday means only 5 more days until the next King Puff Cup with a $225 prize pool. And that next King Puff Cup will be the first topic of this post.
Conquest with additional rules
A lot of talk was going on, since the King Puff Cup staff announced the format for King Puff Cup 14 on December 16th at 14:00 UTC. After a survey, the majority of the community voted for a match format called Conquest mode. This is a very common format, especially in Hearthstone tournaments. In Minion Masters however, it needed some tweaks. But first, let's see what Conquest means:
Conquest, in Hearthstone, forces you to bring 4 decks with different Heroes (equivalent to Masters in Minion Masters). Every match, one deck gets banned by your opponent. He does not know your deck lists, only the Heros! You also ban one deck of your opponents lists and the format forces you to win one game with every deck. The rules state that:
Any deck that is victorious can no longer be used. Another deck must be chosen. And, any deck that is defeated may be played again, or another deck may be used.
In Hearthstone, tournaments with the Conquest format are always Best of 5. Here's a short video for explanation purposes.
In Minion Masters, Conquest was a thing before. The problem was, that players in Minion Masters only needed to switch the Master, but essentially played the same list. In Hearthstone, the problem does not occur, since every Heroes has its very own class cards. Playing the same archetype is possible, sometimes even very similar lists, but not entirely same decks. That's why the King Puff Cup staff added additional rules this time:
- 4 decks must be submitted along with a link to your Steam Profile via email to KingPuffCup@gmail.com when you signup
- Each deck must have a different master
- No deck can share more than 4 cards with any other deck. No Wild Cards are allowed.
The first point is pretty clear. As soon as you sign up, you have to submit 4 complete decks with different Masters each and a link to your Steam Profile to said Email address. The tweaks come with the last point. No deck can share more than 4 cards with any other deck. That means, every deck needs to have 6 unique cards included. Only 4 cards can be shared with any other deck of yours. So better think twice about the core cards you want to use. And don't try to put a card more than once in your deck, since "Wild Cards are NOT ALLOWED. You may NOT have a 2nd or 3rd copy of any card in your deck."
By the way: matches in Minion Masters will be played Best of 3 (each party bans two decks prior to the first game), except matches 12, 13, 14, and 15 of the main stage. This matches will be played as Best of 5 and require therefore only one ban from each party.
What's the advantage of Conquest?
While this sounds pretty confusing (or weird) to some of you, Conquest is not that common and popular for no reason. First of all, it prevents players from snowballing through tournaments by only using one deck. For some players, that also means to leave their comfort zone! For others, that might mean that they have some room for being creative with 4 decks needed to participate.
Conquest adds two other layers of difficulty to tournaments: mind games and prediction. Every regular player knows the most common decks in the Top20 by just looking at the leaderboards in-game. If you spot your opponent is about to play Apep, you might think of a specific list. But is it that list? Does his Mordar run Colossus against your face deck, probably? Banning Apep might bring you a huge disadvantage then and Mordar might be the better pick for banning.
With that being said and explained, we hope that some of the confusion about Conquest and the additional rules are out of the way. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask on Reddit, the Steam forums or on Discord.
Deck of the Week
Last Friday, we presented our first Deck of the Week. Tengs was the lucky guy earning the fame and is now known as Whelp Invasion Tengs, Father of Baby Dragons. If you have some cool deck list to share with us, do it! All we need is a screenshot of the deck, a brief explanation about the strategy and 3 replays against different opponents (1vs1 Ranked). Your submissions go to: thomas@betadwarf.com
With that being said, we end this blog post and start finishing that juicy patch we planned for Wednesday. Balance changes, tons of improvements and a big rework of one of our Masters are coming. Monday means working, even for dwarves ;)
Cheers from BetaDwarf
Cheers from BetaDwarf
