Undercards Talk: Part 1

So I have a couple things started (a long while ago I started a solo fiesta for FFV that I've slowly been progressing through, some casual gaming and other assorted plans, trying to beat CC levels blindfolded) but right now I want to talk about a game I've been playing a lot recently that I haven't mentioned.

Undercards- it's an online Undertale themed collectible (not trading) card game. I've built a few unique decks that I want to put some thoughts down on before I forget about them. To help follow along, you can look up what certain cards not used in decks on the wiki. I'll start with...

Justice Science

Before I can really dig into why this deck worked to get me into Master in Season 21, I need to explain a little bit about how Undercards is played. Each player has a deck of 25 cards and 30 HP to start the match, alongside 2 artifacts (or one legendary artifact, such as Science). Conventional wisdom is that Science is a bad artifact and that Patience or Determination souls (basically, the classes) are the best way to play it. I set out to prove that wrong- after all, Justice seemed to have the strongest set of board removal options, and the goal of a Science deck is to hoard gold and Gaster Blasters to win by direct damage. What could go wrong?

Well, the initial draft of the deck maxed out all Justice spells, and brought Sans, Undyne, Mettaton NEO and 2 Gasters and called it a deck. I think I also had 3 Clam Girls, but I don't remember much of the original version other than that it was very spell reliant. I was consistently spending as much gold, if not more than my opponent to keep the board clear and would eventually die before getting lethal damage.

Oh, Gaster Blasters deal 5 damage to a player or 8 to a monster as a 7 cost spell. The Science artifact places 5 in your starting deck and makes them deal 1 additional damage, bringing that up to 6 to a player or 9 to a monster. Having Gaster on the board bumps that up to 8 to players, which Science boosts to 9. Recall that players start with 30 HP, and also note that the Justice passive deals 1 damage to a random enemy monster and 1 damage to the enemy player if they have more HP than you. This has a lot of value, even against the Health artifact (+5 starting health), or Kindness/Determination souls (heal 2 HP per turn, has an extra life worth 15 HP).

Spells alone didn't work, I needed board presence- monsters that could take down a monster when played and potentially another one later, or at least would divert resources away from my vulnerable health. That's where Fuku Fire came in, substituting for triple of spells. Clam Girl lowering the cost of spells made the final victory require less hoarding, and so on. I started with 3, but then I was drawing too many and replaced a Clam Girl with a Shootout. This all happened over the course of many games, identifying weaknesses and bad matchups and trying to address them. After a few losses to damage over time effects and rush decks, I brought in a Scarf Mouse and Coffee Man for silence and silence+taunt, respectively. And ultimately, this deck worked.

The play strategy is simple- allow a little bit of early damage while trying to find a tempo to play Multi Shot for the full game advantage. This negates the Kindness passive, which is huge in that matchup. The Justice passive also deals the damage dealt to me back over time while I stall. Using spells and effects to wipe the board turn after turn with as few gold as possible (Mettaton NEO worked very well for this after a buffed board) while I held onto blasters and stalled. In hindsight, it wasn't the most interesting deck, but it was the first one I came up with on my own that actually won me games.

As for cards that didn't make the cut? Papyrus Statue, a 1/5 that costs 6 with the effect that all damage to enemies is increased by 1. This was a huge advantage if I could find time to play it AND keep it on the board... which never happened. It's too vulnerable to silence, or Muffet's Pet (kill a random enemy monster with attack of 2 or less) or any number of other cards. It was holding the deck back.

In Season 21, this deck had about a 60% winrate. At the start of Season 22, with the shift in the meta, it was winning about 40% of games, and so I retired the deck. Next time: My Season 22 Integrity attempts and where they went wrong.

Another Month, Another Update!

Future plans:
  I'd like to do a solo class run of every FFV class, all 22 of them. Sullla's solo characters are enlightening, but they only tell half the story. So many places that are roadblocks for a solo character (Karlabos, Purobolos, etc.) aren't for a full party, and some places a solo stomps over (Chimera Brain and Almagest come to mind) are huge threats for a party! I'd like to have a counterpoint to the solo characters, as even though they do demonstrate the ins and outs of the class on its own, they really do only show how an overleveled example of that class operates, and not at all in a party setting. How much does that change things? I'm going to find out! No ETA on when I'm going to start this, but probably somewhere around 2017. Keep an eye out for it!

Blog Index

Updates

• August 8th, 2013
• August 13th, 2013
• May 12th, 2016 (going to try for semi-regular updates from now on)
• June 15th, 2016

Updates on, well, everything

Haven't posted anything here in almost 2 years, and that's not really going to change much for a little while longer- been pretty busy and it doesn't let up until June, really. Of course, once June comes around I'm planning on streaming more (link here) and doing a couple more challenges: naturally another few FFV Four Job Fiesta runs (depending on the teams I get, I might do a writeup here for a no item fiesta!), seriously starting up a PC version FF9 perfect game file (it's well documented how, but the PC version has some interesting changes that should make the overall path a lot smoother), and just generally working from my bloated Steam library (I still haven't played half of it at all!).

So what have I been up to the past couple years?

FFV NINMNFNCM Challenge Part 1: A Rocky Start

FFV NINMNFNCM Challenge:
No Items, No Money, No Freelancer, No Class Mastering

Bartz dispatched the early goblins easily, no need to heal there.  The Pirate Cave was a non-event, with only 1 encounter dealing any damage via an ambush.  The first couple areas before you're supposed to have access to equipment are just too easy, even without items.

The Wind Shrine was a bit easier than anticipated, though Lenna was brought to precarious health by WingRaptor.  I picked up a Broad Sword before the fight and ignored the Tent, using a secret passage to get to the fight quicker.  After getting job classes, I turned everyone into Blue Mages, healed at the pot inside the shrine and picked up Goblin Punch and Aero for use later.  Then I went back to the Pirate Cave for the most valuable spell in these early stages: Vampire, learned from a Steel Bat.  This is the first access to in-battle healing I get, period, healing me for 1/2 of my missing HP, draining from an enemy.  This came in handy in the Torna Canal, as the video below shows.  I won't show most dungeons, just the ones where something interesting happens/it was difficult.

FFV NINMNFNCM Challenge: Part 0

FFV NINMNFNCM Challenge:
No Items, No Money, No Freelancer, No Class Mastering

I'm looking forward to the Four Job Fiesta this year, but while waiting for it to start I wanted to do something different with the game.  I wanted to do a challenge with all classes on the table that garnered its difficulty from the restrictions, forcing clever use of the many classes of FFV to work around, similar to Sullla's Ironcore Team (no party wipes), and T-Hawk's Nudists (never equip anything, ever).  Both of these teams utilized Phoenix Downs to great effect.  What if I removed those?  Actually, let's go all out.  No Items, I haven't seen that done with FFV yet.

No Items in this context means never consume an item, ever.  The only exception being using a Tent to progress the story upon reaching Galuf's world.  This removes Potions, Ethers, Elixirs, status restoring items, rod breaking, !Throw and !Mix, as well as Ramuh and Golem from play.  More annoyingly with the other big restriction, no Tents.  Key Items consumed to get even more items (i.e. endgame tablets) are allowed to be used.  No Items was still much too simple, and GilToss was still accessible.  So I stole a restriction from FFIX, where there's not much to restrict...

Optimal Peggle Scoring

Oh man, it's been a while since I've posted anything here.  Anyway, I recently finished up Ape Escape time attacks, with a final time of 1:59.62, and submitted them all to Cyberscore.  I also looked through the list of games they had, adding in some EoSD scores (can't let bad scores take the top spot when I can make the top spot a slightly less bad score :V), AE2 and 3 time attacks, and a couple other assorted things.  What I noticed, though, is that Peggle had had some decent competition.  The highest score for the first level and the one I'll use to explain why my scoring method is optimal, was 963,830, with 5 scores above 700k.  My method, is done optimally, yields a score of over 4.5 million with very little luck required-or ~2 million, if you decide to ignore one aspect.

Ape Escape any% no IJ writeup

Cut the 1 in Ape Escape...without using the infinite jump glitch.

This run...was something.  For one, something like 3 years ago I jokingly said "I was to get under an hour in Ape Escape".  Jokingly.  Because the infinite jump wasn't discovered yet, so I didn't think it was possible.  There was no community for the game, it was just me doing a run every once in a while.  Then about...a year and a half ago (?) the infinite jump was discovered, and a community sprung up.  I met some really cool people (<3 saboom), but at the back of my mind, sub 1 was always nagging.  Even when I smashed the 1 hour mark with a 57:18 over a year ago, it still occurred to me that I hadn't truly subbed 1 just yet.  We did a few no IJ races, I tried to get there a few times a few months ago, but stopped at a high 1:03.  Well, after the 50:19 any% I pulled...this had to be next.  I had to complete this goal that I already knew was possible from my earlier attempts, even less a slim PS2.  I had to.  and that's what I tried to do yesterday...but fell short with a 1:00:20.  It was far from a bad run, but it just wasn't good enough.  I kept trying for another 4 hours that day, but never managed to top it.  This morning, I tried again.  And failed.  And failed some more.  I failed Specter's Factory jumps/route, I failed Snowy Mammoth movement (kills the run if you fall down), I failed Hot Springs ice bridges (likewise), I failed at everything you could come up with.

Final Fantasy V Four Job Fiesta, Run 2-12

After a month of forced inactivity, and a week of laziness, I'm finally back and writing up the rest of my Four Job Fiesta Report.  Where I left off after post 11 (2-?? was a quick thing on how I finished on time-it'd be a decent read, though 2-13 will cover most of the same things with less OP strategies) was right outside of Phoenix Tower at Level 26.  Without any further stalling, into the tower Team Sidequest goes.

Inside the tower, escaping battles is locked: you MUST defeat every enemy you come across, or die trying.  Coupled with fake walls that if you choose the wrong one is a miniboss, this dungeon can be a challenging place to run through given its 30 floor length.  However, the awesome song Four Warriors of the Dawn plays, so the length doesn't get annoying.

Final Fantasy V Four Job Fiesta, Run 2-??

So, the Fiesta has ended, and my run was unfinished due to my laptop dying.

Or was it?

I recovered the remainder of my data at 6 PM on the 31st of August, the final day.  I then elected to go all or nothing on my laptop, previously been booting to Ubuntu off a DVD, and do a full factory restore.  This worked.  Using no less than 2 external hard drives, I maneuvered my FFV data back onto my laptop...and you guys probably don't want to hear this part.  I had 4 hours remaining to defeat Exdeath for my victory to be counted.