Heroscapers
Go Back   Heroscapers > Arena of the Planeswalkers: MtG > AotP General Discussion
AotP General Discussion General discussions of packaging, terrain, components, etc. If it doesn't fit in any other official category, put it here.

Notices


Reply
 
Thread Tools Search this Thread Display Modes
  #1  
Old August 10th, 2016, 08:55 AM
Tai-Pan Tai-Pan is offline
 
Join Date: December 16, 2006
Location: Germany - Gießen
Posts: 2,810
Tai-Pan is a penguin with a machine gun Tai-Pan is a penguin with a machine gun Tai-Pan is a penguin with a machine gun Tai-Pan is a penguin with a machine gun Tai-Pan is a penguin with a machine gun Tai-Pan is a penguin with a machine gun Tai-Pan is a penguin with a machine gun Tai-Pan is a penguin with a machine gun Tai-Pan is a penguin with a machine gun Tai-Pan is a penguin with a machine gun Tai-Pan is a penguin with a machine gun
Thoughts on colors and 5 person games

My family sadly left for the States yesterday after two weeks of touring Germany and a lot of game time. We played AotP quite a bit with 5 people and I wanted to share some thoughts. We played a ton of HeroScape when I used to live in the States, so the game was familiar, despite it being their first times playing AotP.

AotP is great for fast setup. The big puzzle pieces make perfectly sized boards for 4-6 players, we just slapped some HeroScape terrain on top of it to make it interesting and went to town. Symmetry also doesn't matter as much to me as it did in HeroScape, where I often strove for 2-, 3- or sometimes even 6-way symmetry in my maps to keep it fair for everyone. With ranged Planeswalkers able to summon onto height, it's not that big of a deal.

Another aspect of the fast setup are the colors. We rolled the d20 and then picked a color and you got everything that belonged to that color. They brought Zendikar with them, so we also played that blue or green could choose to take the mixed-color walker instead of their standard, black could choose Ob Nixilus or the Necromancer and the Zombies, and any player could drop points from their squads in order to take the purple figures. Very fast, very nice. I can recall taking 30 minutes to draft 5 500 pt armies and this was a refreshing change.

That all changes with the mixed-color options of Innistrad, but I think I will tend to keep this style of draft, even with the new and mixed-color planeswalkers. Each player picks a color, then they pick a planeswalker that can play that color, then they pick squads and spells. You don't get the fun of mixed-color planeswalkers, but I don't even want to imagine how long it would take to do a draft setup with more than 2 people where you mix spells and squads. We did do a couple of 4 player games where blue-green was an option as long as neither had been chosen. That worked out.

The big bonus of this system is, even with more options as it expands, you pick a color and a planeswalker and every player can simultaneously work on putting together his exclusive army. I really like it.


AotP is also cool for these kinds of games, because gameplay is fast and furious. We played total elimination, meaning a dead planeswalker doesn't end your game. Summoning usually meant the middle got hot very quickly. The long marches of HeroScape armies were a thing of the past. The first priority for most everyone was getting figures summoned and then knocking out other Planeswalkers. Diplomatically, it was exciting to see how players whose Planeswalker had been destroyed allied to target remaining planeswalkers to level the field, which made the games close as well. Most of our games ended with less than a full-squad of figures on the field and few ended with a Planeswalker surviving. It was a great game for the kind of free-for-all we were working on.

These free-for-alls also meant you had to be careful while using your magic. There are a lot of enemies, way too many to use your cards on. You have to rely more heavily on your squads and sometimes the fighting potential of your planeswalker himself and use the cards carefully at crucial moments. I recall trying to free my figures from the last remnants of the blue and white armies without using magic so I would have the cards I needed to confront the red Planeswalker who was mowing her way through green. Very cool!

With everything on the board, it was also possible to do some interesting comparisions between the colors.

Blue - Blue tended to be the hated enemy of everyone and often had a big bull's eye on his head, at least until the Planeswalker died. He also didn't seem to fare as well in a multiplayer setting as he does in 1-on-1 duels, because the cards that let you cripple an opponent are less effective when they need to be spread around. Because Planewalkers fell fast in this setting, unsummoning was especially potent and more than once a player had to unsummon forever one of their surviving squads. Unsummon also proved to be an interesting tool for other players. At this point (Zendikar), Spell decks have no variance, so it was a fairly safe bet that someone was going to get unsummoned if they attacked a blue guy with hidden enchantment. I tried using it to heal my squads by un- and re-summoning, but never did quite get it to work. Mindcontrolling Planeswalkers to hit other Planeswalkers or have someone disengage from half a dozen figures is hilarious (for the blue guy)!

Black - Black tends to do best of all the colors against blue, because it can force blue to discard really devastating cards. I didn't like Ob Nixilus with a black army because so much of black magic relied on damaging and killing expensive figures, and taking Ob Nixilus meant leaving the cheap Zombies made for magic fodder. He is an impressive Planeswalker on his own though, and I did win a game where he played with the Reaver and the Scions and won it by himself after an alliance quickly disposed of all the purple figures. Black has the ability to impressively slaughter huge piles of enemy figures with magic or figures, but seems to be a little trickier to play than other colors. Killing and wounding your own figures can be quite costly at the wrong moment or with the wrong squad, but you can basically negate the negative effects by playing cleverly. This may be my favorite color to play.

Red - Red was responsible for a lot of carnage and quite a few early Planeswalker deaths, but also lost their Planeswalker fast a number of times. It doens't quite seem thematic to me that the little Goblins are one of the most potent squads in the game, but they definitely were. Red felt like it did aggressive damage quite quickly, but they didn't hold up well when they came under attack. Particularly the firecats seemed much more vulnurable than we continually expected. Red didn't feel like anything fancy, just lots of opportunities for attacking and dealing damage.

White - After a number of 1-on-1 games, I had been feeling that white was the weakest. In this kind of massive brawl, they really did quite well. The flying Kor was often a Planeswalker assassin and Gideon personally beat a Planeswalker to death more than once, though he rarely made it back out after storming an enemy position. The Rhox and Hookers (sorry, my sister couldn't stop calling them that) were hardier than I had previously experienced with their 3 lives. Enchanting the squads made them quite impressive, though they were constantly in danger of losing the enchantments via green and blue cards that naturalized or unsummoned, which really sunk their chances of winning. Waiting to pile the enchantments on until after those kinds of cards have been played seemed to be a good strategy.

Green - Green tended to fare the worst in our games. Their squads are good, but they attracted a lot of ire. I guess Elf formations invincible to range and firing from afar tend to do that. We were all somewhat disappointed by green magic, which, while allowing the occaisional turn to be very potent, tended to fall short of delivering the boost it needed to. Some of green's cards are also so specific, they can barely be used (against flying creatures or on heroes that green doesn't have). I personally liked the power the green planeswalker had herself, but her magic was so unhelpful that she usually ended up being the last pick after people quit being curious.



Anyway, thought that might be interesting. Now to return to my Master's Thesis....

Jugger

It's like football with swords or LARPing without the geeky stuff. In other words, it's awesomely perfect!
Reply With Quote
  #2  
Old August 10th, 2016, 09:12 AM
Kajoq Kajoq is offline
 
Join Date: August 31, 2015
Location: USA - GA - Atlanta
Posts: 209
Kajoq rolls all skulls baby! Kajoq rolls all skulls baby! Kajoq rolls all skulls baby! Kajoq rolls all skulls baby! Kajoq rolls all skulls baby!
Re: Thoughts on colors and 5 person games

Great write up! When I first got the game I played a handful of 4-5 player games, I need to get some together again.
I definitely agree with the Gideon comments, when you have multiple people stacking up in the middle you can have Gideon rolling double digit dice and be capable of 1 shotting anything nearby.
Reply With Quote
  #3  
Old January 11th, 2017, 01:13 PM
The B.I.V.'s Avatar
The B.I.V. The B.I.V. is offline
Spandau Ballet Fanboy
 
Join Date: December 3, 2007
Location: Centerville, Utah
Posts: 3,012
Images: 71
Blog Entries: 10
The B.I.V. is inducted into the Halls of Valhalla The B.I.V. is inducted into the Halls of Valhalla The B.I.V. is inducted into the Halls of Valhalla The B.I.V. is inducted into the Halls of Valhalla The B.I.V. is inducted into the Halls of Valhalla The B.I.V. is inducted into the Halls of Valhalla The B.I.V. is inducted into the Halls of Valhalla The B.I.V. is inducted into the Halls of Valhalla The B.I.V. is inducted into the Halls of Valhalla
Re: Thoughts on colors and 5 person games

Your multi-colored planeswalker problems can easily be solved by simply owning two copies of each game/expansion. Then everyone has access to all the cards even if someone decides to play Kiora (blue/green).

I'm HipHoppa on Urban Rivals! Get cool rewards for your first credit purchase with my invitation code 6360776!
The B.I.V.'s Big Bad Custom Creations
The B.I.V.'s Big Bad Heroic Creations
Reply With Quote
Reply

Go Back   Heroscapers > Arena of the Planeswalkers: MtG > AotP General Discussion
Thread Tools Search this Thread
Search this Thread:

Advanced Search
Display Modes


Similar Threads
Thread Thread Starter Forum Replies Last Post
Thoughts on my Cavalier Games mats The Mi-Go 13 HeroScape General Discussion 3 April 6th, 2009 10:16 PM
Master Woo's Colors Xomm Official Units 5 March 7th, 2008 03:59 AM
General colors Nwojedi HeroScape General Discussion 2 July 26th, 2007 12:21 PM
Two colors of snow? Siran Dunmorgan Custom Terrain & Obstacles 17 March 10th, 2007 05:17 AM
sir hawthorne's colors tim_stl Official Units 22 March 2nd, 2007 01:37 PM


All times are GMT -4. The time now is 07:06 AM.

Heroscape background footer

Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.8.8
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, vBulletin Solutions, Inc.
User Alert System provided by Advanced User Tagging (Lite) - vBulletin Mods & Addons Copyright © 2024 DragonByte Technologies Ltd.