Celestial Tournament: What I Expect to See

Game time's drawing near (If I've managed the time zone conversion correctly anyways). And it's been a while, the GWFC to be exact, since I've even seen a tournament like this. I missed out on the Wintergreen tournament but, then, so did a lot of other top guilds. So, beyond my predictions, what am I expecting to see?

Well, for one thing some really good teams. The skill level of the entire playerbase has only risen over the years and these are the teams who've played, more or less, at the top of their games the past two months.

For another, I expect to see some Rock/Paper/Scissors building going on. And the sort of extreme map choices that enable it - I wouldn't be surprised if Jade Isle made an appearance and I wouldn't be surprised if there's a collective groan from the community about it.

A tournament, after all, is a really different creature than ladder play. There the best thing to do, if you can't work out the latest rank farming gimmick, is to just have a balanced build and be able to outplay everyone with it. Flexibility is your design goal since you don't know where or who you'll be playing and you'll need to deal with the various extremes of the day. Those extremes have only gotten more niche thanks to the continuing creep of skill lists and power levels - you can have really powerful hex builds, I'd argue, because strong counters like Divert Hexes exist. And players have gotten much better about creating builds to exploit certain advantages.

In a tournament, however, you're rewarded for exploiting those advantages yourself. The more you can tailor your build to your map, which you know you'll be playing on, the better your chances of winning. While you can run something perfectly balanced and hope to outplay the other team, you can also run something slanted to one degree or the other and hope they can't hate you out.

Adding to this, teams these days run and develop multiple builds. There are a few one-trick ponies on the ladder, but I'm guessing they've been bounced from the tournament already - run one thing and one thing only and you're just asking someone to come up with a hard counter. Teams have options and, in so many words, strategic flexibility which enhances the guessing "Build Wars" game.

So, I'm doubting we're going to see something like in the GWWC where Te threw a curveball by running with a completely different build - FC Air Spike, if I recall - in the third and decisive game which knocked them out of the championship against LuM.

If I can get all nostalgic for a minute, a similar thing happened with my old guild, iQ, where their build had been countered but instead of changing it for the final game, they ran with it again and onto a crushing defeat. I remember being pilloried at the time because I asked the obvious question, "Why the hell did you do that?" (Knowing me, it took five paragraphs, a few uncomfortably strained metaphors, and a flowchart to get there, but that was the gist.) Only to be told, in so many terms, that iQ hadn't managed to play a lot of matches (Not so much of an issue now, is it?) and were really only comfortable with that one build.

It was an answer I knew perfectly well, but I was simply asking the unanswered question for the benefit of everyone - because the answer says a lot about the differences between what you had to do to prepare for the ladder and what you had to do to prepare for that, our first championship tournament. Of course, I was in the middle of making myself look like a complete idiot by making stupid comments like that all the time back then so I probably shouldn't have bothered. But, really, the different ways Te and iQ answered the question were illuminating to me. Te knew their build had been figured out and running it again would prove disastrous so they rolled the dice on being able to surprise the other team with something to which they were unaccustomed. iQ, thought the same thing, but felt their chances were better sticking with what they knew best and trying to outplay the other team.

It was, in short, contrasting lesson in being underprepared and what you do with it but there was, of course, a third way there. And that would have been to have practiced a second build or three in order to have on hand for just such an eventuality. Time has, I think, validated this as the correct move in that situation. And, now, teams are a lot more used to tournament play and they'll be much more prepared with a Plan B when things aren't working. The good ones, anyway.

Beyond that, I think we're going to see some upsets. Some amazing games. And some blowouts and not so amazing ones. I expect to hear some grumbling about lag and/or technical issues. And, above all, I expect that I can't wait to see it all.