Hello Dice Masters Fans! This past weekend, we ran the Team of the Month (TOTM) Competition for May. For this month, we chose to mash a couple different Formats together… Chaos and Energize. We called this Energize: Meta Rules. Essentially this was meant to introduce rules from the Choas Format into the game in a more online friendly way. True Chaos just does not work well online… which is a shame. For details on the build challenge, you can read the original article here.
The build was limited to a Modern build with a small ban list (which you can find in the article). Each player rolled a Sidekick die at the beginning at the game and the result of the roll determined which rules would be active for that game. Here were the Teams that participated:
- Laurier: Who is that masked man?
- Nick: No laughing matter.
- Ryan: Lita’s coffee break.
- Jocelyn: Charlotte’s web.
- Matt: DNF.
We hit the ground running with the Twitch thing and we were able to broadcast the event live (you can check out the whole event while it is available on VOD on Twitch). The first part of te broadcast was a little rough with some unexpected echoing issues. Check out, and follow us on Twitch at twitch.tv/dicemastersnorth to stay up to date on future TOTM Events.
Let’s break this part up with the rules that occured, as it seems to make the most sense.
The Bolt rule was for sure the star of the show tonight. It was just a crazy ability, but unfortunately an ability that we will need to learn to play with… since it is coming back to the game in the form of Jubilee for the Dark Phoenix set.
This rule was essentially made for the spammy Teams. Not to disappoint, Lita was out in force on the night. Her an Atlantis made great use of this rule by clearing out blockers or just straight up burning down the Opponent. This will be an interesting combo once all the actual cards are available in Modern. Lita’s fragility definitely hurts her, but she was quite good with this rule in place.
One of the more interesting counters to the Fish Teams that showed up was Charlotte Flair. She dealt one damage to the Opponent when they fielded a Sidekick. It made for some interesting decisions when the Fish was triggering.
Post-event feedback agreed that this rule was crazy good. Almost too good as it was. It was too easy to apply the ability to Lita herself, which made the Fish Slap that much better. Most felt that the rule would be a little better on something higher costs. Going forward, this would be the new rule:
By increasing the base character cost for this to trigger, it makes it a little harder to get this train running.
To no surprise, Attune made a strong appearance for the Shield Rule. Surprisingly, Attune was not on every Team though. Again, the Fish Slap enjoyed the use of this rule and seemed to pair well with it. The Fish itself was able to help thin the Field for the eventual slap.
Everyone felt that this rule actually worked well as is. We would keep it the same going forward with this event.
As an aside, I have never seem Boomerang trigger more than I have tonight. It was crazy.
I didn’t get to see this rule much on the night, so I am going to have to go off of what the players said. Everyone felt this one worked well too. You were able to get those things out of your Field that you needed to and gave you on demand Ramp.
The overall opinion was that this one worked well too. Mask stays the same for the future.
Poor Fist. It was the rule that could have been. While trying hard to balance it, we actually ended up neutering it. The “go wide” strategy was meant to pair well with this one, however the non-Sidekick limitation was problematic in practice. Pretty much unanimously everyone agreed that this rule needed some tweaking. After some high level discussions, this would be what we used on round two for this event:
Now Sidekicks can get the buff and are more of a combat threat. Is it balanced? We will see the next time we run this Format.
Final Thoughts
For online play, I think this actually made the Chaos Format work well. You do lose the mad rush of rules coming at you, but it is easier to communicate what is happening this way. While some of the rules we chose needed a little work, overall they worked well and represented what we wanted them to. We covered Action damage, Combat damage, and Direct damage.
Do you need to follow these rules specifically? Not at all! You could define rules for each side of the die. Pick whatever you might find interesting. The random aspect of this Format is one of the strongest parts of it. Your Team needs to have the flexibility for any of the possible rules that might be thrown at it.
Other than the rule changes that we outlined above, the only thing I might consider altering for a future run of this event is Lita. She proved almost too good in this environment. I think she has to sit the next dance out.
What rules would you like to see for this? Throw some of your favourite chaotic rules in the comments below. Thanks, as always, for reading! Hope to see you back for next month’s TOTM!
– jourdo