Hello Dice Masters!  Welcome back for the second last TOTM for 2019.  Sorry that this one is coming out a little later than planned, but figuring out the date was a little tricky.  This one comes thanks to Nick for reminding me of an official Format that never made the cut.  Before we get to the details of that though, let’s give a quick overview of what the TOTM is.

For those that are unfamiliar with the TOTM, here is what you need to know:

• You will be given specific parameters for a Team Build for the given month.
• A “fun play night” will be set when people will be welcome to gather and play their Teams themselves for the competition.

This competition will be open worldwide, and anyone is welcome to  join.  The submission deadline for this month will be 9:00 PM Mountain Time on November 22,  2019.  Submissions should be filled out on the TOTM Team Submission Form.  This is not a hard deadline, but the more notice I have, the better I can get things set up.

23/11/2019 EDIT:  Due to some real life scheduling interference, I need to change the date of this TOTM.  It will now be taking place on December 7, 2019.  Two weeks later than the original date.  All Submission links remain the same.  Thank you for your understanding.

Here is the challenge for November 2019:

Do you remember when Wizkids sent out a survey of alternative Dice Masters Formats?  Me neither.  Thankfully, my memory was refreshed on the Dice Masters Discord and the theme for this month’s TOTM was set.  Let me present to you…

What is this?

According to Wizkids, the Speed Escalation Format is meant to run like this:

Players will play a modern constructed tournament where they must swap out 2 cards that began the tournament on their team at the end of each round.

The goal was you would morph your Team throughout the Tournament and end up with something completely different than what you started with.  Kind of a cool idea if you ask me… however, it doesn’t quite have the TOTM feel.

How about we jank it up a little bit.

The rules…

This will be a Modern only build.  The only bans that are in place will be the regular official Wizkids bans:

• Yuan-Ti Pureblood – Epic Humanoid
• Cosmic Cube – Energy of the Beyonders

You will build your starting 10 card Team as you normally would.  This will be entered under the “Starting Team Builder Link” in the submission sheet.  You will then select 9 “bench” cards, and enter them under the “Bench Team Builder Link” in the submission sheet.  These bench cards must be sleeved the same as each other in order to prevent you from being able to identify them.

You will shuffle these bench cards into a pile and place them face down somewhere they are fully visible on camera.  At the end of each round, you will choose three of your currently active cards to remove from your Team.  Without looking, you will flip over the top 3 cards of your bench pile and place these onto your Team.  The number of dice on these new cards can be redistributed as you see fit, but you may only use the same number of dice that were removed from your Team.  For example, if you removed 3 cards each with 2 dice on them, you would have 6 dice to use and distribute onto the new cards.

At the end of the next round, you will select 3 more cards that were not previously swapped and repeat the process.  By the end of the night, you should only have one card remaining from your original Team.

That means that one of the substitutions must be a BAC card.  You cannot choose this card when selecting your replacements.  So, what happens when you flip a BAC over from your Bench pile?  The power now lies in your Opponent’s hands.  They will select one of your BAC’s to remove from your Team for this new one.  They will also choose one of the cards that you chose to remove to put back onto the Team.

More of less, this will end up with the same idea as what Wizkids planned… but there is a little more randomness built into it.

Hopefully this all makes sense.  If there are any questions, please reach out to us!

The plan is to play your Teams on Saturday, November 23, 2019 December 7, 2019 (see the Edit at the start of the article) starting around 7:00 PM Mountain Time.  We will be starting things off in our very own Hangouts Room.  You can find the link here.  Ideally, it would be nice to get 3-4 Rounds of Play in… but we will see what happens.

Matches will be 30 minutes long to avoid slogs.  If the game is tied when time is called, the game will go to 5 turns with the active player being Turn Andy (or Turn Zero if you want).  The player with the most life at the end of Turns will be the winner.

Looking forward to seeing you there.  Thanks for reading and feel free to reach out to us with any questions.

Best of luck!

– Dice Masters North