Wednesday, May 16, 2018

Having a Plan

The first topic I wanted to talk about is having a plan. In my opinion having a plan is the most important concept to take into a game of guild ball. A plan can save you time on your clock, score more points, and help you become a more rounded player. Due to the nature of Guild Ball's activation mechanics having a structured plan is hard to do with reactionary play. This is also one of the most complex ideas to discuss, but I will explain it in simple steps, Kick-off, overarching turn plan, and what to do if your plan doesn't go as plan.

First and most important is having a plan at kick-off. A strong turn one will put us in a better position for the later turns to take advantage of. As the receiving player the goal of our turn should be to score a goal. To begin with we want to deploy our players so that we can retrieve the ball no matter where they kick off goes. Generally we want to pass the ball around to get easy momentum, then scoring a goal with our last activation This is easier said then done, sometimes we have to live with the fact that a perfect scatter will leave part our team vulnerable. Some teams and captains will play this differently for example: Fillet wants to try and get a six point activation or set up a six point activation the following turn, Ballista alongside hoist will pump out ranged damage, or Obulus will puppet master a key player and farm momentum to casket time a key player in the first activation of the next turn, and so so many more unique examples to cover in this post. As the kicker we want to kick off with the player to put as much pressure on the ball as possible. This is usually accomplished by a striker or a superstar captain. We want to kick the ball into a spot that will bring a player forward in a spot that our team can try and attack for momentum, or by kicking the ball to the striker we think is going to score the turn 1 goal for our opponent. An example of this is in a recent tournament I played brewers while Blaine played his Morticians. He kicked with Scalpel to apply the most pressure on my team and kicked to ball to Friday to ruin my turn one goal. Like receiving each guilds kicking plan is different, and you should play your team according to their strength.

Every turn when I am allocating influence to my players I am thinking what I want to try and accomplish that turn. My plan might be to control a certain player with my control style player, score a goal, form a scrum a pump out as much damage as possible to certain players, or any combination of these sorts of things. I have played blacksmiths a lot recently and my thought process for my plan each turn usually went; which apprentice do is going to do the most work this turn, how many players do I need to apply disarm to, what set up does hearth need to do, does cinder have her influence/does she need her one? In a game against brewers with my blacksmiths I would start by giving ferrite two influence to disarm the two players that I expected to do the most damage, then would give 4 influence to either Iron, Alloy, or both depending how much set up I needed to do and would end by giving cinder 1 and hearth 1 or 2 so she could do the set up. Even more general and not turn or match up specific, our team could have the same plan every turn. For example a Fillet team based around fillet taking six of the influence every turn to do the most work with that influence and the rest of the team supports fillet or is self sufficient (like boar or minx), or an Obulus team isolating a key player from the opponents team and pumping out damage. If you have a plan going into a match up for how the game will progress it will alleviate most of the clock pressure.

This brings me to my last topic, coming up with a plan on the go. Sometimes our vision for how the game is going to play out doesn't happen. It is best to recognize this as soon as possible to give us the most time to switch gears. This is easiest to catch when an important activation that we planned to do one thing doesn't happen because we our dice didn't roll what we expected (for the better or worse). For example if you planned for decimate to hit momentous 2 damage for for attacks and she spikes for her thousand cuts on a player, the rest of the teams influence will reach higher in there playbook so less influence might be invested to take out a player. As a result we might have to adjust our plan so that all our influence gets used and none is wasted. The worse off case is we missed a goal with Flint that we thought for sure would go in, that if Flint used run the length he was out of threat from the rest off the other team and our plan after the goal was to chase the ball down to score a goal again. Now we have to go into damage control mode to protect Flint by shadowing him with Brick and setting a scrum. It is best in Guild ball to always have a plan, but to be flexible with your plan incase an activation doesn’t go our way. The team we are playing only generates a certain amount of influence we can use, which in turn only generates so much momentum to use as well. We never want to allocate any of our limited resources to a player without an idea of what they are reliably going to do with that resource. Some players best quality is that they do something for nothing.

Having a plan is in my opinion the most important concept to take into a game of guild ball. Your plan maybe a stuctured plan of X player will do this, than Y player does that, more general as one turn you might just be trying to score a goal. Sometimes the best plan is to disrupt your opponents plan until they make a mistake for you to capatilize on, or to be super reactionary and take whatever is given to you at that time.

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