Aristeia - All Stars 2! Tournament Report

Hi everyone, here is a little run down of an Aristeia AGL event that took place on Saturday the 24th. We had 11 players from a 12 registered, with the one cancelling the day before due to the sickness.

The scenarios we played were:

• Blitz
• Human Target
• Capture the Flag
• Conquest
  
  
  
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Byes were a little bit erratic this event with an odd number, the first bye was random, the second was via last-place. The third I took to avoid any travelling players having the bye and the fourth was volunteered so the player could head home early.

Here is a a list with the Aristos chosen for the event:

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A great showing, with some obvious favourites based on the scenarios of the day, the only missing character from the entire line up was Dart. Unsurprising was the most picked, with Parvati being chosen because of her great flexibility between support and mobility (great for the scenarios chosen), Senor Massacre for his control, durability and damage mixture and Major Lunah who is great at controlling enemy movement in such mobile scenarios whilst being able to throw out a large degree of damage over long range.

We played with the following MODs for the event:
MOD: Zlavin
MOD: AGL Circuit [Saif Traders | HaqqIslam]

Zlavin was chosen due to encourage more intelligent drafting and it's something I really enjoy, I tend to prefer Zlavin as almost being the default for AGL. Plus I'm not a huge fan of mirror matches and it eliminates that!

We chose Saif Traders to see how it would effect the State metagame and the result was that we found it didn't really effect it that much. The situation where removing a state from yourself in a dice roll was rather niche, though it does find a place to remove Burning or Poison tokens through regular activation. It is far less useful to try to remove States such as -,- or & for example.

We also found it was an additional layer of rules to remember, so for my next event where we use the AGL Circuit Mod, I'll have quick reference print outs by the side of each table.

Event thoughts:

I love AGL Circuit, it's a great idea to shake up the basics of the game by adding a small spin to the scenarios and the fundamentals of play. That said, I did find a lot of players forgot about the system, or how to capitalize on it. So I think it's worth having a quick reference sheet next to each table to remind players about it.

Blitz is a great scenario, especially as a pre-lunch or end of day round due to the quick nature of play. We have most of the games completed within 30 minutes, leading to a nice early start to round 2 here, but I think this is a scenario that can be deployed in a tournament roster where you need round times to be smooth and flowing. The mission itself I enjoy, I like the pressure it applies on players to score quickly and pay attention to the board state. It reinforces a great balance of having mobility, control, displacement and frag potential whilst also racing the game clock. Bixie was my absolute MVP in this mission, being able to rapidly leap between the table to contest objectives and keep up with opposing my opponents Gata.

Human Target... ugh. So first I'll start with the positive:

I like the basis of this scenario. I love the idea of having a mobile, hold the ballmarker mission which rewards teams holding onto an objective and trying to score it. Kinda like an Aristeia version of Basketball(?). I like idea of racking up Victory Points on Character Cards and then cashing them in. I think that's a great idea.

What I dislike is the translation and editing of this scenario, to be brutally honest. It's a mess, the second page of the scenario completely breaks down on the wording on Transfer and the Dispute rule. There appears to be a few inconsistencies between the English and Spanish versions of this rule, highlighted in the discussion thread which further adds to the problem. My brief notes are that the mission is messy and unfortunate to play, so avoid this until it is rewritten. It isn't worth the ruling headaches or questions it brings. :(

Capture the Flag, I've only played this mission once before and I had the bye round for this event, but I like CTF modes in various video games, so seeing it in Aristeia is also really cool. Gata is an absolute must pick in this scenario and in the event you don't get her, take something to counter her, either by Immobilizingher, the ability to cripple her mobility via - or just frag her from a distance.

Conquest feels like a more aggressive version of Blitz, I took a similar team comp to it to my memory, it's a really great mission requiring your Aristos' to be somewhat self sufficient and being able to spread out and lock down the side scoring zones whilst having a strong character to hold the central zone. In this scenario, I ended up using Kozmo & Bixie to hold the center, whilst using Bixie to rapidly reposition between the outside scoring zones to Conquer them and then holding the outside zones with characters who can provide long range support such as Major Lunah from the safety of a distant zone. Also shout out to my Kozmo for getting 4 Frags in this mission via exploding dice, though I'm an idiot and misreported my game with only 3 Frags, despite recording the correct amount in the scenario. My favourite play being having Kozmo Meteoric Charge out of the central zone, firing off a Nebula onto Gata before popping off Stellar Nucleosynthesis to frag her, a few switches later and another Nebula had Bixie covering the central smoke filled zone to avoid being displaced out by an enemy Hexx3r, granting me the game win.

Overall, a great fun day of Aristeia, it's a really great game and I thoroughly enjoy organizing events for it over Infinity, I think largely because it plays a lot smoother, though it did take our players a little bit to wrap around how recording the game results worked.

 

Thanks for the kind words both! Honestly i could write forever about this game, it's bloody excellent.

 

I also found my tournament report sheets earlier, noting what characters I used. Would anyone be interested in my selection updates on each round with some crib notes of things I can remember?

 

Starting Roster:
Bixie, Eclypse, Hannibal, Kozmo, Laxmee, Major Lunah, Prysm, Senor Massacre.
Sponsor: Oxyd.
Pick Count:
Bixie: 3.
Major Lunah: 3
Kozmo: 2
Prysm: 2
Hannibal: 1
Laxmee: 1
Eclypse: 0
Senor Massacre: 0

R1: Blitz Vs Wintermute.
Team Comp:
Bixie, Kozmo, Major Lunah, Laxmee.
Result: 9-0/2-1

First pick that I chose here was Bixie, I absolutely had to pick her due to the mobility required by the scenario, she is my primary scorer, so in the event that my opponent has Bixie, I have to priority pick her due to the Zlavin MOD. My second draft was Kozmo & Major Lunah, giving me some extra Speed, off-tanking capability and denial with Kozmo. Kozmo is fairly independent allowing me to rush a changing Blitz zone as needed and to accompany Bixie should it be needed.

Major Lunah gave me my much-needed damage, range and control injection. Being able to potentially Move -> Suppressive Fire/Called Shot is obviously quite huge in a rapidly scoring scenario like Blitz, so she felt a great comfort pick to have over the rest of my roster. Finally, my last pick was Laxmee, giving me some nice dice control which I felt was needed, my team was rather squishy, and my 3 characters really benefit from having the extra dice from Focused State, so Laxmee felt like a great pick here, plus I just really enjoy using her. Lastly, her mobility via her switch is actually pretty underrated and you can harness quite a lot of movement out of it and head into scoring zones whilst supporting your team.


R2: Human Target Vs Piscina de la Muerte.
Team Comp:
Bixie, Prysm, Major Lunah, Hannibal
Result: 8-5/1-0.

For Human Target, I wanted mobility much like the previous mission, with an extra spice of some damage to kill the Human Target. I kept Bixie and and Major Lunah for the required manoeuvrability/damage/control as previous, so I’ve not got much to add here! Worth mentioning, I’m much more actively using Bixie as a spotter for the Major Lunah railgun each turn rather than her own damage potential. I’ll take shots against Gata, but that’s mostly it.

I added both Prysm & Hannibal to the roster for this, which paid off big time. Hannibal has excellent synergy with all 3 of these characters, but I really, really love using him with Bixie in particular. The ability for her to leap out of activation is incredibly important in Human Target for relaying the marker back to your scoring zone, as well as leaping across the battlefield to set up shots for Major Lunah. His synergy with Prysm essentially just makes her hit harder and have a higher increased chance to pop her taunt which is integral to her gameplay and tying up opposing characters. Highly recommend this quad as a team to try out.

R3: BYE.
I didn’t play this round, so I had a semi-nap at my TO station like a mature adult.

R4: Conquest Vs wgrenter.
Team Comp:
Bixie, Kozmo, Major Lunah, Prysm
Result: 9-5/6-0

For the last round (and final!), I had to pick a team that could cover a wide area of the board, whilst retaining control elements and retaining some familiarity on the day. I opted for my safety comfort picks of Bixie, Kozmo, Major Lunah & Prysm.

Bixie lets me cover a wide variety of scoring zones on a turn to turn basis, helping me control the central zone, or cover and contest a flanking zone in a single turn. Usually whilst setting up support shots from Major Lunah. Kozmo is the ideal central anchor, being able to rapidly Meteor Charge out of the centre into a nearby objective to counter-attack if needed, but otherwise mostly just rushed the central zone and kept setting fire to people. Thanks to exploding dice, Kozmo ended this game with FOUR frags.

Major Lunah can reinforce a back zone whilst providing support fire, thanks to Bixie’s ability to Mark people, she can quite happily provide support even without LOS! It’s great. Finally, Prysm is great to hold an entire flank down herself and tie up important characters in the back, being a massive nuisance and requiring disproportionate resources to dislodge, which in a mission like Conquest where you’re forced to spread yourself thin can be extremely problematic for your opponent.

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Overall notes. I find the Senor Massacre pick of 0 is really worth noting, because I played against him 2/3 rounds of the day, he's a hugely important secondary pick in Zlavin I find because of his controlling element and durability. He takes a lot of resources to dislodge, so I ended up not even attempting to pick him because I knew he would be so contested, letting me focus on my other priority picks. This is also the reason I ended up not taking Hexx3r at all. I was happy to concede Hexx3r to my opponent to give me what I wanted, rather than throwing my own plans into disarray by losing the draft. This is one thing I love about Zlavin, it makes the draft format an extra layer of the game, much like a MOBA game such as League of Legends or DOTA and it adds quite a lot to the game, as well as playing up the narrative aspect with no cloned characters.

I didn't end up picking Eclypse either, largely as due to the amount of Mendoza I knew I was going to see, flipping fire token's wouldn't help me and I'm not as comfortable with playing Eclypse as I am Laxmee, who is my other state removal character. I was aiming to mix using Laxmee's Fairy Dust, or using her Focused ability to let characters remove their own states via the Saif Traders AGL Circuit.


Hope this helps everyone! It’s a little bit quick coverage, but I can’t remember it all now. :V

 

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