or
“I lost 5 lbs. in 2 1/2 days playing Marvel Puzzle Quest, and you can too!”
Had a number of posts in the Avengers Elite thread asking about both my strategy and HP spend on shields, and so I thought I’d do a breakdown of my attack plan for the event and hopefully invite some good discussion on the overall meta-game, taking recent changes into account (NOTE: this is gonna be a loooooooong post, so feel free to TL;DR me). I’m also certain that my approach is not the only winning one, judging from the diversity in both teams and tactics of those that landed in the Top 10 at the end.
The game plan
It’s no secret that with the current state of matchmaking that once you hit the upper tiers of the rankings in a given tourney you are under constant threat of the retaliation mob, turning a modest 15-25 pt. gain into an 80-150 pt. loss. I’ve heard this likened in other threads to outrunning the zombie horde, and the analogy definitely applies. Also like a zombie movie, in the beginning, the protagonists are running from single zeds or small groups, but by the end they are fleeing from a legion of the undead. This is a pronounced enough effect in bracketed tourneys where there are more good rewards per capita, but with a single bracket for all competitors and the best rewards extremely limited, I strongly suspected that this effect would be turned up to 11.
With the likelihood and severity of retaliations increasing exponentially as the tourney progressed, this led me to adopt 3 rules of engagement for this event:
- Capture and maintain the lead early
- Minimize risk
- Focus on defense
Capture and maintain the lead early
There’s been a lot of discussion about how joining a tourney late is the key to cruising to a top tier finish. I kinda disagree. In a bracketed tourney this is more feasible, as you can slip into the 2-cover and even 3-cover reward tiers and shield there before the horde hears your footsteps. That being said, it’s not the optimal strategy in my opinion for securing a number 1 spot. If you’re gunning for a 4* cover in a bracketed tourney, or a 5K-10K HP finish in an Elite event, it’s not enough to cruise in at the end, because you’ll almost never make up enough points to close the gap before the zombies smell brains and drag you off the leaderboard.
Getting the lead is the same as it has always been, choose your matches wisely on the way up to limit retaliations and maximize the number of points you gain from each match - nothing new there. I was in the Top 10 in the first 12 hrs, top spot from 1 day in through the remainder of the event, which required constant monitoring, maintenance, and judicious unshielded pushes.
Once the Top 10 began to take shape and created a significant point separation from the horde, that’s when the shields went up for almost the entire Top 25. This meant that I needed to be “playing” the game even when shielded. When you hold the lead early and everyone shields, then you have control of the event - they HAVE to blink and unshield before you do in order to try and close the gap (either with you, or someone close to them).
I watched the leaderboard constantly while shielded, and anytime one of the Top 10 made a play, I went right to the matching nodes to find them and queue them up. This ensured that when I did take the risk to unshield, I was getting 15-20 pts. per match instead of 8-12. With three nodes, this meant that while any number of individual people gained 30-40 points off of me while shielded, I was gaining 45+ points, meaning an overall gain on the field (3 nodes queued up at 15+ per) during staggered pushes, allowing me to hang on to the lead.
This also means it helps to read the tendencies of players styles - I was always ready to abandon queuing up someone who played recklessly without shielding properly, because while they might have been worth 18 pts. when I queued them up, once the mob got them they were worth around 10. Instead I looked for steady players like myself to queue up - I’d say a huge chunk of my points came from Josemartins who held second for most of the tourney and also would play one match before reshielding, meaning I could count on him to provide the highest possible points due to his placement, as well as the most reliable points. I would quickly bump someone else to make room for queuing him.
I’ve done this in a more limited capacity in other tourneys since it became possible to see people in your bracket in your matchmaking, although it’s far less common in a bracketed event.
The end of the tourney is the great equalizer when it comes to how much you can push - to play more than one match unshielded is to invite disaster. Faster teams may get away with 2-4 matches unshielded earlier on in the tourney. I wouldn’t know for sure, because I ran with Tanks 'R Us (Hulk/IM40/Spidey). But in the final stretch (5 hours out until the buzzer) no matter what your team or playing speed, there are just too many people out there looking for big points to either defend their position at the bottom of a rewards tier, or looking to jump up to the next tier from the top of their current one.
You see where I’m going here. If everyone can only play one match at a time without almost certain risk of death by the mob, then so long as the leader has a reasonable cushion (mine fluctuated, but 40-50 points going into the last hour was enough for me) and plays smartly, they will take home the win.
Minimize risk
Otherwise known as: shield your infinitesimalfeline off. I didn’t spend on shields until about 12 hours in, then once I secured a Top 10 spot and dropped my first 8 hr. to get some sleep. From that point on I almost exclusively played one match before reshielding. Just as important, I never unshielded when my nearest competitors were unshielded, because if they were working on a retaliation against me or just had me queued me up from my last push, that would mean game over. This was exacerbated by my running Tanks 'R Us, as my kill time was way higher than I would have liked.
The one time I gambled early on playing a second match when trying to secure the lead against JacobPC, I got hit by both Nemek and another player who were pushing. Once bitten, twice shy. I vowed to be disciplined from that point on and for the last 2 days of the tourney I never played more than one match at a time unshielded.
Before I talk about total HP spend, I need to recount something that happened about 1 1/2 days into the tourney. People hitting certain point thresholds against the field (in the case of this tourney, it started happening to me around 880 points), would begin to no longer be able to find matches above 0-3 points, and even see seed teams (hello AGAIN ChopStuck) in their match-ups while sitting at the top of the boards.
This is important, because I spent the last evening ( 24 hours before the buzzer) grinding 3 point matches which I had to skip 20+ times to even find, in order to extend/maintain my lead going into the last day. It wasn’t until I hit the 1010 point mark that the devs implemented a fix (I posted about it in another thread), and I began to see my unshielded board-mates and other opponents worth 3-8 points each. 130 points at an average of 3 points per match means that instead of the 8-12 matches it should have taken me to move that far it took me around 40 matches.
So, a delta of let’s say 30 matches, at 50 HP a pop, means that due to the seed team effect I spent an extra 1500 HP just to maintain my lead, that wouldn’t be a factor for other tourneys going forward.
I said in the tourney thread that I spent ~2.5K HP in total, but upon doing the math, I spent 300 on entry, 200 on boosts (once was on accident because I hadn’t noticed the changes, the other for a critical unshield in the last hour of the event), and 3150 on shields for a total spend of 3650. Take out the delta from the shield spend on seed team grinding and you’re looking at a realistic spend of 2150 under normal circumstances to run my team with my strategy. A roughly 5 to 1 return on investment under normal circumstances, but still nearly 3 to 1 in actuality for this event for me. Still not bad at all.
For those who think I’m crazy for dropping 1.5K on grinding three point teams, I have this to say: YOU’RE RIGHT. That being said, once you’ve spent 700HP in shields and factoring in the entry fee, you HAVE to make Top 100 to break even, and Top 30 to turn any profit. I had no choice but to forge on - my fellow poker players will recognize this conundrum as being “pot-committed”. I went into the event with 4.4K earned and hoarded over the last 2 months of play, and I was willing to drop it all if it meant at least doubling my bankroll. Even if I dropped to 2nd/3rd place and burned it all it still meant a net gain of 600 HP for me.
I think Nemek who ended up in the 2-spot reported a 1.5K spend for a 5K score, meaning he had an even better ROI than I did (3.5ish to 1). His lower spend makes sense given that earlier on he would be able to power through multiple matches using his faster team with GSBW as the damage dealer over my tankier IM40, and so could reliably save a significant amount on shields, at least until the final stretch.
Focus on defense
It’s no secret that the game has been slowing down with recent changes. Character tweaks, removing the ability to depend on +3 all boosts (trust me, I’m going through withdrawals on that, too), and matchmaking are forcing us all to play slower, more deliberate matches. I’m not going to debate that these changes don’t have downsides for the meta, but please keep those sorts of analysis for the 3,142 other threads already started on that topic. I’m more interested in how I can adapt most effectively to the new meta, and would like to focus on that.
The short analysis is that defensive teams are now more viable than ever before. Taking away the ability to auto launch abilities on turn one (excepting Spidey’s blue and we all know what’s coming for him <pouring out 40 in advance>), means that damage absorption becomes an even greater factor than it ever was before, and sponges like Hulk and IM40 rise dramatically in value at high levels due to this.
Sure, I might have preferred to run GSBW instead of IM40, but this tourney taught me that high health is now an actual deterrent - I think this tourney showed us what the pacing will be like after Magneto gets his turn in the balancing since he was not allowed in the roster and would have been the one cover who could chew through my tanks. A max Hulk takes 3 Sniper Rifles to down, and while I might be worth the most points on the board, with Hulk/Spidey/IM40, I’m also going to be your longest available matchup, which makes it increasingly likely that attacking me means the mob finds you while you’re unshielded and gets that one quick lucky mega-cascade that crushes your dreams like a dixie cup. Clint, who took 4th, also ran the same team.
The other advantage is that since it takes more time for you to beat me, it mitigates the extra time I have to spend out of shields to make a push. In effect, the time lost in killing speed is made up in the length of window high health gives you to finish a match before you have to reshield. I credit my defensive team with two critical advantages given to me in the final hour.
First, I was luckily able to hold off Nemek by the skin of my teeth; any hit to him would have bumped him down out of the 5K tier. He stated that his matches against my team with his fastest possible team took twice as long as against everyone else, so he wouldn’t risk it. This allowed me to stay shielded and maintain in the last 20 minutes.
Second, I actually gained 10 points on defense in the last hour (about 20-25 in the 5 hours before that) when I made a desperate single match push after real life intruded for the two hours just before and I couldn’t do anything but queue up matches occasionally. While I was open, Bugpop, who was playing like a beast down the stretch, lost a round to me while I was vulnerable. I don’t know whether my D got a lucky cascade or the board just dried up for him, but that’s just the point - a high health team exposes you to more chances that the AI hits a miracle or that you get starved for AP when trying to end matches quickly.
That 10 point gain bumped my lead over 2nd from 19 to 29. I was probably worth at least 20 points to Nemek at that point, meaning that without that extra bump he could have potentially taken it at the last second, but the bonus defense points kept the game in 2 match territory.
One last word on boosts in relation to the new meta where defense has at least a puncher’s chance. There are boosts we’ve all been sleeping on due to having that easy +3 all AP option before (again, I know how this impacts current PvE, but that’s for another thread). Once that change happened mid tourney, I rediscovered the joy of +20% damage boosts. Longer matches with top tier rosters means that you have to rely more on base match damage to body blow squishy targets to death, and bring tanks into kill-shot range. +20% to Avengers made a gigantic difference for me, and was way more reasonable to burn through. I anticipate myself exploring all those boosts scrolled off to the right way more in the coming days.
None of this is to say that a defensive team is the best team, or the only option - just saying that for me, it worked out very well at the end and allowed me to execute my plan and get off Zombie Island with a tidy profit. I hope this is helpful to others and sparks some interesting conversation. If not, you’re a masichist for reading this far anyway and you deserved what you got. 
