The Biweekly Tournaments Suck

[Sannsenn]

Hmm, I was jumping in TT after the battle hall update, which means I cannot imagine how bad cheating was in the old times.

In my case and on my server, I found it doable to get rank 1~3, that's why I think cheater is no problem. Of course you cannot match some NPCs who is too easy.
I manage to get all silver cards available by ranking 1~3 in tournaments in half an year. It can be lucky but I work really hard on all cards possibilities.

On my server, most ranking 1~20 players are not 20/20. So that's why I guess there's not many cheaters, or, cheating is no longer beneficial.

[ObsidianFire]

The trick to getting 1-10th place is to never play against NPCs. Winning against an NPC is roughly the same as tying with a PC. You want to aim for roughly 100 points a game. That's like tying half the games and winning the other half. Depending on the tournament, you don't even need to do that.

When you only play against PCs, you have a very good idea what cards they will use and it's not that hard to construct a deck that takes advantage of that. Most people from what I've seen just use the "auto" deck feature and that's incredibly predictable. Build a deck that takes the current tournoment's rules into account and you'll be better off then half the people you play against.

The most annoying part is waiting in the Battle Hall for PCs to pop up who are not playing against NPCs. That takes forever. If more people didn't play tournaments against NPCs, the rankings on the board wouldn't have as many gaps between the high-scoring players and the low-scoring players.

[PangTong]

Hmm, I was jumping in TT after the battle hall update, which means I cannot imagine how bad cheating was in the old times.

It's definitely a lot better now than it used to be. In the old system, you just had to walk up to people and challenge them directly to tournament matches, and you could play the same person as many times as you liked. The amount of points you got was based on on the relative strength of your decks, and how high your opponent was in the rankings. So all you had to do was get a single collaborator, have them build a 3-star deck, and then have them deliberately lose to you over and over while you're using a 1-star deck. If you did this right at the start of the tournament, your opponent would get on the rankings board even from losing, which would further increase the amount of points you got. It was impossible to even get in the top 10 if you didn't cheat, and the 1-3 positions would typically go to the same people every time.

You could still cheat the current system, but you'd need 20 people helping you since the game doesn't let you face the same person more than once. You'd also need to pick a time when no one else was in the battlehall.

When you only play against PCs, you have a very good idea what cards they will use and it's not that hard to construct a deck that takes advantage of that. Most people from what I've seen just use the "auto" deck feature and that's incredibly predictable. Build a deck that takes the current tournoment's rules into account and you'll be better off then half the people you play against.

It's true that most people use predictable decks, although I think part of the reason for that is that the "strong" cards are quite obvious (ones with 8 on two sides), and most variation between players comes down to which 5-star card they pick. But there's not much you can do to prepare yourself against Roulette, or Swap giving your 5-star card to your opponent. Even with Order, you can't really prepare for it without knowing your opponent's deck in advance.

[ObsidianFire]

Roulette is probably the tournament that reveals how well you understand how rules interact with each other. And how well you know how your deck plays. It's easily the tournament I place the best in on a consistent basis.

Swap is the most annoying tournament. Figuring out how to force a Draw with five 3* cards as a backup plan is the way to go.

Order is very easy to defend against. Instead of having your 5* card be the last card (what the game defaults to), have it be the fourth card. That way you will always be able to play it even with Order.

Most of winning Triple Triad (in the current meta) is all about knowing what side(s) your 5* is strong on and then designing your deck around it. A lot of it comes down to blocking access to certain card sides while leaving other ones open. Setting up the field in the first 2-3 moves so that the other player is forced (or heavily encouraged) to play their 5* card before you play yours is also really important. This can lead to weird strategies like playing a double 8 card with the weak sides purposely "open" or not flipping a flippable card so that your own position is better. Plus has it's own interesting variations on all of this too...

Your best strategy though is learning how to purposely tie games. Tying games is fairly easy to do in the current meta and saves you a lot of points in the long run. Flipping cards usually means you have to bring your 5* out which usually means you open yourself to your opponent flipping the 5*. Depending on whether they've played their 5* yet or not, that can go a lot of different ways. Or you can use your 5* to just put an unflipable card on the board or save it to counter their 5* when it comes out. Generally speaking, I've lost more points due to being too greedy with my flips then by being too conservative.

[Rubiss]

Your best strategy though is learning how to purposely tie games. Tying games is fairly easy to do in the current meta and saves you a lot of points in the long run. Flipping cards usually means you have to bring your 5* out which usually means you open yourself to your opponent flipping the 5*. Depending on whether they've played their 5* yet or not, that can go a lot of different ways. Or you can use your 5* to just put an unflipable card on the board or save it to counter their 5* when it comes out. Generally speaking, I've lost more points due to being too greedy with my flips then by being too conservative.

Tying is not a gain over beating an NPC.