Alex: You know, this mysterious voice is always asking if we’re ready. I’m pretty sure you can tell from my bombs that I was born ready! BWAHAHAHAHAHA
Emma: Yes, that bomb is indeed already lit. How irresponsible.
Alex: Oh they’re always lit. I just make sure and pass them along before the party starts.
Emma: Hmm… it would seem that you are wise, even if insane.
Alex: It took you that long to realize my genius, Emma?
Emma: We are prepared, voice!
The Road to Conquest
The second Conquest event wrapped up the early gameplay of the season over the weekend. We’re headed into the finale now.
During the second conquest, several guilds distinguished themselves on the field of battle. We saw some familiar names top the leaderboard, but there were also a few surprises.
Congratulations to all top finishers!
SquareXII ran away with this one. With over a 50% lead compared to second place, they were the undisputed champions of this Conquest event! Congratulations to them for all their hard work and strategic thinking.
The real fireworks during this battle, however, happened between places 2-4. With BTB, EPx and GFX neck and neck headed into the final bonus tally, there was a critical moment to make one last push.
EPx wasn’t going to let that opportunity go. They launched a furious assault in the last moments against GFX, destabilizing their control over ruins and directly attacking the GFX hive to throw off rallies they could use to recover.
Hard to maintain pressure on the Ruins when your base is in absolute chaos.
While EPx was not successful in their bid to shift upwards into the number 2 or 3 rank, their attacks did successfully prevent GFX from being able to challenge BTB in the last moments of the battle.
A big battle with big consequences.
XII goes into this coming Conquest with a huge point advantage, but there’s still room for other guilds to close the gap!
The Coming Battle
The final Conquest is when things will really reach their glorious climax. With players no longer able to convert prisoners beyond their own barracks level, T10 soldiers are very rare to see in the first two conquests.
Some of the biggest and baddest Captains out there may have been sporting some T10s, but the ultimate power of T10 Dark and Light soldiers will be in quite a few players’ hands in the upcoming battle.
Bigger forces means bigger battles. Some tips to remember:
The bonus points for holding a Ruin at :30, 1:00 or 1:30 into Conquest are HUGE. Plan your strategy around these and know that others are doing the same.
Hunting synergy means nothing vs other players. War synergy can get you up to +40% power against your opponents. Dark and Light Mercenaries and Soldiers are the best here.
Pay attention to Mercenary Command Skills when you’re making your teams.
Sometimes T1s in your troop are nice to minimize losses. This hurts your war synergy and troop power though. If you want to minimize losses in conquest, make some T6s of the appropriate Dark or Light soldiers ahead of time.
If the rally leader’s fortress warps, the entire rally is disbanded… even if in a Ruin.
Battle Looms
Alex: So Emma, who are you looking to cross off your list this next Conquest? Are we both racing for a chance to KO Torsten again?
Emma: I will be seeking to battle Bianca. I do not trust that pirate. She knows more than she lets on.
Alex: Oooo, coming after us pirates, huh? That may not end well for you!
Emma: All is fair in Conquest boomy one. I shall relish a chance to meet you fairly on the field of battle.
Alex: It’s a date, Emma! MWUAHAHAHAHA! Now, if you don’t mind mysterious announcer… I seem to have some preparation to do.
Thanks Alex and Emma. Good luck to you in the upcoming final battle, and good luck to all the Captains out there. Make your guilds proud!
Want to hop in and prepare for Season 6? The upcoming fresh start at the season transition is a great time to start playing Eternal Paradox!
Alright, you’re all shuffled up and the cards have been dealt. You’re a master of reading other people, so you know you’ve got this. Suddenly, you realize that your powers of observational deduction don’t work quite right in online poker… whatever shall you do!?
I’ll tell you what you’re going to do. You’re going to math harder than you’ve ever mathed before!
Odds and Playing the Math in Hold ‘Em
So we all know the poker player who plays with their feelings – “I’ve got a good feeling about that turn,” or “I can feel that he doesn’t have it.” That’s fun for tossing plastic chips around in your cousin’s basement over some beers, but I wouldn’t exactly call that a solid strategy when there’s real stakes.
Like most games, poker is based around complex systems of relatively simple math. What distinguishes poker from other games is the incomplete information factor. This is the main mechanic of the game. You know what you have, but everything else is a variable.
Think you can “feel” what other people’s cards are? Let’s review some facts from our last edition to dispel that illusion:
There are 1326 different possible combinations of hole cards you can be dealt in Hold ‘Em
There are 2,598,960 possible combinations the five cards on the table can be in as they are revealed
There are 9,122,409,676,719,740,029,270,368,190,464,000,000 (9.122 undecillion!) possible combinations for how the entire 23-card board could play out for a game with 9 players.
Still think you can play with your feelings? You’re playing the math whether you like it or not… embrace it!
Poker doesn’t have to be undecillion-level complicated though. With just a little learning and practice, you’ll be automatically weighing the chances of any hand you have with a surprising level of human-quality accuracy. The key is to always remember that there are waaaaay more ways that your hand can go wrong than it can go right.
Miss our last Thinking Poker? Check it out to have your mind blown by the not-quite-so-simple, traditional deck of cards.
Base Hand Odds
So you’re at a table with five other players in the hand. Your decision to fold, call or raise to see a flop. You’ve got A/K of hearts. Pretty confident about that? Let’s see where you’re at from an odds standpoint preflop:
Your A/K suited has the following chances of making a hand by the end of the river, not accounting for any other players:
High Card : 17.8%
One Pair : 44.1%
Two Pair : 22.3%
Three of a Kind : 4.2%
Straight : 2.9%
Flush : 6.2%
Full House : 2.3%
Four of a Kind : 0.1%
Straight Flush : 0.0%
With this hand matched against five totally unknown opponents, your hand has a 31% chance to come out on top. That is better than the 16.66% that would be an even distribution for you and 5 opponents..
A few things to note… That straight flush is at 0 from rounding. Keep in mind that a royal flush is just the highest straight flush. Yes, you have a gutshot royal flush draw – only if the 10 of hearts, the jack of hearts and the queen of hearts all hit the table. That’s a less than 1/1000 chance. The suited feels like it helps your odds a lot, but in the end having those matched suits is less than a 7% bump to your odds to make a decent hand.
In the above hand, you’ll be getting one pair or less in the likeliest circumstance. Think hard about how much that’s worth paying to see a flop.
Let’s look at the above hand again, this time in heads up play. There’s only you and one other player in the game and it’s your call whether to pay to see the flop.
Against a totally random hand in this circumstance, your A/K of hearts has a 66.1% chance to win. That is better than half, but it’s not quite the +11% over even odds that you had against 5 opponents.
You’re also not playing against a “random” hand. A player has filtered their cards to a degree. They’ve bet and called, so they are at least signaling they don’t have junk.
Pot Odds
Above, we were talking about straight odds to win. There is, however, another limited information mechanic in poker – the price. Throughout the game, you are put to a decision to add to the pot to stay in the hand repeatedly. This can be looked at as a price to stay in the game. Pot odds are what we call it when we weight this price versus hand equity or expected value.
Say you have a pair of 7s before the flop. There’s two other players in and there’s 800 chips in the pot. The decision is on you, and you can call for 200 chips to see the river. That means you’d be putting 20% of the value into the pot that you could prospectively win. There’s a table pair, and no possible draws on the board. There are two larger cards than your pair on the table.
Against two random hands, you have a 39.1% chance of taking down this pot after the river. You cannot, however, win if you don’t make it to the river or make everyone else fold.
You know from your cards and odds against a random hand that you are likely to have the best chances of anyone else, unless someone hit that low set on the flop. You’re paying 20% of the potential hand winnings to get into the river, and you’re roughly sitting at a player equity of 6:4, or 40%.
This means that you’re paying less than the perceived value of your hand to see the river. With your mathematical likelihood to win, you could conceivably call bets worth around 500 chips and still be on the right side of the numbers. Keep in mind, the pot gets bigger as you add more, thus diluting the pot odds argument and “pricing you in”, so to speak.
This is a good time to mention that “pricing you in” is an illusion. Remember the pot odds. Let’s say you’ve already paid 1000 chips to stay in a hand and there’s 5000 chips in the pot. The river has come, and you know that you have less than a 5% chance to win against random hands. Someone makes a small value bet of 400 chips (to puff up their pot probably!). If you have a 5% chance to win, paying 400 chips to see it through is a bad choice with only 5000 chips in the pot. You’d need ~8% chance to win to square those pot odds.
Already putting money into the pot does not mean you are priced in. Beware sunk cost… it’s the biggest weapon that the person with the winning hand has at their disposal to make you keep pushing over your chips!
Implied Odds
Let’s take this a step further. We know that pot odds are when you take the size of the pot into account versus the price of continuing in the game. Let’s move into something more abstract – implied odds.
Implied odds don’t only look at the pot and your chances versus a random hand. They are looking at the potential throughout the rest of the hand. Let’s look at another example.
You’ve got 10/J suited versus 5 opponents before the flop. You’re at about 24% chance to win… better than even 20% (1 of 5) odds! But wait! Someone’s going hard pre-flop… made hand? They throw down 900 chips into 100 chips of blinds. 3 callers, your decision. You’re now being asked to pay 900 into a 3700 chip pot to see the flop. This is less relative price than your chance to win to see three more cards, so you jump in and call. But… the player on the button raises to triple! Only one caller. It now comes back to you at with another 1800 into a 9100 chip pot. You’ve got the odds on your side in isolation… but this is starting to feel like sunk cost.
…or is it?
Let’s freeze in that moment. Someone made a ridiculously high bet off of just blinds… usually meaning that they have (or are representing they have) a medium pocket pair. They know they likely have the best hand preflop, but after more cards come out they probably won’t. That first player was probably trying to just buy the blinds, plus maybe some sucker that jumped in with trash.
The second player, however, made a value bet. While their raise was high compared to previous bets, they knew that at least one or two players would feel obligated to call after already putting so much money in. This player is intentionally growing the pot bigger instead of trying to elicit folding. This usually means they think they have the winning hand, or it is very likely that they will be the time the river is flipped.
They are trying to price other players in with pot odds… make it so they simply can’t fold over such a small amount of chips relative to the size of the pot. If you call, you’ve paid 2700 chips to access around a ~10k chip pot. While it’s likely that this is worth it to see a flop with your upside chance of almost quadrupling your chips in the middle of the table, tread lightly. If your opponent understands pot odds, they may be keeping you on the hook and just building up their pot without scaring you away.
It’s important to keep in mind here that there are three cards on the flop. With a hand like 10/J suited, you’re likely to know whether you have a real hand or not after the flop. With the turn and river only being one card, be very cautious about following value bets to those cards. If you haven’t gotten a hand worth playing in the first five cards, it’s unlikely you’re going to make one with those last two. A good player who knows they have you beat will just bleed you the rest of the hand to grow their pot.
Simple Gameplay. Complex Nuance
Poker overall is a very simple game in concept, but the combination of playing card randomness and incomplete information makes it so a lifetime of playing poker would still not be enough for anyone to totally understand the nuance and intricacies of the game.
In this article we’ve only scratched the surface of quick odds calculation in poker. Even knowing these few things though, you can estimate what’s worth it to you much better than just playing blind. Poker is about incomplete information… the more information you know about the game and theory, the less disadvantage you take from not knowing what’s in other players’ heads.
That’s all for us in this week’s Thinking Poker. We’ll be back in a few weeks to talk more about the fundamentals of all things poker!
Practice makes perfect… hit the tables today! Play Now
The game has begun, legends! Have you taken your seat at the table?
Legends Reborn is not a complicated game to jump into… you can grab one of the pre-made decks and be having a blast at the tables right away after starting up the game for the first time.
That having been said, there’s a lot of nuance to deck building for those who like to dig in deeper and grow their strategic chops. No one controls the hand you’re dealt… but you can control what goes into your deck.
Calling All First-Time Deck Crafters!
We recognize this may be a review for some of the legends out there. Don’t worry, higher level classes are on the way!
This will not do! We want to take a quick opportunity to walk folks through the basics before we dive deeper into strategy.
If you haven’t played Legends Reborn much yet, but are ready to dive into deck building tactics, read on to learn how to craft your first decks!
Choosing Your Deck
From the main menu, you can select “Deck Editor” to hop right into refining your deck. You’ll notice that there are some preset selections in place. These are great starting points, and you should totally play around with these to get a feel for the style you like to play.
Once you’re ready to start your own destiny… choose to create a new deck and start lining up your strategy!
If you don’t have any cards, no need to worry! There are always time-limited cards available, and you can grab a free daily pack every day to pad your reserves!
Grab these free packs each day from the “Shop” on the main menu.
Deck Building Basics
Every deck starts with a Hero. This is you… the player of the card game. Not only are you choosing whose skin you’re playing behind, but you’re choosing an overarching theme for your deck.
Each Hero Card comes with five cards. These are special Hero-specific actions that you can take at critical moments throughout the match. They’ll often be game-changing if played right, so choose a Hero based on what you think will combo well with the deck you’re hoping to build.
After you select a Hero, it’s on to Creatures. In every deck you get six Creatures. Their stats will determine how your deck plays, so pay attention to which roles work out better for you so you can adapt in the future.
After Creatures, you’ll choose six Action Cards for each Creature in your deck. These Action Cards will be selected from a pool based on that creature’s combat role. These Action Cards are what you will draw from each time your Creatures attack.
You want to choose Action Cards that synergize with each other, but also ones that complement several of your Creatures if possible. Remember, you never know what order you’ll draw cards in. You want as many opportunities to win as possible!
Refining and Improving
Once you’ve selected all your cards, name your brand new deck and you can get to playing! You can click “Summary” from the deck builder menu to get an overview of your deck that you just made.
This summary will show you all your Creatures and you Hero, but crucially will let you quickly reference your Mana Curve. Take note of this. If you ever find yourself with too many high mana cards to play, you may need to switch out for some lower cost cards. Likewise, if you find yourself with just too much mana and no cards, then you probably need to get some higher cost Actions in there.
Don’t be worried if you don’t have too many choices the first time. Time limited free cards swap out frequently, so you can experiment with a lot of different cards over time. As you play, you’ll unlock more cards and also be able to pick up that free pack every day. Before you know it, you’ll not only have a lot of cards to choose from, but know how to use them all!
As we said above, we’ll be back later with some more advanced strategy – but get in and give building a deck a try today!
If you’ve had experience with TCG deck building before, you know how engaging and fun the strategic customization can be. If you haven’t… well, you’re missing out! Luckily for you, Legends Reborn is free to hop into right now!
Welcome back to the Spider Tank Showcase! This week we’ll be taking a pretty sharp turn away from the pew pew of Crosssbow from last edition. This week we’re blasting through one of the bigger hunks of metal in the arena – The Maul!
Maul is a heavy Body, though it’s lighter than the biggest boys out there like Titan, Plate or Tracks. This large bulk provides you with an incredibly healthy amount of durability and Energy, but doesn’t slow your movement to a crawl like the biggest Bodies out there do.
The Warrior
Alright, we wanted to start off with originality… but we just can’t pass up the chance to revisit The Warrior build. Maul was, after all, originally released with the Bouncer. It’s a very classic combo.
The Maul’s bulk allows you to line up your shots a little better to get the best bouncy goodness. Since each ricochet with a Bouncer deals more damage than the last, shots that chain are the paydirt on this one.
Bouncy, bouncy, bouncy.
Maul gives you the maneuverability to make sure you can exploit weaknesses you spot while holding a Bouncer. It’s bulk lets you focus solely on getting your shot off, as you can easily shrug off a hit or two.
The Sentinel
This one is similar in theory to The Warrior, but utilizes the Sniper Rifle to get the most out of Maul’s toughness. Sniper Rifle is deadly from a distance, but lining up the right shot can occasionally leave you exposed.
With a Sniper Rifle, a heavy Body like Maul can easily occupy a choke point in the battle. Control access to part of the map, and you open up your allies to do all sorts of fun shenanigans. The point isn’t so much to not get hit… more to make them pay for wanting to hit you.
Long-range support doesn’t mean out of the action.
In the above clip, the Sniper Rifle has occupied a crucial junction just in front of the teleport. From here, its teammates are able to exercise control over the repair kit above and freely move around the map and only leave one quad where the enemy is safe.
The range on a Sniper Rifle is long enough, that no one can threaten the Maul for long. Even if they can, they have to be in the open to do so… and it only takes two or three clean shots to bring them down.
The Berserker
This last combo isn’t for every Pilot. For The Berserker build, we’ll use Maul alongside Carver. The bulk of Maul allows for you to shrug off the first few hits before your blade finds home, and the high Energy lets you play flexibly with Abilities like Relay Drone and Speed Boost.
You’re going to blow up a few times on this build… more than a few, in fact, while you learn to use it. Patience is the key. When you see your opening, zig and zag as you’re able to. Remember though, the zig towards your enemy. If you get hit a few times, that’s ok. Just kill them before they kill you.
Slice and dice time!
Maul is just heavy enough to ignore full frontal damage for a second or two. That’s often what you need to pin in the enemy with your sword. Keep them running from you. You want to be patient and wait for the right opening, but if you play scared you will lose. You’re a gigantic tank with a sword on top of it… they should be scared of you!
That’s Maul, Folks!
That’ll do it for our 25th edition of The Spider Tanks Showcase! Did we miss your favorite build with Maul? Did we choose one that you think is amateur hour? Let us know on Discord!
Next week we’re giving the Tank combos a rest for a bit, as we’ll dive into Stealth Abilities in the arena. Are you super sneaky? Have some good clips of your deceptive dominance? Let us know on Discord or social media for a shot to be featured in the next Spider Tank Showcase!
Today we’re unveiling a deck-empowering addition to our beloved web3 Trading Card Game (TCG), Legends Reborn: the eagerly anticipated Crafting System. This feature is poised to transform your deck-building experience, allowing for unprecedented levels of strategy, potentially giving you an edge in the competitive Tolkheim battle of Chance!
Unleashing Creativity and Strategy
The Crafting System introduces a dynamic new approach to obtaining the cards you’ve been coveting. By dismantling cards within your existing collection you can harness the resources needed to finally craft the cards your deck desperately needs. This innovative system not only enhances your strategic depth but also opens up new avenues for customization and personalization of your gameplay experience.
Prepare to dive into a world where every card holds the potential to unlock new strategies and compositions. With the Crafting System, the power to shape your destiny is right at your fingertips.
A New Era of Gameplay Awaits
The Crafting System is now live, heralding a new chapter in the Legends Reborn saga. Get ready to explore endless possibilities and elevate your gameplay to new heights. The freedom to tailor your deck is now greater than ever, empowering you to outsmart and outplay your opponents in ways you never imagined.
Empowered by the Gala Ecosystem
In line with our commitment to community empowerment, this update also builds on the foundations laid by our recent Economy Litepaper. The introduction of seasonal rewards in $TOLK, the official reward token of Legends Reborn, underscores our dedication to creating a vibrant and rewarding ecosystem for our players. As you embark on this new journey, remember that your achievements in the mystical land of Tolkheim are not just a testament to your skill but a part of our shared quest to redefine gaming through the power of GalaChain. And we’re just getting started.
Join Us on This Exciting Adventure
As we continue to push the boundaries of what’s possible in the world of web3 gaming, we invite you to join us in this exciting new era for Legends Reborn. Whether you’re a seasoned veteran or a newcomer eager to explore the depths of strategic card gaming, the Crafting System promises a fresh and engaging experience that rewards creativity, strategy and skill.
Stay tuned for more updates, and let’s craft legends together!
