The one about Competition!

2020 is a very exciting year for us, and seeing the first fruits of our labor is a delicious experience. As SkyWeaver's development cycle matures and the game becomes more feature-complete, our Community also starts surprising us with cool initiatives. This is just a taste of things to come, two of my personal favorites.

The first one is SkyWeaverDecks. This third-party program taps into our APIs to bring our users a wealth of information about cards, decks, Prisms, markets, the meta and players themselves.

Veterans and newbies alike can find a lot of information here, and the Top Cards and Prism Winrates graphs are community favorites right now. We have all this info internally, but we didn't have the time or resources right now to make a cool front-end such as this one, so I am very happy the community took action and did such as amazing job. The potential for mods and other third-party sites is immense!

Favorite Community Thing number 2 was the great SkyChampion Community Tournament, organized by the frequently-excellent bruhssaurusrexx and JupiterElicius. SkyWeaver still is missing some important tournament features, such as an Observer Mode, but our community wasn't deterred by this, and organized a great competition in early February. We've had it all: major upsets, daring comebacks and nail-biting matches. Really good show, everyone.

As your Community Manager, I was very pumped up by this community initiative, and I am now actively engaged in making sure we enable more and more cool features that will allow you, the community, to create your own competitive scene. Competition is at the heart of what we are doing, so we should make tournaments easy and quick for you.

Several great players took to the battlefield, and when the cards were down, HypoLast was the victor! A regular in our Discord, HypoLast had a very solid strategy, and was able to best everyone else. So, as usual, I asked him a few questions about SkyWeaver and the SkyChampion Tournament. Let's see what he had to say!

1 - Any thoughts on the current scenario in Discovery and Constructed matches?  

For discovery I'd say that STR/HRT is head and shoulders above any other combination, but anything involving STR is strong. I've been hovering around rank 2-4 GM playing exclusively STR/HRT, slowing trying to reach rank 1. In constructed STR is definitely the strongest prism at the moment, which I think the tournament kind of proved. It just has the best numbers, for both aggro and control. Ladder is mostly aggro and midrange, but I'm interested to see what my meta report reveals when I get to it this afternoon.

2 - Which are your favorite Prisms and why?  

Favorite prisms are easily WIS/HRT. I'm a control player at heart and those are the two most controlling prisms so I'm naturally drawn to them. Unfortunately control has been steadily getting worse over the last few patches and now this patch it's just not viable to play a deck without STR, so I'm mostly on a WIS hiatus for now.

3 - What's your favorite card? How do you like to use it?

Favorite card is either Incinerate or Identity Crisis, I guess Crisis because it's a little more flexible. I like efficient answer cards because I like having control over the pace of the game. I'd much rather lose to running out of answers than running out of steam.

4 - What's the card you fear the most when played against you?

I'm most scared of anything I don't have an immediate answer for, haha. Honestly the card that most consistently spooks me might be Skip. It's just so hard to remove early on and can keep bopping in for damage that really adds up. Sometimes you're just forced to spend a Waterline or Burninate on it which can really set you back. When I'm not playing control anything that goes bigger than me is scary, Prismata and Tiamat are pretty common.

5 - How was the road to become the first SkyWeaver Community Champion? Any commentary on the matches, opponents and their strategies?

Well, I got a bye in the quarterfinals so that was nice, but I definitely thought SwapGo was the favorite to beat me. I didn't think my Entwail control had any chance of beating his STR/HRT deck, which is why I went for a cheeky aggro win. Obviously that got super shut down by turn 3 Burninate, so I decided to just go with what I was comfortable with and play the Entwail deck. Games 2 and 3 were both incredibly close, especially game 3. The play where I Gemini'd his Doom Shroom has been talked about a lot but I really liked the play a couple turns before where I Hyper Beam'd the Hydrex to daze it without killing it. I was being really careful about not letting him pop his Hydrex, I definitely would have lost if that happened.  

Against ReiArthur's aggro deck I think the Entwail deck is a slight favorite, but Rei is a really good aggro player so you always need to be careful against him. The 5/4 shroud Pandora he had at one point was pretty scary but the cards lined up in my favor in the end.

6 - What would you like to see implemented ASAP in SkyWeaver?

Honestly, the game is in a great state and there isn't really anything I can think of that I think needs to be implemented right away. There are some QoL things like permanently showing revealed cards in hand like from Bury in Snow, or some kind of spectator mode, but not having those things doesn't detract from the game at all. It's a really fun game with an amazing community behind it, I couldn't ask for more.

Thanks, HypoLast!

Now, a little community secret you might not know... Our first competitive prize was given to bruhssaurusrexx, when she won her Discord Server's Road to Archon competition. When I realized there was a pizza in line... I knew what I had to do!

(I hope she doesn't get mad at me =P)

And finally, since we are talking about competition, SkyWeaver promoted a small live tournament at NFT.NYC, where 16 players battled for prizes! The tournament was also organized by our community, in this case by the glorious KryptoKid, and Infura and MakerDAO sponsored the event. Along with new players, we have seen some familiar faces, and the final match was between two SkyWeaver veterans, MaxHS and TerranceM, with MaxHS crowned as the winner.

Thanks NFT.NYC and Infura for the opportunity, and I'm sure this was the first of many live tournaments!

Community Fan Art Madness!

Fanart is all well and good, but who doesn't have a soft spot for art made by the community's little ones?!? We don't have Legendary cards in SkyWeaver, but if we did, the Rainbow Unicorn would definitely be one of them!

Join our Discord server to chat directly with us, subscribe to our subreddit to share your ideas, and follow the SkyWeaver account on Twitter if you just want to say heya! Thanks, Weavers, and see you soon in Sky!

Marcelo Suplicy, SkyWeaver Community Manager and Honorary Gravedigger of the Year (2019-20).