Urban Rivals Happenings

Laura's gone this weekend, so I'm left home as a bachelor. So what do bachelor's do? Well, in my world, they drink beer and play video games all night.

I got home and decided to hit some more Urban Rivals. I wanted to complete a few more missions, so I started out by hitting the first tournament that came up with my Elo Ulu Watu deck. I was doing fantastic, holding my own and keeping up around 30th-50th place after half the tournament. I had gone 7-1 with another tie in that span. Then came a game against a Skeelz deck. We had both split the first two rounds and were tied in life while I was one up in pillz. I took a conservative path with my character, but right before I hit "submit" with my move, I realized I could win it. I took a moment, made a few quick calculations, and then the screen flashed "TIME EXPIRED - YOU LOSE". I was shocked - I've never had that happen before, and I wasn't taking a long time. I learned later that when you're at the top of the pile, your time to make your moves drops significantly (I think from 20 seconds to 10 seconds). Instead of winning and gaining 20 points in the tournament, I forfeit the game and LOST 20 points. That put me way out of contention and I ended up in aroun 170th of 3,000.

Still, it was my fifth tournament that I ended up in the top 1/3 of, so I got a mission complete for that one. I also managed to spend a total of 250,000 clintz, reach level 25, win 15 games with at least two Freaks, and max level 250 characters. Not a bad haul for a single night.

My favorite part of the night, though, was probably when I put together my new Ulu Watu deck. I have an Elo version of the deck (restricted deck construction rules), but I wanted to make a solid power deck. Type 2 allows anything to go, so I put together one of those. Ulu Watu are high power characters, and have a bonus that gives them +2 POW. I wanted a deck that I could combine a lot of different ways to make a two-person kill. Here's the deck:



Buck - I just love the beer-belly dude. On a good day, he's a 9/7, and easily makes 1/2 of the kill punch. Besides, he's got a mission associated with him to do 300 damage, and I'm getting close to pulling that off with him. He's in my Elo deck too, and the number of matches he's done the final push for me makes him make the cut here. Plus, he's only 4 stars, so when he's facing all the 5 star people that litter Type 2, he has the tiebreaker.

Gaia - Probably my weakest character in the deck. She makes a 9/4 with a minor reduction in attack. Three stars is beneficial for the same reason four is good with Buck. If I had another high-pow character, it'd probably bump her out of the deck, but right now she's good filler.

Shayna - Weird fish-looking girl. Another four star character, and this one having the potential to hit 11/5 if she attacks. Not too shabby! She can anchor a lot of two-hit KO's, and is usually a strong start. Most people see 11 POW and don't want to bother to take it on. I can get a solid 5 damage out of one or two pillz, and if they want to stop it, it takes a lot more on their side to keep me away.

Stanly - The only common card in the deck, and my first five star. He's an 8/8, which means he can pound a lot of life out of my opponent, but he's also got the wonderful +12 attack if I won the round just before his. Usually I will win a round or two, so he's almost always got that bonus. He makes a great finisher or bluff card - people will almost always go all-out to stop him with his massive 8 damage.



Hikiyousan - Since he's five stars, he doesn't make the cut in my Elo deck, but man, he's a beast! With his ability and bonus going off, he's a 10/7 and nobody wants that coming their way.

Nanook - She's a solid 10/4 with no ability, and only three stars. Most times when she hits play, people underestimate her. With no ability and everyone else having pretty good ones, they look at her like she's not that great a card and don't play hard against her when she attacks. Often she'll slip through when people aren't expecting it, and the 4 damage puts my opponent in striking range of a lot of Fury-ed characters.

Tanaereva - He's why I decided to play a Type 2 deck. I picked up him yesterday and man is he worth it! A 10/7 damage reducer. That means he can go toe-to-toe with the big bads in my opponent's force and if they go all-out to win against him (which a lot of people do - he's a metal man with a bucket on his head!), they're still dropping by two damage. I use him as a bluff and a finisher in equal measures.

Wee Lee - Pretty much the same as Tanaereva, only a little weaker. He comes in at a 9/6, but is only four stars. It's funny to think of him as a wall, but that's kinda his role in the deck. If I manage to crack through my opponent, I'm halfway to winning. If I don't, I'm not taking as much damage. Win-win.


So there you have it, my new deck. It's only been out for five or six games, but won a fair margin of those. Still figuring out how to play in Type 2. It's a bit different than Type 1 and Elo with all the power cards on the table. I'm wondering if I should mix a Leader into the deck, but if so, not sure which one.

Poison and Life

I decided to try to put together a deck from scratch for Urban Rivals and seek out the specific cards I wanted for it rather than see what I could build with the cards I already had. I knew I wanted to make an Elo deck (a specific tournament format that limits the card selection and the number of stars you can have in your deck to prevent decks of all power cards), and I wanted to try a new strategy. My other decks had revolved around increasing my power/attack, and enjoying the gimmick-ey magic users and their numerous abilities.

I wanted to do another duel-faction deck. Creating a mono deck was fun, but difficult and sometimes lacks the ability to react to an opponent's abilities. Additionally, I wanted to try a new strategy. Where normally I've been playing aggressively and trying to kill my enemy quickly, I wanted to create a more defensive-oriented deck.

The first faction I picked were the Freaks. Their bonus is that once they hit their enemy, they start doing 2 damage to them every turn until they're down to 3 life left. It doesn't stack, unfortunately, but it's a nice way to wrack up some extra damage if you hit them early.

So if my plan was to do damage early and bleed with poison, I needed a faction that would be able to help keep me alive. I wanted a deck I didn't currently play, so that counted out the Pussycats (with their -2 dmg bonus) or the Ulu Watu's (with their increase to POW and their decent spread of damage reducing cards). Instead I went with Junga, the animal-people. Their bonus gained me life every time I managed to win a combat. Not too bad. So while they're bleeding out, I'm gaining life and sprinting the other direction. There was my concept: 25 stars of 4 Junga and 4 Freaks.



Boris - He was one of the later additions from the Freaks for me. His stats are not great, but his ability can make up for that. Dropping an opponent by 4 POW to a minimum that's below Boris' POW is quite a boon. It means he can take on an 8 POW character with an advantage, and can face up to a 9 without missing a beat. His 4 damage is on the high end for Freaks too, so if I get him to strike early, he can amass up to 10 damage by the end of the game with Poison.

Hula - She's my safety net. There are plenty of characters and factions out there that eliminate Bonuses, so I pulled her in to combat them since her poison also doubles as her ability. Besides, she's a 7 POW character costing only 2 stars. That's a bargain.

Olga - The highest natural POW any character has in the game is 8, and she's got that at three stars making for a solid character. Also, her ability to drop my opponent's POW by 2 means she can challenge some fairly high POW characters out there without missing a beat.

Olga Noel - She came into the deck for similar reasons as her counterpart. She's three stars still, and while her POW is 2 lower, her ability bumps it up to a 9. I favored her over some other characters in Freaks because of her low star count.

The reason for the low stars in my Freaks deck was two-fold. First, in the event of a tie score during a fight, the tie goes to the lower star character. It doesn't happen often, but it happens often enough. Winning most ties means my poison will start that much earlier. Second, I like the idea of the Junga characters more, so I wanted to save more stars for their faction. So at the end of the Freaks, I had used up 11 of my 25 stars leaving me with 14 for my animals. That meant I might be able to squeeze in a five star character if I was careful.



Pegh - Moving into the Jungo, I knew I wanted to concentrate on defense, and I wanted to make sure I could get a big character into the mix. Pegh fit both roles very well. He was two stars, so he gave me 12 stars left for three character. His ability reduced damage coming at me, giving more time for poison to work, and his POW was high enough that he could threaten to win a fight. While he'd only do one damage to my opponent, he'd gain me two life in the balance and let me stay alive long enough for poison to work.

Scopica - What's not to like about this character? He's only three stars, has 8 POW, and the potential to gain me 4 life if he hits. Regardless of whether someone can stop my ability or my bonus, he'll still gain me some life, and buys me that much more time for poison.

Niva - Having only taken 5 stars for my first two Junga, I had 9 left which meant I could hit the higher-level characters for some really good ones. For my four star character, I chose Niva. Her ability helped control my opponents' damage again, and doing four damage while gaining two life meant that I was potentially throwing a 6 life swing here. Eight POW is gravy.

Ongh - So with five stars left, I took a look over the high level Jungo and found King Kong. A threat on so many levels. With his six damage and life gain, he can cause an 8 life swing. He reduces high POW characters to 6, and he's hefting around a solid 8 POW to boot. Plus, he just looks intimidating.

So there's my deck. I've played it a bit and done pretty well with it. It took me through the first Elo tournament that I played through from start to finish and left me in around 400th place of 30,000, enough to crack the top 1/3 easily. I made it all the way up to a score of 1093 before tumbling a bit at the end of the tournament and ending up back down around the 1050 level.

Overall, a fun deck. I enjoyed putting one together based on what I wanted to build rather than what I had in front of me. I'm already designing a new one, but I'll need to figure out what cards I need to sell to get the points to buy the cards I'll need. Maybe my Rescues. I leveled them up and played them a bit, but they left me fairly unsatisfied.

News Flash: Unscrupulous Characters on the Internet

I've been playing this game, Urban Rivals, for about a week now and have been having a blast with it. Takes about five minutes to run through a match and there's no shortage of players out there.

So I was working on a new faction and happened to get a second of one of the most powerful characters in that deck. Unfortunately, you can have only one of each character, so I took some time to level him up to the max to make him a little more valuable and put him up for sale on the auctions. It didn't take too long, and it was no real effort on my part. The game has a training room where you can go to just grind through a few matches to get your characters to higher levels. So within a half hour or so, he was maxed out and I put him up for sale.

Not too long later, I had a message in my box offering a trade. He posted up one of the really good characters for another faction I like, and I thought, hey, why not. So I wrote back and said "sure" and pulled my card off the auction. Then, with a lapse of judgment, I asked him what to do to effect a trade. Privately sell it for the minimum amount, he said, so feeling a little unsure, I did anyway. Of course we know what happens next. He buys the 13,000 card for 50 and then doesn't sell me the other one in exchange. Instead, he blacklists me so I can't send him messages or see him any more.

It was my stupidity that let him get away with it, so I wasn't really that mad. In the end, he cheated me out of an imaginary card. I had a second copy of it, so it's not like I lost anything, and in perfect karma, later that day, I opened a pack and got the guy he was supposed to trade to me. Not too shabby! Still, it was disappointing to have someone be a jerk like that.

Note to self: don't trade in the game. And if you're going to, make sure they send you the card first.

Josh Wastes More of My Time

When I was up in New York this weekend, Josh took some time to show me Urban Rivals, an internet-based card game. You join for free getting options for one of three different group types: the attack people (who are military and police folk), the cool people (who are beach bums and DJs), and the evil people (who are nightmares and monsters, I guess). I tried out the cool folks.



The idea is that you get a set of characters to build a deck of at least 8 people with. During a game, you'll randomly be dealt four of your people and your opponent will randomly be dealt four of his. Then you go back and forth for four rounds choosing someone to attack with and then choosing someone to defend against his person with.

Each person has a Power and a Damage score (so the weird-looking woman who's slightly forward on the lower group has 5 Power and 6 Damage). When he chooses someone to defend with, we have a fight. If my total Attack (my Power times multipliers plus any bonuses) is greater than his, I do my damage (plus bonuses) to his life total. If he beat me, he does his damage to me. Each person has 12 life. The game goes to KO or to the end of round four. If nobody won by round 4, the person who has the most life left wins.

The most important twist to the game is the Pillz (or some other weird spelling of it). Each person starts with 12 of them too. When you attack or defend with a character, you can devote a number of pillz to the character too. Each one is a multiplier to the person's power. So if I sent that woman forward with three pillz, she would have 20 Attack (5 to begin with, plus 3 more pillz times 5 makes 20). If my opponent blocked with the guy who has the 6 Power and 6 Damage and only added two more pillz, he'd lose, 18 to 20, and I'd do damage to him.

Finally, the last piece to consider in game are the abilities and bonuses. Each faction (denoted by the blue waves or yellow t-shirts in the lower left corner of my cards) has a bonus that stretches across everyone in that faction so long as at least two characters from that group are in play on your side. So for my t-shirt guys, they each gain +8 Attack, and my blue wave guys each gain +2 Power. The abilities are similar to the bonuses, except they're always active, regardless of how many characters from your faction they have.

The games go fast (about 5 minutes or so) and you can start to wrack up experience for your characters. Some characters get better the more you play them, boosting their power, damage, or unlocking abilities. At the end of each game, you tally up points for different missions you're on. You'll usually have dozens going at once. They can be "Do 400 damage" and "Win 25 games" and "Win 15 games with two people from X faction," etc. As you complete these missions, you'll gain new characters or points to use to buy characters for your faction from the auctions.

There's a way to spend real money on the game too to get more characters, but it seems like a waste to me when you can do a lot for free.

Overall, a very addictive game. It's fast so you can get a lot of them in, and the combination of math and bluffing suits me well. Give it a try!