Harder, Better, Faster

In the margins of victory

At its heart Shadespire is a competitive game; to achieve victory you must score more glory than your opponent. Most of your deck should be the made of core and passive objectives to enable you to do this. However, if you are looking for shadeglass then it is very possible that you will have to do more than simply win all the games you play.

In the experience of the author, and his co-conspirators, a typical tournament has three rounds each consisting of a best of three match. If the field of players is eight or fewer, then the victor will be the player with the highest number of victories, as the meerkat says:

If, on the other hand, there are more than eight competitors then after three rounds it is very likely that there will be more than one player with three victories under their belt. In these situations the tournament winner is likely to be decided by a tie-break mechanic. These are usually, number of games lost within the best of three, then glory difference.

For example Dave has won all three of his matches 2-1, 2-0, 2-1 and Katie has won hers 2-0, 2-0, 2-1. In this circumstance Dave has lost more games and so Katie wins the tie (and the trophy).

If there had been a bigger pool of players and Sam had also been competing and won 2-1, 2-0, 2-0 then after the first tie breaker Sam and Katie are still tied on both matches won and games dropped. The cumulative Glory difference over all of those games will now decide the overall winner.

So to win all your games might be enough, it is necessary to grind your opponent into the dust and crush them beneath your tastefully sleeved cards. What you need are spike objectives, objectives that score extra glory and help to build your glory difference.

Most spike objectives are scored in the third end phase, which limits how many you can score quite strongly. It is advisable to have only a couple of spike objectives in a deck, too many and you run the risk of clogging up your objective hand preventing you from scoring other, easier objectives earlier.