Undead desicions

[mattgslater]

Saws suck. Bad. Any time you need a 2+ Loner roll to do anything useful you know you got a loser.

Re: fouling with saw-boy, a Dirty Player is way way better. No 2+ roll.

Re: fluff, form follows function. Fluff is great, and if it gets you to pick viable option A over viable option B, that's wonderful. I got a Human team with nothing but former Journeymen that I play in FUMBBL Ranked against just about all comers, pulls its weight (49W-23T-22L, or "about par" for me), woohoo. But that's because Human Linos are a good value, so I can afford to do it and still win games. If you think "focus on winning" means "ignore fluff", I'm here to tell you they can fit together nicely. But you gotta master the best practices before you can go flouting them.

[MattDakka]

Play your fancy fluffy former journeymen team in Box, then come back and talk about your experience and win rate, I guess it will be lower there.

[mattgslater]

Format is everything when it comes to team development. The revamped Box scheduler would make this team a harder sell: given the current math that team is viable only in open-perpetual formats that actually match TV directly (and I'd have no incentive to build an "artificial cherry flavor" team, either). Back in the 15% days it might have been more viable for Box play, as they pretty much always hang out between 1300 and 1500 and are really meant to be played at equal TV.

Frankly what keeps me from playing Box (with more traditional teams) is that I have to wait too long to get a game. In Ranked I can just go, "what do people underestimate?" and play that and just greenlight/redlight everything so I almost always have a good game in 5-10 minutes, but in Box I have to get lucky and get online when lots of other coaches are also on, which usually isn't when I game, being on the West Coast of the USA. I'm not going to kill 2 hours mindlessly activating a team just to prove a point when I can drop into gamefinder and have something right quick.

What, you think I build fluffy teams for the fluff? Heck no, I build fluffy teams because if I didn't I'd never get to play outside of my two leagues. Oh, and the occasional arranged match, which is a major advantage of Ranked over Box: being able to call out your friends and league-mates for one-offs. That's how you guarantee a fair fight: play opponents who know what they're up against and haggle and horsetrade your way into the most even match possible given the two coaches in question.

[MattDakka]

What, you think I build fluffy teams for the fluff? Heck no, I build fluffy teams because if I didn't I'd never get to play outside of my two leagues. .

My point was that playing a fluffy human all-linemen team in the Box (with more bash teams around) is not that competitive, not that you build for the fluff.
In Ranked you can have a high win rate even with Halflings, if you really want, so showing examples taken from Ranked is not meaningful.

[MKL]

(...)
so by all means give advice related to winning, but temper the desire to only discuss that and bring us closer together with the theme behind your decisions and fluff behind your choices. Otherwise you may as well be the BB "Deep Blue"

rant over, thankyou for your time.

Well, Voyagers, I don't know wich post prompted you to your "rant", but I see where you are coming from. I play just tabletop or mail, so I mostly agree with you.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I think it's the nature of Internet to radicalize every discussion, in a quest for a mythical "optimum badass" that maybe don't exist.
On the other hand it's a shame there is such a disconnect between fluff choices and efficient gameplay: a disconnct not so wide in tabletop, more evident online, where the sample is huge. Probably it's one of the reasons there are a lot of discussions about houserules, despite the chances to implement such rules are pretty low (for me, I'm always looking for ways to avoid stalling, a necessary evil by the rules).
Well, rant over

[mattgslater]

In Ranked you can have a high win rate even with Halflings, if you really want, so showing examples taken from Ranked is not meaningful.

What, by cherrypicking? I don't do that; I hate cherrypicking, why bother playing if you're not going to get yourself hard fights. I redlight stupid matchups* and greenlight everything else (unless there's Khemri in RA's range; they need to beat that grid, only need one more race). Enough of that, though. My point was that, depending on where you play, there's lots of cute/effective stuff you can do… but you still have to minmax hard in a competitive environment, just that you can minmax in multiple different ways.

But no more on this, I have no patience for Blackbox supremacists. It's a pretty skewed way of getting games, no more representative of BB as it's intended than scheduled leagues. (And I definitely wouldn't run a team like that in a scheduled league, that would be stupid.)

*Stupid = not almost perfectly even. In FUMBBL Ranked there's no excuse for playing anything but the fairest of games, unless it's a grid-filling thing or something.