MPQ March Madness complete -- Congrats to the champ: Captain Marvel!

Aweberman

Aweberman said:

Sweet 16
Cosmic Region
(1) Captain Marvel vs. (4) Cloak & Dagger, 106-6
(2) Medusa vs. (6) Gamora, 65-45

Mutants Region
(1) Iceman vs. (4) Cyclops, 83-24
(2) Rogue vs. (3) Jean Grey, 80-26

SHIELD/Avengers Region
(1) Peggy Carter vs. (4) Agent Coulson, 87-14
(2) Riri Williams vs. (3) Mockingbird, 83-19

Villains/Supernatural Region
(1) Vulture vs. (4) Blade, 89-12
(2) America Chavez vs. (3) Red Hulk, 77-24


Elite 8
Cosmic Region
(1) Captain Marvel vs. (2) Medusa

Mutants Region
(1) Iceman vs. (2) Rogue

SHIELD/Avengers Region
(1) Peggy Carter vs. (2) Riri Williams

Villains/Supernatural Region
(1) Vulture vs. (2) America Chavez

The results of the second set of Sweet 16 matches have been collected.
The Elite 8 has been posted.
The Final 4 will be posted on Wednesday.
The championship match will be posted on Friday.

Aweberman

It's interesting to note that despite the dearth of female characters in the 5* tier, they are well-represented here, with 6 of the Elite 8 being female.

Another interesting note is how generally recent this crop of 8 characters is, due to power creep.  Here are the chronological release dates and sequential release order of each of the Elite 8:

18 Iceman (17 Sep 2015)
36 Peggy Carter (26 Jun 2016)
43 Medusa (8 Dec 2016)
44 Captain Marvel (5 Jan 2017)
45 Riri Williams (19 Jan 2017)
53 Vulture (13 Jul 2017)
61 America Chavez (25 Dec 2017)

Smart80

And Shuri and perhaps Valkyrie are fast on their way to join the top...

Orion

Wow, Medusa over Gamora?  Why?  Gamora is way better than Medusa.

Smart80

Orion said:

Wow, Medusa over Gamora?  Why?  Gamora is way better than Medusa.

Yes, it was a sad day..

Daredevil217

Orion said:

Wow, Medusa over Gamora?  Why?  Gamora is way better than Medusa.

Strongly disagree.  Gamora’s stun is awesome. Everything else while good, isn’t anything to write home about. Medusa on the other hand is amazing on soooo many teams. She is essentially the one big counter to a special tile heavy meta. Plus, the healing, stealing, fueling, and passive damage. 

I put every character in the elite 8 in my personal T10 ranking with the exception of Gamora who sits around #15. So congrats to her on making it as far she did.

Smart80

Daredevil217 said:

Orion said:

Wow, Medusa over Gamora?  Why?  Gamora is way better than Medusa.

Strongly disagree.  Gamora’s stun is awesome. Everything else while good, isn’t anything to write home about. Medusa on the other hand is amazing on soooo many teams. She is essentially the one big counter to a special tile heavy meta. Plus, the healing, stealing, fueling, and passive damage. 

I put every character in the elite 8 in my personal T10 ranking with the exception of Gamora who sits around #15. So congrats to her on making it as far she did.

This is no personal dig, just curious. Have you ever made Gamora insta kill a BIG opponent? I wrote alli comms about that, pictures and all... :-)

Daredevil217

Smart80 said:

Daredevil217 said:

Orion said:

Wow, Medusa over Gamora?  Why?  Gamora is way better than Medusa.

Strongly disagree.  Gamora’s stun is awesome. Everything else while good, isn’t anything to write home about. Medusa on the other hand is amazing on soooo many teams. She is essentially the one big counter to a special tile heavy meta. Plus, the healing, stealing, fueling, and passive damage. 

I put every character in the elite 8 in my personal T10 ranking with the exception of Gamora who sits around #15. So congrats to her on making it as far she did.

This is no personal dig, just curious. Have you ever made Gamora insta kill a BIG opponent? I wrote alli comms about that, pictures and all... :-)

I’ve done it. It’s a fun gimmick... sometimes.  Most times I would much rather have a the special tiles I built up and put on the board.

It in no way is anything I’ve tried for or built around. It’s the equivalent to Nightcrawler’s Purple. On a great board you can kill the entire enemy team and it is awesome when it happens. You can even build to try and proc both abilities (Gamoras instakill or Crawlers winfinite). And while they make for some fun mini games if you have time to kill, they don’t ultimately move the needle that much for either character. 

Smart80

Daredevil217 said:

Smart80 said:

Daredevil217 said:

Orion said:

Wow, Medusa over Gamora?  Why?  Gamora is way better than Medusa.

Strongly disagree.  Gamora’s stun is awesome. Everything else while good, isn’t anything to write home about. Medusa on the other hand is amazing on soooo many teams. She is essentially the one big counter to a special tile heavy meta. Plus, the healing, stealing, fueling, and passive damage. 

I put every character in the elite 8 in my personal T10 ranking with the exception of Gamora who sits around #15. So congrats to her on making it as far she did.

This is no personal dig, just curious. Have you ever made Gamora insta kill a BIG opponent? I wrote alli comms about that, pictures and all... :-)

I’ve done it. It’s a fun gimmick... sometimes.  Most times I would much rather have a the special tiles I built up and put on the board.

It in no way is anything I’ve tried for or built around. It’s the equivalent to Nightcrawler’s Purple. On a great board you can kill the entire enemy team and it is awesome when it happens. You can even build to try and proc both abilities (Gamoras instakill or Crawlers winfinite). And while they make for some fun mini games if you have time to kill, they don’t ultimately move the needle that much for either character. 

Fair enough, i like the option a lot

broll

Aweberman said:

Cosmic Region
(1) Captain Marvel vs. (2) Medusa

Mutants Region
(1) Iceman vs. (2) Rogue

SHIELD/Avengers Region
(1) Peggy Carter vs. (2) Riri Williams

Villains/Supernatural Region
(1) Vulture vs. (2) America Chavez

It just occurred to me that we're down to 8 and 6 of those 8 are women.  You go girls!

Aweberman

Aweberman said:

Elite 8
Cosmic Region
(1) Captain Marvel vs. (2) Medusa, 85-14

Mutants Region
(1) Iceman vs. (2) Rogue, 47-52

SHIELD/Avengers Region
(1) Peggy Carter vs. (2) Riri Williams, 56-45

Villains/Supernatural Region
(1) Vulture vs. (2) America Chavez, 68-30


Final 4
(1) Captain Marvel vs. (2) Rogue
(1) Peggy Carter vs. (1) Vulture

And then there were 4.

Rogue pulls off the only upset in the Elite 8 by squeaking past Iceman in a close one.  But Peggy didn't have an easy time handling Riri, at least compared to previous matches.  Vulture -- the only contestant who completely shut out an opponent in an earlier round -- had a little more trouble with America, but still not too much.  And Carol continued cruising, though Medusa became her first opponent to manage double-digit votes.

Can Rogue pull off a much-bigger upset by knocking off Carol?
Can Peggy throw her shield high enough to bring Vulture down to earth?

Results will be gathered a little less than 48 hours from the time of this post.
The championship match will begin on Friday morning (CDT).

The rockett

Damn. It went chalk. 

SymmeTrey

Odd to say, but, while I don't use Vulture much any more, my vote would easily go to Vulture the rest of the way. There have been a number of times where Vulture has singlehandedly won matches for me that should not have been winnable. He was my second 4* champ after Mockingbird which was a great duo.

Everyone else on the team is downed, but, Vulture is in the air and I have 5-10 black. I then spend 6-10 turns going up and down, dropping green AOE, popping his blue to remove tiles, etc. Sometimes you make a move in-between airborne to get some more black when it's available.

Vulture has bailed me out of highly scaled 5* nodes this way, boss battles, etc. He also has tremendous "normal circumstances" utility as well. Just a monster character.

But, I really don't use him that much now that 4* roster is somewhat filled out. Grockmora is faster and America Chavez teams are just more interesting/fun.

Orion

America may not be all that in 4* land, but paired with 5*s, she is AMAZING.  And paired with a Boosted Thor at 50% health, she's insane.  Her crit tiles are coming out turn 2 after Thor does his thing, and Thor's match damage does 17k easy almost every turn.  So much fun.

When I paired her with Surfer when he was boosted, I had a match-4 with America's crit tile and 3 charged red tiles that did 56k damage.  From a single match.

But for this Final Four, I'm saying Carol over Peggy in a close one.

Smart80

Aweberman said:

Rogue pulls off the only upset in the Elite 8 by squeaking past Iceman in a close one.  But Peggy didn't have an easy time handling Riri, at least compared to previous matches.  Vulture -- the only contestant who completely shut out an opponent in an earlier round -- had a little more trouble with America, but still not too much.  And Carol continued cruising, though Medusa became her first opponent to manage double-digit votes.

Should we mention who it was against? Lol

Aweberman

Poor Kraven.

HoundofShadow

We could do a battle between Kraven and 4* Elektra since only these two scored 0 vote.  

Anyway, it looks like C4rol and Vulture are battling it out for the title this Friday. 

1st comparison: generating ap

Ability: passive. C4rol generate up to 4 aps in your strongest colour if opponenents make a match in their strongest colour.

Flexibility: only 1/6 of the colour benefits from this ability. 
Other plus point: possible team damage.
Worst case scenario: board with no enemy strongest colour or enemy are not matching their strongest colour.

Vulture generates up to 4 greens, 3 blues, 2 black and 1 red ap. It renders Vulture immune to damage against 99% of the available characters for 2 turns.

Ability: active/passive because it needs 6 ap or someone need to send him airborne.
Flexibility: benefits 4/6 of the colours.
Other plus point: immune to damage against 99% of the roster for 2 turns. Guaranteed 20 aps after going airborne for 2 turns 99% of the time. 
Worst case scenario: board with less than 3 black tiles or black tiles scattered far apart from one another.

2nd comparison:

Vulture has a 9 ap green ability that could deal either single damage or team damage to the opponents. The drawback is it's a 3 turn countdown placed randomly on the board.
 
C4rol has an 8 ap black ability that creates strike tile every turn for 5 turns and deal single damage at the end of the turn. The drawback of her countdown tile are solved by allowing the players to choose which black basic tile they can place the countdown tile on and offers players second protection by making it fortified at the 5th cover. The third protection would be using her yellow ability to reduce her countdown tile to 0 immediately should her countdown tile be in danger of getting matched twice in succession. 

3rd comparison
Vulture's 10ap blue ability deal single damage and removes up to 4 enemy special tiles(strike, attack and protect). It activates automatically if he goes airborne and has 10 blue ap and removes invisibility, countdown and repeater tiles as well. 

C4rol's 5ap yellow ability turns a countdown tile to 0 immediately. It also improves 3 random friendly tiles once for every friendly countdown tiles that expires. 

It's really a close fight.  I guess one would use Vulture's to feed other characters' abilities (main usage) and to remove special tiles (secondary usage). 

For C4rol, she obviously shines with countdown tiles makers (her yellow ability) and/or countdown and strike/attack/protect tile makers to creates devasting attack. 

Two awesome characters with two completely different strategies. I would give Vulture more points for flexibility in generating aps. I think it's down to whether you are using Vulture to feed your other favourite characters or you prefer to be excited by C4rol's passive ability to boost your strike or attack tiles to insane level. I don't think many would prefer to boost protect tiles. I would put it as a tie.

In a 1 vs 1 fight without ap boost, both characters' strongest colour are black. The fight would look like this:

Vulture (13034 hp) vs C4rol (13995 hp)

Turn 1: Vulture matches black (3ap). C4rol gains 4 black ap and deals 2207 damage to Vulture.
Turn 2: C4rol makes yellow match.
Turn 3: Vulture matches black ap (3ap). C4rol gains 4 black ap again and deals 2207 damage to Vulture again.

Now, Vulture is down to about 8600 hp and C4rol is still at 13000 hp.

Turn 4: C4rol look for yellow matches again.

Turn 5-7: Vulture goes airborne. C4rol throws out Photonic Barrage and continue match black or yelllow and wait for Vulture to land on Earth.

Turn 9: Vulture has only 4 black ap, 8 green, 6 blues and 2 red aps.  He can't use any of his ability due to lack of aps. Vulture makes a match.

Turn 10: Executive Decision and Vulture is gone.

Turn 11: Roasted bird for a meal.

Smart80

Nice explanation, but thats how AI would play that match.. A decent player would gather some blue and additional black before going airborne...

hunky_funky

Smart80 said:

Nice explanation, but thats how AI would play that match.. A decent player would gather some blue and additional black before going airborne...

So it's a tie then? If you playing C4arol against Vulture you'll win, and if you playing Vulture against C4arol you'll win too. So what's the the point of comparing? If we could set AI vs. AI, like a demo fight, and see what will happen, I think no one will complane if one of them wins (I don't know, even in best of 3). But we can't...

Aweberman

Aweberman said:

Final 4
(1) Captain Marvel vs. (2) Rogue, 79-14
(1) Peggy Carter vs. (1) Vulture, 37-57


Championship
(1) Captain Marvel vs. (1) Vulture

Carol handled Rogue with no problem; sure, Rogue had a better percentage than any other of Carol's competition, but Carol still had 84%.  And Vulture also had his closest match against Peggy, but it was still none too close.

Which leaves us with the championship match: Carol vs. Vulture.