Growing Pains and How to Power Through

In anything you do in life you find yourself hitting certain plateaus along the way where you feel stuck and not making any progress. Since I started playing Krosmaster, I’ve always played a very aggressive play style with heavy hitters and more tanky characters. I decided that I needed to take a break and branch out to other play styles and see what I could learn from them.  It’s important to have goals when you play a game so you always have something to strive towards.  In addition to trying to new things out, I wanted to work on closing out games. There are many times that I create a strong advantage for myself only to stumble in the later and more impactful rounds of a tournament. I wanted to practice closing those games out early so the games to save some mental horse power for the later games and committing my plays to memory to the point they are fluid and natural.

I decided to first branch out to a more ranged attrition list, so I picked up the list that won the 2015 world championships. Ghett, Diver, Hennual, Coa, Fern and Moe. My initial reaction was that I was terrible attrition lists after losing probably 6-7 consecutive matches. What I learned is that no matter what stage of the game is, positioning is always important. I had many games where I was whittling them down and went in for an assassination run and have It fail with my character slightly closer than he needed to be, only to have them killed and let my opponent back into the game the next turn. I continued to put in more games and eventually got it to a 70-30 win ratio, but my learning curve wasn’t as fast as I would have liked.

My next venture led me into the world of the toolbox.  The premise is you have 6 points of fixed figures in Coa, Moe, Fern, Phaeris, Poochan, and Mike Lock. For some mobility and more crowd control, I add in Theo and Luk to round out the team. I had a similar initial loss issue with this team too because with Theo as the tankiest character, he can still get blown up pretty easy at 10 hp. This list has a lot of zone control in lock doll and mike’s square attack, but it also has 7 characters that can be pretty much one rounded by a kitty rage team that gets the drop on you and once the box starts breaking down it rapidly crumbles from there. It has a lot of moving pieces that you have to think several turns in advance when each segment comes in or leaves a fight.

Overall, I’ve learned a lot about playing through some losses which is both tough and rewarding. Tough because as human beings we inherently don’t want to lose, but rewarding to figure out the puzzle each game represents and eventually coming out on top. I also got a lot more experience with characters that I didn’t really play a whole lot in Ghett and Diver, both of which I have a greater appreciation for after grinding so many games with them. Playing one list over and over again builds great skill and versatility with a group of characters, however I fell like every player should branch out of their comfort zone to get a better understanding of the game as a whole. I’d like to hear in the comments below goals or things you want to work on in your gameplay!

-Jeric is an established miniatures player who provides tactical insight, event reports and a few odds and ends along the way