Congratulations to the first ever Chaos World Champions: Andrew_Gross and MasterTyler!
This however, is not a story of glorious victory, but rather one about a terrible performance in the first Gold Chaos Agents Tournament. It’s also a story about how trying to play fair is not always the best strategy—so the main moral of the story is that if you have an unfair advantage (such as being the President of the company building the game), you’d better press that advantage before it’s too late.
It’s too late for me and The Marshall now, kids, but it’s not too late for you. Read on to hear my tale of woe…
Heading to Gen Con 2024, I had high hopes of my star Chaos Agent The Marshall of the Unforgiving and I making it to the Gold Finals. I believe in fair competition, so rather than use my insider connections to get a “Guest of Honor” seat for the Gold Finals, I wanted The Marshall and I to earn our way into the 32-Agent Gold Finals Tournament. As a Popularium team member, I would not be eligible to participate in the Finals of the Gold Tournament, but my hope was to at least qualify for the Finals on merit and then graciously give my spot up to a deserving non-Popularium player. Besides, the “Not-Finals” (the consolation Match for those who missed qualifying for the Finals) was on the cards for Popularium team members, and The Marshall was itching to have a go at such legends as Nomatterwhatus and Mack Skywarden, who’d be directed by my fellow Popularium teammates Catalyst99 and Macky.
The First Step: Get into a Silver Tournament!
The first step towards Gold Finals glory was to use my hard-earned Silver Ticket to compete and win a Silver Tournament. Now, dear reader, I must tell you at this point that in the past 6 weeks I have traveled to several different countries, including up to 18000 ft (from where I checked in code for the Chaos Agents Gen Con build), before landing in Indianapolis for the whirlwind of our Alpha announcement and Chaos World Invitational Championship at Gen Con 2024. In these chaotic weeks, The Marshall and I did not have a chance to sync up and get some practice in for the Silver Qualifiers and Gold Finals.
Undaunted, we showed up for World Championship Silver Qualifiers #1 at 4 am Indian Standard Time to take on the dual role of “color commentator / smack talker” and Broker for The Marshall. Despite pulling double duty at an unearthly hour, The Marshal found his mojo in the 2nd and 3rd Matches of the Qualifier, taking us through to the Finals of the Silver Qualifier #1.
Sadly, our run came to an end during the Finals with an early aggressive strategy proving fatal for The Marshall in the face of consistent damage from strong enemy Agents directed by experienced Academy-trained Chaos Brokers.
Even more sadly, this was the last Special Qualifier I was able to bring The Marshall to, as my commentating duties took precedence over the opportunity to participate in further Special Qualifiers. This meant that my last chance to win a Gold Ticket would be at one of the Silver Tournaments that would be running during Gen Con.
The Next Step: Get to Gen Con
As I’ve described elsewhere, my time at Gen Con was like being in the middle of a tornado, as recruiting and teaching brand new Wave 7 Chaos Brokers took up all the time we had at the show. My final opportunity was going to be at the 12 pm ET Silver Tournament held at Gen Con. I came in to the Indiana Convention Center prepared for battle. I knew The Marshall was counting on me to get him this last chance to demonstrate his true quality to our world and the worlds of the Firmament. Alas, the demand for this Silver Tournament was too great: between returning Chaos Brokers recruited at Gen Con and the veteran Brokers who had signed up online, the Silver pods filled up.
And, unfortunately, the final Silver tournament was also out of reach, as, I had the task of being on the team that was going to travel from Gen Con (held at the Indiana Convention Center) to the Sandbox VR location in the Bottleworks District of Indianapolis, where the Gold Tournament was going to be held shortly after the end of the last Silver Tournament. Thus ended my dream of competing with The Marshall at the first Gold Championship Tournament for Chaos Agents.
A Twist and the first Seeding Match
Or so I thought. The final twist came when we landed with more than 24 Gold Ticket holders wanting to play in the Gold Tournament. This meant that the tournament had to be expanded to 4 pods of eight players each, opening up slots for an additional five players to join from the waitlist. Fortunately for The Marshall and me (and unfortunately for others on the Silver Ticket holders waitlist), none of the Silver Ticket holders on the waitlist were on Discord or at the Sandbox VR location. This meant that as one of the Silver Ticket holders, I was offered a slot in the final pod of the Gold Tournament. Though The Marshall and I dreamed of having a Gold Ticket to earn our spot in the Gold Tournament, we were grateful for the opportunity to compete off the waitlist.
The format of the Gold Tournament called for 2 rounds of seeding matches, followed by the finals (top 8 scoring players and Agents from the seeding rounds) and the Not-Finals (the 9th-16th ranked players and Agents from seeding rounds.) The Finals would crown the first Chaos World Champions (up to 3, one for each win condition). As a Popularium team member, even if I qualified for the Finals, I would not be eligible to play in it and win the World Championship. However, my goal was to qualify and then give my spot up to compete in the Not-Finals instead.
In the first round of seeding matches, I was put in pod D with fellow Popularium teammates such as Macky with his namesake Mack Skywarden and Catalyst with the oft-unstoppable Nomatterwhatus, as well as experienced vets such as MrThrifty. I expected the competition to be brutal, so went with The Marshall’s “Strategy A” (as I call it). “Strategy A” calls for him to use his early fighting advantage: with access to Force, Honor, Chaos, and Shield, The Marshall gets a lot of firepower early compared to many other Agents. So fighting early provides two benefits: a) it clears out Agents from Shard-rich areas and gives The Marshall early space for Shard collection (which he needs, as he lacks Space and Dark, so he doesn’t have tools to speed up Shard collection in the mid or late game) and b) potential early KOs and a bunch of damage on the board, which gives The Marshall an early Brawlmaster advantage. Then, after an early fight, The Marshall spends mid-rounds on Survive strategy recovering health and investing in Brain, Life, and Shield for the late game. Sometimes (but not often), he’ll will have the opportunity to go back to collecting Shards during the mid-game. However, this is risky to do in areas with contested Shards as any damage he takes in the mid-game delays his late-game surge. Also, it’s rare for The Marshall to be able to keep up with more efficient collector Agents, especially those with Dark or Space skills, so Shard collection by The Marshall is mostly to add to my overall Shard count for my Chaos Brokerage House.
Then, around Round 20, The Marshall should have restored enough health and purchased enough armor to go back on the offensive. After this point, The Marshall will aim to complete the skill chains for two of Honor, Force, and Chaos. Honor is especially effective in the late game with its combination of melee damage and armor-related skills as the map shrinks to its smallest size in the end game and Speed becomes less relevant.
My strategy in seeding match 1 started off swimmingly, as I was able to buff The Marshall up with some early damage-related deploys and skills, and by about Round 6, we found our first fight versus MrThrifty and Galfyx the Sovereign Warrior. Galfyx, like The Marshall, was on an early attack strategy, however it was a mistake for him to take on The Marshall early. Within two rounds of fighting, The Marshall had Galfyx on the run, with the Tsallis legend escaping the battle phase with only a handful of HP to survive. But that’s when disaster struck.
It turns out that one of my loathed rivals, Raventhon, had snuck into our pod D match with a new Generation 2 Agent, and Galfyx and MrThrifty were able to shift The Marshall’s aggro on to Raventhon’s Massieu Agent Felix the Unlucky Oaf. With a full health bar and on attack strategy, Felix demolished The Marshall, who was barely able to escape the battle with a few HP left. This put us on the back foot, as The Marshall had to go into “recovery mode” for several rounds, but having missed out on the early KO that should have been the result of his battle with the dangerous Galfyx. With our loathing for Raventhon deepening, we plotted our comeback. Raventhon should have remembered our motto - “The Marshall doesn’t forgive, The Marshall doesn’t forget”, before messing with our business.
And such a comeback was on the cards when The Marshall, having recovered 75% of his HP, decided to go back on attack strategy to ambush Raventhon and his Unlucky Oaf. Caught unawares, Raventhon was in trouble, and the battle was coming down to the wire when… The Marshall was sniped by none other than Galfyx, swiftly ending our hopes for a win condition in seeding match 1. A well-deserved vengeful comeback for MrThrifty, with the added benefit of also taking the KO away from Raventhon. To make sure that Raventhon suffered too, I put a “President’s Bounty” on Raventhon and Felix the Oaf’s head, and brand new Chaos Broker Rylar took the bounty of an extra ACT by ending Raventhon’s win condition hopes as well.
In the meantime, another Popularium team member, lowriskadventurer, came out of nowhere to take two win conditions with The Son of the Least Objectionable, an Agent that he had never played with before. Sometimes, pairings are simply meant to be, and the duo of lowriskadventurer and The Son seemed destined to team and become a juggernaut immediately.
The Second Seeding Match and the Agony of Elimination
In the second seeding match, I decided to go with the more conservative “Strategy B” for The Marshall, knowing that at least 1 win condition (but more likely 2) were going to be needed for us to make a comeback in the Tournament and hope for a Finals (or even Not-Finals) seat. With “Strategy B”, we landed The Marshall in a safe zone on the map, and focused on early collection while investing in Shield and Brain to settle in for the long game. Things were once again going to plan, when I suddenly noticed a Xandrian-controlled Agent (aka an Agent that’s controlled by an AI Player Bot) Taru the Revelator on attack strategy close to The Marshall and with only around 60% of their HP remaining. Leaning on the early armor The Marshall invested in, we took the fight to Taru and were able to get an early KO. Eager to go back to “Strategy B”, we put The Marshall on survive strategy. But, alas, the end came swiftly. The Marshall got trapped in a triangle of enemy Agents while trying to flee to a safe zone on the map to regen health, and took way more damage than he could handle in his weakened state after taking out Taru. The Marshall had almost escaped the triangle, but Galfyx and MrThrifty yet again proved our nemesis, as a crit of 36 left The Marshall with no HP to work with, thus ending our hopes of making the Finals or the Not-Finals.
In all seriousness, the rust that The Marshall and I had gathered from the lack of practice showed at the Gold Tournament, demonstrating yet again that there’s no substitute for consistent practice with your Agent to succeed when it’s all on the line. On the other hand, my colleague lowriskadventurer came out of nowhere, not having practiced for months, to win 4 of 6 win conditions available, showing that with the right focus and Agent, anything is possible!
The Champions are Revealed: Andrew_Gross and MasterTyler!
Though The Marshall and I didn’t make the Finals, we followed the action closely at the Sandbox VR location, where it was being streamed on a very large screen, in addition to several of the Finalists playing from the Sandbox VR location itself. The atmosphere was electric — with the initial rounds marked by tense silence as the Finalists set up their early game strategy. But as the game went into the mid and late rounds and legendary veterans such as CatherineC started getting eliminated from the match, the crowd of spectators at Sandbox VR got louder and louder in support of their favorite Agents and players (and sometimes ranting against veteran players such as SpaceCow8oy for their consistent dominance.)
I had a wager with my co-founders Richard and Jon on whether the first World Champion was going to be a veteran playtester or a new star player who joined the game at Gen Con. It turned out that this wager came down to the wire, with the fabled crowd-favorite Hamfist directed by the renowned Broker Andrew_Gross going up against brand new Broker MasterTyler and his Agent Cebula the Shorn from Ulfsbay, who learned the game and teamed up at Gen Con itself. Every melee and ranged attack was met with howls and laughter from the crowd, and it was impossible to predict who would be the last Agent standing till the very end…when Hamfist landed the final knockout blow. The Sandbox VR Finals room broke out in applause for the Champions MasterTyler, present in person to collect his plaudits for winning Shardmaster and the $250 winners purse, and Andrew_Gross, double World Champion with Survivalist and Brawlmaster, collecting $500 thanks to his stunning direction of the legendary Hamfist. A fitting finale to the upcoming “documentary series” on “The Rise of Hamfist”.
It brought a (metaphorical) tear to my eye to see Hamfist crowned the first (double) World Champion, recalling his infancy, when I first discovered him out of nowhere during an Iron Tournament, where he took me all the way to a medal and a Bronze Ticket. How far my boy has come under the guidance of veterans like Andrew_Gross, and no doubt he has much farther to go in his career as a Chaos Agent.
And, once again, congratulations to the first ever Chaos World Champions: Andrew_Gross and MasterTyler.
The best part, for me at least, is that the second World Championship starts in just a few weeks, giving us all another crack at the grand prize. I’ll see you there!