AEGIS Tournament Teams, Past and Present
AEGIS Organized Play is a fabulous thing. We basically alternate between Leagues and Tournaments throughout the year – in leagues, all players are encouraged to play AEGIS online or IRL, and if you play enough games, we send you a special promo card unavailable anywhere else. Then, in tournaments, the most devout players build teams and go at each other and show off their tactical prowess.
The Spring 2020 Tournament, happening now, is our fourth tournament overall. Since these usually draw 10 to 16 players, those are a lot of teams that you can take inspiration from when building at home! Let’s dig into it.
Spring Tournament 2018
This was our first tournament, held a few months before we went to print with the game, and featured some robots that didn’t yet have final stats and information. It was essentially a balance stress test, but teams were creative nonetheless.
There were a number of people running Storybook Ainer, because back before printing, he was quite powerful and had high damage output. Ultimately, it all came down to two Vatis teams, Nolan and Kal. Vatis is a very powerful commander, and lends to a few different strategies. SleepyPaladin’s was all about manipulating positions to sling the enemy off the board with push attacks, while Reggie’s was focused on getting you in the right place to kill you in the more traditional way. Meanwhile, Gojirazard focused on having numerous powerful combine options and Brifox won the day with a strategic team that focused on dodging and outpacing enemy attacks.
Winter 2019 Tournament
Our next tournament was the first tourney we did with the final versions of all the robots, right around the time of the game’s release and featured perhaps the biggest variety in teams.
The finals again featured Brifox and Goji, with Brifox running it back with the same Kal team as the first tournament, and Goji changing up his strat a little, showing off a team based around building up the level 5 Aroz-Ell Sol on turn 1. Cybermage also ran a pretty identical team to Goji, but ultimately they all fell before EpicImpulse’s Diane team, which was able to efficiently deal more damage more often than the competition.
Fall 2019 Tournament
About six months later, we held our third tournament, this time as a Swiss-style affair everyone fought three or four times and were ranked at the end.
After gauntlet of battles, it shook out with EpicImpulse once again at the top with the same powerful Diane composition, followed by newcomer TD, using a potent Gamound team focused on buffing the accuracy of the SSM-3000 Sunset Mode or yeeting the ELL across the map for a sudden and devastating AOE burst. Brifox’s Kal team also returned. Creative new strategies based around Etwal and Sheriden showed up this time, with Goji putting forward an intriguing AoE-focused team for the latter.
Spring 2020 Tournament
And now, we have the Spring 2020 tournament, which is currently running! This time we experimented with a double-elimination bracket. Even more interesting is that this tournament is a playtest tournament where players can experiment with new and upcoming robots from AEGIS2 (coming soon). all the new robots are highlighted in green.
Despite this tourney having a whole bunch of unreleased content, many archetypes are still prevalent. There are two Luxiana teams showcasing this time, along with Etwal, Kal and Poppet. Both Luxiana teams fundamentally highlight ability to resurrect, though they both have new options brought on by our experimental new duplicating Gan. Normally, she would be used with Defense-buffing bots like GAN-100 and GOF-100.
Meanwhile, 2-time champ Epic has opted for a combine-heavy team and Brifox has updated his team entirely with similar, albeit more versatile/aggressive new robots. TD has refined his control strategy from the previous tournament, using new abilities to line enemies up before striking them down with a perfect-accuracy shot from Ghili-100. And then we have Gojirazard, back once again, this time wielding Etwal with some fierce new combine options should his commander get destroyed. This was the first tournament without an abundance of S commanders, skewing much more towards aggressive strategies.
Go Forth and Build Like a Champ
It’s been an interesting retrospective looking at these team comps of tourneys-past, nearly every Commander in the AEGIS Core Box is represented at some point, except for Cyndane. Poor pirate queen.