Submitted by: Amy Falk

When you sit down across from your opponent at the start of a Bring 3, Ban 1 Ranked Play game, what will you do first? You’ll probably say hello to them, introduce yourself, maybe take a quick drink of water, and so on. Then, you’ll both pull out your team of 3 and begin the process of banning and selecting heroes. Despite only taking a couple minutes, how you prepare for this process can make or break your games. I ascribe much of my success in the Age of Fortitude to selecting the right team, and the one game I have lost so far this Age could possibly have been prevented by bringing a better team.

In this article, I’ll talk about how to decide what 3 heroes to bring to your Ranked Play event, based both on what you want to play and what you expect your opponents to do. At the end, I’ll walk through an example of how I would build a team using what we’ve learned. Let’s dive in!

What Heroes Can You Play?

The minimum number of heroes you need to play in a Ranked Play event is 3, but the more heroes you have available to you, the more effectively you can curate your team. Dice Throne is quite well-balanced, meaning that you can realistically bring whatever heroes you want and still put up a fight, but playing heroes you perform best with will increase your odds significantly.

• Do NOT play a hero you’re not comfortable with. Even the strongest heroes in the game require knowledge from their pilot to perform well. You’re better off playing the heroes you’re the most familiar with and enjoy the most.

• If you’re looking for more heroes to try out in preparation for Ranked events, my recommendations are Pyromancer, Cursed Pirate, Thor, and Iceman. These heroes historically perform well at events, and their low complexity allows you to pick them up quickly. There are, of course, many other heroes that perform well at events, but some of them require more time and practice to master.

However, building a team is a bit more tricky than picking your 3 best heroes thanks to Ranked Play’s ban/select format. You will have to account for matchups first.

What Is a Matchup?

Most of the time when you play a game of Dice Throne, you and your opponent are playing different heroes. This creates a matchup (for example, Artificer versus Black Widow). One of the heroes in the matchup is likely to have an advantage over the other, either due to an imbalance in raw power or due to the heroes’ unique mechanics interacting in notable ways. Sometimes the matchup will also be even, which means that neither hero has an especially big advantage. Of course, any hero can beat any other hero with enough luck and/or skill, but being in a favorable matchup raises your odds noticeably.

When trying to figure out which hero wins a particular matchup, here are some factors to consider:

• Raw power: Sometimes one of the heroes is just stronger than the other.

• Playstyle: If you’re playing a slower buildup hero, for example, more aggressive opponents are likely to give you trouble, since they can defeat you before you get to make a comeback.

• Defensive Abilities: If a hero has a really strong Defensive Ability, they’ll be favored against heroes that have a hard time avoiding it. Likewise, if a hero is really good at avoiding Defensive Abilities (via undefendable Attacks, abilities that aren’t Attacks, etc), they will be favored against heroes with strong defenses.

• Special mechanics: Some status effects or other abilities are more or less effective in certain matchups. For example, Knockdown is stronger against opponents who have a hard time generating CP.

Your goal as you’re creating a Ranked Play team is to guarantee an even matchup or better against any team your opponents bring. Since you can’t possibly account for every hero, you should focus on the ones that you see most often at your local game stores or against others.

The Ban, Main, Flex Team

Given this focus on matchups and the way Ranked Play works, this is how I think about constructing my Ranked team: you have three slots to fill in, and each slot has a different purpose to help you navigate the different matchups you might run into. Without further ado, here is the Ban, Main, Flex framework for building your Ranked team.

The Ban slot is the simplest. This is the strongest hero you have available. When your opponent sits down and sees this hero, they should be so scared of them that they immediately know who to ban. Ideally, you don’t play this hero often, but if your opponent decides not to ban them, you should be confident enough piloting them that you can take advantage of the opportunity.

Your Main hero is the one that should get the most attention when practicing. This is the hero you want to play most at Ranked, and the hero you expect to play most. After bans, you will probably look at how good your Main is in comparison to your opponent’s two remaining heroes. Ideally, this hero has a lot of raw power, is flexible, and is generically good in a lot of matchups.

This leaves you with one slot left: the Flex hero. This is a hero that you don’t expect to bring into too many games, but they either cover the weaknesses of your Main or have particularly strong matchups you want to take advantage of. Importantly, if your Flex hero is facing down bad matchups, you can simply not play them. When selecting heroes, your thought process will likely be something around the lines of: “If my Flex is especially strong into the opponent’s heroes, pick my Flex. Otherwise, pick my Main.”

If your Flex is strong against only one of the opponent’s two remaining heroes, and your Main is only strong against the other hero, you might have to allow your opponent to pick their hero first (and take the all-important first turn) if the matchup is important enough.

When you’re building your team, start with the hero you want to play the most - that’s your Main - and work backwards from there to ensure you can play them in as many games as you can. Make sure to test your team makeup against others so you don’t have any blind spots. I’m lucky to have a competitive team (Team DTH) to work with, but asking your friends to grab 3 random heroes and simulate a Ranked Play game will help wonders.

Example Team

Let’s see how this process of making a team works in practice. Let’s say I really want to play as Paladin, since he’s the feature hero for the Age of Devotion coming up. That makes him my Main.

Now, what matchups should I focus on for my Flex hero? To figure that out, I should look at the most common factors that determine matchups and see where Paladin falls:

• Raw power: Paladin is a very strong hero, and I’m very confident with him. I think I can beat a lot of the weaker heroes in the roster purely by outvaluing them.

• Playstyle: Paladin is a heavyweight hero that slowly takes over the game. I’m worried about aggressive heroes that can defeat me before I get a chance to reach that point.

• Defensive Abilities: Paladin does very well here. His base Defensive Ability is on the stronger side, and he has not one, but two extremely strong upgrades for it. He’s also very good at avoiding the opponent’s defense - all but three of his abilities do so - which makes me confident against heroes like Cursed Pirate.

• Special mechanics: Paladin’s roll objectives are very difficult, which makes me worried about heroes that can exhibit a lot of control. This includes heroes that can often manipulate my dice and heroes that have controlling status effects, like Loki.

Based on this, it looks like my Main has a few blind spots, so I should focus on patching those up with my Flex. It seems like I need a hero that’s fast, aggressive, hard to disrupt, and doesn’t necessarily care about activating their Defensive Ability. This sounds like a job for Miles Morales Spider-Man to me!

Finally, I need a hero to eat my opponent’s ban so I have access to both of the above heroes. I’ve heard a lot of people are banning Shadow Thief, so I’ll put them in here. I feel confident enough with Shadow Thief that I should be able to punish anyone who bans another hero.

And that’s it! My team is Shadow Thief, Paladin, and Miles Morales Spider-Man. 

This is the same process I used to build my current team of Shadow Thief, Thor, and Jean Grey. Can you figure out which heroes in that team are the Ban, Main, and Flex?

That’s all I’ve got for today! Let me or the Dice Throne team know if you liked this strategy deep-dive. Good luck building your very own Ranked Play team!