Levee (Fire/Earth) does a passably mediocre job protecting against Missiles (Earth/Water) and Fireball (Air/Fire); Fireball (Air/Fire) and Hammer (Light/Air) can both sneak past Solar (Fire/Light) by sharing an element.
And more prosaically by the fact that:
When I filtered the dataset to have Wizard A with the opponent’s spell list, the spells which most raised Wizard B’s winrate were those three.
However:
I’ve had a hard time figuring out how to weight “counter the opponent’s element choices!” vs “go with what has the most ambient mana!” vs “go with what blocks the opponent’s highest-mana attacks!”. It’s entirely possible that I should replace Hammer with Missiles, Rays or Vambrace; I hope to look into these possibilities later on.
Additionally:
The opponent picked a pretty good set of spells for the conditions in play; as such, I’m seriously questioning whether I can get my master even a >66% winrate.
I deduced the existence of Darkness Mana, determined that it almost certainly has a value in the 16-18 range, and then . . . couldn’t figure out any clever way to use that information when strategizing. I suspect I’m missing something here.
My provisional answer is:
Fireball, Levee, Hammer
This is supported by the reasoning that:
Levee (Fire/Earth) does a passably mediocre job protecting against Missiles (Earth/Water) and Fireball (Air/Fire); Fireball (Air/Fire) and Hammer (Light/Air) can both sneak past Solar (Fire/Light) by sharing an element.
And more prosaically by the fact that:
When I filtered the dataset to have Wizard A with the opponent’s spell list, the spells which most raised Wizard B’s winrate were those three.
However:
I’ve had a hard time figuring out how to weight “counter the opponent’s element choices!” vs “go with what has the most ambient mana!” vs “go with what blocks the opponent’s highest-mana attacks!”. It’s entirely possible that I should replace Hammer with Missiles, Rays or Vambrace; I hope to look into these possibilities later on.
Additionally:
The opponent picked a pretty good set of spells for the conditions in play; as such, I’m seriously questioning whether I can get my master even a >66% winrate.
I took an ML-based approach which gave me radically different answers; the machine seems to think that
Matching currently-strong mana types is much more important than countering your opponent’s choices.
As such, my new best guess is
Fireball, Rays, Vambrace
Which should
give my master roughly 2:1 odds in favor.
Oh, also:
I deduced the existence of Darkness Mana, determined that it almost certainly has a value in the 16-18 range, and then . . . couldn’t figure out any clever way to use that information when strategizing. I suspect I’m missing something here.