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DropMix Mania Recap

Throughout the month of March, 16 Harmonix competitors battled their way through a single elimination DropMix Clash tournament. Each week we narrowed down the list, knocking them out of the Mania bracket in an edge-of-your-seat, best 2-out-of-3 match-up. Culminating in a final 1v1 brawl, two fierce players clawed their way to the top in hopes of becoming the first DropMix Mania Clash champion.

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Rick “The Rock” Cody, our underdog, protagonist, and all-around nice guy came face to face with the DropMix League commissioner, the bad boy, the heel, Tom “Tbar” aka “The Commish” Bartlett in a final best 3 out of 5 battle of the beats.

This title match was fraught with blood, sweat, and trash talk accompanied by only the most fire mixes. Though Rick epitomized the dark horse all fans could root for, Tbar crushed the competition and walked away with a win after dominating the first 3 rounds in record time.

So how did he do it? Luck of the spin? Luck of the draw? Superior Strategy? We reached out to Tom to get his take, but he was unavailable for comment at this time. I like to think that the moons and tides had a significant effect on his gameplay, but there’s no doubt that deck compilation played a major role.

Deckbuilding is a key element to not only curating a killer soundtrack, but also creating game-winning combo plays. Let’s take a look at the winning deck.

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On the surface we see that Tom has 4 bass, 5 beat, 6 loop, and 3 lead music cards. Add in 4 Wild cards and a whopping 10 FX cards to complete a balanced deck. Take a closer look at the choice FX cards and you see a strategy starting to form.

Bartlett padded his deck with 16 music cards, all containing keys as their instrument. All 4 of his Wild cards also consist of 2 keys elements (bass and loop), optimizing the potential for keys on the board at any given moment. Tack on 4 keys-related FX cards (Pack Mentality and Stylin’, from Series 3 and Series 4 discover packs) and he’s upped his chances of earning bonus points. He’s created a deck with complementary music and FX cards, which some would say was the key to his success. Not me though. Too corny.

And with that we have our winner and our winning brackets! Thank you to everyone who followed the mania and submitted brackets along the way, and congrats to those that walked away with fun prizes! It was a wild ride, but it doesn’t all stop there.

Tune in to the Harmonix Twitch, Mixer, and Facebook Live channels for upcoming DropMix League matches and other DropMix-inspired rumbles, duels, battles, and other sports-like words.

Best,

Riley