Assignment 1: One roll, explained

A champion, a reroll state, three augment tiers and an opening item, none of them chosen by you — account for what you did with them

You will be issued an opening state. You do not choose it, you may not ask for a different one, and there is no reroll on the assignment.

What you receive#

A single HEX ARAM opening, frozen before the first purchase:

• the champion assigned to you, and your bench
• how many rerolls you hold
• your four teammates
• the enemy five
• the augment options you were offered, tier by tier
• the gold available for your first purchase

Everything in it is fixed. The assignment is not to improve the hand. It is to account for what you would do with it.

What you submit#

Roughly 1,200 words, in four parts.

Part A — What is this champion for? Not what it builds. What function it can be asked to perform for this team against this enemy, argued from its properties rather than its reputation. If the range of jobs it could take is wide, say so and say which end you are choosing.

Part B — Keep or reroll? State your threshold before you apply it. Price the reroll: the currency, the known quantity you would discard, and the function your team would lose with it. A decision to keep is as much of a decision as a decision to reroll, and it needs the same account.

Part C — Which augment, and why not the other two? The two you rejected matter as much as the one you took. If a ranking disagrees with you, name the assumption the ranking is making and say why it fails here. If you have no evidence against the ranking, take its answer and say that you did — that is a defensible decision, and pretending otherwise is not.

Part D — The opening purchase, and what would break it. Name the assumption your build rests on, and name the observation that would falsify it. A build whose assumption you cannot state is a build you will not be able to revise in week 10.

How it is marked#

Against the four criteria on this page. Note the weighting: reasoning under uncertainty carries the most, and identifying the real trade-off comes second. Neither of them asks whether you were right.

To be explicit, because students ask every year: there is no answer key. Your submission is not compared against what I would have done. Four different submissions can take four different augments and all receive full marks, and one submission can take the augment I would have taken and receive very few, because it did not say why. A well-argued defence of a choice that would have lost the game is a good submission. That is not leniency — it is the only position consistent with a mode that randomises the inputs.

What loses marks: a decision with no stated alternative; a citation of a win rate with no patch attached; an assumption asserted rather than named; and any part of the account that only makes sense if you already know how the game turned out.

Practical#

Submitted through the course page by the deadline on this page. Plain document, no particular template. Cite any data you use — source and patch — and use the patch the assignment names rather than whatever is live when you sit down to write. The policies page explains why that rule exists.