Do or Die: Having an efficient opening turn

The first couple turns of the game are like a race between the two players to set up their ideal board, to find their key pieces, and quite possibly to set up the defensive pieces that they will need to survive their opponent’s opening barrage, or to even delay their attacks by a turn or two if possible. The art of the opening turn is not lost knowledge, but some people tend to see it as such. You’ve got to let go of your greedy hand once in a while to mulligan for a hand that can be consistent!

I pulled an opening hand last night that had multiple foundations to counter my opponent’s gameplan, but I just had to mulligan it. It’s nice to see four foundations in your opening hand when going first, but they were all 2 difficulty, so I couldn’t guarantee more than a couple foundations, and that’s a terrible opening to try to defend on when you are already down a game. There are a lot of things to consider when deciding if you should mulligan your hand, and not the least of which would be your likelihood to actually get a better hand, so we’re here to help you have the best opening build that you can have!

I personally try to build most of my decks to be able to build 4 foundations on turn 1 consistently, but that doesn’t mean that everybody does it. I’m not saying it’s the perfect route, just what I prefer, so some of this article may be a bit biased towards that strategy. I’m also going to be using math that is assuming you are running no 2 or 1 checks. Not because those are wrong, but because the average deck will not have 2 or 1 checks, so this math uses “safety 3s” as a foundation base to build our foundation base.

Reiterating a bit from previous deck building articles, I try to aim to have around 1/5th to 1/4th of my total deck as spam foundations. “Spam” foundations are anything 1 or less difficulty, or perhaps a foundation that doesn't count towards progressive difficulty. This isn’t so bad when there are such efficient 1 difficulty foundations for us to use. You might find that some of the 0 difficulty foundations significantly drop off in power when compared to other foundations, but you also don’t need to run them in every deck. Also, don’t forget to limit your 3 difficulty foundations, you don’t want to draw more than a single 3 difficulty foundation in your opening hand! If you do include 2 or 1 in checks in your deck, your number of 0 difficulty foundations should probably significantly increase, but other than that you shouldn’t have too many of them. Honestly, if you do include a significant number of 2 or 1 checks, then you can just reduce the numbers in this article by 1; don’t include many 2 difficulty foundations, and try to load your deck with 1 and 0 difficulty foundations that support your aggressive gameplan.

Obviously we can’t always draw the perfect hand of foundations descending from 3 to 0 difficulty, so we have to make do with what we can. If you draw a hand of two 2 difficulty foundations and a single spam, it could be worth dropping it to try to find a better build, but that very much depends on the rest of your deck. If you have a disproportionate amount of cards you can’t play on turn 1, such as characters and action cards, then that may change the value of this same hand. Your mulligan could still land you a hand full of attack cards and might be too much of a risk. On the other hand, if you have a hand loaded with foundations you probably shouldn’t mulligan it, but you should at least consider your odds. If you are holding 6 or 7 foundations, then that just increases the likelihood of you checking your attacks during your build turn, and every non-attack that you check during your turn goes further to increasing these odds. I’m not saying that you should throw this hand away, just to not get too greedy with it. I’ve seen people pull a hand full of foundations and then fail on the second or third card, and completely waste the advantage that their deck has given them.

If there’s a sort of ‘ideal’ math that I tend to aim for, it is the following method; if I have a hand of a bunch of 2 and 1 difficulty foundations, then I will build them 2, 2, 1, 2, 1. This guarantees the first 3 foundations, and then the fourth and fifth foundations are on about the same difficulty. Some people would build 2, 2, 2, 1, 1, but I find this to be too much of a risk. You could fail even the third card and end up with only two foundations. At least the alternating difficulty method secures you 3 foundations. If you have a 0 difficulty foundation in hand, the math can change a but. You can try to go 2, 2, 1, 0, 1, but this neglects one of your 2 difficulty foundations in favour of getting the guaranteed 4 build. This depends on the necessity of each of your 2 difficulty foundations in hand, versus how much you need to guarantee having 4 foundations. If you think that you really need to find a given game, I would probably go for the guaranteed 4 build and hold the extra 2 difficulty foundation to build the following turn, assuming you aren’t trying to kill on turn 2.

This also depends on how you personally build your decks. Your opening turn could be a reflection of your deck, too. If you built your deck to function efficiently with only half as many attacks as a normal deck, then you can probably be extra greedy with your foundation builds. If you have less foundations than a normal deck but a lot of ways to build foundations during your attack strings, then your build turns are probably going to max out at 2-4 foundations at best, so you need to make sure that those foundations count, such as ones that will save your life, or ones that can help ensure you pass attacks.

That’s about it for the art of the opening turn, I hope that some of it has left at least something of an impact on you. Next time, I’m going to talk about the public playtest that we’ve all started playing with, and things that you should be looking for in the cards, and ways to check out the characters.