You VS. Your Deck: Draw of the Luck

 

This week, I'm going to talk about how to not rely on your deck to draw you your entire back-swing, by taking the action into your own hands!

First and foremost, this all starts with your character. How much you need to rely on your draw step will rely on, in a rough order of importance:

1: Access to abilities that recur attacks 

2: Your character's hand size

3: Your ability to re-buy attacks

4: Simple extra draw if you need it

Recurring attacks can be a recurring nightmare for your opponent!

Sometimes all you need to get your turn going is a good attack to let your enhances fly, and having abilities that enable you to simply grab an attack when you need it is incredibly valuable. Seong Mi-na2, Rando, and Hiei are examples of characters who don't need to have an attack in hand to start attacking their opponent. If you have several enhances to draw you card, but no attack in hand, you have no offense to even stand on. Looking for characters and abilities like these to get your attack turn in motion early is a good way to fix a deck if it doesn't seem to be able to get the attacks you need when you need them.

Consider the side of your hands!

The simplest way to draw cards is to rely on your hand size, but this doesn't just mean drawing a fresh new hand of cards every turn, this could also be looked at through your deck building. A 7 hand character won't have too much of a problem if their opening hand includes a couple attacks that are more late-game orientated, they can even hold on to those until they need to attack with them. On the other hand, a 5 hand character is going to have a very stressful time if their opening hand includes attacks that will be needed late game. Do you just hold them for several turns, essentially handicapping your own hand size? This is a matter that could potentially be addressed in deck building as well.

You can look in to ways to get rid of these useful cards without making them pointless. You could add the card to your momentum and later take it back when you need it. You could add the card to your staging area and later take it back when you need it. There are multiple ways to deal with having valuable cards clogged in your hand, so maybe look into ways of changing up your deck if you find yourself clutching cards for too long and wasting hand size!

Additionally, you could consider just blocking less often. If you build your deck to rely more on the staging area to defend with, then you will have more room in hand to try to draw lots of attacks every turn! You won't need to hold as many blocks every turn if you have cards that add themselves right to your hand to block with, or cards that trivialize attacks, making them much weaker. You should try entering your opponent's turn with 1 or less cards in hand, and see how often you survive. Perhaps your deck just needs a little bit more defense, then you can spend less time worrying about it yourself!

Sir, I would like a refund on this Spirit Shotgun, 

it didn't kill my opponent in one hit!

Sometimes it's not about drawing tons of attacks, sometimes you just need to play the same attack so often that your opponent may actually accuse you of cheating! This can be as simple as picking up the attack for use again later in the same turn you used it, or it could mean cards that net you additional attacks. Strategies that revolve around scooping up specific attacks is a bit more susceptible to counters than other strategies, but will give you amazing consistency if you can rely on it. 

One of the first things I look for when making a deck is what methods I'll have access to in order to help grab my win condition, and it will usually revolve around what your character can give you. If your character has some draw, even if it's somewhat unreliable, look into abilities to set up the top of your deck. If your character can grab cards from places other than the top of your deck, you should try to figure out ways to rig it. Talim here can grab multiple copies after they resolve, so you could use strong cards that add themselves to your momentum, or you could look into cards that let you add specific cards to your momentum.

Basically, try and look for ways to get the most out of your important attacks. Sometimes this could mean starting your deck at an attack you want to abuse, rather than starting with a character you want to play as. Most people start their decks with their character and go from there, but maybe if you want to restructure your deck you could just keep some important cards and remaster it from that basis. Get creative with your decks, mix it up, see what you come up with!

On the subject of restructuring a deck, that takes us to next week's article! I'm going to start going over ideal ways to tweak your decks, what to learn from losses, and if you should do something as rash as changing a symbol, or even changing the character on top of the deck itself.

Clint "Church" Badger