
You VS Your Deck: Finding your Delivery Method
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Slinging 10 damage attacks at your opponent can be really fun, but what is the point if they keep getting blocked, and then you get back-swung to death because you over committed for a failed kill? When designing a deck, it is extremely important to figure out how you plan to deliver your win condition attacks past your opponent's staging area, past their hand, and directly in to their character.
Exploding Flame Roar is an example of a kill condition in a bottle. It tells you what kind of attacks you should (mostly) be running, and it even provides some nice stun to help push it through. The problem is that 4 speed isn't exactly a lot, and it is a fairly telegraphed card. If your previous attacks don't threaten to kill your opponent, then they can just hold a block for Exploding Flame Roar and be able to get through pretty well. If you have your opponent's foundations stunned out completely, they can shut off 12 damage with a +2 block and a 5 check, so we need to figure out ways to get around this!
Giving speed to your attacks is a very easy to implement delivery method, but being the most commonly printed delivery method also means it's the easiest to overcome, and likely has several ways to overcome it. If you are relying on this method, you should have multiple ways of adding speed. Relying on a single speed pump, even if it's on your character. Some characters suffer from the issue of being far too easily negated, and sometimes not even at a huge cost. Then there is Andy, whose response is virtually identical to Mike Hardiman's enhance, but it is spread out over the course of several attacks, and can't be canceled by just 1 ability. Speed pump is commonly combined with lots of stun to force things through, and that can certainly help get through some speed reduction. The Fire symbol is especially adept at combing stun with speed to really push things through.
You could try to overload your opponent on a single zone. After all, people tend to only run 10-15 blocks on a given symbol, but also 18+ attacks, so it makes sense that some of those attacks would have to land eventually! The problem with this really lies in game 2, and probably 3, when your opponent can clearly see that they only need to hold a single block zone throughout the games. If they can keep up their hand, then they might have a solid advantage against you. There are a few ways to fight this, such as putting a bunch of attacks of the opposite zone in your sideboard. If your deck has 18 high attacks in game 1, and then only 12 high attacks in game 2 and you actively try to play the 6 low attacks that you brought in for game 2, then you can really throw your opponent for a loop. Alternatively, you could try to ensure that your opponent can't hold the correct block zone.
On that subject, you could try to force your opponent to discard their hand, leaving your attacks free to land. There are a couple of issues with this method, though. For one, most of the hand discard in the game, especially to any consistent degree, is found on character cards. This means that your opponent will know your game plan before decks are even shuffled up, and if it's a team format, they can set their deck with the best anti-discard in to it. That leads me to the other issue with this strategy, and it is that lots of currently available anti-discard cards are pretty viable to be played regardless of their ability to stop discard abilities, but because they are strong cards.
You could try adding in methods of clearing your card pool to keep your difficulty down, or you could go the opposite route and boost your checks enough that it doesn't matter how many attacks you've played. You could even go a bit further with True Identity and find ways to re-ready it so that you can keep using it! The math is the same if you clear 1 card from your card pool, or if you boost your checks for the turn by 1, so why should air have all the fun with card pool clearing when True Identity is inherently once per turn?! I could essentially also include the Good symbol's strategy of trying to build up a staging area as they attack. Every foundation that you add to your staging area could be seen as boosting some of your checks for the rest of the game.
Flooding your opponent's card pool is a great way to get around your opponent's speed reduction, but this is not too common to find. This is pretty much locked to the Water symbol, so if you're not on that symbol you're going to have problems in getting this to happen consistently, but this can be something that you can sneak in. For example, Exploding Flame Roar was used earlier as an example of an attack that needs help, so you could slap a bit of card pool flooding in there, even just one card if it's strong, and you can be pretty set. With Yin & Yang, this could even work in a Fire deck if you're careful with your attacks.
In other situations, some attacks can simply serve as a kill condition to themselves, but they can still be amplified by other effects. When building a deck around Pea Shooter, you can choose to include lots of Charge attacks and have momentum generation, you can choose to include Ally attacks so that you can give it stats for essentially free, or you can do neither and find a way to put other copies of Pea Shooter in to your card pool so that it can be a kill condition isolated from the rest of the deck. Sometimes you may need to be a bit creative by finding some synergy to your attacks that isn't immediately obvious to your opponent.
Give your win condition a think over once in a while, and think about how easily it is to overcome. Does a single revoke ruin your day? One solution is to find an answer to Revoke, but sometimes the better answer is to find other things that your opponent will want to Revoke, or even spreading your win across several attacks. Try to not be like Mike Hardiman, and be more like Cowboy Andy.