You Vs. Your Deck: Identifying Weaknesses

It is important to learn your deck's weak points and shore up your defenses where they are weakest. Learning from your losses is the most important step to tweaking your deck. You should remember the state of the game from your losses, did you have too many cards in hand that you weren't able to pass? Were you unable to block because of a lack of speed reduction, or was your damage reduction insufficient? Maybe you lost because some of your kill turns didn't meet expectations and need to be improved? Or was an ability that you relied on negated at a crucial moment?

Generally, having at least 10-12 blocks of each zone is a good goal to aim for during deck construction, but it's also worth considering which cards these are. It might seem good that you have 14 high blocks, but then you notice that 8 of those blocks are your copies of Forbidden Moonset and Spirit Shotgun, cards which you will be hesitant to use as blocks unless the game depended on it.

You should first simply look into changing out cards in your deck on symbol before going as far as changing your entire symbol, or character. If you find that your issue is that you can't successfully block many things, and your character has access to Earth, it might be easy to swap symbols to Earth and take advantage of its plentiful speed reduction, or maybe you should look in to alternatives. If you are on Air and need to block more often, look into more ways to ready your staging area on defense, or perhaps look in to removing your blocks from your card pool, it's like a pseudo -1 speed to all their attacks! On other symbols, you can look in to alternatives to blocking. Discarding the attack during the enhance step is a viable option, or you could find a way to reduce attacks down to a pitiful number, or maybe find ways to make it difficult for your opponent to play more attacks.

If you have exhausted your options with your current symbol, maybe it's time to try looking into other symbols. It's usually best to keep the core of your deck, such as the character and your main attacks, such as maybe even the attacks from your character's support, but it's important to try and keep the support for your core strategy intact. If your goal was to set up a specific combo, make sure to still have ways to draw in to it and protect it, or if your goal was to play a large string of attacks, make sure that you still have ways to make it possible!

If aren't sure of what each symbol's themes are, here's a quick primer:

Air is card pool clearing & readying foundations

All is hand & deck manipulation

Chaos is playing with momentum, and positive control check modification for yourself

Death is staging area destruction, aggressive control, and some vitality burn for your opponent

Earth is damage reduction, and flipping opponent’s foundations

Evil is vitality loss for yourself, and negative control check mods for your opponent

Fire is pump, be it speed or damage, and it also loves to fill its discard pile & removed from game pile to fuel effects, and it enjoys some stun

Good is adding cards to staging area, and making a strong wall to hide behind

Life has progressive difficulty cheats, and speed buffs, some vitality gain

Order has the best ways to mass commit your opponent’s board, or to simply target commit what you don’t like

Void has reactive control, and getting rid of your opponent’s hand

Water has reversals, and ways to re-use attacks

This isn't exactly the end-all for each symbol, as they still have more things for them. As I mentioned before, Earth happens to have lots of speed reduction, but that isn't generally the reason why you choose to build an entire deck on the symbol.

If all else fails, and you have a deck that you really want to keep, maybe you need to change out the character on top and see where that takes you? One of the first things you could look in to, if possible, would be going up a hand size. A faster build should help you see your deck for what it is more often, and is a great way to help identify the deeper issues of your deck! You could also step down a hand size to find a different kind of consistency. Some lower hand size characters are quite adept at amplifying the core of your deck, you'll likely just need to shift out some of your less vital cards for ones that help your lower hand sized character do what they need to do.

It can be difficult to start to understand where you need to make improvements, and certainly difficult to understand when you need to switch characters, especially when they can usually be the heart of a deck! This becomes easier as you learn the available characters more, and can recognize exactly what your deck needs to have. I had an Earth deck that I kept in my bag for over two years, and I would update it with every new set and keep trying it until I could get it to work the way I wanted. RE: capable of winning more than one in a few games.

That's about all that I'm able to discuss on the subject without going in to individual decks and characters, and telling you why one would be superior to another in given circumstances. That is a lesson that is likely best learned with time and experience, or as some people already do, maybe it's best learned by messaging me directly and asking what I think should be changed? Next time, I'm going to discuss deck numbers, why decks shouldn't necessarily be exactly 60 cards, and some ways to tell how many copies of a given card you should be running in your deck.