You VS Your Deck: Making your own Luck

 

Welcome to the first in my series of helping players improve their deck building and threat recognition skills. We are going to go over the ways that you can improve yourself, your deck, and your plays after you lose a game, and what you can learn.

Often when someone loses a game, they will simply blame bad checks, bad draws, or their opponent having miraculous luck and/or amazing draws. While these certain factors result in a loss, and these can even be huge contributing factors, more often than not the loss will come back to the loser. You may have made play mistakes in the game that had ramifications several turns later, or you may have not even noticed a few errors here or there, or maybe you just didn't respect your own deck when it deserved it.

A very important part of the game is learning to respect your own deck. For example, if you are running a Hellfire Impalement archetype, your deck will be filled with bad checks. Undying Rage is a card that flows very well with this strategy, but it may not always be the best idea to include it. If your attack slots are filled with bad checks, do you really want to be drawing a 3 difficulty foundation on turn 1? It should be considered completely unplayable on turn 1. If you attempt to play that Undying Rage on turn 1, and you fail it with a poor check, don't just simply brush it off as bad luck. This is an instance where multiple of your own choices will come together to cause you to lose the game. You chose to include 3 difficulty foundations in your deck with poor checks, and you chose to play the risk. Yes, you will have better odds of passing the foundation than failing it, but you're basically risking losing 1/3rd of your games for it. This comes down to being a very greedy play that even I wouldn't make, (at least, not as often these days as I did before) and I am an extremely greedy player!

So how do you go about fixing the problem of checks? This isn't simply a case where you just remove the 3 difficulty foundations from your list and move on. A list with lots of bad checks is inherently going to be an aggressive list, because you can't afford to play as many defensive pieces as people who run a list with no bad checks. You need to respect your attack lineup while making the deck, you will want to have a turn 1 that matters, and you should be running cards that go along with poor checks. Depending on the number of 1 checks in your list, this may mean that you will want to include more 0 difficulty foundations than normal. Fallen Angels is a fantastic addition to this archetype, because it lets you scout out your opening turn for bad checks, and it will still be passable as your second card without risk.

Your opening turn can shape the entire course of your game depending on if it goes well or poorly. The effects on cheap foundations may not be life saving, but you are going to need them. This still applies for decks that run no poor checks at all, as well. When you are looking at your list, you should consider the amount of cards that are playable on turn 1.

Take a look at this deck, and see if you can tell how many cards are technically playable on the opening turn. All of the cards in this deck are technically viable, and it might even look like a solid deck to some, but I did build it to be a garbled mess, so I hope that you can see it for what it truly is!

Generally you are going to want to assume that you are going first, because that is not just the ideal situation, but also the riskiest. This is a 64 card deck with 32 foundations. Right down the middle, so you should be drawing 3 foundations on average in your opening hand. In most decks, I aim for an opening turn where I build at least 4 foundations, but that's just me. The first things you eliminate from your turn 1 playability are of course, your attacks. Generally you won't be playing those on turn 1, so that would start us off at 18 unplayable cards on turn 1. Next, usually your actions aren't getting played on turn 1, so you can take all of those out of the equation, leaving us at 26 unplayable cards on turn 1. Assets are a mixed bag. Sure, they are nice and you can build them, but you are going to want actual foundations on turn 1, something that really helps you play cards efficiently. All of these are fine enough on their own, but you should hope to not draw more than 1 of them. Flambert is especially nice on turn 1, being basically guaranteed. So we can remove most of the assets from our turn 1 playability, leaving us at, let's say 30 unplayable cards on turn 1.

That basically just leaves us with our foundation base, which makes fine sense because that's what you want to play, but we still aren't finished. This deck's foundation base is a mess. You cannot play multiple copies of the same unique card, so any extra copies of a unique foundation, even if it REALLY helps out our game plan like Delta Blue Team Leader does, are only hindering us. Sometimes it's fine to justify multiple copies of a unique foundation, but really consider what it does for your deck. This deck has 9 superfluous unique foundations, so those are all unplayable, bringing our unplayable count up to 39 out of 64 cards. That's pretty rough.

Next, you are going to need to consider your foundation difficulties, and decide if bad checks are worth it for you. First off, we have a single 4 difficulty foundation, in Symphony of the Deep. It is a fine card, but it is absolutely unplayable on turn 1, bringing us to 40 out of 64 cards. As for 3 difficulties, we have 2 of them, not counting the superfluous unique copy. Most decks have no issue passing a single 3 difficulty foundation on their opening turn, but that's just 1 copy, and we have 2 here, so we're going to have to remove 1 from our turn 1 playability, bringing us to 41 out of 62.

A 60~ card deck should generally have somewhere between 12-16 “spam” foundations (foundations with 0 or 1 difficulties) on average to help with an efficient first turn build, and this deck is bringing in a grand total of 7, and that is very much an issue. On top of that, we are running 2 checks. It is only two total 2 checks, but the risk is still there. If you don't draw either of your 2 checks in your opening hand, the odds start out at 1/29 that you'll check one any time on your opening turn, and if you're wanting to build 3-5 foundations, that could very much be an issue. If we wish to keep the 2 checks, we're going to have to look at our 3 difficulty foundations. As mentioned earlier, we have three 3 difficulty foundations, and they are all fine cards. If we want to keep them in the deck, we have to basically accept that playing them turn 1 going first may be too risky, even at only a 1/29 chance, and that it shouldn't be worth it. Removing the last playable 3 difficulty foundation leaves us with only TWENTY of our cards being safe to play on turn 1, and not even all of them are foundations.

Using this method, we started out with a deck that had an even split of foundations and non foundations, but have realized that we only have 18 actually playable foundations on turn 1, meaning that this deck is going to have horrible build turns. This deck will commonly build 2-3 foundations at most on turn 1, and will likely have to review away valuable attacks just to try and get foundations.

So while this deck may contain mostly playable cards, the deck isn't itself too playable. You need to consider your foundation base when building a deck. As fun as the attack base is to build, foundations are named as they are for a reason!

That's about it in regards to your control check luck, next time I'm going to go over how to try to avoid bad draws, and how to not beat yourself up too bad when you get them!

 

- Clint "Church" Badger