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Let's Chat: Deck Sizes


riddlesworth

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With season 1's release now complete, there's a lot of competition for power card slots (mostly ploys).

 

We see from the winning decks of Grand Clashes between 20 and 24 card power decks. Most people seem to be trying to make the cut to 20. I personally find this very difficult but don't want to make the deck too heavy.

I know the guys at Claim the City advocate 22-24 cards. 

 

What's the opinion on TGA? Anyone regularly playing a 24 card deck?

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  • 3 weeks later...

I'm actually trying to build a 32-card Fiends deck with all the redraws:

  • To the Victor, the Spoils
  • Duel of Wits
  • Improvisation
  • Trust to Luck

I'm having the same problem you are: I want to throw a LOT of goodies into the deck! In this case, though, I'm building the deck with some redundancies, such as Inspiration and Furious Inspiration. Because of the redundancies, the redraw cards are there primarily to keep enough cards in your hand that you will have a very hard time running out.

Two things are true about power decks larger than 20 cards:

  1. Even if you mulligan your opening hand, you won't see all the cards without (1) including redraws or (2) spending activations drawing cards.
  2. The more redraws you add, the more heavily you tilt your deck toward upgrades because the redraws' only purpose is to draw other cards. In other words, a 20-card deck that includes Duel of Wits is effectively a 19-card deck consisting of 9 ploys, 10 upgrades, and the ability to draw an extra two live cards once per game, assuming you ever draw DoW. This isn't a big deal if you include DoW in a 20- or 22-card deck, but it becomes a bigger deal as you add more redraws.
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I am playing a 24 card deck. I tried to shave it as much as I could, sometimes bringing it down to 22, but I am settling down (up?) to 24. The idea behind is to get a deck that is consistent and predictable (by you, hopefully not so much by the opponent :P).  The problem I encounter with small decks is that opening hand mulligans are more painful (though in contrast, they should happen less often),  and they may feel less flexible... stress on the "feel". It is true that in smaller decks you cannot fit the range of ploys and upgrate cards to adapt to different opponents. But it is also true that you always draw the same number of cards regardless of the deck size, thus having effectively the same amount of cards available for each game (not counting dual of wits and so on). In bigger decks you may draw the critical card once in a while that will give you the game, but we overlook the number of times that you simply do not draw that card and all the clutter makes your warband less efficient.

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I think it depends on how many truly critical ploys you have in the deck. In chosen axes, for example, inspiration strikes is so key to swinging momentum early on. Increasing the odds of drawing it early by having a smaller deck. However, with multiple push ploys, you should always be able to get one to counter the earthquake/great concussion issues.

 

I played 20 at the weekend. It was solid and consistent. I'm looking at tweaking for 22, or 24 with duel of wits.

9 hours ago, Tutenkharnage said:

Two things are true about power decks larger than 20 cards:

  1. Even if you mulligan your opening hand, you won't see all the cards without (1) including redraws or (2) spending activations drawing cards.
  2. The more redraws you add, the more heavily you tilt your deck toward objectives because the redraws' only purpose is to draw other cards. In other words, a 20-card deck that includes Duel of Wits is effectively a 19-card deck consisting of 9 ploys, 10 upgrades, and the ability to draw an extra two live cards once per game, assuming you ever draw DoW. This isn't a big deal if you include DoW in a 20- or 22-card deck, but it becomes a bigger deal as you add more redraws.

Do you mean tilting the deck towards upgrades? Because that I agree with. I like duel of wits for countering a bad second round hand and for cycling

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Although opening-hand mulligans are rarer for smaller decks, the difference is so small that it’s hardly worth thinking about. For example, if you always mulligan your opening hand of power cards when you draw four or five upgrades, then this is how often you’ll do so:

20-card power deck: 15.2%

32-card power deck: 16.6%

The difference between these two is roughly 1.4%, which means that it will come up once every 68.5 games. 

The disaster scenario, of course, is that you’ll mulligan into another hand of four or five upgrades! Sounds terrible, but again, it rarely comes up:

20-card power deck: 0.7%

32-card power deck: 1.6%

The difference between the two is roughly 0.9%, and you’ll notice this difference once every 104 games or so. 

Another fun fact: If you rigidly mulligan every time you draw three upgrades in your opening hand, the odds that you’ll redraw to three or more upgrades is nearly 43%, which is practically three out of seven. Don’t do this! :)

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