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Casual Play Rules


Mr. White

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I'm not too interested in Shadespire as a competitive title, but for a quick way to play games in the AoS universe with awesome minis. I built three 'casual play' Shadespire decks last night based on the casual deck thread in this forum.
 
However, I saw some dude post this at BGG and it looks really neat.  Seems real easy to set up and keep organized. Just give the warbands their faction specific cards and do the following:
 
Quote

"I too wanted a fast game with preconstructed decks and also to keep the distinctiveness of each faction rather than just using the best cards. I use the war band-specific cards to make a ploy and upgrades deck. For variety’s sake I’ll remove six of them randomly and replace them with six random draws from a deck containing all the faction-less ploys and upgrades. My opponent will do it the same so we are both equally disadvantaged by not building power-decks. It’s quite fun and much more thematic."

 
So, here's there are several upsides to that 'discard 6 random cards' method.
 
As I was building these decks last night, I was thinking...what happens when I get new warbands? The Leader cards? Will I need to go in and re-tweak each 'casual balance' deck I just built? That sort of maintenance is a headache. What about the cards that are clearly inferior to others? Will they ever get used?
 
However, with this method, No matter the expansion, all the neutral cards get dumped together. Players make their decks with the very small, faction specific number of cards. This is easy. Then, just toss and draw 6 neutrals. New and supbar cards will get shuffled into the mix and show up in game from time to time. These neutral draw piles can even be sorted by 'season' or what not for more variety.
 
This will also keep the game fresh as decks will be different each time, but still generally play to a warband's specific style.
 
I like this a lot. It has really amped up my excitement and appreciation for the game.
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This approach is a good start but might suffer from some drawbacks. Namely:

  1. Some faction-specific sets are better than others.
  2. Random draws will increase the likelihood of lopsided games.
  3. Many card combinations won't make sense, such as a deck filled with a lot of score-immediately objectives and Flawless Strategy.
  4. If you or your group is less experienced, you'll be dealing with a lot of new cards on a regular basis, rather than familiarizing yourself with a handful of universal cards.
  5. If you or anyone in your group takes a liking to the game, those players won't be able to customize their decks.

I like the idea of emphasizing faction-specific cards, which has the dual benefits of emphasizing the uniqueness of each warband and giving players a small number of cards they're likely to see on a regular basis. If you're looking to expand on this idea just a smidge, consider trying something like this (tweaked to your own taste, of course):

  1. Enforce a "faction fraction" rule, much like the Agents of S.I.G.M.A.R. YouTube videos do. They force each player to take four faction-specific objectives, as well as faction-specific ploys and upgrades totaling half the cards in the power card deck. So if you're building standard 20-card power decks, you'd have to take five faction-specific ploys and five faction-specific upgrades.
  2. For players who have a few games under their belt and would like more control over their decks, consider picking a subset of those faction-specific cards and letting the players pick the rest. For example, you might pick two or three faction-specific objectives for each warband, as well as three or four faction-specific ploys and an equal number of faction-specific upgrades, with the players filling in around the edges.
  3. Similarly, create a system for putting some universal cards into each deck, or perhaps allowing each player to draft a card in turn. Or maybe you could put the cards into categories, such as "tier 1," "tier 2," and so on, and then allow, say, each player to pick two tier 1 cards (ploys, upgrades, or one of each), three tier 2 cards, four tier 3 cards, and ... I dunno, one tier 4 card? Whatever you consider the bottom tier, just so someone has to come up with some kind of jank. Or maybe you can create sets of similar cards: for example, a push ploy, a +damage card, a +Wounds card, a defensive card, and a weapon upgrade. Each player can simply pick one, depending on what they'd like to do this game. Or maybe you can put the cards in those categories--pushes, +damage, extra action, +Wounds, defensive, weapon upgrade, etc.--and limit each player to picking no more than one each, with one or two "double dips" allowed.

Anyway, take all this with a grain of salt. And if anything inspires you to improve upon your system, so much the better!

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@Tutenkharnage

You make some good points about the balance of the faction specific decks. I also like your three options here, particularly the first one where half the deck is faction specific decks. The third option, setting up tiers, seems like a lot of analysis to determine categories. I guess the silver lining on the faction specific decks being off balance, is it creates tiers...like Blood Bowl or something. Then would allow me to play a 'weaker' deck while new, or less frequently, players can be pointed towards a 'stronger' one. Make any sense?

I guess one of the goals would be to make getting into the game on a game night fairly easy. I fear if I give the players the option for constructing half their decks (or what not) then we'll spend a large portion of the night reading all the cards. Deckbuilding is a lengthy process in isolation... it seems trying to do that while also navigating a group, and all their choices, sounds like an evening's activity in itself. But I could be wrong. I don't come from a CCG background where I understand cubes/draft nights are workable solutions.

I feel there's got to be a way to make this a somewhat casual playing game though.

Maybe simply just build the decks as constructed in that other thread and just play?

 

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As a member of the original Blood Bowl Rules Committee, I understand the tier talk quite clearly. I definitely see your point about introducing analysis paralysis before the game starts, so here's a thought: prepare half the decks, and then spread the rest in buckets, such as damage, pushes, defensive, etc. Separate the cards into piles, and have each player take a random card from each pile. This will maximize their exposure to different cards while keeping the mechanics relatively easy and perhaps also making the decks reasonably balanced.

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You could also use the 7 wonders mechanics with the Universal cards. For example, after the players have chosen their fixed number of faction-specific cards, they start to complete the objective, upgrade, and ploy decks. For each, players draw randomly a smany cards as cards left to complete the given deck. They choose one card, and give the rest of their hand to the player on their right. Once they are done, they repeat for the upgrade deck, taking one card at a time and giving the rest of the hand to the player on the left, and then change the direction again and repeat for the ploy deck.

This way you add some strategy in the deck building process, it is fair, and becaus eplayers take one card at a time, you will be reducing analysis paralysis. 

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@RafaBO I'm slightly confused.

A player gets his faction specific card, then they take the neutral objective deck and draw randomly up to 12? Or do they read through the whole neutral objective deck and choose? Repeating this step for the upgrade and ploys.

It seems if players are reading through the neutral decks, then passing them on, it could still take a loooong time. Those decks aren't small with all the warband expansions available.

I haven't played 7 Wonders.

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@Mr. WhiteAfter all players have gotten their share of faction-specific cards (e.g. 4), they draw a hand of 8 cards, randomly. Everyone does so at the same time from a common deck that contains all neutral cards. They don't get to read the whole deck, just the hand of 8 cards they got. They will choose one outof these 8, and give the remaining 7 to another player (the player on their right). Because everyone does so at the same time, this player will receive another 7 cards from the player on his left. Is it better?

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11 minutes ago, RafaBO said:

@Mr. WhiteAfter all players have gotten their share of faction-specific cards (e.g. 4), they draw a hand of 8 cards, randomly. Everyone does so at the same time from a common deck that contains all neutral cards. They don't get to read the whole deck, just the hand of 8 cards they got. They will choose one outof these 8, and give the remaining 7 to another player (the player on their right). Because everyone does so at the same time, this player will receive another 7 cards from the player on his left. Is it better?

Ah. Gotcha!

That's a cool idea. It'll give each player a little bit of feeling like they customized their deck without it being an all night affair.

Cheers!

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That’s a good idea; Blood Rage uses it. The only drawback is that in a two-player game, you’ll know which cards your opponent has (well, except the first one). Building on that idea, though, you could build half of each player’s objectives, ploys, and upgrades, hand the player a random collection of cards equal to the number of cards he needs plus two, and let him decide which two he doesn’t want. In this example, each player would have to look at eight objectives, seven ploys, and seven upgrades. Adjust the numbers to your tastes. 

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