Which is better to have in mind when building a deck, a high handsize character or card drawing power?

Think of Leona** vs Hugo*, could Leona** win? There is enough protection for a low vitality character until he/she sets up the kill?

Both, but drawing wins, no contest.

Bigger handsize, smaller vitality. More often than not, all those burnings of Aquakinesis and TBTA end up not just committing your cards, but fill you with superfluous cards.

If you ran Leona with no card draw (not like she has any) versus say *Huitzil* with 4x Aquakinesis and 4x TBTA/Familial Loyalty, I'd say Huitzil has the upperhand.

Without a doubt, bigger handsize.

There's so many ways to get rid of foundations, and in general negate your card draw things. Oh, 2x Bigger They Are on turn 1? Let me Ira Spinta those into your momentum. Oh, playing Hugo? Let me Tag Along your ability and lock you up at your 4HS no ability [until he starts playing attacks, but even then if Hugo has no draw, he cannot afford to discard cards].

Martial Arts Champion, too.

Sure, there are answers to the answers, but when you're a smaller handsize, what's the chance that you draw both your threat [be it card draw, a combo piece, whatever] AND more answers than your opponent has removal? The bigger HSer starts out with card advantage, and can easily leverage that advantage to make even more card advantage. And with so many cards like Amy's Assistance, Battle Prowess, Stand Off, etc., that 14vitality doesn't look so terrible -- and more importantly, even if you build a deck that can crash through that without really needing a ton of cards, good luck pulling that off against the Earth decks fronting 30+ vitality faces. You'll have 1 good matchup... when you start with more cards, you have a better chance to make any matchup favorable.

[btw, Leona can run Hulking Brute to turn into a monster 10HSer when you're spamming foundations, which is Earth's #1 specialty]

Wafflecopter said:

Seconded... Handsize is much better. But handsize + draw is what strong decks are made of... meaning if you are lower handsize you have to overcompensate to keep up.

The biggest reason a large handsize is better is because of the initial turn of the game and the cards accessible by a mulligan. You have a 60 card deck, mulligan with a 5hser to see 10/60, a 6hser sees 12/60 (20% more cards), and 7hs 14/20... Needless to say good players know what they need from their deck early to take down the character across from them, a higher handsize highlights an experienced players knowledge of their opponent's deck. Keep in mind, winning with a low hs is very possible, but you will only see it happen in the best of players hands, becuase they are playing from behind.

The reason you are seeing lower hs do better (i.e. Bishamon/Gief) is their majority use of foundations. Drawing 3-4 foundations is easy if 95% of the deck is foundations, so their 5 card mulligan is simply to draw the 3-4 foundations that go 3 diff 3 diff - 3 diff - 3 diff - 4 diff... The Bishamon can play 4-5 difficulty cards first turn becuase everything in their deck is a 4/5, then when they only need low checks use their ability to mill you and hitting your bad checks aren't that penalizing. (oddly enough, this logic indicates that if FFG continues to have hs disparity, it seems it is getting better with lots of 6s and significanty weaker 7s, than they need to give 5/6hs different win conditions, ones that change the composition of thier decks, all attacks, all foundations, etc.)

Reducing risk, or leveraging your risk-reward the best you can is what you will need to do to be sucessful.

- dut

Wafflecopter said:

Wafflecopter fanboy level +1

I agree with every word in this post. Especially the mention of Leona <3

By the way, in an actual Hugo v. Leona matchup, Leona will win at least 80% of the time, depending on her build. She tanks better than he can. - his higher vitality means that he simply eats the hits as he sets up; because she's less able to eat the hits, she's going to dance around them with card advantage.

Also agree with "handsize + draw" statement.

Iv always been a fan of balencing them out.
I play many 6 handers with card draw, this gives you good starting hands, better health, and the option of a bigger hand size later.
all in all i prefer this to going one way or another, but i will if the character is super enough.
i am at the moment running Felicia and Dariya off of water with aquas and TBTA and Familial, im also running a Jivatma off of earth with hugos draw cards, all seem to work very well because of the fact they have average health to live with, good hand to start and the ability to draw more for later game (or early depending on when the cards hit the staging area)

Just my 2 pence. or cents if u realy want to be picky hehe .

Theo

The most imporant thing is to have enough cards in your hand to do what you need to do each turn. larger handsize excels at not letting you get behind in the early game (or helps you get a head), while draw power helps prevent you from getting destroyed in the late game by simply being overwhelmed by your opps card advantage.

basically both are good, and hugo Vs Leona, ya 2 throws could just kill her, that's life. get some life gain in there

I agree with most of what's been posted, with the exception of this: Calling the newer Hugo a 4-hander or Seong Mi-na a 5-hander is like calling Galford2 a 5-hander. Those numbers are printed only and don't reflect their abilities printed right on them. For example, Gaira can run all of the Hugo support, but there's nothing on his card that boosts his printed 5 hand-size, he's dependent on drawing into and playing cards that allow him to draw.

Also, I think 80% is a bit of slight to Hugo, Mr. MegaGeese. I'd think closer to 67%. If you can draw into Domination quickly and get off a throw, (maybe with an Inhuman Perception to help out against pesky Holding Ground) that could be all she wrote for Heidern's adopted daughter, quicker than she'd expect.

Sorry, Chief, but Criminal Past says no to that.

As does 3 copies of Stand Off + blocking, or The Harder They Fall (which is woefully underplayed).

And good luck getting all four necessary foundations out before She builds a wall of 10+ foundations =/

Or playing it at all, if it's the Hungry for Dinner variety. Prepare to play as Shelby's Cody...but with Hugo.

Which is better, hand size or drawing, is utterly relative to the deck you are playing and what it is attempting. The number of cards you have at your disposal is only relativley as useful as how many you can play at any given time, which is relative to there type, and the overall difficulties and control checks in the deck, in tandem with other things.

I've seen 6 Hand sizers with no drawing beat 7hsers with a ton of it.

I've seen alex decks beat 8 hsers and lose to seoung mi na.

It's is utterly subjective to the character, the nature of their abilities, symbols, and decks strategy.

In a void I would say HS is more important because it gives the opening player that much more ability to have a good opening turn (also because of mulligans), which has a cascading effect though out the course of the game. But then that is only as useful as the player who's running it has the ability to capitalize upon it.

Which is better?

Both, stacked on the same character.

I imagine there's a point of diminishing returns for card draw, and I also imagine it comes pretty early.

There's a point where you can find all of the cards in your deck that you would reasonably want. Once you're sitting on 10 cards, other than using them as a commodity (paying for Ways of Punishment, Experienced Combatant, etc), you're really not much better off with 11 or 12 cards, or even 15. You'll be limited to around 5 cards per turn before you have to start committing foundations (at an increasing rate) to pass any check, and committing several to pass a bad roll. All those extra cards are just extra options -- and since you're not running Order and Law, you probably are still following the usual rules of deckbuilding where you run 3x or 4x of almost all of your cards. Maybe you drew some extra Program Malfunctions that really improve your board control... but you had to tap foundations to draw those PMs, and risk tapping more to pass them + the other cards you want to play. And unlike cards-in-hand, the number of ready foundations is always important - want to block that fast attack? Needs foundations. See a Psycho Style anywhere on the board? Hope you have lots of foundations. Want to use some abilities? You probably want foundations.

Of course, there are some times when the number of cards in your hand might be extremely important -- if your opponent is running a heavy discard/Fio deck, then holding 5 cards at the end of your turn might force them to (at the very least) commit an immense share of their resources to knocking each of those cards out of your hand to set up their kill. But in the normal flow, especially in a control deck (and I would argue that aggro and maybe even hybrid shouldn't really run card draw tech unless the numbers are favorable, a la Aquakinesis), your board position is likely going to be more important than the size of your hand.

I think I'm just going to stop there, because I'm starting to lose track of what I'm writing . Maybe I'll write a proper article with drafts and revisions and **** later...

tl;dr do you really need to run 4x Aquakinesis 4x Bigger They Are 4x BRT 4x Kabuki Artist 4x Taking in Students 4x Kuzuryu Reppa in your 8HS Gill deck?