Years ago I bought on impulse a game where you had pre-constructed deck that you cannot modified.

I think that the game had about 6 different decks. I bought 2 to start with and we had so much fun on the first night that I bought the rest on the next day.

The game was called Fight! and it was a French edition of a game called Brawl by Cheapass games: https://cheapass.com/brawl/

We really had a lot of fun of picking a deck and playing a few games with it to learn its strength and weakness and then to exchange the deck with your opponent.

If KeyForge can give me the same feeling, I am sold and will surely buy a few decks to play with friends.

Remember this game. Got all the decks still in my shelves

There is still a major difference thought: I bought all the decks once and I knew what I was buying because it was not a blind purchase. The deck was around 7€ each back in the days if I recall well. There were 6 or 7 different decks in total and you were done. Besides the mechanics were about speed as the game was real time and not played on player's turns. The cards were all pretty standard and only the quantity of each type of card was changing from a deck to another.

With KeyForge if you ant to play a single specific house you need to get lucky or buy at least 3 decks. IF you hope for a combination of 2, that skyrockets to 2/7*1/6 =1/21 so 21 decks to have statistically 1 time the combination you are looking for. And it goes to 1 chances of of 35 decks to have the exact combination of 3 houses you are looking for. And this is just stats. Because applied in real life, you could possibly buying hundreds of decks and never get what you are looking for just because the decsk will ne be produced and shipped to each retailer with an even composition of house combination.

I don't think a lot of us will be chasing a certain deck, what we are chasing will be a game we can spend some time playing and having fun.

Having a specific deck does not equate to fun, I think by now most of us have considered that the decks we buy will be random and have put that aside as not being a fundamental reason for why will enjoy the game. In fact I think for the most part that is the very reason why many of us will enjoy the game.

As for your maths there is a chance that 5/7 times I don't get the house I want and therefore get my two chosen houses on the second and third try. So that may end up being a little closer to 1/10 to 1/12. Perhaps some one with better maths skills than me can fix me up?

6 minutes ago, Amanal said:

I don't think a lot of us will be chasing a certain deck, what we are chasing will be a game we can spend some time playing and having fun.

This right here.

All of the complaining I see about this game are because people are trying to fit it into what they already know of CCGs. It doesn't fit there, its something new and different and will require a new mindset to enjoy and play competitively (if that's your thing).

1 minute ago, netherspirit1982 said:

All of the complaining I see about this game are because people are trying to fit it into what they already know of CCGs. It doesn't fit there, its something new and different and will require a new mindset to enjoy and play competitively (if that's your thing).

Mate this game is going to be a screaming fit of laughter even if you lose. Winning will be a bonus!!

Not sure where you came out with the 5/7 chances not to get the 2 houses you look for.

The calculations goes as follows, assuming all cards and factions are randomized properly:

There is 2 chances out of 7 that a deck will have one of the 2 factions you want: 2/7

There assuming you got the first one, there is a 1 chance out of 6 that the same deck will have the second faction: 1/6

fF you are looking for only a 2 factions combo and will be happy with any other for the third that gives you (2/7)*(1/6)=2/42=1/21

That means you have 20 chances out of 21 to NOT get the two factions you are looking for. or 1chance out of 21 to get them. Theoretically.

If you are really chasing a particular faction combination then I think you should play with friends and trade decks. That way you aren't trying to shoulder the entire financial burden of finding that perfect deck for you. Also eventually I'm sure a secondary market will emerge for this game. I'm not sure how they will grade decks, but surely having a flat fee to buy your dream deck will be much more affordable than the open ended expense of hitting the slot machine X amount of times.

All that said I think that kind of goes against the spirit of this game. I think the idea is about exploring the decks you get rather than trying to chase stuff. That's the feeling I got from RG's talk at Gencon. Capturing the feeling of early MtG before the internet made it easy for everyone to know everything about a game and it's card pool. Of course the designers intent and the way the audience will treat the game are two different things

Just now, Hellvlad said:

Not sure where you came out with the 5/7 chances not to get the 2 houses you look for.

I am looking for 2 houses from 3. So of the three icons the first, second or third may be the one I don't care about.

So you end up with a 2/7 *1/6 * 1 chance of getting the houses you want on the first and second icon.

But you can also miss the first icon 5/7 times and get the houses 2/6 and 1/5 for the second and third icons.

Also you can get the first icon miss the second and get the third. So you add another 2/7 * 4/6 * 1/6 to everything.

so all up: (2/7 * 1/6 * 1) + (5/7 * 2/6 * 1/5) + (1/7 * 4/6 * 1/5)

0.04762 + 0.04762 + 0.0190 = 0.11424 or about 1/8.75 lets just round up and say 1:9 random draws should contain 2 houses you want.

2 hours ago, Amanal said:

I am looking for 2 houses from 3. So of the three icons the first, second or third may be the one I don't care about.

So you end up with a 2/7 *1/6 * 1 chance of getting the houses you want on the first and second icon.

But you can also miss the first icon 5/7 times and get the houses 2/6 and 1/5 for the second and third icons.

Also you can get the first icon miss the second and get the third. So you add another 2/7 * 4/6 * 1/6 to everything.

so all up: (2/7 * 1/6 * 1) + (5/7 * 2/6 * 1/5) + (1/7 * 4/6 * 1/5)

0.04762 + 0.04762 + 0.0190 = 0.11424 or about 1/8.75 lets just round up and say 1:9 random draws should contain 2 houses you want.

My mistake I forgot to count for the fact that abc combination would not be the same as cba.

Because the places are switchable, it's just gets : ((2/7)*(1/6))*3 since there are 3 possible ways to arrange the same result. That gives you 3/21 or 1/7. Odds are definitively better, that's a 1 chance in 7 decks to get your 2 factions combined properly

Back to the original topic, I too enjoy non-modifiable decks in certain cases. For example, Summoner Wars. I never, ever deckbuild in that game. I like being able to grab a deck and go. And each deck does its own thing in cool ways. I love that game.

Here though, I'm not sure "each deck does its own thing in cool ways" would really apply. Also, I could pick and choose the summoner wars decks I wanted. That's not the case here.

Hopefully you guys are right that this procedural generation thing will build decks that all at least have some strategy to them, but that sounds like science fiction to me.

9 hours ago, Supertoe said:

Back to the original topic, I too enjoy non-modifiable decks in certain cases. For example, Summoner Wars. I never, ever deckbuild in that game. I like being able to grab a deck and go. And each deck does its own thing in cool ways. I love that game.

Here though, I'm not sure "each deck does its own thing in cool ways" would really apply. Also, I could pick and choose the summoner wars decks I wanted. That's not the case here.

Hopefully you guys are right that this procedural generation thing will build decks that all at least have some strategy to them, but that sounds like science fiction to me.

Well, we are living in a cyberpunk future, so sci-fi is within our grasp.

On 8/3/2018 at 1:43 PM, Hellvlad said:

Because applied in real life, you could possibly buying hundreds of decks and never get what you are looking for just because the decsk will ne be produced and shipped to each retailer with an even composition of house combination. 

If you're here for fun with random deck then - you will buy one from the store's shelf. If you want the particular one? You probably will be able to buy it from another player, like you can buy singles from any other card game. Of course you can try your luck and buy random one hoping it will match colors you want. I don't see the problem here.

On 8/3/2018 at 10:08 AM, Amanal said:

about 1/8.75 lets just round up and say 1:9 random draws should contain 2 houses you want.

Does this mean that the odds of 2 decks having the same 2-house combination would be around 1/77? Hopefully they have some kind of process in place to prevent that from happening in the starter sets. Would be a bit of a bummer if the 2 unique decks provided are that similar. Not to mention the incredibly unlucky few who might end up with 2 decks with 3 matching houses.

No, any two decks can have the same two houses 1/9 times, that doesn't change.

The way I think this works is that a computer generates the 3 houses at random, with the deck name, archon art and such. There will probably be a check at this point to ensure the archon art and deck name is unique and if so it will be stored away to prevent another copy being produced. At this point the cards are randomly selected and again checked for uniqueness, I think here there are some fancy computer checks to ensure that the deck meets certain conditions, people have been saying if card A looks for card B for an effect then they have also had card B in their decks. Once the deck gets the tick of approval it is sent to a digital printer and printed, then cut and packed.

Now this process is for the most part when it comes to the houses random. So after that deck is printed and the next one is ready, then there is a 1/35 change it will have the same three houses. If there are 12 decks in each box, then I think just based off the basic randomness of thing there will be times you get 2 or more of the decks sharing the same houses.

Even if you do end up with the same 3 houses there are 50 or so cards in each house and you get 12. So even should that happen you'll still get two quite different decks.