Great post crowdedmind, indeed drawing cards without replacement follows a hypergeometric distribution. I didn't follow dormouse's math either but that's not really the point.

Last night working with the math I calculated the probability of beginning (the first 8 cards) of being dealt 1 Judgement and 1 Will provided you have 3 of each in your deck. With a 50 card deck it was 11% and with 55 cards it dropped down to 10%. This 1% is really what all the fuss is over. I see the benefit of a slim deck, but I also can see the benefits those 5 extra cards could provide.

The optimal Magic deck is played at 60 cards and exactly 60 cards because of the sideboard. Without the sideboard who knows what size decks we would see?

Probability is figured out by how many cards are in the deck to be drawn from and how many times the card that you want to draw appears. The probability of drawing a spade in one draw in a standard 52 playing card deck is 13/52. Each card I draw alters the probability of my chances of drawing a spade (assuming that I draw a card other than a spade). The math wasn't wrong, I just used a far simpler and easier to follow method than you did... one which in my tests holds far more true to the real world experience. You are expressing the chances of not drawing the card... I'm talking about the probability of that card being drawn. They are not the same thing and the math is different for them.

Saying I can draw more cards out of a larger deck is not disingenuous. Because the game has an auto loss deck rule anything that reaches that threshold becomes a major risk. You talked about drawing your entire deck -1 card as being ideal, but it fails to take into account your ability to play the necessary cards to achieve victory before your next draw and any discard effects your opponent may have. The reality is aggressively drawing from a small deck is dangerous and with no guarantee of drawing the cards you need to force a rush win puts you in danger of losing not by anything other than being outlasted. This is an excellent example of looking at something purely by theory and not recognizing that it simply doesn't work that way every time in the real world.

In this particular case you are saying that your deck will function best by getting every card in hand but the last card and you will have the cards necessary to win before drawing your last card. A rush deck built with a swarm of low cost units and the appropriate efficient tactics could do that... but a control deck couldn't. They'd have the cards necessary for the lock but would not be able to deal enough damage in that single turn to prevent the auto loss.

Which supports my statements made previously on this topic both here on the FFG forums and on BGG, that deck size is more dependent on what you want to accomplish and how you hope to accomplish it than on the idea of a minimum sized deck with the maximum number of each card allowed. A rush deck should be as close to 50 cars as you can get yourself. It should also have means by which to dig deeper into your deck that are not dependent on putting units in your quest zone and ideally a way to pull more resources without having to put units in your kingdom zone. Your deck is based on throwing a lot of cheap units into the battlefield zone and swarming your opponent before he has had a chance to get his deck working. This would indicate half your cards should be units, the only tactics you should have should either increase damage in combat, remove defenders, or give you some form of card or resource advantage to get more units from your deck into your hand and from your deck or hand into play. Supports should be giving you the increased draw and resources to continue to flood the board quickly or they should increase the damage you are going to do. Quests are near worthless.

A control deck however is a completely different animal. You need to be able to control tempo and get your lock in place. This means you need to invest in the longer game, meaning you are going to need ways to nerf attacks and neuter troublesome units. You need away to build up your zones while tearing down your opponents. As of yet there are no rush builds for a control deck. The best you can do is get lucky to get the appropriate damage canceling cards into two zones in short order and work from there. I'm not saying a 100 card deck is the way to go, but I am saying that having more instances of an effect in a larger deck can increase the probability of drawing that effect over a smaller deck with fewer instances of that effect.

Now this does leave one thing undiscussed a small deck with built in redundancy where an effect appears the same proportion to other cards as it does in a larger deck. In this case yes, a smaller deck will o course give you the greater probability of drawing the effect... but at the same time forces your deck to be extremely narrow in focus, ignoring flexibility and diversity in favor of a guaranteed pull. This is where a sideboard becomes necessary. You no longer have the space to maintain answers to all the common attacks and shore up the decks natural weaknesses to specific counters and be able to run an alternate strategy, so you artificially create a pool of cards by which you can swap from.

Creating a sideboard takes skill, balancing what is main-decked and what is side-boarded both before the game begins and in between each game takes skill... a different skill than building a well balanced deck and playing the odds when it comes to meta-gaming. The player no longer has to worry about balancing the deck to the same degree, instead they build flexibility and diversity into the sideboard.

The challenge for me in a game like A Game of Thrones is knowing there is no sideboard. I must create my deck with enough flexibility or speed to answer most problems I face and trust in my ability to out play and out think my opponent to get my win when I was wrong about reading the meta-game or facing a deck that is the perfect counter to my own.

Something that was brought up but glossed over is none of the LCG's have cards or effects like Circle of Protection. The lack of single cards which completely neuter entire factions means there is usually a way out of any bad match up if you have a well built deck and you don't make mistakes. Watch a grandmaster at chess spot anyone less a couple of pieces and still beat them soundly and you have an idea of what I'm talking about.

While I think Dormouse's point about a larger deck having more possible options since you can afford to run more hammers in Quest has a grain of truth, there seems to be a big problem with this argument to me.

WH:I is quite a fast game, really. Turn 1 and turn 2 with tuned decks running decent amounts of disruption (Pillage, Lobber Crew, Demolition, Flames of Tzeentch, etc) are often critical to winning or losing. Running a control deck, having cheap cards like Innovation or Contested Village in my opening hand may well mean I don't just lose if a rush deck has some disruption. There are not very many good cheap cards, so it is hard to play a lot of redundant stuff that does the same thing (this is one reason why the Skaven decks are good). Given how strong rush decks are right now, it would seem like a bad idea to run significantly more cards than 50. I am way more worried about losing before I get to actually play something (anything!) in each zone and have it stay there than I am about being decked. I cannot remember the last time I lost to decking - it's certainly been more than a month. When I was starting to play and the decks were much slower, then sure, that happened sometimes.

As for the maths, well, yeah, crowdedmind is correct, I am afraid that Dormouse's maths is indeed wrong. Your chance of having a 3x card in your opening hand is not 3/50 or 3/42. The maths term for these calculations is combinations. The hypergeometric distribution thingy is just an easier way of working out the answers without doing all the factorials. Just google permutations and combinations and you'll come up with hundreds of examples. "Real world experience" doesn't matter for stuff like that, it's just maths.

As for the sideboard vs. no sideboard, I maintain that having no sideboard available means you are encouraged to play narrow decks, not discouraged, since it's unlikely that people have, e.g., maindeck Mob Up! against your Rune of Valaya/Gifts/Thrower deck unless there is a ton of Rune/Gifts decks in the environment.

Um... no the probability of drawing a card is the number of times the card appears in the deck by the cards in the deck, in the example I showed it is 3/42. Period. This is basic expression of probability. Hypergeometric shows the percentage of not drawing a card. They are not the same thing. Google probabilities. We are talking past each other here. I understand how to figure for the decreasing chances of my not drawing a specific card every turn, but that is not the same thing as what the base probability is that I will draw a card, and it is not six of one and half a dozen of another, you can't just replace probability of a draw with the percentage chance of not drawing a card. They are different expressions, they tell us different things, and the math to figure them out is different. Different does not equal wrong.

I've played and lost too control decks that can win two games in 50 minutes... what control players are going to have to be on the look out for are rush players stalling. If I build a rush deck that can win with all cylinders firing in three turns and we get to turn four only my good sportsmanship is going to keep me from taking a couple of minutes for every decision in hopes of running the control player out of time and therefor keep him from gaining his two wins.

Clamatius said:

And this is why we have rockets blowing up on launch pads. Maths are expressions of the real world and when what we see around us does not match with the math, it is usually the application of the math in exclusion to the real world that is the culprit. Miscalculation, misapplication of math, etc.

Clamatius said:

Eight years of competitive play in a non-linear game like Thrones designed by the same man and published by the same company disagrees... but feel free to prove me wrong. Take a look at the final four decks for the last two Gencons and Castle Stahlecks for both 1 v 1 and multi-player and show me the narrow decks.

Have actually experienced competitive play in a game with multiple fronts for combat in a game with non-linear card draw and resource production, or is this theory?

Game of Thrones is a different albeit somewhat similar game, so your point is theory too, no?

Your point largely seems to be that you have played AGoT a lot so you must be right, rather than addressing the actual logic behind people's arguments.

I agree with the point that metagame problems due to not having sideboards can be avoided via excellent game design. However, as ddm5182 pointed out in the other thread, it seems that given the small team sizes at FFG a format with better capability for "self-healing" is better than having the designers constantly on a wobbly tightrope with little room for error.

Oh yes, I absolutely agree that what I am operating from is theory, albeit theory based on long time experience with a much more similar game, produced by the same designer, published by the same company, and shepherded by the same development group. This does not equate to me automatically being correct, though most of my time was pointing out the numerous flaws in the arguments about the need of a sideboard for this game before getting distracted by the min-max mantra, I feel enough vindication that the designer and developers also agree with me... though if it chases away players before they even try to play under this format and learn to grow and adapt to it, it may end up being a Pyrrhic victory.

So far the team has done a good job with this game and Thrones about keeping things healthy and where balance issues pop up they seem to be fixed within the cycle itself or within the next. Add to that the apparent policy of rotating specific troublesome cards rather than entire blocks I think things are going to be all right.

Stand By Me and Christine both had the same writer (Stephen King) and the same studio (Columbia Tri-Star), but I'm pretty sure no one would confuse the two, y'know?

Anecdotal! ANECDOTAL!!!!!!!

*plb plb plb plb plbb* Meep meep! *Pyowwwwwww.......*

Turns out that Magic and Netrunner had the same designer too, and I've played a bunch of both. For some reason my last Netrunner opponent objected when I tried to play a bunch of Magic cards...

dormouse said:

- I remember when somebody dismissed other opinions, based on experience on MtG and other card games because that won't count (even that obvibiusly the 2 game have so many similarities).

- I also remember that somebody mentioned that he could win many games in AGoT because he digged up some long forgotten cards/combos. It seems far from well balanced. (I must also add that the local AGoT players I spoken with insist that some "houses" are much stronger than others)

Sometimes it seems dormouse that you decided that only your opinion is what is based on a solid ground... I don't know why.

BTW, I won't be driven away form W:I because there is no sideboard, and no apparent game balance, but you could be sure that I won't appear in any tournament to play rock-papper-scissor or a test of precognition (I don't even have a crystall ball yet) to dream up what combos I will face from every card ever printed.

I wouldn't be arguing if the different sides would stand on an equal ground, but it's not the case, but the sideboardless enviroment favours in the long run Order highly, thanks to the fact that only they are getting generic response effects. (maybe High Elves Disdain is the most prominent member of the club). This is started to turning into MtG where no matter what your plan was when your oppoent have a simple 2 mana counterspell. The only thing because control decks don't define the metagame yet, that skaven based rush became highly overpowered (capable of a turn 3 win, but only if the control deck won't draw responses). I wouldn't call this balance.

I choosed W:I above MtG because it was more flavourfull, and more close to the "two side fights in the field of battle" feeling. The later part is slowly disappering with every single expansion, if you want to play competitively. For playing with friends it's still there.

I think I stop ranting now.

dormouse said:

I'm not sure how to explain this further, but you are wrong. You take away the chance of seeing 0 of a card from 100% because you want to know the chances of drawing not-0 of that card. If you want to see one in your opening hand and see two you still have the one you need. Hypergeometric distribution can show you the odds of drawing exactly 1 of a card if your want, but that's not particularly useful. you didn't use a simpler and easier method than I, you used an incorrect method.

MtG is not even remotely more similar to W:I than Thrones is... is this a stance either of you are seriously taking? I'm not trying to substitute my experience in Thrones for experience in W:I, I using my experience in Thrones to counter the constant stream of this is the way it is in Magic and therefor holds true for all games. I evidently needed to be more clear about that.

Yes Cain the card pool in Thrones and the nature of the LCG allows for cards to be forgotten and cycled out of metas because people want to play the new hotness. Yes a good player can read the meta game and exploit it by re-exploring cards that are no longer in vogue. This is no different than NFL teams moving to the passing game and away from running the running game, and visa versa. The clever coach will look at his roster and who is on the other teams and their coaches and develop a team that will best be able to take advantage of the field.

Finding out the probability of drawing a card where it is not a specific card that matters about drawing but the general card effect/purpose is not wrong. You may think it give no useful information, but that is your view point. You are welcome to it. Mine has served me well over the years in the games I've played, and that is what is important, that I have reaped real world benefits from it.

dormouse said:

to be clear : I never played AGoT, and I don't think that experience in that couldn't help in understanding W:I, but there are also many similarities with MtG that counts.

BTW, I really don't understand why was the last paragraph adressed to me. I always sad/tought that it matters and often decide games if you could draw the good effects in good time. Mainly this is why I don't want to water down my decks with "development only" anti-combo, anti-something cards in the future.

How is what games you've personally played relevant at all in a theory discussion? No one cares. Extrapolate your points based on logic, not from irrelevant comparisons. Arguing how "similar" games you've played before are to W:I as a basis for justifying your points is the dumbest thing I've read this week. Cut it out.

@ the sideboarding issue... the point is, any eternal format is going to eventually devolve into broken combos/strategies, barring a miracle of game design. If you believe in miracles, then we're golden, and you can dive into thought-experiment land with nary a care in the world that what we're talking about might ever apply to your "real world experience." For those of us more inclined to pessimism, the lack of sideboards suggests competitive deckbuilders are going to be faced with a problem: how do you combat what you expect to be the dominant broken strategy?

In theory, you are going to have 2 approaches. Assuming there are some narrow hate cards to stop the broken strategy (defining "narrow" as "bad unless specificallly played against the strategy it is designed to combat"), your first approach can be to find the deck shell that best incorporates as many of the good hate cards as you can without derailing your path to victory. Couple things to say on this. Note that I'm assuming the game designers' approach to broken strategies will be to print narrow hate cards. They could also ban the offenders (which would actually be a pretty good solution), or print cards that are good AND good hate cards at the same time. Usually the latter is going to result in yet another broken archetype, but this could be an interesting point of discussion; at any rate, since pessimism prevails with me at least, I'll assume this won't be successful at anything but spurring power creep. And lets assume for now that banning isnt going to happen. So, since we assume they will print narrow hate cards, now we note that sideboards allow many, many more decks to utilize the hate, because they don't face the burden of weakening all their other matchups by having to maindeck them. This allows for more varied deck construction in a meta with an oppressive dominant strategy.

The other path to victory is speed. If you can be faster than the broken deck, you can still win. So the most linear aggressive deck is also a reasonable choice, assuming it is at least competitive with the dominant deck.

There we go. Those are my starting premises. Can we have a discussion on why these are wrong, or right, without appealing to how many legos we've built and how similar legos are to W:I? Seriously.

I have built many legos in my time. I am pretty sure that given enough bricks I could build a decent warhammer. Good enough?

I could write a bunch of words here, but to cut it short, I agree with your analysis. Actually, they have already printed a bunch of narrow hate cards that are dead cards in many matchups. Isha's Blessing and Mob Up! spring to mind. From a game design point of view, I personally dislike this kind of "silver bullet" answer.

One interesting hypothetical that I was wondering about the other day: if you didn't have Deathmaster or Clan Moulder's Elite in the environment, what's the best deck? It's actually pretty hard to figure out because there are a lot of tier 2 decks right now that suddenly become competitive. If I had a banhammer out, I may go ahead and ban the Bolt Thrower too just because those decks are just no fun to play or to play against and it stifles a decent amount of the environment.

Interesting thought experiment. I'd guess Chaos or Dark Elf control is probably best, for having access to the most means of disruption. But I could definitely see a viable Dwarf/HE deck as a counter, especially to Chaos. You'd probably see an RPS meta... Dwarves/HE beat Chaos, Chaos beats DE, DE beats Dwarves/HE.

Orcs might still be viable but Squig Herders are a (very) far cry from Moulder's Elite, and without Deathmaster they lack a meaningful way to interact with problem units. The rush deck probably still runs a Skaven package feat. Greyseer but isnt nearly as barrrroken. I'd guess that deck ends up being the annoying deck that occasionally goes "turn 2 Spider Rider Spider Rider Choppa Choppa, burn your Battlefield, go?" but most of the time sputters out and lets the opponent get control. in other words, the "40% of the time, it works every time" deck.

I am not sure that the RPS works out that way - I think it's more complicated than that. DE scouts are pretty annoying when you're playing Chaos since you are often sandbagging removal in your hand. Try that matchup and you'll see what I mean, especially if they have Gutter Runners too -you can build DE as a kind of aggro-control deck that beats straight control. But yeah, dwarves/HE are problematic for Chaos - stuff like the Mountain Brigade with its giant rear end is tough to deal with if you were planning on killing things with damage.

And for sure the Orc deck you're describing would be that deck you'd hand to your friend who hadn't played much but wanted to play in a tournament. Better lucky than good, right?

ddm5182 said:

A couple of thoughts here:

1. The games he's played, if similar (which they sound like they are) are very much appropriate and germane to this discussion. Not being able to understand that sounds a lot more (to me) like the "dumbest thing I've read this week." The human brain constantly refers to comparisons to better understand other situations. Not very difficult to understand that, imho.

2. Tone it down a bit - you can make this point and still come across a lot less rudely. Is it really necessary to take up that particular attitude here?

Fine, point taken. The discussion was devolving into "the game i am comparing warhammer to is more 'similar' than the game you have experience with, therefore your argument is wrong and mine is right" and that's dumb, to say nothing of the inane "my real world experience > your maths" nonsense. Am I coming off harsh here? I guess. Sorry. I'd rather have discussion a few levels above that, though. Fair?

@hypothetical meta, I agree DE is probably where I'd want to be in that triangle. Do you think Chaos can't be built to beat DE? In that case the meta devolves into DE and Dwarves/HE(?) as tier 1, with Dwarves as a foil to Chaos @ tier 2. What beats DE? Presumably something that doesnt care about being scouted, preferably with resilient aggressive units. Might be an Order-based aggro deck, might be Orc rush. WTB this format instead of Skaven Skaven Skaven...

To DDM5182 - I didn't necessarily get that vibe that Dormouse was saying "I'm right because the game I'm most familiar with is more similar than the games your relating it to." I just interpreted his points as being, "if the game I'm using to base some of my experiential opinions on is more similar than the game you're coming from, well it would make sense that my experience would be more appropriate to examine more closely."

Of course I'll admit that is putting words in his mouth but honestly, that's how I see his posts. He's very confident in his opinions but that shouldn't upset anyone unnecessarily, by any means.

I'm glad my remarks didn't come off too harsh - rereading them after an hour or so, I realized that even my posts were borderline insulting in return and I apologize for any slight they may have dished out.

dormouse said:

dormouse said:

NFL teams do not, in fact, "move to the passing game and away from the running game". Teams establish an identity - not unlike cardgame decks, incidentally - by their personnel and their strategic planning, or coaching. The Baltimore Ravens have been a primarily running team since Bam Morris and Priest Holmes in the '90's and have remained so to last year's backfield of Ray Rice, Willis McGahee, and Le'Ron McClain. In that time, they've won only 1 Super Bowl. Despite this moderate success, they haven't changed their approach, even still. Conversely, the Indianapolis Colts have, of course, been a passing team ever since The Main Manning blew into town in '98. They, too, have won exactly 1 Super Bowl in that time. Moral of the story? NFL tigers don't change stripes too terribly often, and definitely not very quickly. This is only a point because it was woefully misrepresented in the aforequoted post. And you know, come to think of it, it's mighty ironic that you would mention a game where, after beginning the contest with an established lineup (starters/deck), it's the adjustments and 1-for-1 substitutions from a side pool of players (the bench/sideboard) that nearly always determine the winner............

And, as it happens, dormouse, why do you so willfully dive headlong into spike pits by drawing analogies and citing examples from topics that you prove to have absolutely no familiarity with? You're clearly a bright guy. Why would you not stick to theoretical debate and logical deconstruction - obvious fortes of yours - and leave the hypergeometrics and professional sports to legitimate authorities? You can carve out a plenty big plot of land in here specializing in your specialties without trying to craft an encyclopedic persona. The trick to persuasive exposition is to know your audience, first and foremost. Listen twice and talk once. After surveying the environment, you'll get a better idea of what and how to communicate with the readers. Try it. I promise beneficial results.

Alrite, Wytefang, defend away!

Vollick1979 said:

60. Unless your opponent's deck aims at decking you out, you never lose a MTG game due to an empty deck. So using a bigger deck has no interest per se. In a "sideboard-free" MTG environment, decks will simply include 2 or 3 cards in 1 copy (reducing 2 or 3 other cards from 4 to 3 copies), and take advantage of "tutor"-effects to get access to those.

What concerns me is the need to play a "best out of three" format if one doesn't have the opportinuty to alter your deck in between. To me, this indicates that WH:I has an important "luck of the draw" factor (important enought that it has to be taken into account at tournament level), that should be reduced at the design level.

Overseer Lazarus said:

Hehehe...it sure seems like I end up backing up his remarks a lot but that's just because I find him mostly correct (from my perspective, of course). Though I am (of late) not so sure about the side-boarding issue especially after some recent testing against the Orc/Skaven uber decks out there. Though it'll be interesting to see how the tournaments pan out (I'd bet 75-90% are going to be won by some version of a Skaven deck).

Anyway, everyone be excellent to one another. Peace.

ddm5182 said:

HEre is the thing though... you just proved my point why looking at the other Eric Lang LCG games which don't use sideboards and have years of history behind their competitive play is relevant. If I want to figure out how relevant my experience with an MP3 player is and then pass judgement on the iPad based on that experience I need to find out how similar they are to each other and what my needs and expectations are and then see if there is information out there that is outside of my experience and try to extrapolate from there. If the MP3 player I'm comparing it to is the Sony E-Series Walkman then sure there are similarities but there is me different about the experience and how they are used than there are similarities. If it is Apple's iPod Touch then I have much more relevant experience though they are certainly not identical products, they were developed from the same teams, overseen by the same VP, and produced and marketed by the same company. There is no denying the two products are more similar than the E-Series.

I've spent a lot of time with Lang products and with the FFG Development teams input on those products. I've experienced them inside and out. What I'm saying is that arguments based on a different and unrelated product, produced by a different company, designed by a different person, and developed by a different team is not the most relevant experience out there. That the statements about sideboards have yet to be based around factual arguments about this game. That if people want to cite their past experience as an indicator that they should do due diligence and take a look at the other two related products and see if their theories have held true for those games, because if they haven't then there is a far greater chance that this game is going to follow the path led by the other two LCG's than it is a completely unrelated product.

That this is being argued with and my statements about experience and seeking additional information is getting twisted to me saying my experience alone is correct is not just shocking but saddening.

So there can be no further misunderstanding -

1. This game is unique. All experience outside of it is suspect.
2. That because there is no competitive history with this game as we have just received the rules, any statements about what this game is, was, and will be in regards to competition is wild speculation.
3. That personal experience can certainly give some information that can be used to make guesses about the development of this game it is all speculation.
4. If you want to use history of other games to get an idea what this game may develop into the closer the games are the more relevant that insight is likely to be.
5. As much as this game is similar to Magic, you can point to over 80% of the customizable card games and find games as if not far more similar.
6. There are at least two games which have more in common with this game than it has with Magic. Logic dictates that ignoring those games in the development of any opinion is going to leave the resulting information highly skewed.

Martin_fr said:

I'm not sure a deck at 60 cards running 3 copies of a certain card (to make room for a single copy card) is better off than a deck of 61 cards just adding a single card.

Regarding Rush Decks:

I think the entire rush deck domination can and will be fixed by upping the minimum deck size to 60 cards. Especially with the 3 copy per deck restriction. It will be pretty easy for FFG to claim the small deck size was in place because there were a limited pool of cards players had at their disposal. Once there are upwards of 60-70 distinct cards for each faction plus neutrals I would expect them to change their rules. Of course if they printed some heavy anti-rush cards that would work too.