Just got W:I over christmas and after playing with the basic decks I've picked up one or two expansions and Im wondering are there any basic deck building guidelines I should watch out for e.g. how many units vs how many support, optimal size, etc.

I'd say:

- Stick with 50card decks. Don't throw in more than 60cards.
- Try to avoid throwing in many single copies of cards. Usually less variety of cards makes standard draw more reliable.
- 3x Contested Village is must-have.
- Warpstone Excavation and Innovation are usefull in 80% of decks. Those are great cards. Don't underestimate them when building a deck.
- Try not to build deck with less than (at least) 9-12 supports that are capable of providing power to kingdom or mission. Heavily unit-focused decks won't work well since they are vulnerable to mass removal. (Troll Vomit, Master rune of spite, Flames of Phoenix, etc etc.)

I agree with everything Cvrl wrote, but I would say both Contested Village and Warpstone Excavation are mandatory in every build. Innovation is good in every deck except Orc Rush.

If I wanted to tell you which cards were mandatory for basic deck building, I'd tell you to play Dwarf. Or, like these other two, I'd tell you to run 3 copies of Contested Village, Warpstone Excavation and Innovation in every deck. (Innovation can work in Orc rush style decks, btw). Do you have one copy of the game that is supporting you and a couple of friends? If so, keep playing with the basic decks and random neutral card distribution for now (being sure to tweak them by substituting cards of the same type) and then play some draft games. They're fun. The forum user, Curator, has written up a method on how to seed expansion cards to work with the basic draft method. It's quite good. If you don't need to supply decks for anyone but yourself, that's a different story. The previous post about running as close to the minimum of 50 cards is spot on. Do this. The previous post about running 9-12 supports is pretty accurate. Just make sure those supports are generating power for you. 20-30% of your deck being support cards is pretty average. Try to avoid using a lot of attachment cards starting off. Don't be afraid to have half of your deck be units. Work in tactics cards and maybe a quest for the rest.

Card cost and loyalty cost awareness is important to basic deck building. Questions you should be asking yourself are: How many of the cards in my deck can I play on my first turn? How many cards can I play on an average turn? And more of a question you should ask your self about general distribution: How many cards are going to be useful to me on my first turn? Be careful with the amount of high cost cards you put in your deck. Always make sure your deck can generate sufficient resources to play a variety of cards on a given turn.

I don't want to tell you how to win. I want to tell you how to get started. Figuring out how to win is part of the fun.

Thanks for the information guys, this is exactly the kind of stuff I was looking for.

At the moment I only mooch cards off a friend who has a starter, but I'm still curious: Is defeat by running out of cards at all common? During one of our games tonight, I had one more turn left, and the turn after that I'd have self-destructed. That's the closest we've got.

Also, we don't have any expansion material, not even the elf starter decks (though those are next on the list), so I'm not familiar with the huge number of options out there right now: Are there any cards that can force an opponent to discard from his deck, and if so can a decent deck, not necessarily tournament-worthy, be constructed around that theme?

I ask these questions in this thread to better understand why 50-cards is recommended as both min and max. I understand it betters the odds of drawing what you need, but the fact that you lose when you run out of cards does have me worried considering it's a smaller deck size than I play in any other card game, especially our group's current favorite The Spoils with 75 definitely running out of cards in that game any time soon.

Any answers / advice would be greatly appreciated, thanks!

Adam said:

If you're doing at least decently well, and you lose because you deck out, I get the feeling your deck needs more OOMPH.

That could mean not enough opportunities to do good damage, or maybe too much utility. Maybe you're just stacking the quest too much, and you can't pay for what you draw into.

For myself, unless I'm playing a control deck, I feel like 4 cards a turn is satisfactory.

I think cvrl is pretty spot on in regards to general stuff, but I have another tip:

Watch your loyalty. Make sure you have some (good) cheap 1 loyalty cards to go along with your Warpstones and Contested Villages. A big problem I've run into is when most of your 2 cost unit slot is made up of 2 loyalty cards. That can make the first 2 turns a lot harder.

Now this may be just me, so please correct me otherwise, but I feel that running at least one Contested Fortress is mandatory in almost any non-rush deck. No?

If someone is rushing you with one unit with one hammer then yes.

It's good, but definitely not mandatory. Maybe if you're not playing with complete sets.

I used to think the same way, but now I feel like it's too slow. If you aren't routinely coming up against demolition, pillage etc. in x3, I'd say it's a good investment.

Virgo said:

I don't know man. Seems like a necessity when high elves are doing stupid amounts of Indirect Damage on ya.

Dr. Nocturne said:

If you're worried about indirect damage, you're better off with toughness.

Not that it matters, because they're probably running the white tower aspirant to make sure it all goes through anyway.