kamacausey said:

Yep, even if you don't do anything tricky with it, just run 3 Temples and 47 characters. Your opponent will EVENTUALLY fall behind the race.

kamacausey said:

As a new player myself, I'm interested to learn more of how the experienced players go about designing a deck too. Especially, I'm still having trouble with valuation - trying to determine what various cards are worth, which ones are better in what situations, and why. Then the next step would be building some intuition on what sort of decks make what sort of cards better.

Let me give a general example... Let's say I had a support card that allowed me to destroy/sacrifice something of mine to force my opponent to destroy/sacrifice sacrifice something of theirs of equivalent value. Generally speaking, it looks like an even trade, meaning that nether side gains or loses an advantage. But because it's my card, I can decide when/if to use it and would only do so if I felt it yielded an advantage. How good is that? Is it worth the card I put in my deck plus the domain I used to put it into play plus whatever it costs to use (exhausting, maybe paying a domain?) Now let's say that we determine that it's worth a little but not too much. However, its worth varies depending on the deck it's in. If it trades characters for characters, then it would gain value if my characters were weaker than the ones they were being traded for right? So in a weenie rush deck, it would become a good card. I imagine in some sort of resource-accelerated deck that focused on bringing out big characters it would be a poor trade (my opponent is likely to have cheaper characters than I) and immediately it's not an attractive card to bring.

Then in addition to the shifting valuation based on the rest of the deck, it ALSO varies depending on the type of strategy I'm taking. If I've got ways to exhaust or destroy lots of characters at a time, then removing one isn't interesting anymore. But maybe if I'm playing a milling deck and I don't expect to win any stories then it's worth killing my own characters to take out enemy characters and slow down their story progress - the loss of character on my side becomes almost "free" in a sense since his only job was to be a roadblock in the first place.

A lot of this probably goes beyond the scope of deck design comments and maybe more into a full length article or podcast but I think it's a good example of things newer players would be interested in understanding better.

While this won't answer all questions nor will it cover everything that i've ever done, but this is basically how I build decks.

Step 1: Have a goal.

You deck needs to have goal. Be it a certain card, combo of cards, or an overall theme such as destory everything or win as fast as possible. Just slapping cards together just because you think they're good will usually result in an average deck or a you'll misplay them because you don't know what you're aiming for.

Step 2: Build around your goal.

Once you pick your goal find as many cards that support this goal as possbile. Don't worry if you find too many, we'll get rid of those in the cutting process later on. But this will give you your card pool in which you'll derive your deck from.

Step 3: Metagame

This is the first in several steps in which you'll begin to narrow your card pool. Take a look at what people around you and around the world are playing. Pick out a few key features. What are they using to win, what are they using that will hurt me, and how fast are they able to do either or both? From that info you being to cut cards from your card pool (don't throw them away, you may need them later) to get around those three things. For example, if your competition commonly has a lot of cards that wreck low skill characters try not pack to many low skill characters or keep cards that are able to quicky/easily block/cancel/removal what is stopping you.

Step 4: Watch the Curve

At this step your pool should be starting to narrow quite a bit. Now if you have any choices left to make you need to narrow it down by looking at some numbers. One is the number of factions. Ideally you'll want to get this to two or less. You can get away with 3, but more often than not you'll run into resource problems eventually. The other number is the amount of high cost cards to low cards cards you need to use. More often than not, high cost cards aren't worth using unless they are or apart of your goal. Otherwise they're usually just too slow to be of much use. You also need to make sure that you have enough low cost cards so you aren't simply doing nothing/enough for the first few turns of the game.

Step 5: Finding the final pieces

Your card pool should be fairly low at this point. Here is where we begin the fine tuning. Figure out which cards you can't live without. Which cards you want to see early and often. Which you'll normally don't want to see a second of unless you happened to lose it. And if necessary which cards you definately only want to draw once or not at all. This will tell you pretty much how many copies of each card you'll want to have. Obviously you'll want 3 copies the cards you can't live without and the ones you'd rather see early and often. You'll typically want 2 copies of cards that you rather not see a second copy of (I.E. non-essential unique cards or things like snow graves). Of course, if your goal calls for it, 1 copy of cards that you'd rather search out for or can only handle a single copy of.

Step 6: Playtest and Tweak

You should be really close to finishing. Now all you need to figure out which cards are worth keeping, and how many copies of each card you need. For example, my deck is using Snow graves because my meta told me that I have enough opponent's using their discard pile to win games. However, they know their weakness and packed in a lot of anti-attachment cards. So, I have two choices, one being to include a third copy or the other being to remove all attachments from my deck and deal with their strategies in a different way. Ultimately playtesting and know your metagame will decide the final cards/copy counts for your deck.

As I said before, the above is not meant for all situations and they are certainly not rules. Merely generic guidelines and patterns I find myself using. If you want to get into valueing card effects I can only help you on an individual card to specific strategy level. The array of effects in this game and how they interact with different strategies is far to vast to pinhole them into specific terms of good and bad ideas.

However, thats part of the fun of a card game. Finding out what works for you and then playing with it.

Still the best advice I can give is that your deck needs to have a goal. Without it, you're either going to make play mistakes or you'll miss the winning strategy entirely.