The season of World- and National Championships is almost upon us, and many of us are honing their decks and playing skills to have a shot at The Title. I won’t be participating in either Championship (both Cons are just an itty bit too far from the West Coast), but that won’t stop me from dispensing advice.
Today, we’ll look into building that winning deck. Before you get your hopes up too high, let me say first of all that, unless you’re dueling, the deck alone won’t win you the game. It’s a multiplayer game: good players who read the board right and have good timing will beat a new player with a killer deck in most cases, regardless which deck they play. But that said, building a strong deck at least shifts the odds in your favor, just like a weak deck can hamstring you.
This article will look beyond the Rule of Fives and talk more about deck content and purpose, and will finish with dissecting a successful tournament deck to apply the lessons. While the article focuses on tournament play, the main differences between a tournament deck and a casual deck usually lie in the reliability of the combos, the efficiency of the cards and in the tightness of the deck. Most casual decks will benefit from the treatise below, because the same rules that make a tournament deck hum also facilitate the silly combo deck you thought of last week and make it playable.
Step 1: How are you going to win?
This sounds like a trivial question, but it bears thinking about before you start putting together that awesome Discard Engine of Doom. What, exactly, is it you’re going to do to win? If you don’t have a win plan, your deck will only win if the guy before you miscalculates and fails to win on his turn, and you want to be more proactive than that. In tournament play, you will always win by taking the last site (unless the game gets timed out). Forget about discard or resource toasting; those won’t even win you duels against a decent opponent. So what does your winning turn look like? You’re going up against an entire table of people who don’t want you to win (because then they lose), and they will do everything to stop you. Ultimately, you have to bring more fighting to bear than the table can stop. There are many ways of doing this. Of course, you can always try to outforce the opponents outright by outproducing them, but this is hard, since you’re up against 2-3 people, who will start clobbering you once you get ahead. All you really need to do is create a situation where the opponents can’t bring their own fighting to bear. You could clear the table with a Neutron Bomb, play a hitter and win. You could attack with more attackers than can be intercepted and drop States on the ones that get through, thus reducing the value of big sticks as blockers. You could use Stealth or Superleap to get your attackers through. Maybe you’ll play Golden Comeback for Ting Ting and heal her after she plowed through interceptors. You could be waiting for the right opportunity, sitting at one site and then take multiple sites in one turn. There are many ways of going about winning, and most of them are equally good. There is no best way, but you have to know which way you want to go. However, the more your best way of winning relies on a specific game state (eg: I can only win if all characters are turned, I can only win if there are no characters on the board, etc), the harder it will be to win.
Step 2: The Engine
Some people refer to synergy, some call it an Engine, but all good tournament decks have it: a way to combine cards that makes them better than they are on their own. You want to maximize the strengths of your cards, in effect making them worth more than you pay for. Eg, you’d want to play Red Bat in a deck that plays with a lot of Events, not just a few. You’d want to play Isis Fox in a deck that can make many attacks per turn. You want to play Dark Traveler in a deck that can get its own Feng Shui Sites into the smoked pile, and not rely on other people’s help. You get the picture. Again, there are many different ways to go about this part, and I can write (and, in fact, have written) many articles on this topic. But for a tournament winning deck, you don’t just want synergy. You want synergy that is hard to disrupt, synergy coming from cards that are good on their own, not combos that consist of multiple weak cards. Especially avoid combos that can be foiled with little to no effort on the oponent’s part, or worse, can be foiled by things that the opponent may do by accident. If the opponent just has to run over a foundation character or put a point of damage on a card, the combo is too weak for a tournament deck. As an example, Spear of Destiny and Primeval Forest would have synergy, but they aren’t a combo you’d want to rely on in a tournament. The Forest on its own is a dead card, and woe to those who play it on their first turn and then spend all their power on foundations without having means to heal a site (but don’t worry, your names are safe with me). In other words: PLAY GOOD CARDS! It’s okay to set up elaborate multi-card combos, if the individual parts do something on their own. Even better is when part of one combo works with a second combo in the deck, or if there are multiple redundancies.
Take, for example, my Hood deck from last year (see below). There are multiple parts in the deck that build around strong cards and work together as well as alone. One of the core parts of the deck is built around having a lot of weenies in play: weenies fuel the Die!!!’s, they assist the Vassals, they get pumped into play quickly by the Dragon Throne, and they are returned to play with Inauspicious Return when they die. In the smoked pile, they assist Luis and the Leopard Club. All of these cards work without the weenies, but they work much better with them.
Step 3: Defense and Metagaming
Now that you have your Engine and know how you will win, it’s time to think a little bit about what the opponents will do to throw a crowbar into your machinery. At this point, you should have a solid deck already that can’t be disrupted easily, but there will be always holes to plug, especially in that winning turn. Now, given how many ways there are to foil your attack for the win, it is unlikely that any viable deck will have an answer for all of them, but you should have defenses against the worst of them. Here is where metagaming comes into play: what kind of defense is easy to come by, and what do your opponents like to play? Certain to face a City Square or Fox Pass in every round? Play Petroglyphs, Whirlpool, or Verminous Rain. Architects ruining your day? Try Fortune, Confucian, Festival Circle or Charmed Life. Pick out the things that you feel will be most common and will hurt your deck most. Often, having your characters smoked at little cost to the opponent is worst, because you can’t defend yourself anymore and can’t attack again in your next turn. Feng Shui sites provide many tools to shore up your deck’s weaknesses, so use them liberally. Ideally, your defenses should tie into your winning combo, so that you can use the same card in multiple functions. Take Disco Inferno, for example. This card can be used to straight up blow away a small annoying site like a K-House, it can be used to destroy a damaged site of your own to fail an attack, or can be played during an attack to weaken the site you are about to hit. You could also use it as an extreme way of revealing a site. Compared to Blow Things Up!, it can fulfill more different functions, thus providing more flexibility. Sure, if you find yourself regularly in the need of getting rid of Police Stations, Ancestral Tombs or the like, you may still rather want Blow Things Up!, but flexibility is a big plus for a tournament deck.
The only time you should really dedicate a portion of your deck just to defense is if there are deck types that just hose you out of the game. A good example would be weenie decks facing down a load of Final Brawls or Aerial Bombardments. Both of these cards are played very frequently, and they can ruin your day. Typical defenses against these kinds of cards are cancellation (Confucian, Police State, Who’s the Monkey Now?), event immunity (Buffalo Soldier) or damage immunity (Festival of Giants). If you can play or replay your weenies fast enough (Dragon Throne, Inauspicious Return), you might not care either, or if the dying weenies provide power (Feast of Souls).
Step 4: Comeback
Things usually don’t go as planned, so your deck needs a plan B to get back into the game when your draw sucks or you’ve been beaten into the mud. The usual deck building response to the situation is alternative power generation, mainly taking the form of Pocket Demon, Violet Meditation, Glimpse of the Abyss, Dangerous Experiment and their ilk. There are other cards that will provide good comeback when you’re being beaten down. City Park and Nine Dragon Temple, eg, are great comeback cards for decks that expect to have slow starts. But another aspect of comeback is actually getting back into the game after you’ve played that comeback card. Is 3, 4 or 5 power enough to put your deck back into the game? A deck that plays large characters will have an easier time getting back into the game than a deck that plays weenies, as the fighting/power ratio increases the more power is spent. A 4-cost hitter should put you solidly back in the game, but if you’re more likely to draw a handful of weenies or 2-cost characters, then maybe a bunch of damage-boosting Events or States would be useful.
Step 5: Denial
Now that you’ve thought about how others are going to stop you from winning, it’s time to put a bit of thought into how you will stop them from winning. This falls under “denial” in the broadest sense of the word: stopping the opponent from doing what he wants to do, which most often is taking his last site for the win. Denial takes many forms; most people think of events that damage or smoke characters when they hear denial, but defensive sites like Kinoshita House and Fox Pass are likewise denial, as could be events that just disrupt an opponent’s attack, like Snowblind, Cloud Walking or Larcenous Mist. The best denial has four properties: it is hidden before its use (ie played from hand, or an unrevealed Feng Shui site), costs no power, is hard to stop and can also be used to assist your own attacks. While I can’t think of any card that fulfills all four criteria (especially the second-to-last one is very dependent on the opponents’ factions and the metagame), there are plenty that fulfill at least three. A tournament deck should have at least some free denial that you can use when you’re out of power, so that you are never completely vulnerable. Especially look over the free events that your deck can use as denial; even though they can typically be used only once, they have the advantage that your opponent can never know that you have them until you play them (barring Covert Ops and other silliness). Also, take a good look into effects that don’t target your opponent’s cards, but your own cards, or that don’t target at all. Good examples are Iron and Silk, Cloud Walking and Expendable Unit, or maybe Satellite Intelligence. Most decks can deal with events that target their own stuff (using Festival Circle or Fortune of the Turtle), but have a much harder time stopping events in general. In short, the denial that the opponent doesn’t see coming is the hardest to stop, so dropping in a card in your deck that no one else in your playgroup uses can provide unpleasant surprises.
Step 6: Resources
This topic is complicated enough to warrant an entire column of its own, so I will just give a few pointers here. In tournament play, you usually cannot afford to sit around for 3-4 turns waiting for your first FSS or foundation to appear, as a 3-player game could be over by that time. Ideally, you want to have 2 Feng Shui Sites by turn 2, and enough resources to be able to play most of your hand, especially characters and denial, at turn 3 the latest, so that you can at least play cards to cycle through your deck, if nothing else. A tournament deck should always be either resourced to the rule of 5’s (ie, 1/5th foundation, 1/5th FSS), or have slightly more resources. As a rule of thumb, a deck that plays many cards that require only a single resource can afford to go a bit lower on foundation, and a deck that plays many cards requiring 2 or more resources should pack 1/5th + 1-3 foundations, unless it contains a good number of 1-resource ramp characters. I usually go slightly heavier on the FSS, adding 1/5th and rounding up, adding one if 5 divides evenly into the number of cards in the deck. Unless all of your foundation and Feng Shui cards have a secondary use, consider adding a card cycler like Coral Reef or The Bazaar to your deck. I prefer Coral Reef over The Bazaar, because the Reef lets you remove the card from the game. Cards cycled with The Bazaar or Rise of the NeoBuro will find their way back into your hand at some point, often when you’d rather draw something useful.
Step 7: Tune, Tune, Tune
It should go without saying that unless you’re extremely confident in your deck building skills (in which case you probably don’t need to read this article), you should at least draw several test hands or play a couple of solo turns with your new deck before taking it to a tournament. Playing against real opponents is, of course, preferred. You want to trim your deck to 60-70 cards, or 70-80 cards for two or more factions. A 60-card deck that has 3 copies of a given card is more likely to hold a copy at a given time than a 100-card deck with 5 copies. If you find that a card sits in your hand for a long time during test games, or you always discard it, take it (or one copy of it) out of the deck. If you frequently find yourself wishing for a specific card, put one more copy of it in the deck. Check if your Engine works. Do you frequently win before the entire Engine is in place? Then take out the cards that don’t enter play if it’s always the same set of cards, since your deck obviously does fine without them. If your Engine doesn’t come into play or is often disrupted, then maybe you need to scratch the whole deck and start over.
Example Deck: Return of the Hoods
66 cards total
12 foundation:
5 Shamanistic Punks
5 Thugs
2 Big Brother Tsien
14 characters:
1 Evil Twin
5 Vassals of Chin
1 Red Scorpion Killers
1 Luis Camacho
2 Big Daddy Vodoo
2 The Big Boss
2 Tommy Hsu
20 events:
1 Flying Sleeves
1 Discerning Fire
1 Verminous Rain
2 Tortured Memories
2 Chin's Criminal Network
2 Glimpse of the Abyss
3 Die!!!
3 Pocket Demon
5 Inauspicious Return
3 edges:
2 The Hungry
1 Spies Everywhere
4 sites:
2 The Dragon Throne
1 Death Ring
1 The White Leopard Club
13 Feng Shui sites:
2 Festival Circle
1 Temple of the Celestial Mercy
1 Disco
1 Sacred Heart Hospital
2 City Park
1 Petroglyphs
1 Nine Dragon Temple
1 Floating Restaurant
1 Temple of the Angry Spirits
1 Fox Pass
1 Nightclub
The deck is a bit low on foundation (13 would be better) and just barely has enough Feng Shui. However, testing has showed that the numbers are adequate.
Deck stats:
Resources requirements:
0 resources: 30 cards 1 resource: 17 cards (7 of which provide resources)
More than two thirds of the deck can be played after a single foundation character is played. Less than half of the non-foundation, non-FSS cards require more than one resource. Hence, slightly under-resourcing is alright.
Alt power gen: 15 cards
Power cost:
FSS: 13 0 cost: 13 cards 1 cost: 19 cards
The deck wins through brute force through the force multiplication that the Vassals provide. In an ideal game, the deck makes an early push (maybe fueled by a power boost from Glimpse) to get ahead in power, and then either rushes to victory with the help of The Hungry, or uses its power advantage from cost reduction and Big Daddy, along with the character recycling, to keep the table free of opponents’ characters until it is ready to win. This is a deck build that can face off against the entire table once it gets a leg up.
The Engine consists of two parts: force multiplication with the Vassals, and cost reduction through Dragon Throne. The Vassals can provide incredible amounts of fighting: two Vassals, attacking with 3 weenies, put a whopping 19 fighting on the table for 9 power, or 4 with the Dragon Throne. The Dragon Throne lets you dump all of your weenies for free, and lets you put into play the amount of attackers you need pump the Vassals effectively. The Hungry fuels a push for an early victory, supplying power for a sustained attack.
Obviously, you want to focus on keeping three things in play as far as possible: the Vassals, your weenies, and the Dragon Throne. Everything else is replaceable. Since keeping the weenies in play is hard, I’ll do the next best thing, something the Lotus excels at: bringing them back into play with Inauspicious Return. Incidentally, you can also return them for free with The Big Boss and the Dragon Throne, one per turn, if you don’t have a better use for the Boss. Weenies returned this way have the advantage that they can be sacrificed to power Tommy Hsu or the Red Scorpion Killers. Keeping the Vassals in play is much harder, since they don’t return so readily. Vassals are typically lost in one of two ways: they are mowed down during your opponents’ turn, or removed by “efficient” blocking, ie the interceptors put just enough damage on the Vassals that they smoke after the attack. To prevent the former, the deck has Fox Pass and Flying Sleeves. To discourage the latter, I pack Sacred Heart Hospital, Floating Restaurant and Nightclub, and utilize the damage dealing abilities of the Scorpions and Tommy. This strategy forces the opponents to either give up their sites or spend more on defense than I spend on offense. Another big issue for this deck is event defense: a well-timed Discerning Fire can completely ruin your game, and other denial events can at least set you back. The Festival Circles along with Tommy help out here, and the White Leopard Club really irritates players who rely on free events. Finally, the deck doesn’t worry too much about the defense sites, since I can usually overwhelm those with numbers, but Verminous Rain can prevent an early game set back through one of those sites.
My own denial consists primarily of Die!!!. This magnificent card combos extremely well with Inauspicious Return, does not target (and thus can be Brain Fired or Festival Circled) and with the help of Chin’s Criminal Network, effective Die!!!’s can be played even when you start out with no power and no unturned characters: play Chin’s Network, play Return, and the Die!!! Tortured Memories is an all-round card that assists both defense and offense. The Death Ring helps to remove small utility characters and puts damage on Big Daddy. Finally, there’s the emergency brake: Discerning Fire. I use this card to solve big problems on the board or take out cards that I can’t touch or don’t want to attack otherwise, such as Edges, States, or Battleground Sites.
The comeback in this deck consists of Pocket Demon and Glimpse of the Abyss. Together with playing a site, these cards should afford 4+ power, enough for a Vassal and a Return, which in turn lets you mount a credible attack to burn for power. Comeback is much easier if the Dragon Throne is still in play, so I usually protect it at all costs unless I am well ahead.
Finally, you are looking at just one incarnation of a basic engine that has been around for a long time (I built this deck for the first time around BCL). Some parts can easily be swapped out to better match your play style or environment. If you play rarely against Dragons, consider adding Evil Chanting to get even more mileage out of the weenies. If I expect to face recursion, I toss in a Inauspicious Reburial or two. Tommy Guns can pump up your Thugs and produce power with Big Daddy. All these little modifications work well, and the deck as displayed here was just the one I happened to have last year at KublaCon.
If you look over other winning decks on this website or Stefan's website, you will find that many of them are constructed following similar principles, whether the designer did so intentionally or not. I hope this article has given those who can’t seem to get their decks to work properly a bump in the right direction.