Cactus Game Design Message Boards

Sounds like it could be a fun feature, but probably not necessarily accurate. Anyway, here are things that all good decks have...basically everything, but yeah.

Speed. Cards that can get cards. Things like Search and Draw.

Heroes. You can't win games without them. The best decks have about 10+

Battle winning enhancements. Bonus if they CBN or Interrupt in them.

Interrupts or Negates. If you can't get initiative, you better have a way to stop them.

Protection. Primarily from Capture (Unholy Writ/Charms) and Discard (Christian Martyr). Banding also works well in this category, since as long as you can overwhelm them you're good.

Options. Being too concentrated is dangerous. If you're playing with all converts, what happens when demons show up? Discard and remove from the game don't really belong in this category though, there isn't too much around them.

Concentration. Being too diverse is dangerous. If you have multiple cards of 6 good brigades, you're doing something wrong. Two brigades is optimal, one and three good, and four is iffy. Anything more and you're likely to be in trouble. Really it just depends on how much speed you have.

Blocks. The best decks have a good amount of blocks, preferably reusable (like Gomer/KoT). The simpler the better.

Low amount of cards. The quicker you can get to your cards, the better.

Also, you can't possibly build a deck with ALL that in it, so are some more important than others? What would be an optimal balance?

The best decks will have all of the above in them.

Quote from: LordZardeck on January 09, 2012, 03:07:11 PM

Also, you can't possibly build a deck with ALL that in it, so are some more important than others? What would be an optimal balance?

My current deck has 7 Draw cards, 1 Search cards, 2 Exchange cards, 12 Heroes, 4 Brigades, 7 interrupts, 1 FBTN hero, 1 recursion, 7 discards, (AoTL and Ehud's Dagger included...), 2 CTB, 9 CBN (not including dominants and set asides), 1 CBI, 1 CBP, 4 banding heroes, 2 cards protecting capture, 2 protecting discard, 1 protecting lost souls, and 2 helpful cards (look at a hand, heal a hero...I'm not sure how you'd include them...)

And that's just my offense...

Which reminds me, I forgot about lost soul generation. That's important to (creating more lost souls to rescue, cards like Harvest Time, Revealer Lost Soul, Ammy Slave...etc.)

How many cards in your deck?

What about Character:Enhancement ratio? What would be the recommended range?

wow. Am i the only one using a 8:15 ratio? lol. How on earth do you guys ever have then enhancements you need?

Quote from: LordZardeck on January 09, 2012, 06:53:48 PM

wow. Am i the only one using a 8:15 ratio? lol. How on earth do you guys ever have then enhancements you need?

Speed.

What happens when speed vs. turtle?

That's probably the most based on interpretation and deck style. A speed deck should have more heroes than enhancements, and that's true of most decks, but I wouldn't say all. Some of my decks will have something like 13 heroes to 7 good enhancements, while others will be about 11 to 10. So that just depends on the deck style.

If we're ranking decks, speed will be at the top.

What happens when speed vs. turtle?

Heavy defenses eat speed for breakfast.

Quote from: LordZardeck on January 09, 2012, 06:59:24 PM

What happens when speed vs. turtle?

Heavy defenses eat speed for breakfast.

False. They eat speed for lunch. Heavy defenses risk running late for breakfast.

Quote from: lightningninja on January 09, 2012, 06:26:53 PM

That's probably the most based on interpretation and deck style. A speed deck should have more heroes than enhancements, and that's true of most decks, but I wouldn't say all. Some of my decks will have something like 13 heroes to 7 good enhancements, while others will be about 11 to 10. So that just depends on the deck style.

If we're ranking decks, speed will be at the top.

Tier list, anybody? Both S and A Tier were composed of speed decks.

It's never been my experience that defense heavy decks beat speed. If that was true, more people would use defense heavy. The only exceptions are in heroless decks, and even then, mostly in very large ones (i.e. 100 or 154). I mean, if a speed deck gets a bad draw, it's going to be hard to recover, but if a speed deck gets a bad draw, it's probably finished regardless.

In the past, I would say that Turtle would beat Speed a majority of games, but that they would all take longer than the standard time limit.

This year, I'm not sure that even a well built Turtle is capable of completely shutting down the variety of super-powered offenses that people are running.  The meta seems much more diverse than usual this year, and that makes a LOT of different things to try to block.