Cactus Game Design Message Boards

Today’s LoR article got me thinking about a few questions, for those who’ve had success in tournaments and at nationals specifically, how many iterations did your decks go through before you felt confident with the deck? What does a fine tuned deck mean to you? And when do you scrap a deck?

Most of my deck ideas get scrapped after just the initial version or one revision when it becomes obvious that they simply cannot accomplish their goal in a consistent way or that accomplishing their goal doesn't actually lead to winning the game. I have a lot of bad deck ideas.

To be fine tuned to me means that I have determined that when the deck "works" I do actually win and that the deck does its thing without depending on things like my or my opponent's starting hands and without getting out raced. If this takes one iteration, awesome! What's important is a good sample size of playtesting games rather than a certain number of deck revisions.

What do you think makes for a better play test game, playing a deck that counters yours or playing decks you would see in the meta?

I have a similar philosophy to KTD, the first few games I play with a new deck are "proof of concept" games if the deck doesn't perform well in that stage I usually move on, otherwise it can be as many as 5 different versions, or as few as 2, depending on how well constructed the deck was to begin with. "The Deck" from 2012 was one of my most iterated decks, as James Reopke and I tried a number of different packages before settling on the "final version" Greek gods was one of my least, seeing only minor changes from the state version to the Nationals winning version.

My general rule of thumb was to play a deck in a tournament once, and if it didn't draw or play out with much success I'd dump it. But when I would find a deck, I preferred to take a popular idea and twist it or run atleast one alignment counter-meta and I was fine. Now this was before the advent of lackey and intense online Redemptioning, so now you can really fine-tune the details; however, I probably wouldn't feel comfortable taking a deck straight off lackey and running it at Nationals. Lackey is nice but it lends itself towards experimenting with ideas which might not see play at the tournament level at all. The exception being if you have a dedicated friend to test your deck against multiple other strategies. If I had to give someone new a bit of advice, I'd say stick with a deck you have had success with all tournament season and have played the most, because there's really no substitute for practicing how to play your deck.

This topic is incredibly old, but it deserves some revisiting, as I found this on "Who's Online" and decided that I should have chimed in.

Historically, I've been known to tweak and revise a deck to death. During the 2016 season, I was playing a Judges/Magicians/Assyrians deck that I had been playing more or less since the 2012 season. I obviously put that deck through hundreds of tweaks and edits to find the "perfect" list.

2017, I did a complete 180, and played a different deck at each tournament. I built my nationals list that I took to 7th place the night before after getting a judges variant stomped by Sergei Creech.

2018, I once again went through a million different decks until finding the Flood Survivors/Egyptians combination, which turned out to be quite good. That deck then proceeded to evolve into the flood survivors deck that I used at TN State and Nationals, finally placing 5th. I played very few testing games this season, letting a knowledge of my offense and defense carry me throughout the season. I went 2-2 at EC Regs, testing the Egyptian variant, which showed me that isn't the correct route to go. In prior years I played far more testing games, but this year, I let a legacy of testing and the general viability of my archtype carry me through state, regionals and nationals. I have no idea what next year holds, as I'm going to be primarily hosting, but this was a thread that I felt like sharing my experience may be valuable for someone.