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Redemption is an offensively biased game. The point of the game is to rescue five souls. Why not use the most powerful cards in the game to help you succeed in this?

On that note, my next article is going to be about Offensive Heavy/Balanced/Defensive Heavy, so I'm going to leave my statement at that for now.

I'll respond to Prof first since his is easy:

Your rankings of dominants seem biased due to being an offense-heavy player:

Quote

Son of God - obviously offense
New Jerusalem - obviously offense
Vain Philosophy
Angel of the Lord - obviously offense
Grapes of Wrath - probably offense
Christian Martyr
Destruction of Nehushtan - most arts used now are defensive, so eliminating them helps the offense

Only 2 of your top 7 dominants are primarily defensive.

Defense is bad and always has been bad. When some cards help you win the game, and others just stop your opponent from winning, which would you rather play generally?

Quote from: Alex_Olijar on June 20, 2013, 09:46:17 PM

Another article has hit the presses!

So for the most part I agree with you one the dominant rankings, but there are a few I disagree with.

1) Falling Away - Yes its no longer a staple, and yes its completely stopped by two other cards, but its base power is unmatched by any other evil dominant.  I still agree mostly with its placing, except beneath two specific dominants, which I will get to in a second.

2) Harvest Time - You are really going to bash Mayhem for being hit by Nazareth, but not mention it at all when its Harvest time's turn?  Harvest time is a card that is stopped by a rather popular card, and has various alternatives (water jar, call, fishers, hopper, etc.), it really should not be rated above Falling Away.

3) Mayhem - Look, I know you are saying Nazareth shuts down one of the best parts of mayhem, and it totally does, but that doesn't take away from its other benefits.  In enhancement-lite decks (like many are now), it can be just a straight draw when you need it, and if your opponent doesn't play naz (or you know, doesn't draw it), the ability limit your opponent's hand size is still very powerful.  All in all, not the best dominant, but not nearly as bad as you make it out.

4) Burial - The only time you should be using burial in your deck is if you are running the 2/3-liner and other return to deck cards for souls.  Other than that, with the amount of soul gen out there, it really isn't that great.  Again, you bash Falling Away for its counters, but then completely neglect to say that one of those "commonly played counters" counters burial as well.  And though not as common as GoYS, I still do see the anti-burial soul get used.

I guess in summery of what I'm trying to say, Falling Away and Mayhem are both better than you give them credit for, though not too much better, and should be considered for the last couple dominant slots in deck building, and you give Harvest time and burial too much credit, though I mostly agree with what your saying (and I don't think anyone should argue at all about the top 5 doms).

As a side-note, Strife (while still pretty bad, and quite deserving of its placement) does have some offensive capability.

Being a good dominant is inherently better than being an evil dominant. I'd consider FA and HT on the same relative tier, but since good>evil, I'd give HT the nod.

Mayhem actually is as bad as I think it is. I've tried to make it good because it used to be so brokenly awesome. It's just not anymore. I want it to be, but I just can't justify it over anything above it.

You bring up some interesting points on Burial. I'll counter with the idea that often you are running at least two sites anyway - Burial can be a great extra turn in that situation. It could bury an opposing two line. You bury the Thorns so you can DoU. It could bury a non-limiter soul so the opponent can't rescue the NT or Female that's left. Burial is rarely effective in my eyes if you are using it to clear the table (because that rarely occurs). You are typically using it to manipulate the souls on the table.

Hey guys, I just posted a new article about different styles of alignments! I apologize for this being so late, but I've been working a lot and working on deck building. Olijar made me finish, or you might not have gotten this for another two days! But anyway, I'm going to bed and you should click the link in my sig and check it out!

Spread offenses versus theme offenses? Which are better? It's another entry in my never-ending series on Economics. This time the lessons Economics teaches us are applied to deck building yet again with a stimulating discussing of the diminishing returns of only playing one color in your deck.

So what you're saying is that Soul Control is good?

No.

Interesting point about diminishing returns. One could argue that this is where recursion becomes a major asset to themed decks. Rather than filling your deck with more strong cards, keep re-using your best themed cards.

Yep, that is one of the main powers of recursion. Playing two Authority of Christ's is probably better than playing one and Fall like Lightning.

No I haven't specifically place 1 lost soul every 7 cards and then done 7 pile shuffle, leaving all the lost souls in one pile which i then place at the bottom of my deck, what are you talking about?!?!?!?

Luckily this is really only possible in casual games (and the only time i've done it) since it takes a LOT of prep work to make sure you have 1 lS EXACTLY every 7th card. But seriously, as soon as I was shown that that was the most common form of redemption shuffle I was confused as to why thats allowed to happen without it being mandatory that your opponent also be allowed to shuffle your deck

Quote from: lp670sv on July 09, 2013, 12:38:49 AM

No I haven't specifically place 1 lost soul every 7 cards and then done 7 pile shuffle, leaving all the lost souls in one pile which i then place at the bottom of my deck, what are you talking about?!?!?!?

Luckily this is really only possible in casual games (and the only time i've done it) since it takes a LOT of prep work to make sure you have 1 lS EXACTLY every 7th card.

It takes *minimal* amount of prep work to get this configuration in a standard 56-card deck.

See this post for a description on how to do this all day long.

1) your method results in all 7 of your lost souls being either in the top or middle, mine puts them on the bottom or middle with a cut. you can also expand the method out to use more shuffles to make your opponent less suspicious but it involves additional math for each shuffle.

Ban all lost souls. Problem solved.

A 56 card deck has 6 more cards than a 50 card deck.  Since we draw 3 cards per turn, that means that it will deck out 2 turns slower.  I wouldn't exactly call this calculus

Also, I think you meant "1/40" in your first regression instead of "1/1".

I would have liked to see some speculation on when extra cards might be worth it (e.g. adding extra drawing).

With the 42 card deck, your chance of drawing any one card in your opening hand looks like this:

1/42 + 1/41 + 1/40 + 1/39 + 1/38 + 1/37 + 1/36 + 1/35 = .2085328

Unfortunately your math is slightly off.  In each iteration after 1/42, you are forgetting to adjust for the odds that all previous draws did not net you your desired card.  I carried out your logic to fractions beyond 1/35, and at 1/16 (i.e., your 27th card) the sum exceeds 100%. 

And this logical conclusion of the odds of being able to draw any card in your deck with over 100% certainty upon drawing the first 27 non-LS cards of your deck...  Well, I think we know the odds of this are less than 0%.

Obviously 1/42 are the odds of getting any card as your first card.  The odds of getting that card as your second card, after you missed with your first, is 41/42*1/41 (41 out of 42 times you miss, and then 1 out of the next 41 times after the first miss you get your card).  Each iteration will simplify to 1/42, leaving you with odds of 8/42, or 19.05%.

Personally, for me, it's easier to calculate the odds that you don't get your card, and then subtract that percentage from 100%.  The odds of not getting a specific card repeatedly can be multiplied together.  So it would be:

1 - (41/42)(40/41)(39/40)(38/39)(37/38)(36/37)(35/36)(34/35)

Which equals 1 - 80.95%, or 19.05%.  Same as 8/42.

Doing this same calculation for a 56 card deck with Hopper is 16.67%.  So you better yourself by 2.38% going with 50.

Additional geeks' note:

You can extend the "subtract the odds of not getting your card from 100%" logic to find the odds that you get one of any number of cards in a starting hand.  Example:

Let's say you make a 50 card Gates of Samaria deck with 8 LS, and you include King Solomon, King Hiram, Zaccheus, and I Am Creator to help tutor GoS.  The odds that you get one of these 4 tutors in your initial D8, or GoS itself, would be:

1 - (37/42)(36/41)(35/40)(34/39)(33/38)(32/37)(31/36)(30/35)

Which equals 1 - 32.71%, or 67.29%. 

So 2 out of every 3 games or so, you will get GoS or one of your 4 tutors for it.  Which is a really fun deck to play by the way 

Math hurt brain... logic says 50 is less then 56 so it must be faster....

Quote from: asrgimli on July 12, 2013, 01:49:57 PM

As a future math teacher, I was going to do this myself, but just hadn't gotten around to it yet.  However, when you said:

As a future engineer hopefully, he's approximately correct as long as you end your calculation when you still have a significant amount of cards left in your deck.

Man, I'm going to kill someone some day.

WIN.  You are awesome.