Metagame.com - Take Your Game to the Next Level

Years ago, I worked as a reporter for a local newspaper. The editor used to post daily reminders and scribble notes across my columns that read, “You just lost to the ham sandwich!” That’s because there is an old adage in the writing world that goes something like this: When writing an article you are competing with the reader’s urge to drop your boring column in order to grab a ham sandwich. You have to solicit and secure interest in your writing by using some eye-catching phrases or seductive sentences, or by eliciting some early laughs. Exciting introductions that reel the readership into the heart of your article are the goal in this industry.

I hate ham sandwiches. In my battle against the ham sandwich, I often lose. Knowing this, I have chosen to forgo any discussion of nudity, and any gossip about the additions and subtractions coming in the next Donkey Club line-up. Instead, I want to introduce this class to the best-kept secret in the Vs. System.

If you want to live a clean life and enjoy the benefits for strong professional play, then you will want to read about the secret. However, before we jump into the spoils and gallop off to glory, it is worth taking a quick moment to review some relevant information covered thus far. We have talked about the importance of packing the appropriate amount of drops in your Sealed and Constructed decks. I provided you with a formula and application in MS Excel used for calculating the probability of drawing your drops, drawing combinations of characters and plot twists, and generally achieving your deck’s win condition. I am sure that some of you are slacking, but other star students have been communicating with me outside of class. I have received about 25 emails asking about various concepts that we have discovered. There have been some simple statistical questions, computer and technology concerns, and even some very enlightened conversations about Vs. theory and applications. The secret is coming, but first we will take some time to answer a couple of questions.

Although my math is a little bit rusty, my XLS is not . . . ;) Seeing your table in part 1 and using the XLS Formula, I can’t manage to get the same values as you did. Only looking for the first case: 4 copies, no mulligan, 1st turn, you have 35% possibilities. Using the formula I get 30.5%.

Good question. This may have been a failure on my part to explain one of the steps. Before we select methods of answering questions, we have to generate the questions themselves. In science we often look to disprove rather than prove a hypothesis. Therefore, the statistics were conducted in a way to consider the probability of NOT drawing a given (named card) vs. the probability of drawing that card. If you use the formula (1,6,4,60) in Excel, then your answers will vary slightly from those yielded when using the formula (0,6,4,60).

Let’s use Rmachado’s example of drawing a copy of a card on the first turn with no mulligan. If you use (1,6,4,60), then you will get a calculation of the chance of drawing a single copy of the card (1) out of your initial, turn 1 draw phase (6). There are four copies of the card in your deck, which gives us the respective 4 and 60. Assuming that you are not statistically impaired and do not run more than 60 cards, your answer would be 30.5%. This is one way to estimate the probability. In fact, when we are looking for multiple cards or combinations, you may use this type of formula for a rough estimate. We conducted such analysis in Lesson 2. However, ideally we want to calculate the probability of not drawing the named card. In this case, you would use the formula (0,6,4,60). The value in the first variable shifts from 1 to 0. You then get a value of .6485. To answer the question in terms of the probability of drawing a card on the first turn with no mulligan, you must subtract that value from 1 (or 100%). If you take the value of not drawing a card by a given turn subtracted from 1 then you are left with a rounded 35%. This way is more correct.

The basic fix is to solve for O and subtract the result from 1.00. See if that gets you to the Promised Land. Thanks for your interest. If you find the articles useful, please let me know. I hope the formula helps you build better decks and win more games.

Whenever you write for a public forum, there are bound to be readers who respond with negativity. One particularly interesting comment concerns one of my previous articles, and will also lead us into the discussion of our big secret.

“I have read what you are putting up on Metagame.com. Who are you? Why do they let you write? What do you know anyways?”

I got my hater blockas on. Please excuse yourself from my class and consider yourself expelled from the Kingpin’s School of Hard Knocks. For the rest of my students, it is important to recognize that most instructors are not the originators of ideas. They do not invent the majority of the content that you cover in a course; rather, they organize and discuss relevant information, theories, and practices. I am no exception and have studied the very best information that is available to the Vs. community over the last couple of years. I quote classic reads like Cheng’s article about tempo, some of the early writing by Ryan Jones and Mark Slack, and more recent articles by Adam Prosak and Kim Caton. There are a number of solid writers contributing in the areas of Sealed play. I am not the inventor; my role is to analyze and synthesize some of the information presented.

While I have not written anything on my own that is really that earth-shattering, game-breaking, or whatever other hyphenated term applies, it may be fair to look at my collected writings as a sort of “Kingpin’s Cliffs Notes.” Cliffs Notes are the yellow pamphlets for lazy readers (like those of you who may have skimmed this article until you saw a heading with words like “The Secret”). They offer a reader the broad strokes and often gloss over some of the slight nuances and intricacies that make understanding an art form.

If you are seeking the flavor and small details, then go back to the original sources of the ideas. If you want to get some great bang for your buck, then take a fun dive into my yellow-tinted, glossy articles. The particular synthesis that supports the secret involves bringing together information from multiple writers and listening to reviews by game designers and others in the know.

Games are about advantages. In Vs. we have the big types of advantage and some more subtle types of advantage. Most players can spout the obvious types of advantage. Ask a common group of aspiring professional card-flippers about advantage and they will cite endurance totals, hand size, and board presence.

Endurance management is a key to winning any game. Most decks cannot win when they try to check out of the final phases of the turn owing the world more than they have to offer. Living in the proverbial blackness of the endurance game gives us the life to carry on. If you are in the red, you are dead.

Some games live and die according to hand advantage. In some earlier games like War and Slapjack, hand advantage is all that matters. The more cards you control, the closer you are to victory. In TCGs a card in the hand has relative value. Some games let you draw fewer cards, and thus the value of a single card is increased; in other games, draw effects or a large hand size (by game rules) decreases the value of a card in the hand. In this game, it could be argued that hand size is important but not the paramount type of advantage to be gained.

In the beginning of the game, decks like Big Bat established win conditions based on card draw and hand advantage. No one ever complained about having extra cards to use with Bastion. However, more recent shifts in the game have decreased the importance of hand advantage. Cards like Mr. Mxyzptlk, Troublesome Trickster and Straight to the Grave have decreased the value of cards in hand. To use an economic model to describe the relative value of a card in hand: As the supply increases, the demand decreases. If you have cards that keep coming from the KO’d pile to your hand, the supply of cards in hand is increased. In general, the increased supply makes the availability of cards abundant and the resource of “cards for the hand,” less costly. In contrast, if we held the game rules constant but decreased the amount of cards that could be drawn each turn from two to one, then the cards in hand would become vastly more valuable. The value of a card in your hand will shift over the course of this game pending new card mechanics, the costs of important effects, and the release of new sets—but at the time of this article, characters on the board are worth much more than cards in hand.

Board advantage is the king of Vs. System. If you seek a single type of advantage, then this should be your holy grail. Team attacking decks have grown in popularity. In this game it has been said that you may ditch multiple cards from your hand to keep a key character on the board at a given time. In general, maintaining board advantage gives you access to team attacks and reinforcement if your characters share affiliations. If the characters do not share affiliations, then they usually “turn on” desirable effects. The costs of many cards require a player to exhaust a character, KO a character, pull a character from the board to the hand, or do some other character-related task. If you have three characters and you are required to stun a character for some great effect, the more characters available for that payment, the better.

When a player is in a tough Sealed or Draft match, the outcome is typically determined by a solid swing in board advantage. Sometimes you get it early and sometimes you win it later through failed attacks or through the use of clever tricks. As a general rule, the player with the most characters has an advantage in Vs. System; after all, this is a game about battle. It seems appropriate that the superheroes and super heroines are the focus of the game.

There are several lesser types of advantage. You can gain advantage through playtesting and preparation. Knowing the field and the metagame will give you a leg up in any game. While playing most decks, there is also a certain amount of information available to a player and his or her opponent. If you control more information than your opponent, then that type of informational advantage can result in better playmaking and game-based decision making. Finally, there is the advantage of skill and error minimization. This is a rather obvious type of advantage, but it is one of the sources that we exercise the most control over.

In the end, you have to look at the game and decide which type of advantage you are seeking. I tend to seek board advantage over all else. As the game designers provide more options for “free” characters, the economics of the game may dictate a decline in the value of characters. I predict that this is an unlikely scenario. However, there are rarely absolutes in a game that is often designed with such creative tension. As soon as we commit a golden rule to heart, the cards from the next set taint our rule set, and we must adapt.

Maybe this was not really that much of a secret, but it took me a while to start building decks around the sole purpose of gaining board advantage. I am still working on making the optimal plays that maximize my various types of advantage. For your next bit of homework, try to build and play decks that only focus on one type of advantage. Make a card drawing deck. Make an endurance gain or defensive deck. Make a deck that keeps two or three more characters on the field than your opponent can maintain for the entire game. To step your game to the next level, it is important to understand each of these sources of advantage and learn to earn that advantage in competition.

Jeremy “Kingpin’ Blair” (7-drop, TAWC) is a card-flipper and student of the game from the Southeastern part of the United States. If you have constructive comments or questions, feel free to contact him at Tampakingpin@yahoo.com.