Follow me back to eighth grade English class. After a semester of avoiding split infinitives, arranging your modifying verbs, and trying to reel in dangling participles, you get the assignment. As she stares down her horn-rimmed trifocals, she drops the proverbial bomb. You get saddled with twenty-two chapters of The Red Badge of Courage or have to drudge your way through some epic poem about the bay of wolves.

That familiar tension rolls up the back of your neck. When I was in eighth grade, I spent most of my time spurting bursts of air into Nintendo cartridges to keep my Metroid game from going on the fritz. There were pick-up basketball games, after school specials, and all types of more interesting things to be doing than reading Dandelion Wine.

After wading my way through the dense chapters of a couple of books, I learned some shortcuts. If you read the first and last sentence of each paragraph, you will probably be able to follow the story. I could pull average grades and still have time to save Zelda.

In ninth grade, I made the varsity football team and gained access to the collective knowledge of my academic predecessors. One day after practice, a senior shoved a little yellow book into my chest and told me to “work smarter, not harder.” I glanced over the yellow background and read the bold black letters: “Cliffs Notes.” There were those out there who understood the pains of reading complete books for school, the trim timelines of hardcore high school gamers, and that students like me roamed the Earth. Somebody took the time to reduce Crime and Punishment to an actual length that was not a crime and did not entail punishment.

You could scoop up these crib notes for less than it cost to buy the actual book, and they’d already done half the work. My high school years were given back to me; I would actually have time to flip some cards, save some needy princesses, and play some ball without the burden of 300 pages hanging over my lazy head.

Epic Novel vs. Epic Quick-read

Now that I am an adult, I have learned the true meaning of Christmas, actually read complete books, and stopped sticking lost teeth under my pillow. But I still want to get the most bang for my buck out of my time. I am a busy guy. The Kingpin has needs. I live a paradoxical existence, balancing out the mantras of “time is money” and “take time to smell the roses.” It isn’t easy.

For all of my love of Vs. System, I hold many other loves and want to spend my card-playing time in the most effective ways. When I get together with some buddies to playtest, I do not particularly want to waste time on poor deck ideas. Making decks that don’t work is frustrating, playing decks that don’t work is boring, and there is something to be said for efficiency.

Over the past couple months, I have written enough articles and installments of this School of Hard Knocks to fill many chapters of a very disorganized book. In the end, I am sure there are many people out there who would rather have access to a condensed version of the Kingpin’s words of wisdom and insight; if you are sensitive to time or a bit lazy, that is how you roll. The Kingpin understands these needs and has prepared an abridged version—“cliffs notes,” if you like—encompassing some relevant game theory, key tips to remember, and hard-hitting concepts in our beloved game. Let’s revisit some of the essential concepts in what might be an otherwise epic treatment of Vs. System theory.

It is Always about Advantage

Games are about advantages. In Vs. System, we have the big types of advantage and some more subtle types of advantage. Most players can spout the obvious types of advantage; ask an average group of aspiring professional card-flippers 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.

Who is the Beatdown? (Tempo Tips)

In every match, there is an aggressor and a player needing to play defense. If you know the role you should take, then you can make decisions accordingly. If you misjudge your role in the tempo game, you might find yourself in the loser’s bracket.

Think back to a recent game in which you were the beatdown or aggressor. You needed to deliver as much damage as quickly as possible. If you let tempo control slip to your opponent, you might have been taken out of the game. Stall decks like to control the early part of a game by KO’ing your small attackers, exhausting threats, and neutralizing the damage that an aggressive build might deal. If you understand that goal, then you are better prepared to amp up your assertive efforts while playing an aggro deck against a stall deck. In turn, if you are the later-game player, then you need to take action to stop those critical attacks and make it to your win condition.

Hand Maintenance Wins Games

Aside from tempo, other key factors for victory involve card and hand advantage, establishing (and maintaining) character and board advantage, and making the most effective attacks and formations to maintain endurance. While various decks have differing needs, hand advantage is a key concept in most trading card games. If you have played decks like those sporting the now-banned Frankie Raye ◊ Nova, Optimistic Youth, then you understand how hand advantage may be directly linked to your win condition. Our golden rule for card advantage, though, may best be understood as hand maintenance.

With decks like Injustice Gang big-hand burn, Squadron, and even the range of off-curve to long-curve decks, a player must understand how the hand interacts with the deck’s goals. Off-curve decks tend to spend a lot of their resources early, and run a risk of fading out as the game progresses. Card drawing and effective use of your resources is essential to avoid the collapse of the low-curve engine. In contrast, some decks desire very small hands or giant hands to reach a goal. The key is to understand the card-in-hand requirements for your individual deck. As with understanding tempo, understanding hand maintenance requirements takes practice, but certain deck types may be clustered together for understanding. Late-game curve decks usually need to preserve their hands and tricks until late in the game, while shorter curves may only need to keep one or two cards in hand at a time. Each deck has different needs.

Board Presence: More Big Baddies

If you want to understand the importance of board advantage, then play in several hundred Sealed Pack matches. Some Constructed decks get away with hijinks because they are packing a ton of tasty tricks, but tricks are sparser in Sealed and Draft formats. The key to winning games often comes down to a critical turn in which a player is able to brickwall an attack, KO a key character, or make advantageous combat moves and gain a one or two character advantage over the opponent. Many players have been in this situation: Your opponent hits the beginning of his or her curve before you’re able to get characters on the board. The opponent hits his or her 1-drop and you whiff. He or she drops a 1- and 2- drop and you do not hit until 3. As the game progresses, you are forced into a constant state of catch-up while the opponent glides to an easy victory. Have you ever had an opponent KO your 5-drop? These instances speak volumes to the importance of board advantage. Some time ago, Adam Prosak wrote some articles on the benefits of team attacking in Vs. System. He provided a rationale for making safe team attacks to secure stuns up the curve rather than making a more risky attack with an ATK pump. If you have not had a chance to review that, it is perhaps some of the most important information provided on the concept of creating and maintaining board presence. In the end, board advantage seems to be the one rule that is difficult to break and is likely a key factor in the majority of match decisions.

Strive for the Win Condition

One of the most relevant things to analyze in deck construction is the win condition. Does the deck expect a bunch of little characters to get together on a key turn to fight? Does the deck want increasingly bigger characters to battle until the biggest and best one is left standing after a veritable slugfest? Or does the deck look to secure victory with a collection of counters or multiple opportunities to burn an opponent? The win condition should be a compass for deck construction.

Popular decks have primarily relied on causing endurance loss through combat to achieve the win. There is a subset of key variables or establishing operations that may be necessary for achieving that endurance loss. Recent decks such as Ivy League have attempted to remove a player’s cards from his or her hand and thus limit the number of resources and the size of characters that can be recruited. Other decks have provided weapons, tools, or bonuses to supplement undersized characters in combat, and yet others have relied on the tried and true strategy of bringing the “best fighters”—characters with the most desirable statistics—to the party.

Next week, we will complete the set of crib notes. If you are a seasoned player, you most likely have taken these ideas and developed a code by which to operate. This code informs deckbuilding decisions and the way in which you play your games. If you are a new player, you may want to think about testing out these ideas and developing your own code.

Jeremy Blair is a past English student turned Cliffs Notes user who loves to play Vs. System. If you have constructive comments or criticisms, hit him up at Tampakingpin@yahoo.com.