Did you ever notice that there's usually one person who wins all the tournaments in your area? If you've ever played that person, remember how your carefully laid plans never had quite the teeth you expected? That person was too well prepared, and had just the right card to either foil you or further their own agenda, right when they needed it the most.
That's not an accident. Sure, an important part of deck building is knowing what cards to include in your deck, and the metagame is certainly fun. But, another, and just as important part of deck design, is the ability to manipulate the resources in your deck so you have what you need, when you need it. The really great players have mastered this, and their wins prove it.
My new series will explore some of the different ways to manage your deck. I'll try to keep the math to a minimum, but it's important to recognize some of the theories behind the implementation. We'll look at the gamut of things you can do, from specific strategies that lend themselves to deck management, (Visit Cochrane Memorial decks or Processing Ore decks - to name a couple) to some alternative ways to accomplish your goals. This series is targeted at those of us who already know the basics. We know the benefits of a Q-Flash side deck; we understand the rules and barring a few minor clarifications, can answer most of the questions asked on the Discussion BBS. We win more than we lose at the local tournaments, but we have a nemesis (no, it's NOT Lore) who always seems to beat us. Hopefully these articles can help you turn the corner from being merely a good player to becoming a great player. I'm not going to promise that you will be the next world champion, but you may see your ranking improve.
This first article, I'm going to focus on the odds, and how they improve when you stock multiple copies of specific cards. This may be review for some of us, but it's still helpful to go over one more time. If you have 30 different cards in your deck, the probability that you'll get one specific card on your initial draw, say the only Kevin Uxbridge in your deck, is 1 in 30. Let's figure what the likelihood would be if you keep the deck size the same, and increase the number of Kevin Uxbridges to say 10. It's easier to calculate the probability of NOT drawing a Kevin Uxbridge in each of your first seven draws. [The math looks like this: there are 20 cards that are not KU. You have 20 chances out of 30 to draw one of them. Divide the number of cards that aren't KU by the total number of cards, 20/30 or .66. The second draw has a chance of 19/29 or .65. Keep doing this until you get your seven draws and multiply the results together (.66 x .65 x .64 x .62 x .61 x .6 x .58 = .03)]. What this means is that 97 percent of the time you'll draw a Kevin Uxbridge on at least one of your first 7, if you have 10 of them in your 30 card draw deck. See what I did there? The calculation gave me a 3 percent chance of not drawing KU in my first 7 draws, so I subtracted it from 100 to determine what I really wanted to know: how likely it would be for me to pull a Kevin. Of course, you'd be crazy to stock 10 Kevin Uxbridges in a deck of only 30 cards, but the trick is to figure out how many of that critical card you need to include so you get one in your first seven cards.
Now, there's an easier way to help you gauge how many cards you need (and will get in your original draw). As with our earlier example, if you have 10 copies of Kevin Uxbridge, in a 30 card draw deck, divide the number of KU's by total cards and multiply the result by the number of cards you'll be drawing. 10/30 or .33 x 7 = 2.3. (This is the average number of KU's you'll get in any 7 cards.) Think about the different permutations. 5 Q's Tents in a 36 card draw deck within your first 3 turns. 5/36 x 10 = 1.3 Q's Tents in your first ten cards. Or, 4 Devidian Doors in a 28 card draw deck (thanks to a seeded AMS, you can do this) in your first 2 turns. 4/28 x 9 = 1.2 DD's in your first 9 cards. If you're like me, all you've read so far is technobabble, but it's very useful information to think about when designing a deck. The calculations give you different numbers, but both are helpful. The first, is the probability of drawing a specific card, and the second is the average number of a specific card in any given draw. Now, I don't expect that you'd keep a calculator handy when building your decks, it's just not practical, nor all that fun (unless you need some serious help.) But, you might want to take a few minutes and examine your deck building habits, and then apply one (or both methods) to see if your deck has an effective distribution.
First, think about the deck size you usually use. I like to keep my decks focused and tight, in the 30 to 40 card range. If I'm playing Borg, I may stray into the 50 - 60 card range, depending on the strategy. I also like to keep my deck size in multiples of both 2 and 3. (I'm an anal-retentive freak, who likes to shuffle my cards by dealing them into two piles and then into three piles, and I like to have even numbers of cards in every pile.) But, I know this, so my decks are usually 30 cards, 36 cards or 42 cards. If you want to go bigger, no problem, but keep in mind that to maintain a useful distribution, you'll need to stock more multiples than in a smaller deck. Play around with the numbers to find the best fit for your strategy and deck. Second, think about the cards that you use more often than not, Ready Room Doors, Wormholes, etc. and those which are truly indispensable to your strategy, say, Galathon and determine how many you'll need to stock. Use the number of multiples in your deck (for each card), and look at the average number of cards per draw to see how likely each of them will surface in your first few turns to see if it's a respectable number (circa 1 per draw per card). That's a more useful calculation than trying to determine the probability, and it's a lot less intensive. Based on that information, you can then increase the multiple if it's too low. Don't forget to play-test its accuracy. I usually sit in front of the television with my deck. I shuffle and draw during the funnier sitcoms, observing what kinds of draws I would get for the first few turns. I want to see if my predictions are on the money. It's not too scientific, but I can get the feel for any Rakal shuffles, and see what my deck might play like.
I realize that we've concentrated on math this time around. Next time, we'll look at some of the cards you can use to help stack the deck in your favor. (Stop, you're pun-ishing us.) I'll address some of the metagame aspects of using those cards, as well. I'd like to take a moment and give a special thanks to my good friend and math coach, Sir Francis. Without his explanation of the probability calculation, I'd have been up a creek without an article. As always, I welcome your feedback. If you have any mathematical tricks you use to build effective decks, by all means, please share them with us. If you think I'm way off base, let me know. However, please keep the personal attacks to a minimum, and challenge my ideas - not me. Until next time, good luck and good gaming.
-Dover :)~