[Intermediate] What is Card Advantage?

[Raphael Majere]

Brontos' article (on Resource Boosters) is excellent so I am using it as a basis to discuss my ideas.

Firstly the Article is extremely well written.

The idea of card advantage is rooted in the current deck I am mainly playing now. The only reason it wins is because it has huge card advantage + Lotsa control.

"Power" is nothing without control. (ie, Green - lotsa draw but very limited control)

What is control? Examples: Blue counterspells, Dante-d Agents, ability to remove threats: agents, sites, Actions.

In terms of speed and deck building, my approach for ACR has been narrowed to just 2.

Fast = rush. Slow = control.

There is no-between for me. Why?

My fav card, Pre-emptive Strike, is 6cc. Which is not a lot and it's considered the slow one.

Cards that have great card advantage in my deck.

Marco
Pre-empt strike
Ances Discov
Dante + Cesare
RI (?)
Mysterious stranger

- Marco - a agent that can attack/block and have the potential to cast a 0 cost counterspell. Combined with Dante, excellent card. Did I mention that he can block Officials?

- Pre-emptive Strike - my fav card in ACR. +1 income boost, replaces itself via draw. What more can I ask for? . I swear: many good players rage quit on me when my lock (Cesare/Dante) is out and I cast Ances Discov. To Bring back 2 pre-emptive strikes (they can see it slowly moving from archive to my hand) - Rage Quit.

- Ances Discov: Need I say more? 1 card to bring back 2 cards. Lastly ACR is mainly a 'non-mana focused' game, ie. There are not many 'lands' needed. Which means to say: there are a lot of goodies in the archives. Combined with DI/Mysterious Strangeer, I find many goodies like Cesare/Rodigo/Leo and other high cost cards in there.

My fav: bring back my RI/Cesare or simply 2 Premptive strikes. wicked.

- Dante (+ Cesare): Cesare, on its own, is already a card with great card advantage. If unblocked, he works like a Papal influence (and re-useable!). I usually use him first as a blocker. That takes out 1 opponent's agent; score some points and is reusable. Superb card advantage. Combined with Dante; even better. A little OP IMO.

- Dante - on his own. Not a bad card either. Combined with any agent; he allows them to stay alive and block other bigger threats for 3 turns. For cost 1cc?! Well worth it.

- RI - A card that I feels needs a little nerf. Why do I feel so? In my slow deck, I am not concerned how much my opponent gain in a region as long as it does not reach 10. Why? A late game 20 cc/RI gets me the 10 I need in my region and nulls him back to 0.

This simply means that whatever my opponent did earlier to increase the points in the region are simply useless. That is HUGE card advantage.

(My suggestion of RI. Only allow it to hit a max 10 for myself and cannot push back my opponent's score)

- Lastly, Mysterious stranger. +1 income boost, Drops the highest cc card of my opponent's hand, a 2/1 agent. A card that is obviously 'not bad'. But because I have Dante, Stranger becomes very good for me, as a blocker.

Hence, understanding and identifying the route to win is every important. Is card advantage the only way to win? Of course not. Rush decks with PP/Nico/Ezio Gold works very well too, despite Nico/Ezio being cards that gives the player a clear disadvantage.

Why do they work then? Despite going against the mantra of 'having card advantage"? It's simply because (Thanks to Brontos for the deck) they are 'fast' enough and can secure the 2 regions/10 points in time. Would they work if the points needed is 12 instead of 10. I don't think so.

In such a rush deck, its actually quite a study in itself. The deck tries to win with the 6 cards in hand + a few more from draws. The concept of winning with limited cards FAST > worth the sacrifice in card advantage.

Hence, again, understanding and being able to identify cards that can help you to win is crucial. A case in point: Noble rush is not a top tier deck. Why? Because it's caught in the middle in terms of speed. It lacks the speed to win in time (aka quickly) and for sure, it cannot win slow/counter/control decks.

As a closer, IMO, a good TCG should have both kinds of decks. It's generally very fun. Looking forward to Auction House! I wanna build a rush deck!

[Tuism]

I also wanna build a rush deck. I want PPs/Nicos

And Ancestrals/Wraths

Oh and Femme Fatales.

While I don't disagree with you entirely about the two extremes being the most powerful, I REALLY like the inbetweeners the most. Like any media copy deck, or the Lanz deck. Or the Femme Fatale/Borgia Tower fighting combo deck. Or what I call my gambling deck (it's not rushing, but it's gambling )

[Brontobeuf]

Great stuff in this thread Raph. Your deck is a beast, I never play the deck I should play when I face it.

This simply means that whatever my opponent did earlier to increase the points in the region are simply useless. That is HUGE card advantage.

A quick detail to rectify here. Hope you won't mind.
Technically, it is a circumstancial card advantage. Not a strict one.

A strict card advantage is given by In Depth Study or Mario Auditore, or Preemptive Strike.
A cisrcumstancial Card advantage requires your opponent to do some things that will give it to you. In this case, you will only gain card advantage if he played two Papal Influence on the site before you negate it with your RI. That's tactical advantage, moral advantage, tempo advantage, but not card advantage directly.

[The Rancord]

I personally think you souldnt talk about single cards when talking about card Advantage.

Every 2/2 ally can create Cardd Advantage or field advantage when facing allies that have less than 2 power and less than 3 health.

The concept is, that my hand is my most important ressource. So this is mostly important in control decks. I want an answer for every card my enemy plays. Every card he palys that I do not need to answer, lets my hand stay one card ahead of him. A card like rpe-emptive strike, removes a card I have to answer but replaces mine, so I stay at +1 as well. Every card I draw, that is not a threat or an answer, is essentially dead and stays in my hand, but is essentially a -1 if I do not have any cards that are stronger but force me to discard a card.

Now if he reaches a critical hand size 1-2 card and I have for example 5 cards, I can easily play my big winners. If he does have a counter he does not have any cards to win him the game. The chanes are higher that my remaining 4 cards have another card that when me the game, in contrary to his 0-1.

[Raphael Majere]

Jan 10, 2012 8:50:16 GMT -5 Tuism said:

Like any media copy deck, or the Lanz deck. Or the Femme Fatale/Borgia Tower fighting combo deck. Or what I call my gambling deck (it's not rushing, but it's gambling )

I agree that the media copy deck is an exception. But it would be very dependent on luck, it's the kinda deck that shocks everyone at tourneys. I played it vs noobs and waste SO much time on Poison that I lost! There was nothing nice to take from their decks!!!

Jan 10, 2012 9:07:29 GMT -5 Brontobeuf said:

This simply means that whatever my opponent did earlier to increase the points in the region are simply useless. That is HUGE card advantage.

A quick detail to rectify here. Hope you won't mind.
Technically, it is a circumstancial card advantage. Not a strict one.

A strict card advantage is given by In Depth Study or Mario Auditore, or Preemptive Strike.
A cisrcumstancial Card advantage requires your opponent to do some things that will give it to you. In this case, you will only gain card advantage if he played two Papal Influence on the site before you negate it with your RI. That's tactical advantage, moral advantage, tempo advantage, but not card advantage directly.

I fully agree.

[Tuism]

That's funny that I like gambling with playing risky decks but I wouldn't gamble by buying mixed boosters

To me, synergies are just as important as card advantage - for every card that doesn't synergise, you're at -1 advantage against cards that DO synergise. There're no hard and fast numbers rules when counting synergy, say for example Silvio Barbarigio and Animus Reboot/Wrath - you can't count that card advantage, but the synergy is important.

And the more synergies in a deck the better it runs. Like Nobles, like Borgia decks, like Lanzs.

But it's still correct that if it comes down to it, synergies can be broken by card advantage. But so it can be the other way around.

[drazel]

I would say it this way :

Card advantage is what makes a card great
Synergies is what makes a deck great

Even by playing a lot of good cards providing card advantage, you'll have hard time to win if you do not have good synergies in your deck.

[Brontobeuf]

This has been proven wrong in MTG and WoW many times in the past. Most beautifull decks are rich in both, card advantage and synergies. but they are very rares....

This was what we called "good cards decks". You just play together all the current good cards (limited by your ressources/mana/color/heros) and you play them well. And it works wonder most of the time.
Usually, good cards gives you an advantage of some sort, most frequently card adv.

Of course, synergy based decks also got their share of glory. Silvers decks in MTG, Cat decks in WoW, etc.

It's just a matter of card pool in the end and deck builders.

[drazel]

I have to disagree.

Being an active player of MTG since 1995, the huge majority of successful decks (in tournament) I have known have good synergies, even if they are not "mini-combos synergies" as I like to call them.

Good cards decks exist, it is a fact but they are almost exclusively aggressive decks.

[Raphael Majere]

Hey all, I tried to sign up for MtGO but the client software sucks. I cannot install it properly. I tried repair/update the client; there is always a error when the download of 30000 files halfway.

Sorry for this troll post. But is this a common issue with MtGo client?

[Ringel]

Sorry I can't help. However, once you get that working, I doubt we will be seeing much more of you. MtGO is the real deal, with tournaments and alternate formats and everything you could want if you got the cash.

(Not that I've ever played there. I've never had a Windows computer.)

[bluebird503]

Jan 10, 2012 12:23:34 GMT -5 drazel said:

I have to disagree.

Being an active player of MTG since 1995, the huge majority of successful decks (in tournament) I have known have good synergies, even if they are not "mini-combos synergies" as I like to call them.

Good cards decks exist, it is a fact but they are almost exclusively aggressive decks.

I have to disagree, block has been known to have the Good Card decks a ton of times and most often they are midrange or just big card control decks, aggressive decks in their very nature have synergy, because all of their cards aim to win very quickly before your opponent can have a strong grip on the game. Sure some aggro decks have more synergy than others, I would say affinity had some of the most synergy of any deck of all time, where as something like Zoo from Ravinca era was just good aggressive cards, but.. Midrange decks in MTG were commonly known as good card decks, because they aimed to just play good cards, and weren't really able to out control the control decks, and out aggro the aggro decks, they had to do the opposite of the deck they were playing against..


I have no problem with playing these resource accelerators btw as long as the decks call for them, I agree with you card advantage is extremely important(and like most It's the first thing I think about when building a deck, I'm a blue player in MTG(and inherently I'm playing Blue/Green in this game), I mean I've won and lost tournaments with other decks of course when it's the right call, but I'm someone who likes to play a good control deck more than anything else) , but that's why if you want to play these accelerator cards you either need to win right away and not give your opponent the chance to grind you out with 2 for 1s, or 3 for 1s, or you yourself need to play some big card advantage cards like reboot, or the draw 3 or especially daring experiment.


Also MTG Online is awesome, I hope you have fun, I have enjoyed MTGO quite a bit in my time .

[Tuism]

Compared to ACR... I'm gonna say that magic is over-updated for me too expensive too upkeep, and won't get me to go back. Hopefully I won't be saying the same thing about ACR in the future, cos that would just be way too ironic.

Super rush decks are great these days with Patronage (don't got enough myself to play), when I see one I almost mediately know it'll be a difficult recovery... But hey, consistency wise it's not always gonna get that awesome opening hand. So it's self balancing.

I still like synergies and things that make you go hmmmm

[drazel]

Jan 11, 2012 0:35:47 GMT -5 Tuism said:

I still like (...) things that make you go hmmmm

so you like chocolate ;D

The hardest thing Ubi has to manage to do with ACR is to make enough powerful cards in each faction to have various decks.
I played against Soooo many Cesare Borgia decks the last few days that I have the will to make a deck made to beat just this one consistently

[Brontobeuf]

Sudden Exhaustion is perfect imo.