Hello Everybody!
I decided to write a post about the deeper mechanisms of the game, so beginners and advanced players alike can construct their decks more consciously and effectively.
This post is going to provide some game theory behind aggressive decks, and deck speed in general.
It's going to be a loooong post, I presume. It also will be a bit more oriented towards advanced players, but I'm positive that beginner players will also find some interesting information to consider.
Also, sorry if this is not the right place for posting stuff like that.
Also, not everything written here is my original idea, but is considered basic game theory in the trading-card game "Magic: The Gathering". I think that with the two games being somewhat similar, a good portion of the insightful theory originated from there can be also useful to consider in this game too.
Okay, so I see a lot of people playing aggressive (or "aggro") decks. That is easilly understandable because the goal of the game is to reduce the opponent's life to zero. And this can be accomplished by (surprise, surprise) attacking. An aggro (also called or rush, or speed deck) exels in attacking the opponent as fast as possible.
In this post, I try to write about a few tidbits and choices to consider when designing an aggro deck. It's a videly thought preconception that aggro decks are 'dumber', and require less skill and thinking to play than a stall (or "control") deck. This is, however, wrong. An aggro deck needs loads of thinking and tweaking in order to thrive, and this is especially true in the world of Elements (more on this a bit later).
So, the first step is to decide which cards will be included in the deck. Most players evaluate an aggro card by looking at it and asking themselves the question "how much damage will this card cause for every 1 quantum invested?" This question evaluates the card's speed, and thus, it's "aggro-ness". For example, a Horned frog costs 2 quanta and has a power of 3, so it's clearly better suited to attacking than, say, a Mind flayer, which has a power of 2 for the same cost of 2 quanta. But what about a Fire Spirit? Zero pover for 2 quanta, yet still, we "feel" that this card is designed with attacking in mind... So, this simple evaluation can be vague, and often leads to suboptimal card inclusions in various decks.
I think that, there are several other factors to consider when designing an aggro deck. These factors are:
- Damage dealt per card (very important!)
- Damage dealt per quanta invested (the aforementioned "speed-factor")
- Damage dealt in proportion to opponent's life total (again, more on this later.)
Whith all these things taken into consideration, I think that the right question to ask ourselves, while evaluating an aggressive card, is something along the lines of "How much damage will this card deal to my opponent until it becomes redundant?" This is a much more complex and obscure question than the previous one (solely regarding the "speed" of the card), but answering it correctly gives a good grip on not just the usefluness on an individual card, but on the whole, the validity of the agressive strategy in the game (again, more about this later
).
I'll try to interpret, or "crack open" this difficult-to answer question, by explaining what do I mean by "the card becoming redundant", and what are the factors to consider about a card becoming redundant. I'll try to give in-game examples to make my points clearer.
In each and every game, there are 2 players who can make a card redundant or obsolete: Me and my opponenent.
I make a card not needed if:
- I have it in my hand but I won't play it because I cannot, I don't have to, or because I'd rather play something else.
(a quick aside: this is the single most effective way to cut the excessive copies of a card in your deck: Every time you draw it, ask yourself "would I be happier if this card were something else, rather than <cardname>?" For example, next time you have 6 fire quanta and draw a Crimson Dragon, ask yourselves: "would I be happier if this were a Lava Golem?" if you have too much dragons in your deck, the answer will be "yes" most of the time. About time you switched a dragon for a golem. )
- I have it on the battlefield but I make a play that makes it redundant (i.e. I sacrifice a Spark to an Immolation, or I play a Sundial while having a Dimensional Shield, 1turn remaining, in play.)
- I win the game before playing it (again, think of excessive dragons sitting in your hand when you've just won).
My opponent can make a card redundant if:
- S/he destroys it
- S/he makes it impossible to deal damage (Dimensional Shield, anyone? As a fellow aggro player, you should especially care about enemy shields!!)
- S/he wins the game before you do. In this case, all of your cards suddenly become redundant. Naturally, your sole goal in the game is to avoid this situation by winning.
(Hint of the day:It's a good indication of your deck's speed (or rather, the lack of it) if your opponents constantly defeat you while you have 4 Miracles clogging up your hand.)
The easiest thing to evaluate is a card being destroyed. The factors to consider here is a card's "threat level" vs. it's resistance to removal. Cards with a high "threat level" tend to be destroyed early.
Among "aggro" creatures, "threat level" scales up with the power of the creature, while resistance with the toughness(or the creature being immortal). However, if YOU are the aggro player, then the opponent's creatures are a threat only if they can effectively hinder your progress. (Your progress is zeroing the opponent's life total.)
(A quick note: I found that there are far less number of creatures of this kind in the game then it would seem at first glance. For example, a Mindflayer is NOT a creature that needs to be removed, cause is's only a2-power critter, and thus, it cannot damage-race with your aggressive creatures. This brings up the concept of "race", which I will deal with a bit later. For now, let's just remember that if you are the aggro player, then you only need to worry about a handful of enemy creatures.)
Among permanents, the threat level is measured as in how much the card can slow you down. Remember, as the aggro player, you are only concerned with bringing the opponent's life total down to zero before the opponent can do the same to you. That's why a Titan, while doing more damage than an Owl's Eye, is not a threat because you plan to outrace the Titan's damage anyway, but the OE can kill your attacking creatures. (using the same logic, one can come to the conclusion that a Pulverizer or Lobotomizer isn't a threat either, but shhhhh! that's a secret, don't tell this to the control players!)
Well, this turned out to be a pretty long post already, I've dealt with a good portion of game theory so far, and every concept I wrote about could've brought up a thousand another. For example, resistance to removal, removal in general, and the aforementioned "Damage-per-card factor" brings about the concept of card advantage, but it's way too deep and wide of a concept to cover in this post.
There is, however, one more thing that I want to write about, and this thing is the situation of racing with your opponent. The vast majority of suboptimal card choices in an aggro deck is a result of losing the focus on the race and the speed of a deck.
Every game of Elements is basically a damage race between the two players' decks. That's right people, game-stalling decks are in the race, too! They just approach the concept of "race" from a different angle, but their goal is also to finish off the opponent before the opponent fininshes them off.
Where two decks race each other, there is inherently one that is 'slower' and one that is 'faster'. This has nothing to do with starting hands or card draws, this is an inherent attribute coming from comparing the pure speed of the two decks. The main principle of racing is that the player with the faster deck should do everything to finish off the game the sooner the better, while the one with the slower deck must do everything in its power to slow down the flow of the game.
If you look at a card list of a control-oriented deck and an agressive deck, of course you can decide which is the faster one and which is designed to slow down (or stall) the game. Aggro players want to win fast by playing agressive creatures and eliminating opponenet's defenses, while the stall deck kills off the opposing creatures, builds up defenses and conserves its life total.
But what if two similarly designed decks face each other? Guess what, this is a race situation too! One deck is inherently faster in dealing damage than the other (mirror matches with exactly the same cards aside). The vital thing is to find out which deck I'm piloting -the faster or the slower one-, and playing accordingly. If I'm inherently slower, then I must slow down the speed of the game, so my slower tempo can "catch up" with the other, faster deck. If I'm the faster one, I have to finish the game before my opponent catches up. Slowing the game down usually means killing enemy creatures and using dual-function cards, like drain life, in favor of life-gaining rather than threat-eliminating.
In a stall deck vs. stall deck race, being faster usualy means the ability of sticking a huge, effective creature (say, a Golden Dragon) on the board and then either defending it, or following it with more creatures while the opponent wastes its cards removing the original threat.
(on a side note: If you play MtG, and want to read more about this concept, then google "who is the beatdown", one of the best game theory articles ever, written by Mike Flores, one of the best game theorists ever. All I have written down about racing originated from that article.)
(side note 2: how can you be always sure that you are piloting the faster deck? Easy, simply bulid the fastest deck available. No, it's not a joke. If you know that yours is the fastest deck, then you'll always know your position in a race.)
Phew, I know that this is a long and hard-to-understand post, but I want to say only one thing before I bid you farewell. And this is a shout-out to all my fellow aggro-players: 'Don't dilute your deck with creature removal!! Don't use Firebolts/Fire Lances, or Drain/Siphon lifes etc. in your aggro decks!' I know that it seems like a great idea to kill off opposing aggro creatures, but in reality you just diluting the threat density in your deck. consider this: The opponent plays a 5/1 Lava Golem. Which one would you rather draw: a Bolt to kill it, or a Crimson Dragon to outrace it? Of course you'd rather draw the Dragon. (Let's assume it's midgame and you have the quanta for playing the Dragon). If you say "but I don't have other creatures, and I should kill the Golem so I can buy more time", then I answer that your deck is wrongly assembled. You should have your own Lava Golems down on the battlefield. If you don't, that's maybe because the opponent killed them. That means s/he's the "slower deck" and you should "outrace" him/her anyway. Remember what I told you about racing?
You don't need Bolts to race.
Oh, and consider the number of your pillars very carefully! Every pillar drawn mid-game is a dead draw, slowing down the speed of your deck. That said, I think that the most efficient aggro deck currently is the pillarless rush deck (if tested and fine-tuned properly).
But on the whole, I think that the game in its entirelity is fairly unbalanced, in the favor of stalling-oriented decks (or "control" decks). That's because the agessive cards' "damage-vs-lifetotal" factor is just too weak. This could be helped by reducing the maximum life totals to, say, 80 or 70. But this is just my impression after more than a few thousand games played.
Thank you for reading this very long, and maybe pretty confusing post! I hope that I could write something that caught your eyes and piqued your interest a bit. Feel free to share your thoughts about the stuff written down here, every comment is appreciated!
The game's theory is very deep and there are lots of things to write about, if you want me to do more posts like this, then just write something about it in the comments.
Thank you all,
Acsabi44
(sorry for my terrible english)
