General Strategy

[kev]

I thought I’d put together a thread for strategy discussion that doesn’t fit a particular round or opponent.  Feel free to add thoughts on roles, Event Cards, or whatever.

kev’s thoughts on going berserk:

Berserker - Discard 1, 2 or 3 cards from the Vault during deckbuilding. The Berserker may use 1, 3 or 4 extra upgrades respectively.

Most of the time we should only Berserk if we feel it's likely to increase our winrate.

For each card we discard, our winrate needs to go about by an increment.  Discarding in this way makes more sense later in War because the disparity between winning in losing in late rounds is 33 cards, and a 1-3 card sacrifice becomes more forgiveable.

The incremental increase in required winrate is as follows:
Round 1: 6.67%
Round 2: 4.76%
Round 3: 3.70%
Rounds 4+: 3.03%

So if we’re thinking about discarding 3 cards in Round 1, we need to be confident the Berserker’s winrate will increase by 6.67% * 3 = 20%.

Note that the above assumes all cards are equal.  If we have leftover garbage in the vault but we agree our success in War depends on us not losing a particular deck, these numbers aren’t as useful.

[kev]

The Gen, Lt, and St positions all impact deckbuilding.  We're left with a decision on which of the remaining three positions we should delegate to which matchups.

Berserker - Discard 1, 2 or 3 cards from the Vault during deckbuilding. The Berserker may use 1, 3 or 4 extra upgrades respectively.

Quartermaster - If the Quartermaster plays in a battle, each winner from their team may claim 1 card from their element by relinquishing 3 of their salvage, or 2 salvage if the Quartermaster wins. Limit of two cards per person. Teams may not claim cards they already have at least 6 copies of.

Standard Bearer - The Standard Bearer salvages N more cards and discards N fewer cards, where N is the number of wins their team has had that round.

Assuming we're not using the berserker ability, there's no inherent bonus for that role winning in a round.  Accordingly we should assign Be to the lowest conviction matchup.  The Quartermaster ability is something we probably will use but should strive not to.  If we're targeting specific cards we need in vault we should assign the QM role to the matchup in which we have the most conviction.  If we aren't targeting specific cards, we should assign SB to our highest conviction matchup, as extra cards are always useful.  Also getting a salvage of 10+ cards really opens our options in interesting ways.

Conviction doesn't have anything to do with our individual abilities.  If we don't have a sense for whether we match up well or poorly versus their range, we can always use historical team winrates.

[AnnaMall]

Firstly those thoughts are going to be more important further in in war, for orund 1 is mostly speculation. I see berserker and quartermaster as having situational uses.

The math breakdown for berserker is nice to have in mind, but we will never be sure of what we ll face to add the propabilities. 1 upped for 1 discard is nothing imo and 3 discard for 4 upps is a bit too much, so I would consider only 2 discard for 3 upps. A rule of thumb that I would use is: when you look at a deck is there 3 cards that seem much better upped? Does that actually make a change in testing(trainer ans xeno)? Then consider upping. In a 10 round war using berserker's ability for 3 upps every round is a 20 card handicap. Out of the 10 matches, half would be counters that you lose/win no matter the upps. From the rest we should win 4/5 due to upps to be on the positive side, which I think is unlikely to happen that often due to 3 upps. So in short use that role very rarely when we have a good feel of opponent vaults or leave it alone altogether.

Quartermaster is another situational role imo due to the organization of our vault. We gambled on low Q so we will need to have the cards for conversions. 1/3 or 1/2 less salvaged cards is cutting it too shorts for us I am afraid. If we go on a highly positive streak or a highly negative one then this will be handy.

Standard bearer is a nice role to have in team and can help us with the Q issue in the vault. So until this is rectified I believe this is the most important role next to Gen and strat

Strategist allows for some flexibility but that works against us as well. A key role we have to take advantage of as soon as we get a picture of vaults. From round 2 on this should make or break teams.

In short: berserker, Quartermaster and standard bearer can be allocated randomly until the above problems are rectified.