jmdt's Über Guide to Über Deckbuilding
I explain bits and pieces of deckbuiding to people all the time, so I though I'd sit down and share the knowlege I've gained in building dozens of decks and testing over 15K games with various decks. This isn't a newbie guide per say as much as a general discussion of deck building techniques. I assume you understand the mechanics of the game and know how each card works. If not, take a moment to read through and understand each card. The most important aspect to build great decks is actually understanding what cards do and how they potentially work together.
I'll update as I get time.
1. Pick a Winning Strategy: Find a Combo
The absolute first step to building a great deck is finding cards that play nice together. The more technical term for 2 or more cards working together is synergy. The core of every winning deck is great synergy. You want the cards in your deck to work together for one common purpose, whatever that purpose may be. Many decks fail because they try to do too much at one time. The more things you try to do with a deck, the less effective the deck is at each of them. Now there are times when your whole deck will not synergize, but we discuss why this is sometimes a benifit later. The important idea to rember is to always base a deck on atleast 2 cards that have synergy. Remember some strategies are inherently stronger than others. While you can make an effective deck with any card, not all combinations are strong. Step back and think how effective your idea is. If you want an uber deck, you need an uber synergy. If you are set on a less effective strategy, don't fret fun decks can still be made to be very lethal with some pointers I will teach you later.
There are 2 general types of synergy: hard and soft synergy as I shall refer to them. With hard synergy, 2 cards together are much stronger than either of the cards by themself. The best example of a hard synergy is the combination of discord and black hole. Discord and black hole are both annoying cards individually, but when used together the effect is devastating to your opponent. There are other cards that have a built in synergy.
card Fallen Elf's use of a
effect makes it have automatic synergy with
cards. Its 3 attck makes it synergize especially well with Adrenaline. Soft synergy is somewhat of a mono deck phenomena I have noticed. The fewer elements your deck uses, the more efficient your quanta usage will be. This is not to say rainbows are definitely worse, but rainbow decks do trade efficiency for the ability to have a variety of cards to deal with various situations. A good example of soft synergy is shown by Comparing 2 decks that aim to do the same thing, one a mono and one a duo. I will compare the EM decks The Ultimate Speed Em Deck (
http://elementscommunity.org/forum/index.php/topic,10563.0.html)(USEM), a mono
and Mummy...Get a Life (
http://elementscommunity.org/forum/index.php/topic,12849.0.html)(MGAL), a
/
duo. Due to the inclusion of larger creatures, MGAL is a faster deck than USEM by a small margin. However, due to the synergy of heal operating from the same quanta pool as frog and cockatrice, USEM has a 75% EM rate versus a 50% EM rate for MGAL.
So you must wonder how jmdt comes up with his crazy ideas? Well 2 ways actually. 1st as I explained in the introduction a deep knowlege of all the cards is very important. Since I have looked at all the cards and played a few games with each, I inderstand how and in what contexts they all work. This leads to a number of 'eureka' moments. Times were an idea with great synergy just pops in my head in random thought. Usually while in chat, but sometimes in random places I get nice elements related ideas. These moments are rare, so thay my not help you much. Many of my decks develop from 'what if' moments. As a scientst/researcher, I'm always curious how things work so I often set off to investigate unpopular elemental combos or cards. By exploring cards that are not typically used, you can sometimes find decks that are gems. After everyone said steam machine was terrible when it first came out, I started to investigate steam machine with the goal of making it work. My experiments lead to the infamous Need a Parka (
http://elementscommunity.org/forum/index.php/topic,12200.0.html). Parka removes Steam machines reliance on masses of fire quanta by using Shard of Readiness(SoR). To give time for steam machine to grow, acrtic octapuss is added, whichitself benefits from SoR. Another example of synergy at work. Sometimes quite frankly I just build decks from scratch as I need a deck and just don't have an idea at the moment. In these cases, I will generally look through my card list element by element till I find something I like. A good example was during war 2 when I played for
, I would look through the different elements cards and think, "how would any of these card work with my fire cards?" Doing this you will sometimes find amazing combos you or maybe everyone has never thought of.
2. What AI are You Playing? Is the deck for PvP instead?
Before you take your idea further than just a nice synergy, you should take a step back and think about a few things. Not many of us have lots of time to waste on losing decks, so we want to maximise the efficiency of our idea. What is my idea good against? This question will point you in the right direction most of the time. Most concepts naturally lend themselves to certain directions. If your idea seems to have a good deal of rushiness involved its prolly best for AI3 or T50 and maybe PvP; odds are pursuing the fg or maybe AI5 with it is probably a terrible idea. You just can't effectively rush the false gods and AI5 can only be effectively be rushed part of the time. When grinding the AI you want the maximum electrum and/or score per time and that's just not the way t do it. As I don't play the fg much, I've honestly only made 1 fg deck Maxwell's Silver...Buckler (
http://elementscommunity.org/forum/index.php/topic,10966.0.html). It came from a what if moment exploring the synergy of maxwells demon and fire buckler. The combo has very steep control potential, but takes time to work. By adding creature control on a stick and then stalling to give it time to work, I'd effectively created a fg deck without trying.
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3. Deck Construction: What other cards do I want?
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4. QI, who cares about that?
I'm gonna assume you have read ScaredGirl's thread on Quantum Index (
http://elementscommunity.org/forum/index.php/topic,5676.0.html) for this section. I have a love hate relationship with QI. QI is VERY important, but at the same time the target QI is also dependant on what the deck is doing. I have effective decks with QI ranging anywhere from 3.5 to 8. Does this mean the QI is broken...no. When I first started deck building, I sucked (yeah I said it); solid deck building is a learned skill. Studying QI really helped me to better understand and hence better build solid decks. When I first discovered QI, I developed a spreadsheet that allowed me to 'virtually' build decks. For a period there, I literally built every deck in a spreadsheet, forcing the quanta to be in the ~5.0 range. Regardless of everything else, a deck with a QI of ~5.0 will function well mechanically. It may suck in practice due to the strategy used, but you will generally find no excess quanta or shortage of quanta hindering the deck.
Over time studying popular decks that worked, I learned that rushes favor lower QI's (increasingly lower as the cards get more expensive) and that stalls can often fully function with only minimal quanta generation. I look at the target QI as a necessity factor with 5.0 being the average value for an average deck. Rushes need extra quanta early to get a field of damage out as quick as possible so you lower the target QI to compensate, and since a stall such as mono aether only needs to play an expensive shield every 3 turns (and even then you usually wait for the opponent to get out damage) as opposed to quickly after drawn the necessity of quanta generation is lowered and the target QI can be raised to compensate. Eventually I learned enough that I rarely use the spreadsheet now (except for upped pendulums) and can generally ballpark in initial design (it's also quicker to just pull out the TI-83 to check).
There is a special case to QI calculation. A standard QI calculation is usually only effective for monos and duos and works best for decks close to 30 cards. Speedbows or PSNbows, rainbows that operate with supernovas for speed, can utilize QI but in a somewhat different way. Instead of basing everything on the pillars, you base quanta generation on the supernovas. For a speedbow, my general rule of thumb for a speed based build is to make every element use 6 or less quanta; ideally you use each element about equally and get as close as you can to 6 quanta without going over. The one exception is
; if you have too much
usage it can adversely affect speed by delaying supernovas a turn or 2. My experiment with this rule for supernova deck building was highly successful. In Da Fastest Speedbow Eva! (
http://elementscommunity.org/forum/index.php/topic,11757.0.html) I filled each element with its most rushy cards and tweaked sever times to ensure no element went over 6 quanta. The result was a deck that was both highly stable and uber fast. If more stalling is available you may can use a bit more quanta from each element, but it is a delicate balance. A PSNbow is similar to a speedbow, but from quanta balance perspective has its own set of rules. Since you do not use Quantum Towers in a PSN bow and instead rely on Supernova exclusively for quanta generation for most of the deck, I general lower the per element cap to 4 for a rush and if you are going for a slow build a few cards may can be 6, but only in rare cases. Since you have pendulums you will have an excess of quanta from your mark element and
. My testing has shown that ~ 20 quanta is about the best you can support from your mark element in a fast deck. In a slower deck you can support some expensive
cards, but I again am not a fan or running
in supernova powered decks. A good example of a balanced PSN bow is my Charged up da Rainbow...Where's mah Pot o' Gold? (
http://elementscommunity.org/forum/index.php/topic,13441.0.html) deck. My goal was to make a rainbow deck featuring Elite Chargers due to their sturdiness and momentum ability. Not long before, pendulums had been released and I had made 1 prototype PSNbow so I decided to see what could happen. Using my 20 quanta rule, I ended up with 4 chargers and a host of other fast playing critters giving a shield defeating deck with a ttw in the range of 6.0.
5. Test, Test, Test.
Regardless of target QI value, only testing will reveal the ideal value for the particular deck. If I test a deck and I find I have too much quanta sitting around most of the time I either add some larger hitters for smaller ones or remove a pillar for something cheap. Conversely if my hand is sitting full most of the time, a dragon or 2 may need to go. To further hammer this point, someone (I believe kevkev) did a ttw of 3 unupped mono
with varying QI but essentially the same deck. The study showed that the deck with ttw closest to 5.0 had the fastest ttw. Again, with a high QI, critters could not come out quick enough and with too low a QI there was not enough damage to go around.
6. Time to Pwn
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