How to evaluate vanilla creatures
Bonsoir, in this post I would like to discuss how to evaluate the power level of vanilla creatures. I am hoping to both help PvP players who are trying to build a deck using creatures for a PvP Event as well as Card Designers who would like to balance their cards. I am going to differentiate between 5 aspects which are important.
Contents
Attack per Cost
Rule No. 1: The higher the Attack/Cost ratio, the better.
This one is fairly obvious, and the one that most beginners will understand intuitively. Attack and Quanta Cost are the most important numbers on a creatures, and you naturally want to get the most bang for your buck. So: Cockatrice with 4/3 = 1.33 is better than Blue Crawler with 3/3 = 1.00 is better than Guardian Angel with 1/3 = 0.33.
So far so good, but this can't be all there is. For some creatures this rule does not seem to pertain. For example let's take the Ash Eater. It has a pretty convincing Damage to Cost ratio of 2/1 = 2.00. However it does not see any play in competitive Fire Rushes. An even more extreme example would be the Photon: With an Attack of 1 and a cost of 0, it's Damage to Cost ratio is actually infinite, however, similarly to Ash Eater it is not played in any competitive rush deck (other than those where its main purpose is to get sacrificed to Immolation). So we might need a few more rules to fit those creatures into the big picture.
Size
Rule No. 2: The bigger a creature, the better.
Here by size I indeed mean a creature's size independant from its Attack/Cost ratio. If two creatures have the same Attack/Cost ratio, this rule says that the bigger one of them is better.
This one is a little less intuitive so let's try to understand this rule. One way to look at it is that big creatures allow you to put the same amount of potential damage into less cards. So if your deck contains a fixed amount of damage, taking few big creatures instead of many small ones will free up deck space for other cards, for example pillars. This means that the deck with bigger creatures will produce quanta faster than the deck with small creatures. Now, supposing that the small creature and the big creature have the same Damage per Cost ratio, this means that the deck with the big creatures will get their damage faster.
To demonstrate how this works, let us look at an Elements game with slightly modified rules: You have to build the fastest 3-card deck (with no mark) possible using only Purple Dragon, Abomination and Entropy Pillars. (Obviously there is no deckout rule). What deck do you build? According to Rule 1, Abomination and Purple Dragon are equally good. So which one is better? Let's find out: 1 Abomination, 2 Pillars kill on turn 23, 2 Abominations, 1 Pillar kills on turn 18, 1 Purple Dragon, 2 Pillars... turn 15!
So, the one-Abomination deck has the problem of simply not having enough damage in it compared to the life total it has to chew away, resulting in a fast start - it is the fastest deck to get a creature on the field - but nothing to follow up. This is comparable to the problem Photon or Ash Eater have in "real" Elements - you can obviously get them out fast, but you will need to get a significant fraction of the opponent's HP in damage on the field at some point, or it will simply take you forever to kill him. The two-Abomination deck and the one-Dragon deck solve this problem by packing more damage. What makes the Dragon deck come out ahead is the fact that is has two pillars as opposed to one in the Abomination deck. Because its damage is concentrated in one card, it can play an additional pillar which means that at the time where the Abomination deck plays a five-damage card, it plays a ten-damage card.
Basically, a Dragon is two Abominations with the same prize quanta wise, but you invest one card less. Alright! Now that we have understood this, let us move on to the next rule.
Size
Rule No. 3: The smaller a creature, the better.
... so this is the opposite of rule 2, which is bad. However, the two rules don't always apply for the same kinds of creatures. What are the reasons for preferring a small creature?
While discussing Rule No. 2 we talked mainly about how much damage we can get into play after a certain amount of time, with that time being set sufficiently distant in the future. Now, getting a high amount of damage on the field certainly seems like a legitimate approach to trying to win a game. However, you must not forget to consider one thing: At some point, your opponent will die. This means that sometimes, while you were waiting to play your big creature, you maybe could have just played some cheap creatures and the opponent would be dead already.
As a hypothetical example: How good would this creature be?
Its atk/cost ratio is quite spectacular, better than any unupgraded creature that costs more than one, and it obviously wins any comparison regarding rule two. So does that mean it is the best? We will later determine that it is actually about on par with a dragon which is rather disappointing for that atk/cost efficiency. The problem is that while when in play, this creature ends the game immediately, you have to wait several turns in which you do nothing, except to accumulate quanta, to play it. This means we can also look at it this way: You want to optimally make full usage of your quanta every turn. Quanta that you do not spend at the end of every turn are did not do any work, so when you finally spend them, you need them to do more.
This explains why this rule has a stronger significance in duo decks than in monos. In a duo deck, your quanta production for one specific element is much slower than in a mono, meaning that you are more likely to be sitting on your quanta at end of turn waiting to be able to play your creature. This also explains why duo rushes are so much slower than mono rushes as they push you towards the weaker, smaller creatures.
Another lesson we can derive from this is: Mix the creatures in your deck up! If there are two creatures in the same element that have different cost but are roughly equally good, then the smart thing is to play a mix of both. The reason is that this reduces the chances of having to pass the turn with a big amount of quanta left, since if you have lots of quanta, you can play your big creature and otherwise just play another small one. In the early game when you tend to have less quanta you will more often play the small one while in the later game when your pillar stack has grown you will play your big creatures more often.
Now, the big question on your mind is probably: How do these rules mash up against each other? At what point will size trump atk/cost ratio? How big does a creature have to be before it is too big? Really how much better is a deck with a creature mix? At this point if you're a really good mathematician you could probably calculate all of that or you can take the easy way and just run some simulations which I did. For the results please see my second post in the thread as they are rather long and I would like to discuss two more rules (or pseudo-rules) first.
Hit Points
Rule No. 4: Hit Points are not intrinsically valuable. Their worth depends on the metagame.
The HP of a creature do not help you kill the opponent. They make your deck neither faster nor slower. Showing their worth is entirely the job of your opponent. If your opponent is not running any cards that interact with your creature's hit points then you might as well just run all 1-HP creatures. That being said, this is a rather rare occurence in nowaday Elements PvP. Since interactive control cards are an integral part of todays metagame I would like to show some methods to categorize the various creature control cards and how to counter them.
To illustrate this I am going to analyze the forms of CC you might face in the War Event. So the first thing I am going to do is make a little scale where every card gets a number on based on how prevalent the card is expected to be in the metagame:
5: War dominating card, heavily played by any team. 4: Heavily played in element, often splashed by other teams. 3: In-element staple. 2: In-element roleplayer. 1: Fringe playable. 0: Not played.
Alright, now to the real question: How do we counter CC? Before we go into the specifics, there is one rule that is applicable for almost any type of CC: Play more creatures and less pillars. If the opponent has CC, this means that the game will go longer and thus you will have more time to wait for quanta and play your creatures. If you took a deck that was purely optimized for speed then the opponent would simply kill your first couple creatures which destroys you quanta balance by postponing the point at which the game ends. For this reason you will rarely find a PvP deck that is looking for speed only; most of them will be a little overquanta'd.
Now to the various types of CC. The first category will be:
Damage-based, single-target CC:
| Card | Rating | Damage |
|---|---|---|
| Lightning | 4 | 5 |
| Fire Bolt | 4 | Increments of 3 |
| Shockwave | 3 | 4 |
| Owl's Eye | 3 | Increments of 3 |
| Rage Potion | 3 | 5 |
| Ice Bolt | 3 | Increments of 2 |
| Drain Life | 3 | Increments of 2 |
| Red Nymph | 2 | Increments of 5 |
| Grey Nymph | 2 | triangular numbers x 2 |
| Toadfish* | 2 | triangular numbers |
| Liquid Shadow | 1 | Increments of 1 |
| Black Nymph | 1 | triangular numbers |
| Acceleration | 1 | Increments of 1 |
| Aflatoxin | 0 | Increments of 2 |
| Parasite | 0 | triangular numbers |
- when they can use the ability
The obvious counter to those cards is to play creatures whose HP are above their damage. This forces the opponent to spend two cards killing it, thereby depleting his resources. More subtly, a softer counter to this kind of CC is to play smaller creatures. This reduces both the quanta advantage gained by destroying your creature as well as the percentage of your overall in-deck damage taken away by killing one creature. Overall though the order in which creatures improve when you expect to run against this kind of CC: Small creature, HP above damage > Big creature, HP above damage > Small creature, HP below damage > Big creature, HP below damage.
Damage-based, mass-CC:
| Card | Rating | Damage |
|---|---|---|
| Rain of Fire | 2 | 3 |
| Thunderstorm | 2 | 2 |
| Blue Nymph | 2 | Increments of 1 |
| Unstable Gas | 2 | 1 |
| Dry Spell | 1 | 1 |
| Plague | 1 | Increments of 1 |
Against these cards you obviously also want your creatures to be above the damage threshold, but additionally you have to consider that these cards almost eliminate the advantage small creatures have against CC by simply hitting all of them at once. The only advantage small creatures still have is that you can more finely adjust how much damage you commit to the board.
Metagame
Rule No. 5: The metagame can sometimes drastically change the evaluation of a creature.
This should not come as too big of a surprise. In the following paragraphs I would like to continue to outline how creatures interact with the metagame by continuing the with my War example.
Soft, single-target CC:
| Card | Rating |
|---|---|
| Reverse Time* | 4 |
| Eternity* | 3 |
| Basilisk Blood | 3 |
| Arctic Squid | 3 |
| Freeze | 2 |
| Auburn Nymph | 2 |
| Antimatter | 2 |
| Purple Nymph | 2 |
- Reverse Time and Eternity are a little special because they are an exception to the rule that you should take less quanta against decks with CC.
Soft CC does not care about the HP of the target creature. This means that playing small creatures is the major counter to them. Having extra HP is wasted quanta, simply play many creatures at once so that they cannot control them all. Also these cards often only work for a limited amount of time which helps you even more.
Next up are Shields. I'm going to first discuss the the damage prevention shields and then the rest of the bunch.
Damage reduction Shields:
| Card | Rating |
|---|---|
| Titanium Shield | 3 |
| Skull Shield | 2 |
| Solar Shield | 2 |
| Ice Shield | 2 |
| Emerald Shield | 1 |
| Shield | 0 |
The damage prevention shields all have in common that you would rather have big creatures against them since that way they prevent a lower percentage of your total damage. To the rest of the Shields:
Specialized Shields:
| Card | Rating |
|---|---|
| Dimensional Shield | 5 |
| Bone Wall | 4 |
| Fog Shield | 4 |
| Wings | 3 |
| Dusk Mantle | 3 |
| Sundial | 3 |
| Dissipation Shield | 2 |
| Fire Shield | 2 |
| Gravity Shield | 1 |
| Procrastination | 1 |
| Spine Carapace | 1 |
Spine Carapace and Fire Shield are basically mass-CC cards. Against Procrastination, big creatures are slightly preferrable as they need a lower number of attacks to kill the opponent, meaning their procentual prevented damage will be lower. Against Gravity Shield you obviously need creatures with 5 or less HP, against Wings airborne creatures. Sundial does not care about what type of creatures you have, but it only provides 1 turn of protection, and the opponent is hindered at doing damage as well. So a good way to counter it with creatures is to simply be as fast as possible, forcing him to try and start chaning early, meaning that you don't want to underquanta your deck too much. Dissipation Shield and Bone Wall both have in common that you mainly just need a lot of creatures, against Bone Wall preferrably small ones, against Dissipation Shield smaller creatures with (atk modulo 3) = 1 are preferred, but more importantly you need your creatures to be good against the CC that they are combined with. Against Dusk Mantle and Fog Shield it doesn't matter what you play except that smaller creatures with reduce the variance of the RNG. Finally, with Dimensional Shield there is no strategy involved at all as it is simply a hard counter against creatures (guess why it is a 5). You will need to find another way around it.
The last way of how your opponent can stop your creatures that I want to cover is healing. Healing is the most universal defense mechanism as it also works against damage that cannot be blocked or destroyed otherwise, such as Poison. The downside to this that the defense they provide against more specialiced sources of damage (such as creatures) is rather behind the curve. This means that you should do pretty well if you just have enough damage and underquanta your deck a little to account for the longer game times.
Healing Cards:
| Card | Rating |
|---|---|
| Sanctuary | 4 |
| Miracle | 3 |
| Stone Skin | 2 |
| Heal | 1 |
| Empathic Bond | 1 |
So those were the main ways of how your opponent can try to counter your creatures. As you may have noticed we get a wild mix of metagame effects, some pointing in completely oppsite directions, but for the metagame we analysed, the main trends are:
- Smaller creature rise in value a little.
- You generally want less quanta in your deck than you would need for optimal ttw.
Of course, the possibilities how your opponent can deal with your creatures are not the only ways the metagame influences the strenghth of creatures. For example Purple Dragon and Emerald Dragon are an innocuous-looking pair of creatures at first, with the Emerald Dragon seeming slightly superior due to his extra Hit Point. However if you look at some statistics you would find that Emerald is putting up some thoroughly mediocre results, while Purple Dragon is a total menace, one of the most winning creatures in War of all time. The reason for this of course is that Purple Dragon enjoys the in-element company of Discord, one of the strongest cards in the game that it combines very well with. So metagame is not only what your opponent can throw at you, but also what you can combine your cards with.
The inconvenient thing about the metagame is that it can also sometimes be dynamic. For our War analysis, we determined that Lightning was one of the predominant CC cards. Now if you managed to create a deck that Lightning is very ineffective against and that is also strong in the metagame in general, then the overall presence of Lightning in the metagame might decrease. This in turn can reinvigorate decks that were previously not competitive against Lightning but that are good against your new deck, which weakens your new deck. The equilibrium will be somewhere in the middle of those possibilities. This is particularly relevant in metagames with smaller cardpools. Here the strenghth of a card can drastically differ from what you are used to from the base game when important cards are taken away.
Ok those were my tips for players and designers on what to consider when evaluating vanilla creatures. Some of those can be applied to non vanilla creatures as well, especially those that have abilities that simply affect their atk or how easily they die. For others it is going to be more complicated.
Disclaimer: The following article was written by 10 men on 20 April, 2013. You can view the full post here on the forum.
