Card Advantage is Everything

Hi!  If you've stumbled on this page right now it's not supposed to be here, this is a work in progress that I've temporarily published to share with people and get their feedback and thoughts.  That's why there's no introduction.  Or conclusion.  Or second half.  Sorry!

There are two very different ways of generating card advantage and all the various strategies and deck types that you’ve heard of will fit into one of those two categories (or be able to pivot between either depending on the matchup). The two different ways are Attritional and Tempo.

Attritional Advantage is what players would most commonly recognise as card advantage because it means using your cards to defeat your opponent’s cards on a better than 1-for-1 basis, until eventually you’re the only player left with cards and you can win the game.

The means by which you gain Attritional Advantage come in several forms but the essence of this strategy is that it seeks to play a transactional game, and to play it better than the opponent.

Transactional: relating to exchange or interaction between people

 

In a transactional game your opponent plays a card and you kill it, or you play a card and your opponent kills it. You’re trading the cards in your deck against each other and each trying to gain an advantage as you do so. This may sound like it describes every game of Star Wars Unlimited that you play but I would draw a distinction between a transactional style of play (which prioritises cards killing cards) and a style of play where you focus on ignoring the opponent’s cards and attacking their base directly instead.

If you were to play a transactional game with your opponent where neither player is able to generate an Attritional Advantage then you would be in a stalemate – every card you play gets destroyed by your opponent in a 1-for-1 trade of cards, and you answer by destroying every card they play. In that unlikely hypothetical extreme then 50 cards later you’re both out of cards and the game is going to end in a draw.

The way to avoid this is to play a transactional game where you CAN trade better than 1-for-1 with your opponent’s cards. This could happen in a number of different ways, and common ones would be:

• Drawing more cards than your opponent
• Playing cards that destroy multiple of the opponent’s cards
• Having better quality units that can kill your opponents card and survive
• Committing fewer cards to your resource row so you’ve got more cards to actually play

At its most simple hypothetical form, if you play a transactional game where you are able to destroy 3 of your opponents cards with 1 of your cards then (if nothing else changes) at some point you’re going to find yourself with an extra 2 cards available that your opponent doesn’t have an answer to, and those will grind out the damage you need to win the game.

A lot of this very basic stuff and is simply stating what most players would understand as "card advantage". We’ll return to Attritional Advantage later to take it into the murky grey area and talk about when destroying your opponents cards doesn’t actually count as destroying their cards, but for now let’s put a pin in Attritional Advantage and move onto it’s countpart: Tempo Advantage.

The unspoken assumption that Attritional Advantage strategies make is that the limiting factor on players is the availability of cards: everyone will get to play all their cards but one of you will have better cards and gain an advantage and win.

Tempo Advantage strategies pivot on that basic assumption and, suitably for their name, aim to create a game where the limiting factor on players is not how many cards they have available, but how much time they will be given to play them. To minimise the amount of time an opponent has to play their cards a Tempo Advantage deck will want to play an purposeful game.

Purposeful: fixed in one’s purpose; determined

 

The key difference between a transactional and purposeful game is that the transactional game sets out to interact with the opponent and profit from doing so, while the purposeful game sets out to achieve an objective (eg. “deal 30 damage to your base”) and profit from avoiding interaction with the opponent as much as possible.

In a purposeful game you’re not seeking to exchange resources with your opponent, you’re trying to avoid interaction with your opponents cards (as much as possible) and to build up your resources quickly and decisively.  At its most simplistic; if two Tempo decks meet each other you’re in a drag race where neither deck destroys one of the opponents cards and you’re going to see who can deal damage to the other player’s base the fastest.

While Attritional Advantage decks are always looking towards the long term; towards an end point down the road where they are the only one left with cards, a Tempo advantage deck is focused on the short term and on creating just enough of a lead on the table.  A purposeful strategy needs this lead to last long enough that it can get over the finish line before the Attritional advantage deck can make the quality of its cards take control of the game.

Just as Attritional decks have various tools for generating their advantage a Tempo deck could have different ways of opening up that short term lead that they need on the table...

• Playing cheaper cards so that they can play two cards per turn instead of one
• Cards that affect the game immediately when played (eg. Ambush, on When Played)
• Action compression to get more value from cards before they are destroyed (eg. Rebel Assault)
• ‘Tempo’ cards that don’t actually destroy an opponent’s card but have a disproportionate short term impact (eg. Cunning)
• Adding ‘reach’ to their attacks to end games as quickly as possible (eg. Surprise Strike)

If you’re familiar with the concept of Tempo Advantage in card games then, again, a lot of this is nothing new and we’re restating the obvious. But typically I think Tempo Advantage is not spoken about as being a form of card advantage but as being what you do instead of gaining card advantage. I think bringing Tempo back into the card advantage fold is an important step in bringing together a more holistic view of strategy.

We’ll pick this up again later, but for now the short explanation is this: if you win the game when the opponent has 2 cards left in hand you’ve effectively ‘destroyed’ those cards. You may not have played a Pillage to force the opponent to discard them, which an Attritional Advantage deck might do (and which most players would immediately recognise as a card advantage play), but by ending the game before they could be played you’ve ensured they had just as much impact on the outcome of the game as they would have done if you’d played the Pillage.

The same is true for if your opponent played a Poe Dameron but you ignored it and attacked their base instead. If you won the game before he could attack with Poe and transactionally trade it for 2 or 3 of your cards then that Poe Dameron affected the game exactly as much as if you’d destroyed it with a Fell The Dragon. Tempo advantage creates card advantage by ‘destroying’ cards your opponent draws, or even cards they’ve played, because it doesn’t allow them to have an impact on the game.

Bottom line: ultimately Tempo Advantage generates card advantage just like Attritional Advantage does, it just does it in a very different way.

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Aside:  as I was writing this tempo section it occurred to me that I’ve said something very similar to this before in a different game. I used to blog about the Marvel Champions LCG and this point about using the end of the game to make the opponent’s cards irrelevant came up when I was explaining why a rush strategy would be successful against that game’s ‘big bad’ villain, Ronan The Accuser. Exactly the same principle applies.

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From Theory To Practice

So, if there’s only two types of strategies – Attritional and Tempo – why do common metagame breakdowns have more like four or five different types of deck categories?

We've already said that Attritional decks have lots of different tools for how they gain a long term advantage, and the same is true for Tempo decks to gain their short term advantage.  Which of those tools they rely upon the most is what defines these become broad metagame sub-categories for how deck types approach generating the advantages they need to win games.

Let's start with the two Tempo Advantage deck styles first of all: Aggro and Tempo.

Aggro decks are perhaps the purest form of a purposeful style of play, tending to display a single-minded approach to destroying the opponent’s base and ending the game as quickly as possible. You can expect a quick and direct assault on your base, with units supported by events and upgrades that either buff the damage they deal or add damage directly to the opponent’s base. Aggro decks set out to win by simply being the most undeniably relentless decks in the field – opponents may attempt to set up defences but the aggro deck will simply swarm by them or over them and keep going.

Tempo decks also need to be quick and aggressive to end the game, but they differ from Aggro decks in devoting some of their cards and resources to dismantling or delaying the opponent’s defences. They probably know that their offense is either slower than an Aggro deck’s would be, or more easily blunted, which is why they’ve opted to play cards that will buy them the extra time or certainty that they need to ensure their assault gets over the line and destroys the opponent’s base.

This is a good time to talk specifically about some of the signature cards you might expect to see from these two decks, because doing so helps to highlight the differences between the two strategies, but also to show what the commonalities are that mean they’re both pursuing a Tempo Advantage strategy rather than an Attritional Advantage one.

Aggro Cards

As she’s the poster child for Aggro I’ve picked three cards from a typical Sabine Wren deck. First up in the Aggro deck corner we have Rebel Assault, which serves the dual purpose of both buffing the amount of damage that your units deal (+2 damage after both have attacked) and of compressing the actions that you spend in doing so. That action compression may be the difference between getting to attack with both units before the opponent gets to play a Takedown and kill one of them, and in the most extreme cases may be the difference in destroying the opponent’s base and winning the game before they can stabilise and take control. If the objective of a Tempo deck is to end the game as quickly as possible then Rebel Assault may both end it a turn earlier (by adding the damage) and earlier within a turn.

For A Cause I Believe In deals damage directly to the opponent’s base the turn that you play it, and it also serves a secondary function in allowing you to fix your next draw. That damage dealt is the most important element of the card in most cases, though, as it sidesteps any unit defense or removal that the opponent may have, adding a new line of attack to the deck.

I’ve shared Wing Leader as a third example card because adding those Experience tokens to another unit means the Wing Leader is able to impact the game on the turn it comes into play. Where Ambush units can attack other units (normally a transactional move) the Wing Leader is a unit that can contribute damage to the offense immediately. And actually, while we’re here, it’s worth noting that Ambush cards with Overwhelm are also very good for adding base damage on the turn they come into play (think K-2SO, Wrecker, Steadfast Battalion etc) while Ambush cards that don’t have Overwhelm tend to support a transactional style of play rather than a purposeful one.

Tempo Cards

For Tempo decks I’ve picked out cards you’d frequently see in a Cunning Boba Fett deck. Waylay and No Good To me Dead are good examples of how the Tempo deck approaches generating that short term advantage in a different way. 

All of the example Aggro deck cards supplement an initial assault by actually adding damage to the attacks, while neither of these cards do that. What Waylay and No Good To Me Dead do instead is to supplement that initial assault by preventing the opponent from defending themselves and, critically, they do this cheaply.  If we compare Waylay to Vanquish, for example: Vanquish is an event that destroys any non-leader unit, while Waylay only returns it to the opponent’s hand. When you play a Vanquish you each put a card into your discard pile, it’s a 1-for-1 trade, an even transaction.  When you play Waylay you put a card into your discard pile but the opponent doesn’t put a card into their discard pile.  In a transactional game that means Waylay is a 0-for-1 trade that’s actually put you at -1 card advantage.  The reason you play Waylay is because those 2 resources you saved compared to Vanquish will allow you to play a second card on that turn, increasing the tempo of your plays and creating a short term advantage.

No Good To Me Dead is very similar to Waylay in a lot of ways – Waylay sends their unit away for 1 turn but requires them to spend resources playing it again, while No Good To Me Dead removes it as a problem for 2 turns by exhausting it (assuming it wasn't a Sentinel unit), but if you haven’t won the game by then the opponent will get it back without having to pay anything at all.  In both cases the discounted price that you’re paying to deal with the opponent’s unit is intended to allow you to do something else as well on that turn and so either maintain your short term advantage, or ideally widen it. In both cases you’re gambling that the game won’t last long enough for that 0-for-1 trade to come back to haunt you.

The third card I’ve picked for the Tempo style of play is Cunning, which can be one of the most blow-out game-ending plays that the Tempo deck has available. Cunning offers the Tempo player the choice of 2 out of 3 effects, all of which it is happy to see.  You can choose to use the bounce and exhaust effects as a combined Waylay/No Good To Me Dead and take three units out of the game for a turn, or if you're close to ending the game you could choose to pin down only two units (or bounce a frustrating Sentinel unit) and then add +4 to your next attack.  That +4 attack is an Aggro trait not a Tempo trait, but remember... Aggro and Tempo decks both ultimately have the same objective of playing a purposeful game and generating Tempo Advantage.

And so its worth pulling back out and remembering that, while these cards are in some ways very different - For A Cause I Believe In and Waylay may cost the same amount of resources but have completely different effects - they share a common goal.  And most important is that all of these cards (with the exception of Wing Leader) also share an important trait that means they are more poorly suited in an Attritional Advantage deck: they're all a 0-for-1 trade that actually puts you behind on cards when you're looking through the long term lens of the transactional style of play.

Waylay, Rebel Assault, Cunning, A Cause I Believe In, No Good To Me Dead... every one of these cards goes into your discard pile without sending anything to your opponent's discard pile.  

They're all a negative attritional play, but a positive tempo play.

Sidebar: Boba Adapts To Survive

Getting ahead of ourselves a little, but there's a really good real life example of how a good player responded to the metagame by recognising that he had tempo cards when he needed attritional cards.  When Spark of Rebellion first released and the metagame was very young the game really centered around two leaders - Sabine and Boba - and nothing else was really working reliably.  Because there wasn't really a strong Attritional Advantage deck in the metagame the Boba Fett players had a lot of tempo tools in their deck because all they really needed to do was avoid losing on tempo to Sabine and their bigger units like Vader, the Firespray and Boba himself would naturally give them Attritional Advantage later on. 

It didn't matter than Boba was playing some 0-for-1 events because Sabine had plenty of them too.

When we started to see Vader, Iden, Krennic and Palpatine decks work themselves out the Boba players had to adjust by removing some of those tempo tools.  They could no longer afford to play all these 0-for-1 trades and put themselves behind unnecessarily on attrition, so you started to see their choices slip more into cards like Shoot First (which means you kill a unit without losing a unit, a 1-for-1 trade where you both put a card into your discard pile) or Surprise Strike.  I'll never find the quote but I remember clearly that there was a Boba player who won a big event, it may even have been one of the very first $1k events to be held, and he said exactly that - he'd had to remove a lot of cards people thought were essential in Boba Fett until then so that he wasn't giving up so much (attritional) card advantage when he played against the new control decks that he knew he would have to face.

WIP LIST

• Attritional Examples
• Who’s The Beatdown & when to switch modes (One of the important reasons for bringing attrition and tempo together is so you realise they’re a switch you can flip).  Sabine stops playing resources and recovers attritional advantage 2nd wave
• Messy in real life
• Cards that don’t count as cards - don't pat yourself on the back for killing something that wasn't going to matter
• Where does ramp fit in?  Tempo loss and attritional loss, puts pressure on later cards to recover what was lost

Hello There! & the Millstone Fallacy in Star Wars Unlimited

Welcome to Mission Briefing, my new blog about the Star Wars: Unlimited Trading Card Game (SWU, to it's friends).  When games get under my skin I tend to start a blog to share idea and strategies and tips, and what I think about the game.  That I'm sitting here typing this now tells me that SWU has managed to do exactly that and I need an outlet for all the stuff my brain is churning through about the game.

In this first blog I wanted to take the chance to introduce myself and explain what I think this blog is going to be for... before moving on and talking about actually useful and interesting stuff!

Kind of a Strange Old Hermit

I've been gaming pretty much since I could hold a tape measure straight in the mid-80s, but the interesting part of my gaming background probably begins in 1994 when a Magic: The Gathering Revised Edition gift box changed my life forever.  That sounds extremely dramatic but is essentially accurate: that gift box launched a hobby that gave me many lifelong friends, thousands of hours of entertainment and ultimately took me around the world.  

My active Magic career primarily spans 1995-2001 but in that time I had a decent share of success and made it to multiple Pro Tours (ok... multiple means 'two') but I was always better at understanding the game in theory than I was at putting it into practice so I had a more fulfilling time as a writer.  I've written for Starcitygames.com before going on to work directly for Wizards of the Coast as a coverage writer at Grand Prix and Pro Tour events.  From there I got introduced to the World of Warcraft TCG and worked for Upper Deck and Cryptozoic on that, and then under my own steam I wrote popular blogs for Netrunner, Marvel Champions and the X-Wing Miniatures Game.

Star Wars: Unlimited is the first trading card game I've been involved in since WoWTCG folded over a decade ago.  It may be an all-new game but the mechanics are so similar to those games I know so well that in many ways SWU has felt like coming back home after a long trip away and I'm having a lot of fun.

Without sounding like I've gone all misty-eyed about the long-ago times: I think there was something genuinely special about having been around on websites like The Dojo back in the mid-1990s. That was a time when some of the smartest people in the world were turning their minds to a silly card game about Goblin Balloon Brigades, Llanowar Elves and Demonic Tutors and solving how the whole thing actually worked.  Fundamental concepts of TCG strategy, like 'Card Advantage' or 'Mana Curves' that we take for granted today all started out on The Dojo and its connected IRC chatrooms.

It means that when I see players who are new to SWU, or even new to TCGs at all, asking questions like "what do people mean when they talk about tempo?", "how do I sideboard?" or "does card advantage matter in SWU?!?" then I feel like I know a lot about these subjects and I want to help newer players to understand them and improve their game.

So in this blog I'm going to try and share some of my old Jedi knowledge about subjects like that, and in doing so hopefully we can all learn - myself included - about how those topics apply to Star Wars Unlimited.  As well as talking about TCG theory I expect at various points I'll subject you to the decks I'm playing, the tournaments I've been to, and because I've learned from experience how much effort can go into writing and maintaining a blog I might even be lazy sometimes and just point you to things other people have said and done that I think are worth shining a spotlight on!

And I want to start us off by looking at an old old piece of Magic: The Gathering knowledge that has suddenly become more relevant to Star Wars Unlimited...

Vigilance & 'The Millstone Fallacy' 

A card that is finding itself right in the spotlight at present is Vigilance.  Its the double-Vigilance aspect legendary card that lets you choose two effects you want to do.  There's not many actually pairing a blue leader with a blue base to play Vigilance for the 4 resources it says it costs, but we're finding a lot of players who are happy to pay 6 for Vigilance and get the effects even if they paid 50% more for them.

Vigilance does a lot of things but the one that I want to focus on is that it 'mills' 6 cards off the top of your opponents deck.  Discarding cards from the top of your opponent's deck is commonly known as 'milling' and that's entirely because of one card that was first printed 30 years ago in Magic's second ever expansion, Antiquities: the Millstone.

In both Magic: The Gathering and Star Wars Unlimited not having any cards left to draw is A Bad Thing.  In Magic if you try to draw a card and there are no cards left you lose the game immediately, in Star Wars Unlimited it's not quite that punishing but it's still bad: for every card you can't draw you take 3 damage.  When you're out of cards and taking 6 damage to your base at the end of each turn it probably won't take long for that to turn into losing the game anyway!

Running your opponent out of cards is a valid win condition for your deck and a valid strategy to go for, both in Magic and in Star Wars Unlimited.  It's not easy to do though, in Star Wars Unlimited we have 50 card decks and even playing 3 copies of Vigilance will only discard 18 cards from the opponent's deck.  So you need your opponent to draw 32 cards before he even starts taking a single point of damage from it (32 cards = 6 in his opening hand and 13 turns of drawing 2 per turn).  So it needs the game to go long without either winning through damage... and actually the odds of you drawing all 3 copies of Vigilance in those 13 turns are pretty slim so actually it's more like 18-20 turns on average.

But winning the game through running the opponent out of cards isn't what 'the Millstone Fallacy' is about.  The Millstone Fallacy is about how useful 'milling' cards off the opponents deck is if you end up NOT running them out of cards. 

The Millstone Fallacy is what comes up when people say things like "just play Vigilance to discard 6 cards and you can kill your opponent's best cards before he even draws them!" and I've seen that concept being talked about a few times since Vigilance came to prominence...

...and that's the Millstone Fallacy.

What's wrong with the idea that Vigilance has 'destroyed' cards is twofold:  

1) Vigilance hasn't 'destroyed' any cards it's 'replaced' them.  There were 6 cards on top of your opponent's deck that he was going to draw and now they're in his discard pile, that's true.  But there's also 6 cards lower down in your opponents deck that he wasn't going to draw before the end of the game, and now he will draw them because you've moved them closer to the top of his deck.

2) Vigilance may 'destroy' your opponents best cards but there's an equal chance that his best cards weren't in the top 6 cards of his deck and he wasn't going to draw them during the game, but now that you've moved them 6 cards closer to the top of his deck he is going to see them.

Playing Vigilance to mill cards from the opponent's deck when you have no information about where his best cards are in that deck (and you're not going to run him out of cards before the game ends) has on average ZERO impact on the game.

To demonstrate this more clearly I'm going to create an example.  

Let's imagine we're playing two similar control decks against each other.  Our opponent has 30 cards left in his deck so we're nowhere near running him out of cards, but we have an advantage on the table and we know that we are going to win in 5 turns unless our opponent draws the one card in his deck that can save him: his one copy of the Star Destroyer, Avenger.

We know we're going to win in 5 turns unless he draws Avenger, so our opponent is going to get to draw 10 cards while looking for the card that will save him.  The bottom 20 cards in his deck aren't going to help him because the game is going to be over before he sees them.

That, maths fans, means that he's got a 10 in 30 chance of drawing Avenger, which nice and neatly turns into a 1/3rd chance (or 33.3%).

So what changes if we play Vigilance and send the top 6 cards of his deck to the discard pile?

We've removed 6 of the cards that the opponent was going to draw from the game, if Avenger was in those 6 cards we're delighted!  But that's not all we've done.  We've also meant that there's 6 cards he wasn't going to draw (the cards that were 11th to 16th in his deck) are now going to be drawn before the end of the game.  There's 4 cards, which were 7th to 10th in his deck, that are now the new 1st to 4th cards - he was always going to draw those cards, but he's going to draw them a few turns earlier.

But remember, to keep this example simple all we care about is one thing: is he going to draw Avenger or not? 

And the answer is that the overall odds of your opponent seeing Avenger before the end of the game have not changed at all.

Yes, there was a 20% chance that you 'destroyed' Avenger with Vigilance but there was an equal 20% chance that Avenger was already functionally 'destroyed' by being buried deep in your opponent's deck and your Vigilance brought it to life.  Previously he had a 10 in 30 chance of drawing Avenger and after you hit him with Vigilance he still has a 10 in 30 chance of drawing it.

If that's all made sense so far then there's an important distinction to make: this doesn't mean that Vigilance has had no impact on the outcome of the game.  The opposite is true and it absolutely has - it's either made it more likely that your opponent draws Avenger (by giving him a 10 in 24 chance of seeing it in what's left of his deck if you missed) or it's made it impossible that he can draw Avenger (by it being in the top 6 cards).  But what is also true is that you had no control over whether Vigilance made things better or worse for you and so on average the impact of Vigilance is equally likely to be bad or good and the overall impact is a net zero.

I've used a deliberately simple and binary example - we're looking for 1 card in their deck and that card is all that matters and we either 100% win or 100% lose if they draw it.  Games rarely come down to something that clean cut and in reality all the possible impacts of what cards you defeat with Vigilance will branch off into a multiverse of possibilities.  What cards you stop them seeing, what cards you replace those cards with, what cards they see earlier that would have been useless later, and vice versa.  It's almost certainly never going to bet as clean as 'did they see Avenger or not' but that doesn't change the fact that the net outcome of all of those possibilities is as likely to be bad for you as it is to be good.  

You're replacing six random cards with six random cards, were those random cards better or worse than the first set of random cards?  Who knows... it's random.

Except for when it's not random.  

If you have information about the distribution of cards in your opponent's deck then Vigilance may not be random, it can be targeted to an extent.  Currently there's not many examples of how this would happen but I can think of a good one that happens quite often in matchups with Vigilance.  If your opponent has played Inferno Four and decided to keep the two cards on top of their deck you can be pretty confident they want those cards and Vigilance is likely to be good.  You're still going to replace those 2 cards with 2 random cards but at least you know you're replacing something that the opponent thinks is important with something that is random.  

And that's about it for the Millstone Fallacy except for one Advanced Level piece of information and that information is... Information.

When you discard the top six cards of your deck both you and your opponent gain information about what was discarded from their deck and therefore what is left in the rest of their deck.  If you see the last two copies of a card hit their discard pile then you know there's none left in their deck.  You can adjust how you approach the game based on that information, maybe there was something you were afraid of that you know can't happen now.  

The downside to this is that your opponent is gaining the same information and can respond to it just as much as you can, and actually will always tend to be able to respond slightly better because he knows the contents of the remaining part of his deck and hand better than you do.  If you see two Darth Vaders hit the discard pile and think "aha, I'd have to be really unlucky to lose my Gideon Hask to Darth Vader's ambush now, he's only got one Vader left" then you don't know if he's already holding Darth Vader, but your opponent does.

On average playing Vigilance will always hand a small information advantage to your opponent, although if you're a better player you may be more aware of how to leverage that information into an advantage on the table than your opponent can.