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.