Deck Building 101

BASIC RULES

There are a few basic rules or parameters that you must follow when building your deck.

1) Each deck must contain at least 30 cards.

2) You can place up to 4 copies of each card in your deck.

3) A player may choose up to 7 cards to begin the game with in their starting hand. Any starting hand with less than 7 cards will be filled with random cards from the deck.

BUILDING YOUR DECK

Tip #1 – Strategy or Theme

Before you start building your deck, you may want to consider what your general strategy or theme will be.

A general strategy is how you plan to win the game. A few examples are…

• Rush – Rushing and overwhelming your opponent with early and fast moving combat units. The goal is to apply as much pressure as possible by striking early and often before he can get set up to defend against it or mount an attack of his own.

• Victory Points – Winning by achieving 5 victory points instead of destroying your opponents population.

• Defensive (Last Man Standing) – Play to outlast your opponent by being the last man standing.

You may also choose to build your deck around a theme or specific card(s). Such as…

• Elven – A deck loaded with elven units, of course. :)

• Sinister – A deck filled with undead, demons and spells that use your own population as a resource!

Tip #2 – Deck Size

There are a lot of appealing cards and it is oftentimes tempting to cram as many of them as you can into your deck. Keep in mind, however, that as you deck size increases, your chances of drawing any one particular card from your deck into your hand are decreased.

If you find that your games are usually over relatively quickly and you aren’t drawing very deep into your deck, then having 35+ cards in your deck probably isn’t going to help much.

Then again, if you frequently find yourself in long battles where both sides are losing a lot of combat, a few extra cards in your deck could make all the difference.

Either way, it is probably best to keep your deck size somewhere in the 30-36 range, and probably never more than 40 for the most part.

Tip #3 – Resources: Supply & Demand

Make sure that you have enough resources to support your deck.

It is probably a good idea to start with the basic cards you want to build your deck around and then determine which types (wood, iron, stone, mana, gold, population) and the amount of resources (supply & storage) that your deck will require.

Your Castle can be used to increase the storage of each resource by up to a maximum of 2. Hence, if you plan on playing cards that require more than 3 of a specific resource, you will have to provide another way to increase storage.

Regardless of whether you need more than 3 of a specific resource, keep in mind that using your Castle to Expand is a long process (60 seconds) that keeps you from using your Castle to draw cards (20 seconds). For this reason alone you will probably want to find alternative ways to increase your storage.

Tip #4 – Distribution

In addition to resources, you will also want to make sure that your deck is balanced in other areas as well.

• Early defense – Make sure you have a way slow down your opponent early in the game (first 2 minutes). This can be achieved in many different ways, such as walls, towers, cheap combat units, defensive spells, etc. It’s a good idea to put at least one or two of these in your starting hand. Remember to make sure that you will be able to afford them as well.

• Cost – Try to avoid putting too many expensive cards in your deck. While they are generally more powerful, you can also easily run into problems if your opponent is able to take out some of your resource supply. Consider a balance of low, medium and high resource cost cards.

• Frequency – If a card is important to your deck but you can’t fit it into your starting hand, consider adding multiple copies of it, even if you only plan to use one of them. Adding more copies of a card will increase its frequency, thereby increasing your chances of drawing the desired card earlier.

For example, if you are running a 31-card deck with Golden Dragon but can’t fit it into your starting hand, there’s a reasonable chance that it maybe be one of the last few cards that you draw. Putting a 2nd or 3rd copy of this card in the deck greatly increases your chances of drawing it early.

Here is a list of the probability of drawing at least one of a specific card, based on a 31-card deck and no copies in your starting hand:

Draw…….1 copy……..2 copies……..3 copies……..4 copies
…1………..…4.2%………….8.3%………….12.5%…………16.7%
…2………..…8.3%…………16.3%…………23.9%…………31.2%
…3…………12.5%…………23.9%…………34.3%…………43.7%
…4…………16.7%…………31.2%…………43.7%…………54.4%
…5…………20.8%…………38.0%…………52.1%…………63.5%
..10………..41.7%…………67.0%…………82.0%…………90.6%
..15………..62.5%…………87.0%…………95.8%…………98.8%
..20………..83.3%…………97.8%…………99.8%…………99.9%
..24…………100%………….100%………….100%………….100%

This doesn’t mean that you should always include 4x of each of your most important cards. If you only plan on playing 1 copy at a time, e.g. – Market, then after you draw the first one you will essentially have 3 dead (unwanted) cards in your deck.

Tip #5 – Starting Hand

Once you have built your deck, you can select up to 7 cards to begin the game with in your starting hand. At the bottom of the Deck Editor, you will find a option (button) to Save & Edit Hand. This will bring up the following screen that will allow you to add up to 7 cards to your starting hand.

The cards you choose to put in your starting hand will vary based on your deck and general strategy. It is a very good idea to always put 7 cards in your starting hand. You aren’t required to put 7 cards (or any) in your starting hand, but you will usually be much better off in the long run rather then letting the computer randomly choose them for you.

You should probably include about 4 or 5 cards that will get your economy growing, such as resource production, resource storage, trader and/or exchanger cards.

Also, consider including a way to stop early attacks by your opponent. Since you have no control over the order your cards are drawn beyond your starting hand, it may take a few draws to get some defensive help. Don’t leave it entirely up to luck of the draw.

Try testing out your starting hand in Training Mode to make sure you have the resources and timing optimized to get your deck rolling as fast as possible. It will only take a minute, but will pay dividends.

Tip #6 – Tweeking

Don’t be afraid to experiment. No deck will ever be perfect and will probably have some weaknesses against certain decks and strategies. The trick is to find counters and minimize these weaknesses as much as possible.

OK, now it’s time you build and try out your new deck. Try out several different types of decks and keep your deck evolving as new cards become available to you.

GOOD LUCK!

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