One of the important properties of a winning is to make certain that you are adding to your advantage from the moment the game starts.  The best way to do this in Star Chamber is to make sure that you are getting your cards into play.  If you are not using most of your available tech each turn and you opponent is you will be at a significant disavantage.

This article describes some techniques I use to analyze my deck ideas and tweak them to make sure that cards will flow through them properly and that I can inflict maximum pain on my opponents.  The ability to do this easily is one of the main reasons that I wrote DeckViewer.

Early Turn Card Flow

The first thing to do when considering card flow is to think about how tech is allocated and how many tech you will have each turn to spend on card play.  Turns 1 through 4 are critical points so let's focus on those.

Turn 1      1 Native Tech
Turn 2      2 Native Tech (Possible 1 artifact)
Turn 3      2 Native Tech (Possible 2 artifacts and 1 lab/sci)
Turn 4      3 Native Tech + artifact and lab techs

Getting a 3rd tech at turn 2 depends on having an artifact planet right next to your home world or using Ancestral Claim or some other card.  I don't like to build my decks to depend on this, it's just too risky.  I personally feel it is unwise to build a deck to depend on more than 2 tech before turn 4, you can often get extra tech at turns 2 and 3, but I don't believe it is something a deck should rely upon, as I prefer to not run the risk of having no cards to play for 2 or 3 turns if the artifact planets are too far away.

How this affects your card choices

You want a high probability of drawing a 1 tech card in your first 6 cards, and you want similarly good chances of drawing 3 native 1 or 2 tech cards in your first 8 cards.  How good?  Well I try to get the odds of drawing a 1 tech card in the first draw up above 85% or better.  I try to get the odds of drawing three 1 or 2 tech card in the first 6 cards up to that same 90% value.  This means that nearly 9 times out of 10 I can play a card each and every turn.

Rules of thumb:

• 85% chance of 1 tech card with 6 draws
• 90% chance of three 1 or 2 tech cards with 8 draws

You should not count 1 tech cards that cannot be effectivly played the first turn, nor 2 tech cards that can not be played on turn two.  Examples of these would be local contacts which can't possibly be played effectively on turn 1, and Defensive Conversion or Ground Assault which cannot be effective played on turn 2 on most maps.

The while these calculations can be made by hand, I found that too cumbersome, and it makes tweaking decks much too difficult.  This was one of the primary reasons that I wrote DeckViewer.  This program will read the files in your collection and print out the chance of drawing each card as well as the chance of drawing various card combinations.  This program is the easiest way I know to get a feel for how cards will flow through your deck during the critical first 3 or 4 turns of a game.

Here is an example of a deck that will flow well during the first 4 turns:



This 42 card Clave Deck has an 88.6% chance of being able to play a card on turn 1 (after 6 draws).  By changing the "1" above to a "3" and the "6" to a "8" we can see what are chances are to play 3 out of our first 8 cards which would allow us to play a card each of the first 3 turns.



Above we see a 98.9% chance of drawing 3 cards that will play out of our first 8.

Here is an example of a deck that will have serious card flow problems in the early game.





This 33 card Ferrier deck uses too many high value cards, and will have big problems with card flow during the early turns, there is only a 57.1% chance to draw a card you can play on turn 1, and only a 37.3% chance to be able to play a card each of the first 3 turns.  This deck may have potential, but you will be facing and uphill battle against an opponent who can play 3 cards by turn 3 while you only get out one.

Mid Game Card Flow

I define the mid game as the time betweens turn 4 and 12 where you have at least 3 tech available going up to an average of about 7 or so with 2 artifact worlds and your 5 native techs by turn 9.  During this part of the game you can get to the meat of your deck and should be moving things through fairly well.  The trick here is that cards really come in two varieties.  The first is cards you can play anytime to useful effect.  These are things like ships, ship mods, cit mods or cit zaps.  You can generally find a place to put them, and if pressed playing one will always enhance your position even if you can't play it in a great place right now.  I think the majority of cards fall into this category. 


But there are a bunch of other cards that are what I call special situation cards.  These are cards you want to hold in your hand until the right situation comes along to use them.  Examples of these cards are Power Drain, Solar Flare, Defensive Conversion, basically any card that if played at the wrong time is useless or even worse, counter productive.  Defensive Conversion is a great example, when played too early it could cripple your expansion, but at the right time could protect a critical planet.

When considering card flow through your deck you need to make sure not to have too many of these special situation cards.  If you do you'll end up with a hand full of them, or have to begin dropping them in the black hole.  I have yet to come up with a definitive number, but it's likely 15%-25% is the maximum you'll want in your deck.

Late Game Card Flow

After turn 12 and the game going into escalation you begin to have another problem, that is your 6-8 tech all of a sudden needs to move  2 cards through your hand each turn rather than 1.  You may get a reprieve if you've wittled your hand down to 3 or 4 cards, but playing only one card at a time will quickly fill your hand and your opponent will be able to play two cards to your one.  This means that you'll again need to think about having low tech cards to play along with your high tech cards to keep the pressure on your opponent.  If you did your job right managing early deck flow you should not have too big a problem here unless you packed your hand with very tech intensive cards leaving you no extra tech at all.  The way I like to manage this is to count up the total tech in my deck, and then divide by the number of cards.  Both DeckViewer and the Star Chamber Collection Manager provide this info at the top of the deck in the deck summary section.  These are the numbers in parenthesis next to each tech.  For example "4(59) 4(68)" This is a deck of 41 cards and so the average tech required is (59+68)/41 = 3.1.  Thus with 8 tech we should be able to move 2 cards per turn through this deck with no significant difficulty, but with 7 tech it could get dicey, and with 6 we would be in trouble.

A Word on Splash Decks

These techinques can also be used on slash decks, but the splash color does complicate things somewhat.  Because you cannot count on getting your splash tech before about turn 3 or 4.  The same issues arise in a splash deck as a native deck during the early game, but don't count on being able to play your splash cards early.  During the mid game you may have less native tech because of the need to have either some of your artifact worlds producing your splash tech, and the reasonable desire to have 2 sources of splash tech so that you don't end up without any splash tech at all.  A common technique to avoid both these problems is to use a splash scientist on your home world.  Using a lab on your homeworld is not recommended as it would cost you 2 turns of 4 or 5 production if used before turn 12.  That loss in production will give your opponent too much advantage.

I tend to try to keep my slash cards down to less that 1/4 the total cards in my deck, and to use only 1 splash tech for most of them.  Using this conservative approach I have successfully created and used splash decks, but still tend to favor native decks as they are less prone to error and harder to disrupt.

Conclusion

There has been much made about the advantages and disadvantages of 30 card decks.  It is my contention that card flow is much more important than the number of cards, and that by paying attention to card flow you can build a great deck that will perform well with any number of cards.  If you can keep those cards moving and take advantage of all your available tech you will be building killer decks and winning games.

Good Luck.