Introduction

In the first of this three part series we talked a little bit about the importance of playtesting in developing and growing a trading card game. We also explored the idea of resources and proposed an unconventional way to use one of these resources, turns, to generate a favorable board position in anticipation of a non-traditional victory.

Before I begin, I want to offer the same preface that I offered last time: the goal of these articles is to offer an attempt at laying the groundwork that I hope will one day grow into a more developed body of Stargate theory. In addition, I offer general ideas of decks to playtest in order to attempt to demonstrate a practical application of the theory I am discussing and to attempt to plant the seed of ideas in the mind of those that have the time and talent to fully develop them.

With that said, today I am going to be talking about two of the unique elements of deck building in Stargate, the requirement to include at least 20 hero and 20 villain cards in your deck, and the unique twist that the card drawing/running out of cards mechanic adds to the game. In this article I hope to develop two concepts: deck size and redundancy while also hopefully pointing the enterprising deck builder towards another possible deck idea that will utilize these concepts.

Deck Size Challenges

Unlike other TCG's, having the smallest possible deck is not an advantage in Stargate, since a small deck will increase the likelihood that a player will run out of cards and be left without access to resources. These two mechanics mean that even the most single minded strategy may be required to include a large number of cards that serve some function other than furthering that strategy (something that is a deck building no no in many other games).

These unique issues make for an interesting consideration when deck building: What is the optimal deck size and how can deck size be used to better accomplish the goals of the deck builder? Furthermore, because more is sometimes better, deck building decisions may not always boil down to and may occasionally come down to how much redundancy can be put into a deck without sacrificing quality?

Consistency and Redundancy

Before I continue I want to take a minute to talk about two related concepts: consistency and redundancy. Consistency is the ability of a deck to repeatedly accomplish the same task or to work in the desired manner repeatedly. Consistency is essentially a measure of how well your deck overcomes random chance to function in a specific way. Consistency can be accomplished in several ways. In order to achieve consistency, a deck can either find a way to do the same thing several ways, reduce the number of cards in the deck overall, or add search cards to find cards with the desired effects. When I say redundancy, I am referring to the number of cards in a deck that can accomplish the same objective in a roughly equivalent manner. If I have 8 support characters that add Culture, and I add two more, I have increased the redundancy of my deck with regards to winning Culture missions. Simply put, consistency is the goal, and redundancy is one of SEVERAL ways of achieving consistency. Good decks seek to be consistent in their operation (often seeking out consistency in several aspects of the deck), and one of the best ways to be consistent is to add redundancy.

Combining Consistency, Redundancy, and Deck Size

So how does all of this fit together? Simple. Since players are forced to include 20 cards to play on each side, in order to build consistency on one side or the other, the player must include a variety of redundant cards on that side in order to increase the ability to consistently draw a certain ability. This idea runs contrary to many other games in which the answer to the consistency problem is simply to trim out other cards in an effort to reduce deck size. Before I continue, let's look at an example of how increasing redundancy can help a deck builder to increase the consistency of a deck. Let's say that a hypothetical deck builder wants to draw an obstacle 3/4 of the time (this is obviously an extreme situation and the limited number of effective cards makes this a stretch, but it serves to illustrate the example well). The simplest way to to do this in the absence of any requirements to have cards on both sides would be to have a 40 card deck, 30 of which are obstacles. Since deck building rules require that players have 20 cards on each side, the player must now play at least an 80 card deck, 60 of which are obstacle cards. In increasing the deck size from 40 to 80, the builder increases the consistency of the deck's ability to draw an obstacle, but it decreases the deck's consistency in drawing any specific obstacle. How does the talented deck builder overcome this problem to make sure that the deck works the way he/she wants? Simple. The deck builder seeks out redundant obstacle cards to make sure that the greater range of cards is actually just a larger number of similar cards.

In order to do this, builders must look at cards that accomplish similar goals for similar costs. Luckily, in Stargate, cards are naturally somewhat redundant since all obstacles effect some combination of 4 categories at some magnitude. By selecting a variety of cards that accomplish the same or similar tasks, a deck builder can achieve redundancy. For example, a player looking to create redundancy of Science and Culture obstacles would not only play Red Sky (with its 2/3) but will also play Sabotage, essentially doubling the number of two cost obstacles accomplishing roughly the same task. Redundancy is not always a perfect science, but by using redundancy to achieve consistency, a deck builder can use the unique rules of Stargate to give him/herself an advantage by drawing cards with desired effects more consistently.

Applying the Theory: A Villain Deck Concept

How does consistently drawing one type of card offer a deck builder an advantage? By creating a deck that is designed to win by scoring villains and having a deck that is largely stacked towards drawing villain cards, a deck builder can give himself a strategic advantage. On the most basic level, the Villain deck gains its advantage from one simple idea: every card designed to be played on your turn is a dead card when you are trying to win with a villain deck, and card cycling (in the form of complications) assists you more than your opponent (since your complications are inhibiting their goal while their complications are merely a way to ditch a card.) How does a villain deck relate to the ideas of consistency and redundancy? By stacking the deck to include a massively larger concentration of villain cards, the villain deck player insures that they will draw far fewer dead cards than their opponent (since the villain player's hero cards and the opponent's villain cards are all essentially dead cards). In order to make this strategy feasible, the villain player needs to achieve as much redundancy as possible. This means significantly exceeding the 40 card minimum, and using every additional card to increase the likelihood of drawing an obstacle. A deck like this may even take this concept to the extreme by shooting for a 65-80 card deck containing 45-60 villain cards. To illustrate the value of this point, imagine two decks competing against each other. The two decks have the following traits:

	Deck One	Probability	Deck Two	Probability
Hero Cards	24	.4	20	.29
Villain Cards	36	.6	50	.71
Total Cards	60	1.0	70	1.0
Live Cards/8	3.2		5.68

A simple glance at this chart makes the advantage of this deck type clear. A generic player, playing a fairly average deck build (I am sure players will critique these assumptions, if you disagree, feel free to run your own numbers, these seem consistent with the typical deck I see played) will have over two less live cards for every eight cards they drawn. By live cards, I mean cards that can be played for their intended purpose for positive benefits. Clearly this degree of card advantage puts the villain in a positive situation before the game ever starts, simply because they have manipulated the size of their deck to achieve consistency of villain cards without losing consistency of quality by including a variety of redundant villain cards.

Building a Deck

As I have before, I will once again sketch some general strokes for what I feel has the possibility to become a competitive and interesting deck. Villain decks already exist and have been gaining popularity, but here are some ideas that I believe can be integrated into these decks to help further the archetype. My suggestion is a deck that is approximately 70 cards (possibly slightly more), only 20 of which are hero cards. The team members should be members with as high of a score as possible to reduce the likelihood of losing on experience points.

The hero cards should focus on three goals wherever possible: Cheap to play, generating card advantage on the villain side if possible, and avoiding hand destruction/giving your opponent an advantage on their hero side. If villain decks become popular, a fourth goal, avoiding a villain loss should also be added to these goals. Reconnaissance is a natural "3 of" for this deck, giving you information about your opponents hand and allowing you to pull any hero cards they might have and force then to use then on the villain side. Similarly, cards like "top minds" allow a player to dodge obstacles that may have nasty discard text, couple these cards with deck thinner like Ill gotten gains and a few Gear cards for the gains to search (hello Zat Gun and your text stopping ability) and it is not too difficult to fill the hero side spots with cards to further your goal or hinder your opponent gaining any advantages on your hero turn. Further card ideas may be anything that makes complications more expensive (reducing their ability to get rid of worthless excess) and card drawing.

The villain side is where games will be won and lost, and as a result this side requires the most testing. Certainly a variety of redundant cards to keep your opponent fighting for every glyph are a must, as are a plethora of adversaries to score. An often forgotten asset for villain decks are cards that allow you to either move glyphs or shuffle them back into a deck. By combining powerful, scorable villains with a variety of obstacles to hinder the opponent, and stacking the deck to insure that the opponent will always be stressing to win a glyph (and that you will always have a villain available to score when they fail) the villain player can turn their opponent's hand full of worthless cards into a method of winning an unexpected and powerful victory.

Recap

In this article we examined the idea of using deck size to create consistency. Unlike traditional games where this is done by minimizing deck size and finding ways to quickly cycle he deck, we looked at methods to use a bigger deck to achieve consistency of draw without losing other consistency by playing a series of redundant cards. We then combined these ideas to form the basis of a Villain deck which relies on superior card advantage to overwhelm the opponent by scoring adversaries.

This has been the second of a series of three articles on Stargate theory and future deck building applications. I hope some of you out there will take these ideas, think about them, and come up with now and innovating ways to apply them. As I said in my first article, the existence of a robust deck building community is necessary for the successful growth of the game. In the final of these three articles we will talk about the importance of various types of synergy and again give an example of a possible archetype that attempts to focus on using synergy to the largest advantage possible.

Until next time, keep playing, keep innovating, and I look forward to seeing you on our travels through the game.