Introduction

My goal for this article is not necessarily to reveal some largely undiscovered tournament tech, or to show off a winning creation. My goal is to take you through the thought processes of building a deck from start to finish; the initial brainstorm, proof of concept testing, revisions, live fire, more revisions, and finally, a semi-finished product.

Who I am

Why should you listen to me? I've been playing TCG's since they began in the early '90s, and my playing and deck-design resume includes top finishes at regional, national and world championship-level events for games like Magic: the Gathering, Legend of the Five Rings, and World of Warcraft.

For both parts of this article, I'll be looking back at how I applied each of the aforementioned processes of deck building to a recent deck building adventure that I called, The Villain Deck.

The Idea

I can't really remember when exactly the germ of the idea that became The Villain Deck first hit me. I seem to recall a super long defensive game, my opponent and I going back and forth forcing each other to fail missions, and I thought to myself "this game would be over 10 turns ago if I had more than 5 adversaries in my deck to score."

I do remember sitting down immediately after that game to jot down a quick card list that eventually became the backbone for The Villain Deck. The deck I was envisioning was built around the following concepts:

1. The Aldwin (Tok'ra Agent)/Ishta (Leader of the Hak'tyl Resistance)/Charles Kawalsky (Good Soldier)/Rak'nor (Rebel Convert) team, both to make it harder for my opponent to win via experience victory, and to maximize the game's advantage of going second.
2. A large villain deck, roughly 3/4s the total deck size so that on any given turn, I could expect my hand to include 5-7 villain cards to hinder my opponent's ability to advance their game plan.
3. A villain deck comprised of many, many adversaries, as scoring adversaries is my primary path to victory.
4. A villain deck with a large majority of obstacles that cost 3-power or less, so that I can be reasonably assured of being able to stop my opponent on their first mission.
5. A small hero deck, sticking as close to 20 cards as possible so as not to impede the drawing of villain cards.
6. A hero deck comprised of the Fro'tak (Jealous Rival)/Healing Device combo, and cards that either find the combo, or disrupt my opponent's hand.

Deck building is, more than anything, about having a plan, so that when you sit down to play, you know what you're attempting to accomplish and how to go about accomplishing it. It seems like a simple statement, but it's also something I see new players mess up on an almost daily basis, particularly in Stargate. It is absolutely imperative that you avoid the common pit-trap of just throwing a bunch of powerful cards in a deck, and then shuffling up to play. Not understanding how your cards will interact with each other is a sure way to find yourself losing. And it's not like this is just a mistake for new players. I myself once played a deck in a Stargate tournament that included the Janet Fraiser (Brilliant Doctor) support character, while running the Janet Fraiser (Field Medic) team character! All I could do was discard her to pump, which is not at all what I had wanted to use her for. If I had understood my plan, I could have either picked a different team character (Carter has the exact same stats), or a similar support character like Rodney McKay (Stargate Expert) or Heimdall (Geneticist).

So, deck building is about having a plan and identifying cards to achieve that plan (or hinder the opponent's plan). After all, you wouldn't rob a bank without a plan, so why build decks without similar considerations? It's one of the easiest ways to gain advantage (in this case, advantage on-plan, but the types of advantages in Stargate is a topic for another article altogether), and yet, people just don't do it.

My plan in place, I jotted down the following:

The First Cut

• Aldwin (Tok'ra Agent)/Ishta (Leader of the Hak'tyl Resistance)/Charles Kawalsky (Good Soldier)/Rak'nor (Rebel Convert)
• 3 Fro'tak (Jealous Rival)
• 3 Ocker (Tok'ra Operative)
• 3 Healing Device
• 3 Ill-Gotten Gains
• 3 Suppression Fire
• 3 Reconnaissance
• 2 Osbourn (Antartic Researcher)

• 12 Missions

• 3 Serpent Guards/Lack of Experience
• 3 Harsh Conditions/Language Barrier
• 3 Brainwashing
• 3 Unlikely Friends/Naquadria Hallucinations
• 3 Goa'uld Bomb/Senate Expense Review
• 3 Endure the Tests/Blinded
• 3 Stonewalled/Shock Grenade
• 3 Carnivorous Creature
• 3 Mind Probe/Information Leak
• 9 Replicator Package (Too Close Encounter/Overrun/Corrosive Spray)
• 3 Red Sky
• 3 Out of Your Depth
• 3 Sabotage
• 3 Renewal
• 2 ea of the following Villains:
  • Hathor (Mother of All Pharaohs)
  • Baal (Charming Villain)
  • Frank Simmons (Government Adversary)
  • Nirrti (Goddess of Darkness)
  • Sokar (Rising Nemesis)
  • Fifth (Hardened Foe)
  • Replicator Carter (Leader of the Scourge)
  • Mollem (Duplicitous Diplomat)
  • Anubis (Banished Lord)
  • Apophis (Threat to Earth)

Looking back on my initial notes, they were a little jumbled, but the above captures it fairly well. Also, it was exactly in-line with my plan. In the super-large villain deck, I had 15 obstacles that I could not play @ 3 power, but 51 that I could play on 3-power. Also, all the adversaries could be played either on 3-power, or on Fro'tak+3-power, so I was good there. The hero deck was full of cards that were either the Fro'tak (Jealous Rival)/Healing Device combo, cards that found the combo or cards that disrupted my opponent's plan.

A Concept Not a Deck

It is important to realize, however, that at this point, all I have is a concept. I do not have anything remotely resembling a deck, even though it might look like it. A concept, as a principle of deck design, can either be workable with the available card pool, or not, but until you figure out which type of concept you have, you do not have a deck.

In order to decide if a concept is workable, you do what is called proof of concept testing. Proof of concept testing is important because it lets you know whether or not you're on solid ground from a theoretical basis. The goal in this type of testing is not necessarily to win every game. Rather, it is to see whether or not the deck does roughly what it's supposed to do. Are you able to play to your plan? Is your plan good enough to keep you in games, regardless of whether you are winning them or not? I like to do my proof of concept testing either online, using the Skirmish function in the main lobby, or face-to-face at the local store. The Skirmish function is one of my favorite ways to test ideas and concepts for Stargate, as it gives me the ability to test against rotating opponents and strategies, something face-to-face testing does not always allow for (live opponent's don't always have multiple decks handy, and there aren't always multiple opponent's available). To prove a workable concept in a game like Stargate, I like to get between 15-20 games in against a variety of decks and opponents.

One thing to keep in mind during this process is that winning and workable are not one and the same. I've had decks that won only 5 of 20 games during proof of concept that went on to become successful decks at high-level competitions. It is possible to have a workable concept with the wrong initial cards. You are only testing the concept as a whole, which is why I pointed out that after your brainstorming/planning phase you do not have a deck, merely a testable concept. This idea is difficult to describe without interchanging terminology, but if the deck does basically what it is supposed to do and loses, the concept is still workable.

What struck me as odd during my concept testing was how consistent the large deck was. I couldn't necessarily count on individual cards on a consistent basis, but there was so much redundancy that it really didn't matter. Rarely was my opponent completing his first mission until his 3rd or 4th try, which is exactly according to plan. My opponent's would wind up around 16 or 17 experience, almost enough to win a normal game but not enough against my 24 experience team. My team was able to score some early combat and ingenuity missions, which was always nice. And I was able to consistently score enough adversaries to win. I had a workable concept.

Test the Concept

Proof of concept testing also doubles as the first run of playtesting, which is important because it shows where your deck is lacking. As I said earlier, it is possible to have a workable concept with the wrong cards, and concept testing will reveal if this is the case. Initially, I had Renewal, to combo with Baal and Mollem, either incapacitating team characters, or destroying support characters. After some test games, I decided to abandon Renewal altogether, as it was never strong enough to warrant inclusion.

The reason? With a deck this large, it's a hard combo to consistently pull off. Added to that, neither combo is particularly game-breaking. Without Baal, Renewal was just a nice combat trick, and with Mollem, the opponent needed to strike multiple Science/Culture missions in the same turn, which is hard to guarantee playing a regular villain deck, let alone one with roughly 40 cards dedicated to forcing your opponent to play one mission per turn.

So Renewal was out, and I made a choice to not replace them with anything, to shrink the deck slightly and improve consistency.

Also of concern was the number of 4+ cost obstacles. Often, I would wind up stuck with 2 or 3 of them in my hand at the same time and a complete inability to play them as anything other than complications. This was a problem, as they were included to be game-breakers and stoppers, and this just wasn't happening. I was particularly disappointed with the Senate Expense Review/Goa'uld Bomb glyph-denial package, as the cards seemed too expensive for the effect, which was often (ironically) contrary to my deck's plan.

When Goa'uld Bomb goes off, it puts a glyph back under the opponent's mission pile. This effect seems quite strong and on the surface felt like an auto-inclusion for a deck like this one. But what I noticed during my initial testing was that when I'd get to the point where I could play them, I'd return their glyph and on the next villain turn, I'd be minus 1 power (because the opponent lacked the glyph). This was a problem, as I'd often have to concede a mission just to get the power back to play my other stoppers. While the Expense Review/Bomb effect is quite strong and worthy of inclusion in a lot of decks, this wasn't one of them, as they were just really expensive obstacles that had no tangible effect on the actual game state. Paying 5-power to not gain an exploitable edge in the game felt like a bad deal, so I cut them both.

After making some other largely irrelevant revisions in the card counts (going to 2 Shock Grenades instead of 3, for instance), I was ready to resume testing with a leaner, slightly less power-hungry deck. When playtesting, it can help to keep detailed notes about how often you play each card (versus playing them as complications), how often the obstacles succeed at stopping missions (essentially, cost-to-effect ratio)

The results were largely favorable, with the revisions and cuts I had made turning out to be advantageous to the way the deck played out. There was one match in particular, however, where I realized that a large chunk of my deck was just flat-out wrong.

A Key Match

I somehow managed to find myself in a mirror match. His team was slightly different (he had Samantha Carter and Harold Maybourne instead of Rak'nor and Ishta), and the dissimilarities didn't end there. He had such a large advantage on-deck (again, another article, another time) it was almost embarrassing. His team was better than mine, even with the lower experience value. His hero deck was better than mine, as he was making better use of Ill-Gotten Gains by including Dialing Computers, Hazard Suits and Galaran Memory Devices (2 cards I had not even considered), and had included the card Close Inspection, which let him shuffle back key obstacles and discarded adversaries. Even his adversaries were better than mine, as they were cheaper and more numerous. This allowed him to score sometimes 2 per turn, and deploy 2 or 3 per turn, which allowed him to outrace my scoring of larger, more awkwardly-costed adversaries like Replicator Carter and Hathor.

Matches like these are important to have during testing, because they open your eyes to alternative viewpoints about how to build a similar deck, even if all you do is confirm you were right in the first place and move on. The above match let me see the power of cards like Galaran Memory Device and Close Inspection, and the virtue of lower-costed adversaries.

Refining the Hero Side

In particular, Close Inspection was the one that I wanted to include right away. I had originally passed on it because I only had one guy, Aldwin (Tok'ra Agent), that could use it with a positive effect. However, after seeing how great a card it is, I swapped Rak'nor for Samantha Carter (Problem Solver), and put in Close Inspections. This gave me two people that could get a positive effect out of the card.

Also, I wanted Dialing Computers (a card I had passed on because I didn't see the need to replay missions when I was trying to score adversaries) and Galaran Memory Devices (which serve the double-duty of getting cards out of my hand that could be considered clunky in certain matchups, like combat obstacles against combat-skipping decks, as well as shuffling back Close Inspections for multiple uses).

This round of testing also revealed the ineffectiveness of Reconnaissance. I really don't care much about anything my opponent is doing on my turn, so the need to disrupt his villain strategy is minimal. Also, the odds of him having two game-breaking hero cards in hand at the same time are minimal. So I cut the 3 Reconnaissance to make room for the Close Inspections.

The hero-side cuts for Dialing Computer and Galaran Memory Devices on the other hand, were not so straight-forward. Every other card in my hero side was performing at or above expectations, so I couldn't justify cutting any for the 2 Computers and 3 Memory Devices that I wanted.

After much deliberation, I decided that the difference between a 20-card hero side and a 25-card hero side in a deck this large was minimal, and I just added the 5 cards on-top of my original 20

Refining the Villain Side

On the villain side, I had a number of choices to make. First, I knew I needed to go cheaper on the adversaries, while at the same time not including more than 20 so as not to draw too many at a time and clog my hand. While the adversary strategy I played against worked well, I decided that my obstacle strategy was paramount to achieving my plan, and I didn't want to make too many sacrifices on that concept of the deck. So I mixed in more smaller-costed adversaries, cutting the clunky and under-performing ones like Replicator Carter (Leader of the Scourge) (deck was too big to consistently return replicator cards), Fifth (Hardened Foe) (only scored 2, and reviving him repeatedly wasn't part of my plan), Baal (Charming Villain) (such a small effect for such a big price), and so on. Of the initial 20 adversaries I had included, all that remained were 2 Nirrti, 2 Frank Simmons, 2 Anubis, and 1 Apophis.

So I had 10-13 slots available for adversaries, and I filled them with a mix of small, specialized adversaries like Ja'din (Servant of Cronus), and larger adversaries like Tanith (Lurker) (who I completely brainfarted on for about 3 weeks while all this was going on). I liked how things looked, and moved on with more revisions.

On the obstacle side of things, I decided to cut some more of my 4+ cost stoppers, going down to 2 Carnivorous Creature and 2 Stonewalled, leaving the Shock Grenade count at 2.

Going down to just 6 obstacles at more than 3-cost was a move to make the deck more streamlined in its plan to stop the opponent from hitting the first mission until things could be setup on the hero-side (specifically the Fro'tak (Jealous Rival)/Ocker (Tok'ra Operative) + Healing Device combo). The downside to such a move is that it does limit my late-game effectiveness slightly, as the deck now lacks the game-breaking type effects in the late-game that it had in earlier drafts with larger-costed adversaries.

Making revisions can be both one of the easiest parts of deckbuilding and one of the hardest. As you can see, cutting cards can affect more than one aspect of the game. Adding cards can have the complete opposite effect as you had intended. The revision process, in a lot of ways, resembles a sort of dance with a partner steps on your toes from time to time. A lot of the time, things go beautifully - other times, things are a little awkward and you wind up with a spike heel through your toes.

Revising and tuning decks is a continually revolving process. You are searching for what doesn't work just as much as you are searching for what does work, and the only way to do that is to test, re-test, and test some more. Often, cards you dismissed in earlier incarnations become relevant in later incarnations, much like I had dismissed Dialing Computer early on in my testing, only to include it later on.

The Final Deck

In my case, the dance of testing and revising yielded the following:

• TEAM
• Aldwin (Tok'ra Agent)
• Charles Kawalsky (Good Soldier)
• Ishta (Leader of the Hak'tyl Resistance)
• Samantha Carter (Problem Solver)

• MISSIONS
• Prison Break
• Supply Raid
• Destroy Minor Goa'uld
• Attend Triad
• Expose Blackmail
• Relocate Advanced Civilization
• Contact the Asgard
• Time Loop
• Uncover the Stargate
• Pandemic Containment
• Offworld Research
• Conduct Repairs

• HERO DECK - 25 Cards
• 3 Fro'tak (Jealous Rival)
• 3 Ocker (Tok'ra Operative)
• 2 Osbourn (Antartic Researcher)
• 3 Healing Device
• 3 Galaran Memory Device
• 2 Dialing Computer
• 3 Ill-Gotten Gains
• 3 Suppression Fire
• 3 Close Inspection

• VILLAIN DECK - 75 Cards
• 1 Apophis (Enemy Reborn)
• 1 Apophis (Threat to Earth)
• 2 Anubis (Banished Lord)
• 1 Ardent Prior (Damaris)
• 2 Nirrti (Goddess of Darkness)
• 2 Frank Simmons (Government Adversary)
• 2 Tanith (Lurker)
• 1 Samuels (Turncoat)
• 2 Imhotep (Enemy Within)
• 1 Hathor (Mother of All Pharaohs)
• 2 Yu (The Great)
• 2 Ja'din (Servant of Cronus)
• 1 Klorel (Mighty Warrior)
• 2 Blinded
• 2 Endure the Tests
• 3 Unlikely Friends
• 3 Naquadria Hallucinations
• 2 Brainwashing
• 2 Carnivorous Creature
• 3 Harsh Conditions
• 3 Language Barrier
• 2 Mind Probe
• 3 Information Leak
• 3 Overrun
• 3 Too Close Encounter
• 3 Corrosive Spray
• 3 Red Sky
• 2 Stonewalled
• 2 Shock Grenade
• 2 Sabotage
• 3 Out of Your Depth
• 3 Team Compromised
• 3 Engineered Virus
• 3 Under Fire

Final Thoughts

There are many similarities and differences between this list and the jumbled stack of cards I took into concept testing. Many "powerful" cards that, during my initial brainstorm, I had considered to be core to the strategy of the deck (Sokar (Rising Nemesis)/Goa'uld Bomb/Senate Expense Review, for instance) did not make the cut in favor of slightly less powerful cards with more finesse (Team Compromised and Imhotep (Enemy Within) come to mind).

Building a solid deck is hard enough without the handicap some players give themselves by being married to certain cards or strategies. Literally no card should be safe from being cut if a better alternative is available. A famous example of this comes from Magic: the Gathering. In Magic, for the uninitiated, the goal is to reduce the opponent's life total from 20 to 0, and at one point, the best deck was built around two cards: Illusions of Grandeur and Donate (a two-card combo that effectively dealt 20 points of damage to the opponent, thus killing him as early as turn 2 or 3). As the deck evolved, successful variations popped up that included nearly all the powerful cards from the Illusions/Donate deck - except Illusions of Grandeur and Donate. As the metagame evolved, the Illusions/Donate kill was no longer the most efficient way to abuse the powerful cards that made up the deck, so the deck cut its namesake cards in favor of better alternatives.

I hope this article contained something you found useful. Feedback is always appreciated, and I can be reached in-game (Toku), comments on this site, or by email (tokuwtc@gmail.com).

Hugs and hand pounds
-Toku