Games for Gamers Who Like Games Like Magic (Part 1)

 Christmas! Time for a little Christmas break.

Since I won't be playing a lot of Magic until next year, I'd like to take a quick break from writing about Magic to talk about some things that were..... well, sprouted from my love of Magic.

So, less of a break, I guess.

It goes without saying that Magic attracts Gamers, being, well, A GAME. But it does attract a certain type of gamer. The type who optimizes and strategizes and likes THINKING not only about playing the game he or she is in, but about how the game is played, how it works, and why it works. To be brief about it, it attracts a startlingly high proportion of designers, strategists, and game-mechanics junkies.

To use some Magic design vernacular... Melvins.

"Ah," I hear you say. "This is going to be one of THOSE articles."

Well, yes and no. Bear with me here.

At the risk of blaspheming, I have a confession - I play games other than magic. Card games, even!

And as a Melvin, I feel obligated to analyze strategy.

Slaying Gods for Fun and Profit

What I've been playing lately is Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer. Lauren "Mulldrifting" Lee (now a Level 1 Pro) recently wrote on Star City Games about it and, well, I can't help but take that as a jumping in point for me to talk some strategy.

A game created by renowned Melvins (and some Magic pros like Brian Kibler, even), Ascension is, essentially, a game about deckbuilding. Does it get more Melvin-y than that? (Answer: Yes. Read on!)

If you haven't played and are looking for a primer, go and read Lauren's article. I can wait.

...

...

You good?

For the lazy, I can quickly rehash the general strategies:

Power - Gain Power! Kill monsters! Win Honor!

Runes - Gain Runes! Acquire heroes (and constructs)! Have an awesome (and honor filled) deck! (???)! Profit! (It's better than it sounds)

To be fair, going the deck approach is pretty broad. Depending on what cards come out of the center deck, you can wind up with a lot of different decks. In practice, it usually winds up being a hybrid approach, where the power deck needs runes to get good power generators, and the rune deck has some power generation cards in it to build up some extra honor.

In fact, to some extent, it's not about choosing what is going to go into your deck - it's about drafting the best card.

Yeah, I said draft. (Boy do I love drafting)

Drafter the Fact

Ultimately, Ascension is a drafting game. In a Magic draft, how you value cards will depend on what's available to you, which is based on what direction your opponents go, which is also based on what directions you are leaving open. It's a big feedback loop. The main differences in Ascension are that you have more information about your opponents and the turnaround time between action and consequence is much faster (due to fewer players and the deckbuilding mechanic)

So what we're really looking to do is pick the "best" card of any given board. I know, big strategical shocker there.

What defines the best choice though? There are a couple metrics - the obvious one is cost-to-(resource). How much are you getting out of it? Since playing the cards is free, cost-to-rune/power is not especially valuable, but it's still meaningful. Cost-to-honor is important though, and I'll talk about that later.

The metric I find most valuable, however, is what I call "Density."

You Are My Density

It should be clear that the cards that cost more are (generally) more powerful and thus more desired. The key to Ascension is to be able to get to those high-power cards. You do this by (1) affording them, and (2) drawing them. Let's focus on (1) for now.

The important thing to understand is that you start every turn 5 cards in your hand. With your initial deck, this means that you have, on average, 4 runes and 1 honor. And most importantly, you will not have more than 5 runes. Now, most of the really juicy stuff to buy starts at 6, and the really good monsters start at 4 and 5 power. (Note that you need at least 3 power to do anything of value at all with your power. Killing the Cultist is... a consolation prize, really.)

Your goal is to increase these averages. The key to this is Density. You can't just pick cards that do cool things, (at least at first) you have to pick cards with good Densities Consider these:

And then compare to these:

(Yeah, the costs are different, but BEAR WITH ME DAGNABBIT)

Some players in my local playgroup are (in my opinion) overvaluing the former, which do nothing in terms of Density, while undervaluing the others, which, while not necessarily as reliable, have more Density. Consider - they will almost always give you two resources. Sometimes (often if you're good) more and sometimes (and this isn't necessarily bad) less.

Okay, test time! Now consider this:

At first glance, it's like the first ones, right? Right?

Wrong. While it doesn't immediately gain you extra resources, it will increase the overall Density of your deck. As long as there's something in your deck that's better than your starting cards, your future hands will be better. Obviously, the utility of this will decrease as the game progresses.


Third and final point on this, and one that might be a bit surprising: The base cards aren't that bad.

They're the easiest way to increase your overall resource yield. One of the guys I play with always complains that he keeps on getting bad hands; ones where he's split between power and runes. He'll have 3 or 4 runes and 2 or 3 power and he's not really able to do much of anything. He's also got a serious aversion to taking base cards. Coincidence? I don't think so. Remember those average hand numbers I mentioned way back at the beginning? His decks' average yields aren't breaking the usefulness threshold, and the cheapest, easiest way to fix that is to buy those base cards. At costs of 2 and 3, you can basically always buy them, sometimes in multiples. And buying in multiples will greatly increase your average resources in your hand. There's certainly a tradeoff in card utility there, but if that's what you need to be able to buy utility cards at all, you've just got to suck it up and by those basics.

So with Density in mind, what card would I love to have? This guy:

Three runes. Seriously. (Okay, 2 and a virtual rune, but you know what I mean.) Keep in mind, 2 is basically the optimal rune amount you're looking for, and 3 is pretty rare, so even with that restriction, this guy is boss.

Not to mention, Constructs are pretty sick. Even the worst of them gives you some value simply by being a "free" card. By that, I mean that you only have to draw them once. Small decks are your friend, and Constructs do contribute to that. First pick, basically every time.

Come back next time when I continue to not talk about Magic and instead take a look at a fantasy card game from Richard Garfield.