Ben's Quick Post Sac Airport Thoughts (and a deckbuilder's lament)
Should I run this card in my deck? (A cautionary tale)
Sitting here at the Harry Reid International Airport at the end of a 9 hour layover before the flight back to Dallas, I've finally gotten over being slightly mad at myself for a very simple but also very important deck building decision for the deck I brought to BCS Sacramento.
Yes, slime won, and yes, there weren't even that many slime players present, and yes, I probably could've performed pretty ok with slime. Regardless, I believed in an 8 choice Revue Starlight deck as “good enough” to make top cut, and then potentially get to top 3 on a good day. On the podcast and potentially in a future blog post I'll explain more about my mindset about the deck, but for now I'm going to focus on one aspect where I unwittingly didn't follow my own advice.
Even before the tournament started and in other conversations with players online and offline, if someone asks me for deck construction help my first question tends to be “What problems are you having with the deck?”. Is it drawing climaxes? Is it constructing a board? Upkeeping hand? Effectively setting up the finisher? Having enough stock? Filtering your hand? Is there an issue at levels 0, or 1, or 2, or 3? Is it, perhaps, having enough deck speed to get rid of a bad deck/deck one?
Right before check in was over, some one asked about their standby ayakashi deck that accidentally had a 51st card in it. It was this card (insert image of card here).
The deck has pretty ok deck speed otherwise, and this was a one of, so I asked if he was having any trouble getting to climaxes. Perhaps classically in Weiss, he said he always felt like he'd draw out 5 in the first few turns, so no issues there. Thus, I agreed that this card was likely ok to cut right before the tournament to have a legal deck.
Every card in a deck should have a purpose. They should solve a problem, and make up for the weaknesses that might come from the other card choices, and overall serve the gameplan of the deck. For example, Rikis (and other early game clocking effects) should plus your hand early so that you can transition into your level 1 game.
That's not to say that you can always cover every single weakness of a deck. If a deck has no weaknesses at all they'd flood the top tables at Z tier, and even the best decks in the format have chinks in the armor. But it's important to identify the biggest potential weaknesses and attempt to rectify the issue, which is something I did not do.
The level 1 Nana combo in Revue Starlight does not have deck speed. It mills no other cards besides triggering for attack. Thus, a clear weakness to the early game plan is deck speed. Steve always says that deck one is the worst deck, and I tend to agree. Every time I can resolve a level 1 climax combo and leave my deck at one card remaining while still at level 1, it feels really nice. Going into the tournament though, I'd just accepted the lack of deck speed as a fact of the deck, and ran with it.
And what do you know, whenever I went out a bunch of climaxes early, it became a gamble weighted in the opponent’s favor whether or not I could block with the 2-4 climaxes left in the deck and stay at level 1 to effect my game plan better. That's not to say that it directly lost me games, but the negative snowball from not blocking led to many gambles that in hindsight, probably didn't need to happen. (I went 4-3 in swiss fwiw)
Before the tournament, I discussed the deck with the NorCal revue player that ultimately played choice/pants to a top 16 finish. I'd gotten to ask him some burning questions I'd had about the list since he piloted it last year at BCS Anaheim and the Sacramento 2k. One of them included asking about 3 copies of the camera event, a 1/0 event that checks up to 4 cards for a character on play. He'd said that the additional deck speed felt necessary for the Nana combo, and it was easy enough between drawing and fukaziroh to have at least one copy to work with when necessary.
I proxied 3 copies into my deck for some post tournament games and had never felt so stupid in my life. The immediate usage of the card for value was almost a slap to the face. If no deck speed simply add deck speed 5head. Instead of following my own advice, I'd prioritized some potentially useful tech cards in favor of not addressing the deck’s major weakness. That's not to say that those tech cards can't replace other cards in the deck, as this was obviously a very small amount of playtesting, but after trying it I was flabbergasted as to why I wasn't playing the event before.
We've said on the podcast before that truly, there's only so much you can address with deck construction, but that doesn't mean that you shouldn't try. Deck construction is still one of the most important aspects of Weiss Schwarz, even when decks can feel all figured out. So, if you ever wanted to ask for our opinion about your deck list in particular, you can skip asking us and start by asking yourself the question I didn't ask myself.
“What do I feel is the biggest issue with the deck right now?”
PS: of course, that doesn't mean you'll correctly identify that biggest issue with the deck that may or may not need addressing. But practicing trying to figure out those things is a big part of getting better at deck building, even better if you don't suck like I do and can work through these sorts of problems without playtesting 10 games before adjusting the deck again :)