by psylensse » Thu Sep 15, 2011 8:21 am
printed out your guide today to read on the public transit ride home: TEN PAGES in Word! absolutely massive.....
I thought a bit about the whole process of deck building. For the absolute newest players, it's almost inevitable that deck building from scratch is going to be rough. from personal experience, from my youngling through my padawan stages (not sure where that cutoff was exactly, couple hundred games maybe? frankly I still think I'm in the midst of padawan-ness) deck building wasn't "building" so much as it was "take the starter and modify it". And while that doesn't sound like much, after numerous iterations it's evolved into it's own identity, although you can still see the traces of starter in there, certainly the *flavor* of the starter typically remains. Maybe for this tier of players, it would be highly useful to instruct us how to evolve our decks? maybe to even take a step back from there - how to use the starters? I know there are videos, but having someone spell it out alongside would be tremendously beneficial. I didn't understand that Monk was an endgame unit for Falkow until probably after I joined your guild, which is relatively recently. Technically that discussion probably belongs in its own thread since it's not "Deck building", but at the same time since this thread is for beginners too, I think that for beginners the concept of deck building is probably more accurately "Deck evolution", of which there are probably two levels - grand sweeping evolutions, and then tweaks.
Discussing how to build a deck and how to play a deck - related and different at the same time I think. At the earliest levels, it's like the suggestions you gave Malarious in his recent video replays. those aren't really issues of deck building, per se, but until you understand how to play decks how can you build them? related to the "how to use the starters" above. again, likely a separate thread which, btw, if it already exists I apologize - looked for it but couldn't find it.
onto Deck Building itself - a case study example of how a deck was built would be awesome. Where in the world did you start when you made Big Blue??? Even stuff like BKR/Jack that seems so commonplace now, where did that idea come from? any of the prebuilds or even starters, for that matter.
Related - when you build a file, you must inevitably conceive of an opponent or opponents that a file is catered towards beating. Who are these opponents? Do you think of Sea Serpents? Undeads? That seems too limited. Maybe you have a philosophical style that you envision as your opponent? Maybe the deck you are trying to build counters rushes, aggression, etc.? do you try and encompass as many as possible? Where are the limitations of what a file can counter? Rushes, Big Blue, GMB, these are all such wildly varying styles it seems, that no one file can possibly be catered towards all of them.
On my third or fourth read through, the section on opens really struck me, by the way. 1) it definitely seems that you have been playing long enough to know who opens what, and can adapt before turn one. this seems very valuable. 2) the examples were great. I used to auto-pilot this part of my game. Now I give it a lot more thought.
Hope these comments are helpful. More than any specific comment I made, I predominantly wanted to suggest that there needs to be some sort of intermediary bridge to better encapsulate the beginners. Possibly some comments on evolving your deck - how to identify weak spots in your file: is a card just not working at all in that file, or does it just need to be played better? are there cards you pretty much never access? etc. fairly basic stuff and probably somewhat tedious to write out, but useful. Looking forward to the next iteration of this guide, thanks for everything Gon!
Phellitiest (spambot) wrote:My personal relative delights in frogs.
