Van Hemlock

Last night's card card game was something of a lesson in the importance of knowing how probability works, I think. Being the veteran pro of the EVE CCG that I now am, I'm attempting to remove the training wheels a bit, and instead of having someone else who knows what they're doing build the deck for me (i.e. Using the prepackaged Starter Decks), I'm having a go at putting one together myself.

This could have gone better, and even before we started playing, I knew I'd done something terribly wrong. My deck was much bigger than everyone else's, largely because I just can't say no to interesting cards, and during my little deck building session a few night prior, I sort of went a bit mad - "Oooh! That'll be useful!", "Oh! Got to have me one of them!", "Hmm, can't have too many Asteroids, I reckon..." and similar. Turns out you can indeed have too many Asteroids, and in fact, too much of everything really, and the problem is one of basic statistics.

I play a Minmatar deck, which means I can include any cards with a lil Minmatar symbol on, or any that have no racial symbols on at all. There's quite a lot of overlap though, and many of these cards can be included in several different race's decks, if desired. Apparently, the minimum size of a legal deck, is 52 cards. I have no idea what the upper limit is, or if there even is one, but last night showed me why they probably didn't think it necessary to make much of a fuss about it. I must have had around 100 or so. You can only have four of the same card in a deck though.

Now, imagine that you've been a busy shopper, and gorged yourself on Booster packs, and now have all the possible cards you want at your disposal for construction. One of the cards is, say, a Thrasher. You devise a cunning strategy that revolves around this one card. With a 52 card deck, and some truly random shuffling, you'll have a 1 in 52 chance that the Thrasher appears, the first time you draw a card. So to increase that, you put four Thrashers, the maximum, in the deck, bringing it up to 4 in 52, (1 in 13). Much better. So clearly, it would be a bit daft to, for example, add further 48 Non-Thrasher cards to the deck the night before playing, taking you back down to 1 in 25. I don't even have four Thrashers!

In short, it's not a good idea to dilute the deck too much, and pays to keep the thing as lean and trim as possible, and this became painfully obvious during the games we played last night. One three-way and a series of two-players matches, and through each of them, my foolishly bloated deck refused to be helpful, generally throwing up asteroid fields, when my lack of ships made trying to hold any regions to put them in, practically impossible.

The first big three-way, Minmatar (Me), Amaar and Caldari saw me bumped off very early on, again, partly because my deck building skills are my biggest enemy at this point, and partly because the Amaar dug in ferociously again, and the Caldari really does understand deck dynamics and had a pretty potent fleet of ships out and active rather early on. He won in the end, the Amaar not being quite able to make his fortress as impregnable as last time.

The two player matches went a bit better, and I'm starting to see that the Minmatar deck I have at the moment, (when it is cooperating), is all about early ninja raids on opponent's bases, while they're still trying to get set up. Tricky in a three player though, as this tends to require All-or-Nothing assaults that will just get me obliterated by the remaining third player. I also seem to do better when there are few, or no, Outer Regions on the table. Not sure why yet.

One of the later games, Me vs Caldari, was a bit different. My deck relented and gave me my Card of the Night, the 'Furnace Mill', a rare Starbase Structure, which costs 2, adds +1 Starbase Shield and has the following text:

"At the beginning of your turn, you may pay ISK(X) to place the top X cards of target opponent’s market on the scrapheap. X equals the number of regions that opponent controls."

In other words, I pay two ISK, for both regions the Caldari was controlling, and he has to throw two cards away, from his Market, to his Scrapheap. I was doing this every turn for quite some time, while, unusually for my deck, managing to dig in and play a quite defensive game, although a hefty suicide rush from the Thrasher in the later stages certainly bought me some time, and before he could get enough ships together again to swat me, I burnt him out of cards, making him lose. I guess if his deck had been as massively bloated as mine, he'd have survived. Irony!

Very much luck, rather than design though, with my deck so floaty and unfocussed, it's a wonder I didn't lose every game. Clearly much more thought needed into what cards are really needed, and which ones just sound cool. I used to half-heartedly play Magic the Gathering, back in the day, and deck construction in that, is a much more documented and understood art, and there were definite ratios involved in putting together a winning deck - so many of this type of card, so many of that, two of this type for each one of that type, and so on; thousands of players and thousands of games, all honing the 'Perfect Deck' down in a very evolutionary process. I'm sure this EVE CCG is quite similar in that regard. I just need to do a bit of research and work out what the optimum ratios of Asteroids and Spaceships are...