Experimental Deckbuilding – Testing Regimen

Welcome back to the Experimental Deckbuilding series! Today we are going to put together a testing regimen for our Rohan fellowship and examine what’s working and what’s not.

Before we do anything else, we are going to want to look at this classic blog post from Tales from the Cards. It’s an introduction to deck testing theory, and kind of gets at what we are looking for. While a little dated – there have been three full cycles and most of the Saga since it was originally published – the theory behind it remains sound, and Ian offers valuable insights into how to test a deck.

The most important thing I think he brings to the table is this advice: ask the right questions. That is, ask why you lost, and why you won. Go into detail – find the weaknesses of the deck as well as its strengths. Find out what cards you are always playing and what cards rot in your hand because you can never afford them.

So, before we do anything else, lets find ourselves with a decent set of questions going into the testing process. What are we worried about with these decks?

The first worry I have is this:

1 – Is the fellowship too reliant on its opening hand? This is the first question Ian asks of his proposed deck later in the series, and it’s a good one for almost any deck. If I don’t have the right cards in my opening hand, do I lose? If Forth Eorlingas takes six rounds to show up, can I muddle through things without it?

My initial sense is that having early game willpower in hand is going to be crucial, as well as perhaps early game defensive boosts. I don’t have an especially effective early-game defender, and I could easily get overwhelmed by enemies. Against some quests, if I don’t get threat reduction in my opening hand, things could go poorly as well.

That leads us to a second question:

2 – Can the fellowship handle standard combat in circumstances where staging area attack is precluded? Plenty of quests have large enemies that will engage early, and which we must be prepared to deal with from early on. Others have enemies that automatically engage you, which means that leaving them in the staging area is not an option. Still other quests push your threat so high that you just can’t avoid engaging the enemies that show up. And sometimes, even with all of our card draw, it takes 10 rounds before we draw into Forth Eorlingas. Do we have what it takes to handle those combat rounds without leaving all the enemies in the staging area until we can kill them?

And our third question, a little more detailed:

3 – Does our lack of healing create significant problems for our deck? Direct damage is not uncommon to see in quests, and our only effective way to deal with it is Honour Guards. Are we going to be able to deal with quests that challenge us in that way?

In addition to these detailed questions – questions that get to the heart of how our deck functions, we want to keep an eye on the standard questions: is the card draw and the resource curve working out well enough? Do we end up with more cards in our hand than we could ever pay for, or end up with resources piling up on our heroes and no cards to spend them on? This will tell us a great deal about the functionality of the decks.

The last of the standard questions is another good one. Are there any cards that are just dead when we draw them. Are there cards that we consistently draw and think “man, why did I get this?” Of course, not every card is going to be useful in every circumstance. Sometimes you just draw that duplicate unique, or your third chump blocker when you really wanted a questing ally. But if there are cards that we are consistently not playing because we don’t see how they can contribute to our board state, then it’s worth looking and asking if we just want to get rid of them and find something better to play with.

 

Finding Our Quests

It’s important to have realistic expectations going into this process. We are starting with a fun idea, one that uses cards that are generally neglected in the modern card pool. We probably aren’t going to build a set of decks that can reliably beat every quest in the game, or even most of them.

What I’m looking to do, however, is to put together the core of a fun and effective deck that I can sit down with and enjoy a game. We will definitely want to tweak some cards – this isn’t supposed to be a One Deck, after all – and add specific cards to play against specific quests, perhaps even more than a standard sideboard. Some quests might take a wholesale retuning, and that’s ok. I’m aiming at the core of the deck – the parts that make it function well around which I can hang quest-specific tech.

The first quest I’m going to run the deck against is Journey Along the Anduin. It is (still!) a very fun quest, that offers a decent challenge. In the modern card pool, it is certainly on the easy side, so it won’t be offering a stress-test on a specific portion of the deck. But it does require us to be able to handle a large enemy from turn 1, and the second stage of the quest will challenge us with the potential to build up a high amount of threat in the staging area, followed by a mass battle that we’ll have to be ready for.

But I picked this quest largely as a way to get used to how the deck plays, to get a sense for what to play when, and what bits are important in the early game and what is worth saving for a later turn. And, if we have significant difficulties, we can look at what needs to change to get the deck running better. This is a practice run quest, to identify any glaring flaws we can see from playing the decks, and to give us experience for the stress-tests.

So, what quests do we want to run this fellowship against? I’m going to look for a total of 5 different quests, each challenging in their own way.

Peril in Pelargir

The first quest I’m going to add to the list is Peril in Pelargir. I knew that I wanted at least one of these quests to involve battle questing – both because this deck feels like it would be good against it and because thematically, this deck almost screams battle questing. We are letting the foes of Rohan gather around us until we charge out and sweep them under the feet of our hooves – if that doesn’t thematically call out for battle questing, I don’t know what does. I chose Peril in Pelargir specifically because it will challenge these decks with low threat enemies that will be hard to leave in the staging area. In addition, battle questing will force us to prioritize hero actions differently – with our powerful attackers largely exhausting to quest, we could easily find ourselves in a tricky situation.

Morgul Vale

The Morgul Vale is going to be our second quest. With three successive boss enemies, the last two of which will require us to engage them, this quest will challenge our fellowship’s ability to defend repeated attacks from powerful enemies. In addition, we will be forced to deal with these enemies early on – possibly from round 1. If our defensive capabilities are not up to the task, this quest will reveal those weaknesses quickly.

Intruders in Chetwood

Intruders in Chetwood is another of my personal favorite quests. I love the theme, and I love how the quest plays out mechanically. It’s a well-balanced, difficult-but-not-frustrating quest that will offer a different type of challenge to our decks. For many of the quests in the game, our decks will be facing difficulties with low-engagement cost enemies that engage and force us to focus on defenses when we really want to be killing enemies in the staging area. This quest instead will challenge us by leaving all the enemies in the staging area unless we optionally engage them ourselves. In addition, the Orc War Party will prevent enemies in the staging area from taking damage while it is there itself, so we will want to have a way to deal with that early on. The challenge from this quest will be three-fold. First, we run the risk of not being able to do any staging area attack at all on a given round until we can reliably engage and defend a 6-attack enemy. Second, we run the risk of building up a great deal of threat in the staging area and having difficulties questing past it. And third, the quest will punish us by increasing our threat every round by the number of enemies in the staging area. I’m excited to test our mettle against this one.

The Siege of Gondor

Our fourth quest will be a very difficult one. The Siege of Gondor is a very hard quest, and requires decks that face it to perform highly on many different levels. It will test our fellowship’s ability to muster willpower and clear locations against a staging area that might reveal as many as four cards per round, while the other option is to take points of direct damage that our decks cannot afford to take very much of. The enemies are not extremely difficult to deal with, but archery and other direct damage options will make speed of the essence. Of all of the quests we will be facing in this testing regimen, this is the quest I am most worried about, but also somewhat excited to try and adapt these decks to the challenge.

Escape from Umbar

The final quest in our circuit will be Escape from Umbar. I have actually never played this quest before, but I have heard many good things about it. A number of prominent community members have integrated it into their standard deck-testing protocols, and I’m going to do likewise here. A brief survey of the encounter cards indicates that we are going to have to deal with some archery, along with a number of effects that could potentially require enemies to engage us directly without going to the staging area. Since our decks really want enemies to stay in the staging area for a bit, this will be interesting to see how our decks handle the experience.

And that’s our regimen put together! Thanks for stopping by to look at it. Next time in this series, we will look at our deck’s performance during the practice runs against Journey Along the Anduin, in addition to the first to quests of our dedicated testing experience.

However, the next post on this blog should be the writeup of the Hunt for Gollum quest. I hope you are looking forward to that as well!