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Adventures in Deckbuilding #238: Shining Armor, Forward Commander (Blue/Pink Aggro) [Core]

Going In Hot

As I always say when I get to one of these Manes in the Adventure series, I'll take an interesting but underpowered Mane over one that has seen real use in the competitive scene any day. It is always so hard to look at them, and not see the well-developed theories that have already been built for them. Any deck that even comes close to the idea that the Mane gets used for on a regular basis will always just get sucked into the local minimum that is the well-optimized prior build. And since in this series I always try to be creative when I can, if I end up something that's effectively just a subpar copy of a meta deck, I come away underwhelmed at the whole proceeding.

In Shining's case, that means that I need to avoid Blue/Purple llike the plague, because the synergy there is just so obvious and well-explored that I won't be able to avoid it. The trick to Shining's design is that a deck that uses him will really want to find a way to compensate itself for the cards that it's losing to discards. If the Mane is firing properly, you can expect to losing at least one card every turn to its ability, and often enough it will be two cards, usually for the Swift and Agile options. That's a lot of cards to be throwing away. Blue/Purple's compensation is AT, both from Daybreaker of course but also from all of the cards in that combination that help to provide discounts and generate more AT as needed.

If Purple is off the table, that really only leaves Pink, which will try to compensate with card draw to refill the hand, and White, which will compensate by enabling play out of the discard pile. I took stabs at both options for this build, but I found that the Pink synergy seemed better-suited to what is going to be a fast build. In a way, it kind of is a meta-copy, since this deck and colour combination reminds me a lot of the Princess Cadance/Blue list that used to be so popular in Core. I've tried to be creative and novel where i could, but a lot of the build ended up revolving around Gallus & Silverstream, for the huge tempo that they provide when you are able to get them out for free. Luckily, the colours maintain enough ways to frighten and dismiss stuff that I think we'll be able to pull that off reliably enough.

There is one TL card in the draw deck that I haven't used before, that being Flare, the 2-cost 3-power multicolour Friend. Her ability at first might seem a bit dangerous; we hardly need more discard outlets when Shining is always going to give us one. But I found the power versus cost compelling, and the ability certainly has the capacity to be pretty strong. A good number of the deck's Events also have powers of three or two, making them viable discards to her ability in most cases. And it's worth remembering also that the Gallus Friend would gain its power after Flare's ability is done processing, so we'll likely have more ability to move him around with it, at least in the early game. (If you manage to discard Message from the Past to move Gallus, you're doing just fine.)

Message is, of course, the natural Shining synergy that we just can't go without. It provides the ability to discard cards without actually discarding them, as used to be exploited with Follow My Lead back in the day. But this one just makes it all so much simpler. As with Shining deck, every copy of this card that you can find is going to be a multiplier on your ability to make the Mane work and keep accomplishing your other objectives too.

Overall, this deck has the feeling of being something like Hot Wings, with that mix of Friends which hit for a good amount of power out of the hand with strong options for disruption. The Problem reflects that too, as I think we can be confident in running Rules Technicality, as we'll likely have the resources to defend it when it shows up on the opponent's turn. Not Enough Glitter may look odd since we have some 1-cost Friends that we'd really prefer not to get dismissed. But I expect that we won't ever put the Magic counter on the Problem. We'll assign it somewhere where it won't do anything, and treat the Problem as a way to wipe tokens off of the board when it comes up, which can be handy in a number of match-ups.

I expect a relatively baseline level of competence out of this deck. Blue and Pink are two colours that just work very well together, often without a whole lot of effort. I'd be surprised if this deck was particularly good though. It lacks the absurd resource efficiency that you get out of Purple, and Cadance provided a better accelerant for the old style of these colours, I think. But should be fun to play with regardless.

Next week we'll be taking a look at a Mane that's been around for awhile, but had been overlooked by my dice for a long time. The last FM Mane that I hadn't done in this series: it's Princess Luna, Double Your Fun!

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Adventures in Deckbuilding #237: Hitch Trailblazer, Bunny Cop (Yellow/Blue Aggro) [Core]

Trilemma

Getting back to this series after so long away has been a really great experience not just because it's been a refresher on the game, and not just because it's reminded me how much I actually do enjoy doing this, but because it's given me an excuse to really take a deep dive into the new sets, which I had kind of let pass me by while I was focusing on other things. Maybe this shouldn't come as a surprise, but there are a lot of cool cards and concepts and ideas in the most recent couple of sets that we've had, and so far at least every week has been a dive and an experiment on some idea that I've noticed while looking at them.

One of the first ideas that I had, though, was one that I coudn't act on until I got a Yellow or Blue Mane to base an article around. NG and TL gave Yellow-Blue two new Friends in Hitch & Sparky and Alterro, that each benefit from having more than the usual number of Problems in play. Add Vapor Trail to that mix, and we have a significant chunk of the Blue/Yellow Friends all pulling in the same direction: toward a deck that wants to run lots of Dilemmas and use them for lots of confronts and lots of faceoffs. I knew that I wanted to try doing that at the first chance that I got.

Unfortunately, it wasn't quite so simple, at least not with this Mane. Hitch really wants Critters in play, but more relevantly to the challenges I faced, he really wants Critters in play early, since he needs one on the field in order to flip to Boosted. And there actually aren't that many options to have reliable Critters to confront a Problem with at the start of the game. It seems like you're pretty much boxed into starting with Buckball Strategy so that you have enough requirement to play one of them, too. I ended up with Cloudpuff, Fluttershy, and Cockatrice Migration as my options, but it's never great to have such a constrained set of paths to flipping. Plus, add in the set of cards needed for Blue entry, the big pile of Dilemmas that I want to run, and the multicolour cards that want to take advantage of that strategy, and the deck is nearly full already!

That leaves precious little space to consider tools for disruption, Resource removal, or any other features and tricks that the deck might want to use. It leaves me leery, especially as someone who remembers the days when you could easily build a Yellow deck with 9 separate pieces of Resource removal, and now I'm sitting here with just 3. (Though it is at least Resource removal with tactical flexibility.) Full Name Drop is realistically the only true disruption that we've got, outside of the Mane, but we don't really have that many Critters to our name so I'm not sure how effective that will be. I even had to cut Antoine and Birds of a Feather, two cards that I thought would be in nearly Yellow deck I could imagine. But there just wasn't space.

Admittedly, the Dilemmas themselves deliver a reasonable chunk of utility, since they provide options against both Troublemaker control decks and Farm decks. We have a good supply of them, and Road to Bridlewood should ensure that we have even more Problems out more of the time, giving us more tactical options for those all-important double faceoffs and multi-confronts. I am at least very satisfied with the Problem deck, where Yellow and Blue were easily able to pull together a mass of 2-bonus Problems that should remain easily confrontable.

All in all, as much as I was initially excited to try building this concept, I'm not super-thrilled with where it's ended up. This Mane doesn't really jive with the concept as well as I was hoping it would, but I'm not sure which Yellow Mane would be better for it. I mean, sure, there's the Dilemma Fluttershy that's been nerfed so many times that I've lost count, so that's probably the best place to try, but I don't know if I have a whole lot of confidence in that direction. Then again, what do I know? Aggro certainly isn't my first language. It's possible that I'm just bummed out every time I finish building an aggro deck because I have to make so many tough decisions on what to cut to get down to the magic number. So much better to be playing control, where flexibility is often more important than consistency, so having a bunch of 2-ofs isn't the worst thing in the world. Maybe this deck is actually good, and I merely lack the vision to see it for what it is.

The torrent of new Manes continues, though not with one from the most recent two sets next time: It's Shining Armor, Forward Commander!

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Adventures in Deckbuilding #236: Sunny Starscout, Stronger Together (Orange Farm) [Core]

Counting On You

After turning around from making a Farm deck last week, here we are finally getting that in. At first I wanted to do some kind of aggro deck that revolved around frightening your own stuff, because I know that there are some cards in TL that do that, and Sunny is well-positioned to exploit that idea, but there weren’t actually that many cards that did it, and trying to marshal all of them together into an Orange deck was going to require some complicated colour theory.

So, instead, the other way that it’s easy to frighten your own things is by running a Farm deck with some Villains. And Sunny is pretty good here, with your Friends coming back stronger from the initial frighten. It’s a strategy that works best with single Friends that are high-impact. Which is why I initially started down the road of what was effectively Big Orange, with the cost-reducing Limestone Pie, Dazzle Feather, etc.

But Sunny has a bit of an issue running that kind of a strategy because a lot of the really big Orange Friends have a high requirement of 4+. So I was in a bit of a pickle as to how we would consistently hope to get that much Orange together. Clearly, we need to have some entry, since this is Core and we can’t just rely on Staff to solve all of our problems, but that always feels so bad in a big deck, when you’re using it to farm and high flips are supposed to be the name of your game.

Initially, I spent some time looking at Earth Pony Crystal as a way to potentially solve this problem with high requirements. It would allow me to get stuff into play without worrying about those requirements so long as I had a source of some Magic counters. But then I realized that I could throw in Lantern and Brighthouse for only a couple of card slots, and have that secondary source of points. Bonus of course because the ideal Starting Problem for a deck like this (Cleaning Up the Town) also wants me to have a lot of Resources at home. So now, the Magic Restored section of the deck is also helping with the farming, which started to make me quite excited.

Especially once I added Skye Silver as well, as another sizeably-flipping card with more support to help us win faceoffs. The whole package is impressively cohesive given the number of things that it’s trying to do. It adds up another deck that I’m really excited to see in action, if I get a chance to try it out.

That brought me to the point in deckbuilding where we start to think about utility. Orange has a decent Event suite, with some moderate disruption, though because we’re running mono, we’re not going to get anything permanent. And when it comes to Resource removal, admittedly there’s pretty much only one card to work with in Rocky Riff, but at least he’s a great candidate for the position, working well as part of our Magic setup and really good with Sunny’s counters as well.

Last to mention is the issue of getting Sunny flipped in the first place. In general this is a bit of an issue in mono-Orange since there are so many Earth Ponies around. Luckily, the neutral entry cards that we’ve had lately have a diverse set of traits, so I was very happy to be able to throw in Patagium, who flips for 4, and Breezie Swarm as well, which will probably almost always cost 2, since Assist allows characters to be exhausted to help with the cost as well.

As I said above, after finishing with the build I was left with the impression that this deck is pretty cohesive. I’m eager to try it out sometime, though Orange isn’t really my strong suit, so I’m not going to voice any confidence on this deck being any good just yet. Still, it seems like it should be solid.

As I said last week, we’re rolling through the New Generation Manes, and that’s continuing, as on Feb 15, we’ll roll on into Hitch Trailblazer, Bunny Cop!

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Adventures in Deckbuilding #235: Misty Brightdawn, You Win Some, You Lose Some (Blue/White Aggro) [Core]

Misunderstood

If you’re like me, you took one look at this Mane and thought, “Well, it’s a Blue Farm Mane, no doubt about that.” I don’t think that’s an unreasonable reading either. The flip condition seems clear as day: she wants to be involved in a faceoff, and the easiest way to do that is to play an Epic quickly and get up and challenge it. And since the Boosted side incentivizes you to start a faceoff on every turn, it should play well into that strategy as well.

So, that seemed like a slam dunk. What a great, straightforward Mane to work with as we ease back into the weekly schedule for this series! Except, as I sat down to actually start making the deck for this Mane, it just didn’t quite feel right. Like, the essential structure of a Farm deck is easy enough to put together, though Core is actually a bit short on Villains for my taste, at the moment. But I got to this point where I was looking at the deck and thinking: “Okay, we can flip easy. But then what?” There’s nothing about the Mane that makes it easier to actually defeat those Troublemakers. Now, if you lose you get an AT, but again, how does that actually help? How is that going to work into a plan to not lose the faceoff again next turn?

Blue Farm will want to be fast, especially as we have a Mane that scores points for us, and the colour doesn’t have a whole lot of good disruption built-in either. (Remember what I was saying about feeling like I was short on Villains?)

So I decided to do something crazy: build Misty as an aggro deck instead. That is probably the second-best fit, if we play a really aggressive style that is just trying to start a Problem faceoff every turn and take advantage of our Mane’s abilities that way. For which the most natural fit seemed to be Blue/White, the traditional colours for aggro that is extremely fast and fragile.

The problem though is that in aggro, Misty’s flip condition is now a big liability. We want to flip her as soon as possible to unlock our Blue requirement, but it’s hard to start a Problem faceoff early. The showdowns that we got recently in Tales of Light help with that a little bit, but that still necessitates 8-9 deck slots that are pretty much just there to flip our Mane over, which doesn’t feel great. We can’t even really use How About You? for this, as because Misty’s trigger is mandatory, if we lose the faceoff we’re back at square one.

And it’s all of that deck space dedicated just to getting Misty off the ground that really makes me leery of this deck. Like, sure, it probably aggros well enough, but what about the… everything else? The Dilemmas are nice, and will help a little against Farm and Troublemaker control. But our disruption is extremely marginal, and we’ve really got to reach to fit any Resource removal in here. White does at least provide some nice Problems to help with our scoring if we’re rolling along well, but it’s the games where this deck hits any kind of speed bump that worry me.

I was also curious at the fact that so few of the Blue/White multicolour cards felt like they belonged here. Part of that was due to the fact that colour combo was also trying to hold up Accessory-based strategies a while ago, and that’s definitely not where we are. Eggmund Bunny should do well though, when played to a Dilemma most of all, but also at a fresh Problem when possible.

So in the end neither option of Aggro or Farm left me much enthused for this Mane. The Start side doesn’t really fit in the one case, and the Boosted side isn’t the greatest in the other. It seems like Misty might just forever remain misunderstood.

(Though, I can’t wait to get a chance to work with this Mane in Adventure. I think that I could build a pretty slick Control deck with her there.)

Through the New Generation Manes we go, because next week we’re tackling Sunny Starscout, Stronger Together!

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Adventures in Deckbuilding #234: Rarity, Fashion Mogul (White/Pink Control) [Adventure]

Rarity, Fashion Mogul

Out of Retirement

Here we go again. There’s a pretty significant gap between this post and the last one, and there are a lot of reasons why that happened. I decided to spend some time focusing on other priorities, but I never left off with wanting to finish this series. Pushing now toward picking it up again is largely the fact that the game has moved on a lot since then. Two whole sets have been released since the last post, meaning that I’ve got a lot of work to do to catch up. But it also means that there are a lot of new cards to discover and think about.

For the impetus of this particular deck, I needed something to play in Adventure for the Last Chance Qualifier event for the 2026 Invitational. It just so happened that I had an Adventure-legal Mane Character queued up after the last post, so now here we are.

It turns out there is apparently just something about the multicolour Opaline cards, because now a second has formed the nucleus of a deck that I made. At first it was the Yellow-Pink one, now it’s the Pink-White one. It turns out that quite a few of the staple cards in these cards already involve retiring stuff, so it’s actually pretty easy to get her trigger to fire. Namely Windy, Posey, Bodyguard and Belly Flop in this list. All great staple cards on their own. And they also draw me some cards. And Opaline works as an entry card when I start with Trading Traditions too.

Princess Cadance, Everlasting Love is a card that I think traditionally has been more often used in aggro contexts, but I find it really useful here, again to go with all of the retiring that naturally goes along with Pink-White. Unfortunately she does require cards to enter the discard pile, so there’s no synergy with Party of One. But between her, Opaline’s card draw, and Tender Taps being able to hit most of the important Friends as well, I found that I wasn’t often short on tools.

And indeed, that sentence was past tense because I have real experience playing this deck in that tournament. As mentioned, I found that Friend removal was not a problem at all. This deck just has so many ways to get rid of stuff, though admittedly I didn’t face too much pure aggro, which is where I would expect things to get a bit more dicey. Resource removal is a serious weakness as well, as all we have is Fashion Overload, and not too many Resources to trade into it.

I think that I boarded out Ice Slide in every game that I ended up playing, since I was thinking of it mostly as a tool to use against Farm or other Troublemaker-heavy control decks and I didn’t end up facing any of those. Similar logic applied to Changeling Throne, which is in there because I know that Chaos-based decks can very much be a thing in Adventure, and were not encountered in this tournament.

If there was anything to be learned from the experience though, it was that these new sets, NG and TL, hold all kinds of surprises and wonders waiting to be teased out, and now I can’t wait to explore them some more!

In that big, a whole lot of Mane Characters got released! Nothing to do but to get on with things though. The next post, which if things go to plan will happen just next week, and not in another two years, will be about Misty Brightdawn, You Win Some, You Lose Some!

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Adventures in Deckbuilding #233: Princess Twilight Sparkle, There's A Spell For That! (Purple/Orange Midrange Farm) [Core]

Princess Twilight Sparkle, There’s A Spell For That

Say It Again Slower

When New Dawn first launched, an Orange/Purple aggro deck strikingly similar to this one was my go-to, featuring the original Legacy Leech as a way to supercharge Princess Celestia, Restricted Section and gain a pile of AT into the midgame. Alas, some people decided that we can’t have nice things, and the deck in its original form fell by the wayside. But I’ve certainly never forgotten it, and so looking at this Mane for this stage of the journey, I decided to take a look back and see if I could make something of it again.

Notably though, as referenced by this post’s title, despite featuring broadly the same star cards as its predecessor, the strategy and flow of this deck are going to be very different from the original. That original deck was aggro to its core, and this one is leaning much heavier on the idea of being a slower, more controlling deck in the early game. So the theory goes, after we’ve spent the early part of the game loading up the discard piles with control Events, we can do the same thing as before and charge into the midgame with superpowered Celestias.

Naturally, thus, this isn’t an aggro deck anymore. It’s kind of a mish-mash actually, so I guess midrange is the only label that can be honestly applied. It’s equipped to play slowly if necessary with delaying events that can trigger Tempest Shadow and a good supply of Orange Events for Apple Bloom as well. Once we banish a big pile of Events, we can transition into a midgame that’s going to consist of about equal parts Farm and Aggro. Both gameplans should be supportable with the cast of Epic Troublemakers and Problems we’ve got in here. Yes, it’s a Control Problem deck, without doubt, but the idea is that if we don’t have a 10+ power Celestia on the field, then we’re playing Control anyway, and if we do, then we can confront anything in that deck.

As was true in the original, Orange and Purple get a big boost from having lots of Events in their deck in terms of deckbuilding, because that means we can include Torque Wrench and basically be set in terms of Resource removal. With the amount of attachment Resources White is using these days, one also shouldn’t forget that she gets counters whenever an opposing Resource leaves play for any reason, not only when she was the one that made it go away. Mysterious Disappearance as the only other Resource removal is there for pesky Resources that are otherwise difficult to get rid of by Friend-based methods, and so obviously can be sideboarded if you don’t expect to run into any of those.

Tempest Shadow was a card that lots of people told me to put in the old deck originally, and I’ve finally redressed that wrong. As this Mane is generally easy to flip, getting to Unity 10 Purple should represent no challenge at all, and if we do then our key disruption Events on the opponent’s turn get, well, even more disruptive. Plus no one complains about Prepared as a keyword, and it’s even more useful in this deck than it would have been in the original, with actual Troublemakers to hide behind.

The Event suite has changed from what the deck used to have, mainly as we needed to shift more Orange Events in to give Apple Bloom a reasonable chance of getting used. She can be a real terror for opposing decks with only a few characters, or even just those with key activated abilities that require an exhaust. Put that together with the fact that the Orange Event suite we have is composed of some standout Events, and it’s a strong package. Those Purple Events that we are left with are also among the standouts of the colour.

Notable to discuss when using this Mane is when we ought to be revealing the top card of our deck in search of that discount. My gut instinct says that, just as the strategy of the deck changes dramatically as it transitions from the Control early game to the Aggro/Farm midgame, so too should this be the moment when hiding info from the opponent becomes less important than being able to play cards as efficiently as possible. But it’s possible that play experience may produce a different optimal strategy.

As I mentioned, the original version of this deck was one that I dearly loved to play with. I expect that I will get some experience with this one as well at some point or another in the future. And I have a feeling that I will find it just as enjoyable, though perhaps in a slightly different way. These two colours are just destined for great things in my eyes whenever they pair up.

There was another big gap in this series, but I really want to finish this thing up once and for all. The truth is, I have an idea for another weekly series that I want to start running, but I’m not going to be able to start it until I finally clear out the backlog for this series. So onward we go, next week with Rarity, Fashion Mogul!

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Adventures in Deckbuilding #232: Queen Chrysalis, Overt Operations (White/Blue Midrange) [Core]

Queen Chrysalis, Overt Operations

Relay Race

I was thinking that I was probably going to follow up the last entry with another deck showcasing a piece of Prize Wheel 2, but instead a different bug bit me this week. Actually, if you were paying attention to the most recent Meticulous Talks stream, you would have gotten a small sneak peek of the thoughts in my head, as I talked about the seeming potential in combining Blue and White to make a Midrange-style deck.

As I said then, Blue is and has always been a great aggro colour, with much synergy for confronting Problems quickly mostly due to the necessity of a deck doing lots of confronts and faceoffs having good solutions for moving characters around. White, as a colour with a lot of deterrent cards that put roadblocks in the way of the opponent without sacrificing a lot of tempo on your part, seems like a good fit here. White is able to bring hard removal and slightly better Resource removal to the deck as well. So the deck that I theorised then was a solid midrange that used Blue cards to confront Problems and force faceoffs, and White cards to slow down the opponent.

The part that I didn’t mention during the stream was that I was thinking of doing a lot of this with Hats. Looking through the cards, I was extremely surprised at the number of Accessories that Blue has available to it, and indeed they’re some pretty good Accessories too. Golden Horseshoe often sees play in Blue decks on its own, and Daring Do’s Safari Hat, while it didn’t quite make the cut in this deck, was a very strong contender. Wedding Ring is a wonderfully cheap card for the free moves that it provides, plus the potential Experienced power. But the card that really ties the whole deck together is Coco Pommel, because with her on the field we can make some really spectacular conga-lining happen.

Consider, after a DFO, we reattach Golden Horseshoe at the start of our turn, which triggers a move. In the Main Phase, the shod character can pull another character, potentially activating more moves with Wedding Rings involved and pulling a Fleetfoot at the end of everything. That can be a lot of AT saved, enough to confront one Problem for free, perhaps. (In Adventure, a Cybernetic Limb Actuator might be all we need to confront the other Problem as well, though admittedly the Wedding Rings only work once per turn.)

As always, cutting down a Hats deck was hard. Playtesting (which I did manage to do for this deck, for once) seemed to hint that I want even more Accessories than this, as I had a hard time drawing any of them. But I’m really not sure where to make changes. Remembering that our Mane is unlikely to flip early, the entry structure is hard to change, as we actually don’t have that many paths into White early on. Much of the utility that shows up elsewhere in the deck is also stretched thin, with only three pieces of Resource removal, not many options against Troublemakers, and just a few pieces of removal. Plus, I really felt the need to include Beat The Rush because the power of Immediate-speed movement gets greatly multiplied when we have our Resources in play. That card effectively becomes an anti-Troublemaker tool when it can effectively pull three or more characters to a Problem before the Challenge step.

A lingering uncertainty also remains with the Mane itself. I’ve never really figured out when the best time to flip Chrysalis is. Three AT is a big investment, especially for a quicker deck like this one, effectively cancelling your own ability to do anything else for the rest of the turn. Perhaps with time I could figure it out, or (more realistically) if I was going to play this deck seriously I would just use a Blue Mane. That would also free up a bit of deck space from not having to include the Blue entry as well.

Overall, though, I’m very intrigued by this concept, and I think that I want to explore it further, albeit not with this Mane. Sorry, Chrysalis.

Next week, we move back to Purple, to close out the triple for Princess Twilight Sparkle, There’s A Spell For That!

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An Adventure in Deckbuilding #231: Spike, Crystal Hero (Purple/Yellow Midrange) [Harmony]

Spike, Crystal Hero

Reaching

My intended vacation that I announced in the most recent post ended up being a bit longer than a week, as what started with a distraction from a wonderful holiday combined with a general malaise about having to build once again with this terrible Mane. However, eventually I said to myself that I would pick this series up again once the second Prize Wheel increment was legal to work with, so now here we are. And guess what? This is the last Crystal Games Mane that we’ll have to deal with. That’s not to say that there aren’t still some quite questionable ones left on the list, but this will likely be the last time that I just have no idea at all what to do with a card.

Spike here represented the first time that a card designer tried to push Purple in the weird direction of “Play some troublemakers, but don’t play control or Farm”. (It wouldn’t be the last time either, but it still hasn’t worked.) Add to that the usual problems with the entire Mane design philosophy of Crystal Games, and we’ve got a card here that, ah, fails to inspire.

In that sense, it’s good that I waited until I had a whole bunch of new cards to try out so that I could pick one and try designing a deck around it. And, like the name suggests, it’s a bit of a reach to take one with five requirement in what will be our off-colour and imagine that we can start from there, but that’s exactly what we’re doing this week.

Antoine is a card from PW2 with a lot of potential, so long as you can keep it fed with Critters to retire. There are two “natural” ways to do that in the cards that I’m most familiar with: Raptor Raiser to get things started so long as there’s a big Troublemaker in play, and Fluttershy, Birds of a Feather if you already have some number of Critters in play. (Remember that she herself is a Critter as well, so you get one at least for that. But certainly you’re hoping for far more.) Once that is rolling, then Antoine’s discount can be applied to a good variety of things. Even when it’s used on a 2-cost Friend, that’s still a 50% discount, after all. And since using Antoine’s ability doesn’t require anything to get exhausted, we can use it as often as we like, so long as we don’t run out of Critters.

Now that was all well and good, but the real reach came in trying to support all of that heavy Yellow with a Purple Mane, and a Purple Mane that is probably never going to flip too. This means, for example, that the usual stalwarts of Singing Barrel and Rushed Makeover are going to be less useful than usual, especially if we’ve lost Buckball Strategy and Spike is back to 1 Power. Thank goodness, then, that we have some pretty good Friend-based entry in the Fond Memories cycle to lean on. Changeling Citizens is also here, but usually won’t be a great option unless we have some Purple Friends out as well.

So we add up all of that, and then realise that we still need tools against Troublemakers and Resources, and then we get into the tortured process of cutting this deck down. Of the cards that got left in, those Troublemakers might stand out as fairly strange inclusions, especially since there’s only 4 of them, which isn’t enough to flip Spike. The logic goes like this: we want to have a few Troublemakers to act as springboards for Raptor Raiser, since I think that she is the easiest way to get a big pile of Critters on the board without much extra work. Then I think, if you need to have just a few Troublemakers in your deck, you’re better off going for Villains, for the extra utility of frightening the opponent’s stuff, and the occasional points you might get for them. Likely you end up sideboarding a number of them out if you expect the opponent to be playing Troublemakers. But if the opponent is aggro, then a well-timed Villain can be a nice piece of interaction to have.

A late inclusion to the deck was Portal, after I realised that there actually are a number of things in this deck that I’d like to flicker. Raptor Raiser, of course, but also Sanctuary Patients, and Birds of a Feather itself (to use her ability a 2nd time in one turn).

Of course, I’m sure that this deck is still trash even with all of that. But maybe, with a Mane that actually contributes something, there could be hope for something like this in Adventure. I am interested in the concept, which is all that I shoot for in these decks.

As I said at the top of the post, that is it for the Crystal Games Manes. That’s a huge sigh of relief for me. Next week we’ll have our third deck for Queen Chrysalis, Overt Operations.

#mlp:ccg #deckbuilding #adventures in deckbuilding

Adventures in Deckbuilding #230: Yona & Sandbar, Pony Pals (White Farm) [Core]

Yona & Sandbar, Pony Pals

The Dynamic Duo

It was indeed one of the first things that I thought about when I first saw this Mane: “Wait, is this actually a Farming Mane?” Since the +2 power boost that Yona & Sandbar can apply with their Boosted side can be given to a character and not just a Friend, it seemed to me that a White deck with enough Immediate Events and Hasty other-things could indeed make a run at farming with this Mane. And while I was told at the time that there weren’t enough good Immediate-speed things to run in White, I actually think that there are enough, especially now that Prize Wheel has given us the Hasty Overwhelming Aroma.

In many respects, this deck is made up according to the same blueprint as a traditional Blue farming list, with the biggest flaws in the plan being that we don’t have access to Flash Magnus’s Shield, or any Friends that help with winning faceoffs. What we do have, though, is a wonderful Starting Problems for mono-White decks that don’t intend on having a Problem faceoff anytime soon. When every non-Friend card in our deck can give our Mane +2 Power, and the ones with White requirement also give them another +2, I would tend to think that our Immediate-speed Events and Resources should support Farming quite nicely.

Many of them are great faceoff tricks as well. Wrinkle in Time is an obvious one, as is Costume Change, such as it is. That one also has the benefit of getting something out of your discard pile, to the bottom of our deck, but we are capable of shuffling with Pony of Shadows. Wink! and Fit of Pique are notable mostly for their cheapness, as in “Why wouldn’t you play these for an extra benefit in a faceoff?”, especially in Wink!’s case where the opponent might have a faceoff trick they’ve been waiting to play. See High Alert for the same reason: “That’s +2, and I’m up by 1, would you like to play anything in response?”

Pony of Shadows here is, obviously, nowhere near as big of a deal as it is in a Blue farming list. Yet at the same time each of the Friends here has the ability to be quite impactful (and I’d appreciate not flipping them for Faceoffs anyway). Spoons is a natural all-around good choice, particularly useful once again in taxing many of the faceoff tricks that are commonly used against farming decks. Capper has been a card custom-built for White farm since his inception, which means he basically hasn’t seen any play, but it’s a fine card in its role. Stygian is admittedly less useful since many of our Resources are Unique, but copying Saddle Row is obviously amazing. And, if it has to be, there are benefits to copying a Unique Resource as the real version can go to the discard pile and be targeted by a Costume Change later.

Resource removal is certainly light, and made all the harder because we don’t have good cards to retire to fuel a Fashion Overload. For this we must turn back to the old standby of Winterzilla, used only in a pinch to deal with Resources that cannot be allowed to stick on the opposing side. Though, as any Farming list will tell you, when you have only a small number of Friends, the number of opposing Resources that are truly intolerable is actually not that high.

I don’t know if this deck is actually any good, and I expect that the next time that I roll this Mane I will return to the more standard Octavia-style aggression that Yonabar was essentially built for. Yet still, I want to try playing with this deck at least once for sure. There’s still a part of me convinced that this may be the right way to play this Mane, especially looking at this deck now, and so it needs to be proved wrong. Or right, in the best-case scenario.

I am about to embark on a weeklong vacation, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t build another deck and write another post. In fact I intend this to be a very productive vacation, as I have so many things on the go right now that need to be dealt with. And given how little enthusiasm I have for once again returning to Spike, Crystal Hero, I’ll be happy to be able to relax while slogging through the build.

#adventures in deckbuilding #mlp ccg #deckbuilding

Adventures in Deckbuilding #229: Queen Chrysalis, Overt Operations (White/Purple Control) [Core Pauper]

Queen Chrysalis, Overt Operations

Sing Me A Round

I’ve not heard many people making waves about any Pauper format lately; it seems like it’s something that catches on every so often when the metagame is feeling a touch dry and animates the community to explore something new. Not that I’m necessarily trying to start a conversation, there’s just a 20% chance that any given deck in this series needs to be built as a Pauper variant, and such is the case this week.

My first outing with Chrysalis was White/Orange, and while I briefly toyed with the idea of trying something with Yellow, the obvious control nature of this Mane made me discard that idea. I returned instead to White/Purple, which has long been one of my favourite colour pairings. Admittedly, with the Rares out, what I consider to be one of the most iconic cards in these colours, Twilight & Rarity, Exposed, is not available. Yet still, the natural inclination of the colour combination is to hide behind some Troublemakers and play something a little slower.

This is helped especially by the amount of removal that White has been slowly accruing over the course of the last few sets. Admittedly that’s just two cards: It’s Gonna Work and Dramatic Apology, but this deck is seeking to get double value out of a lot of its Events. Starlight Glimmer has a lot of Unicorns to help her fish Events out of the discard, and the six Song cards can get double-played by Octavia as well.

Octavia is actually a card that I want to experiment a bit more in normal Core with now that I’ve built this deck. Song synergy in Pauper is greatly limited by the fact that almost all of the Songs in Core are SRs, but if Octavia can get going it’s quite possible to get a lot of value out of her. For one, the Song played from the discard is played for free, meaning that we get to ignore requirements as well as costs. Second, the free Song counts for her first ability, meaning that we only need to play one more Song to bring her back on line. In a deck that did more deliberate discarding, probably due to some reanimator shenanigans because Catchy Song is a Song after all, that is starting to sound somewhat reasonable to me.

In this deck, both of the Songs that we do have access to are at least pretty good and versatile. Luna’s Future is our main source of Resource removal, and has some potential with its first ability. It’s Gonna Work is one of our main sources of Friend removal, and its ability to bring Troublemakers back into play is also likely to be very useful. It is unfortunate, looking at the deck now, that we have no ways to bring Unicorns into play at Immediate speed, which limits the potential for a surprise Worn Out on the opponent’s turn. And Worn Out is, actually, the only Immediate-speed trick that we’ve got. I do get the sensation that even in the best case this deck is likely to end up with a lot of AT from Prepared and nothing much to do with it.

This feeling is amplified quite a bit by my realisation that, with the Pauper restrictions, we don’t have a whole lot of good Troublemakers in Core. Maybe I just need to reset my expectations from the strong Troublemakers that we had access to in the Odysseys Block, but very few of the Troublemaker possibilities here gave me much confidence. Sirens is wonderful of course, but you can’t base a control deck on just one Troublemaker.

Perhaps it’s not surprising at all given how the history of White has gone, but I think that for this deck concept it would do better as the secondary colour. I’d much prefer to have Purple as the primary so that I could be a bit more aggressive with Princess Celestia, Restricted Section as a finisher to take advantage of all of the Events we’ll be banishing, and to have more Immediate-speed stuff to use.

Even so, this is a neat-enough deck that I’d like to give it a try someday. Sometimes one needs to explore a concept the wrong way in order to spark ideas that lead to great things.

We’ll be staying with White for next week, with deck #1 for the newest Mane in Core: Yona & Sandbar, Pony Pals!

#mlp:ccg #adventures in deckbuilding #deckbuilding

Adventures in Deckbuilding #228: Silverstream, Everything's New! (Pink/Orange/Yellow Farm) [Core]

Silverstream, Everything’s New!

And Nopony Was Surprised

… That I found another deck to shoehorn Strawberry Sunrise into, that is. Notwithstanding that Celestia will always be my favourite character, Strawberry Sunrise is 100% my favourite card in this game, because I just love finding the weird interactions that it allows. Up to this point, I’ve used it almost exclusively as part of control decks, since in general turning Troublemakers face-down isn’t super useful at her cost point for other kinds of decks. This is the first time that I’m taking a stab at Strawberry Farming. And while I imagine that it will end up being just as much of a novelty as all of my other Strawberry decks, I’m still just as proud of it.

It didn’t take long for me to settle on this colour combination, given this Mane. In fact, it was another “process of elimination” week. I wanted to go slow, midrange with lots of Pink disruption and removal options. I could go White, but then the deck naturally turns into a Bodyguard deck and that’s boring. Go with Purple and the deck turns into BRB and that’s also boring. Go with Blue, and the deck seems almost certain to just be a worse version of Cadance/Blue. Yellow’s a possibility, but I did Yellow/Pink last week. We could go mono-Pink, but Pink is actually one of the worse colours for going it alone, completely lacking Resource removal, having anti-Troublemaker tools that are effective but expensive, and lacking in easy-to-use point acceleration as well.

All of that has been said to leave us with Pink/Orange, which is historically one of my least favourite colour combinations. I know that it’s a good colour combination, and has been piloted to greatness on several occasions in the past. But I’ve just never been able to really wrap my head around how to make it work. And then, idly scrolling through multicolour cards hoping for inspiration, I saw Applejack & Pinkie Pie, On The Ball. My first instinct was to think that the card wouldn’t be too bad in a Farming context, since it can’t be frightened and has a reasonably high power (4 at least if a Troublemaker has uncovered for it to fight). My second instinct, the one probably distinctly my own, was “Huh, that would be really good in a Strawberry deck!” where we could take advantage of their inability to be frightened to use Villains with the usual Strawberry shenanigans to frustrate the opponent.

Orange is in many respects a natural fit for Silverstream, as this Mane generally wants to sit on a Problem for a while, with all of her abilities geared toward single confronts, if not necessarily Farming. She’s not particularly at home in this deck unfortunately, and it will probably require a bit of an effort to flip her, but this shouldn’t be as much of an issue with Buckball Strategy to make up somewhat, and low requirements on many of our Friends. This is another deck where I made a very concerted effort to keep the requirements of my secondary colours down, such that Power Play is the only non-Pink card with requirement greater than 2. That one I think is quite worth it in a deck that will want to have Spike & Gabby out, and is just fine value on its own even without them.

Orange provides a good fit simply because it is one of the few colours with a legitimate defence against Dilemmas in Monumental Evil, Dilemmas being one of the most natural ways to avoid dealing with our Troublemakers when we use them to do controlly stuff. The big drawback is that Orange doesn’t provide a whole lot to shore up the Resource removal hole. While Big Mac can be nice, there are a great many better anti-Resource cards that I would prefer instead of him.

Overall, as stated above, I expect this deck to be about as much of a meme as Strawberry decks always are, though the concept absolutely can and does work sometimes, which is one reason why I always love trotting it out. Now I just need to figure out how to somehow take advantage of her effect in an aggro deck, and I’ll be set with a Strawberry for every occasion.

With this deck done, the Pink Manes are all finished, which is really a relief. It’s been one of my least favourite colours to build with for the whole series, but now it’s done. Next week we will have Deck #2 for Queen Chrysalis, Overt Operations! The RNG has also indicated that this will be a Pauper deck, so we have that to look forward to as well.

#mlp:ccg #deckbuilding #adventures in deckbuilding

Adventures in Deckbuilding #227: Fluttershy, Reformer (Yellow/Pink Farm) [Harmony]

Fluttershy, Reformer

Contradictions

Somehow, in my prior two outings with this Mane, I settled on building aggro decks even though this is clearly a farming Mane. Or at least, so my instincts said when I looked at it this time. Simply because, due to Fluttershy’s ability, a Villain uncovering at her Problem won’t frighten all of the Friends there as the triggered ability will be suppressed by the Mane’s continuous modifier before it has a chance to fire. In theory, or so I theorised, this would allow us to make a Farming deck with a few more Friends in it than usual so long as we dipped our toes into Pink for some flip certainty thanks to Pinkie Sense.

Did that theory work out? I’m never sure in Harmony, mostly because the format has such a large card pool that I’m almost certain I’m missing some obvious synergy that is probably out there waiting. Part of my trepidation comes from the fact that while Yellow does have some tools that work out great in Farm, like Spooky Ruins and Raptor Raiser, the rest of the colour’s support for the archetype is harder to gauge. While the Mane offer a nice trick of us being able to run many Villains, and thus being able to use them as control tools, without having to worry about frightening our own Friends, Fluttershy offers no other help to win the faceoffs required to actually do the Farming. The Problem deck doesn’t exactly fly together either, given that Yellow’s traditional faceoff stance has generally been to not care about them, or even to try to lose them with the UR Novo.

In many respects, a lot of these seeming contradictions are present throughout the deck. Autumn Blaze, for example, has a clear anti-synergy with one of the core cards that I mentioned earlier: Spooky Ruins. But I figured that it would be useful to have a backup plan just in case something happened to the aforementioned Resource.

Or, one might justifiably wonder about the presence of Kind As Can Be in the deck. The only critters to resurrect with her ability are Brian and Sneaky Snake, which are not incredibly high impact, and with only a few low printed power Yellow Friends in here, surely getting to Unity 15 won’t be particularly consistent either, right? Personally, I don’t think so. We have a few sources of many critter tokens, and since we’ll probably have most of our Friends grouped up with Fluttershy at a Problem, we’ll be getting maximum value from Diurnal Amulet. Amulet, by the way, is also at home in a deck like this to be exhausted for the opponent’s turn, when we’ll want the -1 power to prevent the opponent from challenging a Troublemaker.

Especially in Harmony though, I think that the deck is a fair bit too “straight-up”, as it were. Yellow has traditionally also been short on great disruptive tools, and while Pink has those in spades, I was keeping my Pink reqs low quite intentionally. I only wanted just the barest dip into the colour, so that the Yellow could stay strong. That means all of Pink’s disruption was just too far away on the colour tree. In an older Harmony where Villains on their own were sufficient for controlling an aggro opponent, this deck might have stood a chance. In today’s world of mainly dilemmas and other tricks, it probably will have a bad day against opposing aggro. In theory, though, if the ideal situation of farming a Troublemaker and scoring 2 points from confronting each turn can be achieved, that seems like a relatively strong engine to get us along in a game. But ultimately this deck has got me nowhere as excited as I was last week.

It feels really good to close off each Harmony deck that is still left on the To-Do list. We still have a few more of them to go, but I’ll be happy to not have another one for a while if I can avoid that.

Another milestone awaits us next week: after completing Silverstream, Everything’s New!, I’ll be completely finished with all of the Pink Manes.

#mlp:ccg #adventures in deckbuilding #deckbuilding

Adventures in Deckbuilding #226: Princess Twilight Sparkle, There's a Spell For That! (Purple/Orange/Blue Aggro Farm) [Core]

Princess Twilight Sparkle, There’s A Spell For That!

Fossil Record

Hello, everyone. As expected, I wasn’t able to spend any meaningful amount of time on this series while I had the Invitational to worry about. Unfortunately, that included an extended delay in getting through the last match which added nearly a month to the expected runtime of the tournament. All that time was more days that this series had to slip, which is especially grating because it is actually very close to being finished. Out of a total of 253 decks that I need to build, I’ve reached 226 so far, counting this one. That’s only 27 to go, well within what I should be able to accomplish this year. So that’s one of my big resolutions this year: getting this series wrapped up with a neat bow. (Notably, until Prize Wheel gave us the new Yona/Sandbar Mane, this series would have wrapped up on the 250th post, which sure would have been nice.)

Now, the interruption of this series for the Invitational each year, does at least come with an upside, that being that spending multiple weeks with so much work needing to be done necessarily forces me to streamline my schedule and clear time to get the work done. So I hope that this series should run smoother for the time being as it slots into the time no longer being used for editing videos. We’ll see how that goes.

As to this week’s deck, a few days ago Hithroc and I revisited our Fond Memories card ratings from a long time ago on the Meticulous Talks stream. Among several things, I was struck by past me’s adamant belief that there was going to be some Purple/Orange Dragon deck which was going to be a major factor in the Core meta. That obviously never happened, and aside from the evidence of my voice on that video I have no idea exactly what deck I was thinking of. So, having rolled Twilight for the second time this week (and yes, I know that last year the previous post said Yuna would be the next deck; well, I forgot) I thought that this would be a great time to try it out and see if there actually was anything to the concept.

Now, in terms of competitiveness, I don’t expect anything special here. This deck will surely get mauled by Stunning Wonder the same way that every other deck does. But I am ultimately on the optimistic side here. The foundation of the deck is indeed the two FM Orange/Purple dragons that I rated so highly the first time, Garble and Maar. While Garble can be a source of AT if there are good Friends on the other side of the board (remember that tokens have zero cost!) Maar is the clear standout, especially when paired with the Blue Ember from DE. Denying an opposing flip in every faceoff is a huge deal, and when active should mean that this deck has an easy time winning almost any faceoff that starts.

Knowing that I was going into three colours and I had a Mane that would likely be flipped easily, I knew that I wanted to take advantage of Bloodstone Scepter, and I tried very hard to keep all of the requirements which weren’t Purple at 2 or less. Sudden Closure is the only card which violates that, and I think it’s worthwhile for the unconditional removal that it provides. It is often hard to get an effect like that in these colours, after all.

The other element which draws the eye right away, naturally, are those Epic Troublemakers. When I get the chance to test this deck I may end up cutting some of those, because this deck isn’t really a Farming deck. Those Epics are there for point acceleration and nothing more, which is why I don’t want Villains. But in a deck that should have such an easy time winning faceoffs, having some non-Villian Epics seemed like a great way to get some extra points every now and then. Even the new Legion shouldn’t be that hard to farm, since we’ll almost always have a dragon involved (they may not be able to contribute power, but they’ll still be involved, which is all that Maar cares about). And, indeed, in the later stages of the game, if we have Orange Ember on the field and have liberally spread the +1 power counters around (and there are quite a few ways of doing that in here actually) then we probably could away with insta-farming a Grogar if we play one.

At the end of it all, I can’t tell if I’ve recaptured that optimism that animated my spirit two years ago as I reviewed these cards. Probably not, because there are a number of other Fond Memories cards that I gave high ratings to “because they’d go in the Dragon deck” which aren’t featured here. Yet even so, I’m eager to try this out. It seems like it should be fairly solid. Or perhaps I’m just so out of practice that I can’t tell anymore. Either way the solution is the same: play more games.

So that’s one down, 27 more to go! That’s still a fair number though, so don’t worry, there’s quite a few of these posts still coming, over the course of this year. Next week, Fluttershy, Reformer!

#mlp:ccg #adventures in deckbuilding #deckbuilding

Adventures in Deckbuilding #225: Princess Skystar, Out Of Her Shell (Pink/White/Purple Control) [Adventure]

Princess Skystar, Out of Her Shell

A Fond Longing

For those who may have been living under a rock for the last few weeks, this week is the Continental Championship tournament at Everfree Northwest. Though that wasn’t the only tournament taking place this weekend. There was an Adventure tournament as well, and I hadn’t put any thought into what deck I was going to be running until a few days ago. As is traditional, when I’m going to a tournament and have no idea what to build for a deck, I look to whatever Mane I need to build with for this series and start from there.

In this case, from that starting point I was led in a somewhat roundabout direction, due to the unusual constraint that this deck needed to consist of cards that I actually own. The very first card that I added to the nascent decklist was Discord, Happy Trees, a card that fits very well in the Adventure style of Pink/Purple control. I could put that in there with Portal and other standouts of the format, and I’d be set, or so I thought. But it turns out due to some unfortunate happenings in my personal life, I don’t actually have access to physical copies of the Fond Memories cards, so we’re left with a Pink control list somewhat lacking in some obvious cards.

Other than the ones already mentioned, the most notable things that I wished I could have were many of the Troublemakers from Fond Memories. Obviously Sirens was a card that I immediately reached for when building a deck like this, along with Mane-iac as a possibility. I also wanted to put in Bloodstone Scepter back when the deck had a lot more Purple in it.

It’s interesting to see how much a relatively staid colour combination like Pink/White or Pink/Purple really wants the cards that are in Fond Memories, even in a format like Adventure with so many great cards from the past. Indeed, it was a memory from my own past that finally gave me a direction to work towards. Those three copies of Party of One do somewhat stand out, after all, even though in most matchups I wouldn’t want to have all three of them included. As I once heard from an old friend, that card on its own can win a match, if judiciously applied in the right circumstances, and done so repeatedly.

With a few more deck slots to put toward more counterplay, I saw that Adventure format is fairly dominated by Bluna at the moment, which was the reason that I felt I should put in Flurry Heart. The decision to put in both Bait & Switch and Discord was simply a factor of again having some extra space and figuring that I could go extra hard against Farm. Plus, in play, I found Discord to be very useful in stacking Blackmail on the top of my deck. In fact, I don’t think that I ever had a Problem other than Trading Traditions or Blackmail in play.

Not that it was always a particularly successful line of play. I guess that I didn’t quite have the mental agility to get the best out of the deck in actual play, as I spent a lot of AT drawing to find the particular answers that I needed at any point. Somewhat surprisingly, what I found myself short on more often than not was removal, so I guess that I could have included some more Pink Events for that, or even some Friends that accomplish the same idea. Bugle’s deck in the event that used Pleurite and Amusement Factory as removal was a nifty idea. I remarked at the time that it’s strange how every card in the game seems to get 10 times more annoying when it gets Portaled. Maybe that’s a reason why the card got banned that one time.

I’m sorry that updates have been so sporadic around here. Chances are that is going to continue since the Invitational is starting soon, and that tends to dominate my time while it is going on. But I’ve accomplished a lot of things in my life simply by being persistent, and the same will prove true here. The next post will come at some point. Hopefully soon.

And when it does, it will be about Princess Luna, Double Your Fun! For the first time! It’s the last Mane in the game that I haven’t built for this series yet, so that’s actually pretty exciting. Maybe I’ll get to it sooner rather than later.

#adventures in deckbuilding #mlp:ccg

July Feature: Archetype Determinant, A New Tool for TIA

One of the problems that I’ve faced a lot when building and working with the TIA system is the problem of how to properly classify decklists. How, that is, to determine when two different decklists are similar enough that they ought to be considered variations on the same idea, rather than as separate ideas. I’ve gone through a number of different approaches to solving this problem over the years, starting with a loose set of heuristics based on colour, Mane Character, and any tribal synergies that existed within the deck. I tried to refine these heuristics for a while, hoping to find some well-defined rules that I could use, but the problem proved much more complex than such a simple system could handle. Thus, for the last little while I’ve been doing classifications purely ad hoc, and it’s been working well enough. But the problem of trying to have a system to do it is one that I never fully left off thinking about.

In this post, I’m going to be going through the beginning of the most recent attempt that I’m making at this, a system that right now I’m calling Archetype Determinant (AD), which hopefully will eventually be mature enough to be included as part of the TIA process. AD essentially looks at the past history of decks that have been built in Core, and assigns archetype-scores to each card in the format based on how often it shows up in each kind of deck (aggro, control, combo, farm, or midrange). Then, upon seeing a new deck, it adds up the individual scores for each card in the deck, producing a histogram that hints at which archetypes the deck is most likely to exist in.

For example, here’s what the current version of Archetype Determinant thought of the decks from the most recent OnlineCon:

Motivation

When I was doing ad hoc classification of decks, I found that when the answer wasn’t immediately obvious, I would often look at what you might call “signpost” cards, cards in the deck that usually only show up in particular archetypes. For example, when trying to differentiate between a Blue Aggro and a Blue Farm, seeing a card like Prince Rutherford, Yak Smash is a hard signal that it’s Farm. Similarly, if it’s a bit of a toss-up between Farm and Control, there are certain Troublemakers that tend to mostly show up in Farm like Pony of Shadows or the Storm King.

This is also true of Problem Decks, which tend to be fairly similar across archetypes, as generally aggro prioritizes low confront requirements and/or high bonuses, while control will prioritize the opposite: high confront requirements and low bonuses. So there’s often a lot of clues to be found in looking there too.

Seeing these obvious clues, though, really made me wonder if there may be more subtle signals hidden within the data. For example, we can look at a really innocuous card like Join The Herd. It’s quite a generic effect, and you may perhaps have a notion of the kinds of decks that it would normally go in. As it turns out, it’s used nearly equally in Aggro and Farm decks, with a slight preference to Farm. So it’s a moderate signal for both of those. It’s easy for a human to pick out the strong signals within a decklist, but what about the accumulation of weak signals throughout the list? That’s a problem that’s easier for an algorithm to solve.

How It Works

Archetype Determinant starts with the TIA database of decklists which have been played in competitive events. The database isn’t enormous, but it’s not small either; it’s 226 decks as of this writing. Obviously, more data is always better, and one of the interesting things about this tool is that it doesn’t need to be limited to decks that saw competitive play. In theory, any constructed decklist could be a data point to interpret, though it is likely that an advanced system should give extra weight to competitive decks. For now, though, AD is only looking at the TIA database.

Over those 226 decks, every card that shows up at least once receives 5 scores reflecting the proportion of each archetype the card shows up in. So, for example, if a card was used half the time in control and half the time in aggro (which usually doesn’t happen, but this is just an example) the card’s individual scores would be (aggro: 0.5, control: 0.5, farm: 0.0, midrange: 0.0, combo: 0.0).

Once every card has a score, rating a deck is as simple as reading the decklist and accumulating the 5 numbers over the whole decklist, creating the 5 scores you see output in the histograms at the top.

Interpreting Histograms

So what do the numbers mean? Obviously, if one bar is way ahead of the others, it’s a good signal of which archetype probably sits in. Based on my experience, aggro decks tend to be the ones that most often fit this category, which makes sense as a lot of the cards that tend to show up in aggro decks are usually only in aggro decks, and so tend to be strong signals. Think about Dilemmas, Events, and the Problems which aggro decks tend to use.

More interesting are decks that have two prominent bars in their histogram. When one remains dominant and the other is secondary, that would seemingly indicate a deck that leans in one direction but also has strong affinity for the play-style indicated by its secondary archetype. Consider, for example, a Farming deck which can lean on playing Aggro if it needs to, like many Blue Farming decks do. Or a Control deck which sometimes employs lines of play similar to what a Farming deck would do.

Finally, there are decks out there which the system really can’t properly interpret at the moment, with three or more prominent bars in their histogram. It should be stressed that AD is still a system in its infancy, and so obviously there are going to be decks out that aren’t properly classified for a variety of reasons. And that brings me to:

Shortcomings And Improvements

While the eventual end goal is for Archetype Determinant to form a stage in the TIA pipeline, the system as currently implemented should be considered as essentially an alpha release. I think that it’s got enough features to be useful, but there are many areas it could use improvements in. I also should perhaps stress that the goal of this project isn’t to create an algorithm which can decide for me what archetypes to assign decks into. Even in its final form, AD will be merely a tool that is considered alongside other variables and intuition.

One obvious shortcoming of this system comes to a simple and valuable adage: "The map is not the territory." This system relies on ways that people have used cards in the past to predict how they will be used in the future. Thus, by definition, a new deck that uses cards in ways they haven't been used before is going to be misclassified. This is a big reason why AD in its current form can never be the one final word on which archetype to classify a deck as.

At the same time, there are still improvements I want to make. A change likely to make a significant improvement in the accuracy of the result is to also consider pairs of cards that show up in decks in addition to single cards. After all, many cards exist in loosely-defined “packages” that get added to a deck together in order to augment a certain intended playstyle for that deck. Admittedly, I am having a bit of a tricky time coming up with examples right now, but even if there aren’t any obvious strong signals, there may be weak signals out there of sets of two or more cards which tend to occur together only in decks of a certain archetype.

One issue with doing this, of course, is that we start to look at a lot of data points. The card data for just this version of AD covers 651 cards. If we start covering arbitrary pairs, that number would rise to more than 420 thousand (as there would be 650 possible pairs for every card, so 650x651=423,150). That’s probably still okay to handle, but it’s starting to get high, especially since the obvious next step is to look at 3-tuples, 4-tuples, etc.

All of that may make you wonder: why not just go whole-hog and send a Neural Net after the problem? After all, classifying objects into groups is a pretty textbook application for machine learning. And yeah, at some point in the future I might do that, if I can find some time to learn how.

For the time being, my major areas of work on the system are going to be on adding diagnostic elements, so that hopefully I can come to a greater understanding of how best to interpret its histograms. Another point of work will be to find more decks to feed into the database. And naturally I’ll want to run it on the Harmony and Adventure TIA pools as well at some point in the future. For now, though, it’s simply going to be another tool in the box when it comes to classifying decks and considering archetypes in TIA.

#mlp:ccg #machine learning #deckbuilding

Adventures in Deckbuilding #224: Princess Cadance, Friends of the Family (Pink/Blue Aggro) [Core]

Princess Cadance, Friends of the Family

The Deck that Almost Isn’t

I’ve been away for a long time now, and I’ve gone back and forth for quite a while about whether this article ought to be more about the difficulties that I initially had with building this deck, or the difficulties that presented themselves in terms of writing this post and keeping going with the series. I’ve actually had the deck built for what’s probably coming up on a month now, but I held off on writing the post for it because I was really just lacking in motivation.

Those who know me would know that I’ve gone through a phase of multiple years now of really only rarely playing the CCG. Doing Meticulous Talks and TIA, as well as the occasional convention, kept me plugged in enough for some of that time, but over the past few months I’ve felt increasingly distant from the game. This got to the point where I didn’t really feel qualified to be making these posts anymore, talking about these decks like I had any idea what I was doing putting them together, or any clue what the proper reactions to the current metagame would be. I realized that I could not keep on doing things as they were. I would either have to stop with this series, or find the energy to keep on going with it.

Now, the good news, obviously, is that this post is happening. As I had hoped, the way to rediscover the game turned out to be the same way that I discovered it in the first place: by playing it, with good friends. The onset of Continentals was a nice motivating factor in this as well. So as gloomy perhaps as all of that sounded, the upshot is that the series is back on and I’m ready to take it on once again.

With a fairly important qualification. That being that I’m never going to do the same Mane twice in a row again. Because, as I hinted at the start of the post, the process of just getting this deck down was bad enough on its own. I think it’s a pretty weak thing, kind of built around an idea that’s not really worth building a deck around. But it is what it is.

That build-around card here is Gallus, Cleaning Up. As I learned when playing Purple/Orange Aggro, while it can be difficult to win a game purely with gigantic Friends, there comes a point where it’s possible. In that deck I could consistently drop a 2-cost, 10-power Restricted Section and if the opponent couldn’t deal with it, that was it. I thought that surely I could build a deck with enough discard and draw to make a monster out of a card that gets +1 power every time that I discard a card.

Crucially though, Gallus is lacking in several key areas compared to Celestia. For one, his impact from hand will be limited, as we can only build up those +1 power counters over time. Similarly, because that power comes from counters and not from a continuous modifier, simply Gallus sets us back to square one. And, perhaps most importantly, the consequence is that in order to make using him feel worth it, the whole rest of the deck had to be built around the idea of discarding cards and drawing cards. Fair enough, Blue and Pink have a lot of good cards that discard and draw, and enough of them are griffons that we end up with some okay griffon synergy.

But the biggest mark against this deck came when I looked at it and thought, “You know, with all this hand-cycling draw, I should put in a few copies of Still Partying.” Why is that a Problem? Because then we’re not a quirky deck built around Gallus, we’re a bad Still Partying deck, and further optimization from there just merges back to Gabby Draw Combo. Which really isn’t a vote of confidence in the foundation of the original idea.

Next week, we are definitely not going to be building for Cadance, because this was her last deck. But I am fine with staying in Pink, for Princess Skystar, Out Of Her Shell!

#mlp ccg #adventures in deckbuilding

No Adventures post this week

I apologize, but there will be no new Adventures in Deckbuilding post this week. I got bitten by a new idea and so I've been dedicating a lot of my free time this week toward working on it. I don't want to say too much about it right now, but it is CCG-related, and it has the potential to be something fairly sizeable if I manage to get it finished.

Anyway, I won't say anything more about it until there's something concrete to look at. Next week, we'll get back to regularly scheduled deckbuilding posts

#mlp:ccg #secret-projects

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