Talk:Constructed booster pack

Deck Size

Needs a minimum deck size or else I can show you an 8-card deck that eliminates everyone else whenever it gets a turn.-Bucky (talk) 07:39, 3 March 2022 (UTC)

Sure. What's your suggestion? 60 cards sounds fine, but it can be made flexible. --JakeTheWolfie (talk) 03:18, 4 March 2022 (UTC)

I'd suggest a 40-card singleton deck. -Bucky (talk) 04:12, 4 March 2022 (UTC)

I do want to give players at least some duplicates in their deck. Maybe have a singleton version alongside the normal one? Also, considering the deck idea down below, I think an absolute minimum should be 15. --JakeTheWolfie (talk) 04:52, 4 March 2022 (UTC)

Although, I am interested in those 8 cards that probably need to be banned --JakeTheWolfie (talk) 03:56, 4 March 2022 (UTC)

I had something like {Boost (#1167) x4, Shoot (#1662) x2 , Blank round (#683), Wrath of Bucky (#98)} in mind. Just keep Shooting, drawing and shuffling 'til you win, the other two cards are there in case the opponent tries something.-Bucky (talk) 04:12, 4 March 2022 (UTC)

Yeah. Applying the Pidgeonhole principle here, you're guaranteed to get at least 1 boost in your opening hand, which can then combo off with any other you have and the game is essentially won on turn 1. There isn't really a good solution other than to ban all unconditional elimination effects. --JakeTheWolfie (talk) 04:52, 4 March 2022 (UTC)

Shoot isn't even the best card to use there, as a number of other cards such as Deadline (#779) will give a win when played for free as many times as I want. The real culprit is simply the combination of Boost and a very small deck size. Still, I do agree that Shoot needs to be banned. -Bucky (talk) 05:54, 4 March 2022 (UTC)

So, here's a few ideas that I have. Two different formats with two different deck sizes and X-of limits. The first is what Bucky suggested, a 40 card 1-of deck. The second would be a 60 card 4-of deck. Thoughts? --JakeTheWolfie (talk) 20:30, 28 April 2022 (UTC)

Card Selection

I feel like allowing players to pick and choose the cards they want from the entire archive (minus an assuredly long banlist) raises a couple problems. First is the loss of variety. Even with the strongest cards banned, there are many cards that simply won't see play because some other card does the same thing better. Nobody's going to play Pretentious Dismissal (#6074) or Eye for an Eye (#8969) when Falcon Punch (#1980) or Matter Drain (#4656) exists. Second is the ability of players to build around a win condition. Cargo Cult (#6475) isn't balanced for a deck that can efficiently produce Crate tokens. To Sail Beyond The Sunset (#7589) is as good as a free win in a deck stocked with cards to grab it from the discard pile. I would bet that most of the game's win/loss conditions, when properly supported, are probably strong enough to warrant a ban, which raises the question of just how a player is supposed to win. My proposed solutions are to limit a session's card pool to a few/several subpages, and to move from purely constructed decks to either a draft format, or some blend of the two. --ChippyYYZ (talk) 06:02, 4 March 2022 (UTC)

One solution could be to restrict cards which eliminate players or win the game to only 1 of each. Another can be to restrict a deck to only having 1 set of wincon cards per X cards in the deck, where X is a minimum decksize. A third is to simply restrict players to a continuous range of 500 or so cards. Large enough to have a lot of cards, but small enough to not be too broken. --JakeTheWolfie (talk) 17:50, 4 March 2022 (UTC)

One reason behind my 40-card singleton suggestion was to make it difficult to focus the deck entirely on a single win condition. To deal with the possibility that the opponent might counter, neutralize or forcibly discard the single copy of the win condition, the deck would need to play several distinct win cards in a way that supports all of them. Thus, I second the singleton rule for win conditions only.-Bucky (talk) 20:23, 4 March 2022 (UTC)

Actually, we could just ban all wincons from the main deck, and only allow players to use wincons from this pack. --JakeTheWolfie (talk) 20:38, 4 March 2022 (UTC)

My findings after creating a 40-card deck are: (1) There are an awful lot of cards to choose from, (2) there are an awful lot of cards that are, if not generally, then situationally overpowered, and (3) it's possible to make a deck that performs a specific task with frightening efficiency. I think Cosmic Drifter is a relatively tame win condition, but individually unspectacular cards like Solar Flare, Timeskip, The Doge of Venice, and Careless Greed work so well together in a deck designed to cycle itself repeatedly that I don't expect any banlist could reign in a clever deck builder with some time on their hands.--ChippyYYZ (talk) 05:10, 8 March 2022 (UTC)

I was reminded today of the Everything Vs. Everyone deck's way of handling win and loss conditions: At the beginning of each game, two win conditions and a loss condition are drawn at random. A similar setup might be good for Constructed Infinite Dvorak, where instead of every deck being hyperfocused on finding and fulfilling its win condition(s), each deck needs to be able to Do Enough Dvorak Stuff to meet multiple different goals.--ChippyYYZ (talk) 03:49, 15 May 2022 (UTC)