Deck Building Difficulties

[Horizon Ian]

New article in Developer's Corner up: Deck of Many Things.

Let us know if this helps at all.

[Wargfn]

Deck of many Things is a great article.

I think one of the hardest parts of deck building is the limited exposure. In other DBGs, I can take a look at what other players are doing and build accordingly. With a player base of less than a thousand players on Kickstarter and a brand new store, that makes the challenge of working out what works difficult. Having a deck builder site available, can at least let us share decks to see what other people are creating, but alas, other than the 4 starter decks, we still don't have anyone actively shaping the Meta game. And due to other reasons, my own updates to the DBS hasn't come as far as i would have hoped.

You can however, build a deck list and share it very easily, and every card in the game is at least on the site.

[Horizon Jeff]

Deck of many Things is a great article.

I think one of the hardest parts of deck building is the limited exposure. In other DBGs, I can take a look at what other players are doing and build accordingly. With a player base of less than a thousand players on Kickstarter and a brand new store, that makes the challenge of working out what works difficult. Having a deck builder site available, can at least let us share decks to see what other people are creating, but alas, other than the 4 starter decks, we still don't have anyone actively shaping the Meta game. And due to other reasons, my own updates to the DBS hasn't come as far as i would have hoped.

You can however, build a deck list and share it very easily, and every card in the game is at least on the site.

Good points.

I think also a good portion of our initial audience base, Traveller fans, are a little less familiar with constructed deck games. And that rather unfortunately intersects with the fact that our game has a much higher initial barrier to entry than we had originally planned.

One of our initial goals had been to make a game that would be easy to play for beginners. But we missed on that, partially because as development progressed, modelling the IP assumed more and more significance to us. Also, Ian and I who drive the design both play a lot of ccg/tcgs, and we ended up making a game best suited for those players, which was never our intention.

But within tcgs/ccgs, Traveller has some pretty significant differences that make play distinguishable from, say, Magic. Chief among them is that in our game, unlike so many others, you don't have to build up your economic position to play cards. Magic, you drop one land a turn and are able to cast more/bigger spells over time. For us, you can play your most expensive cards on turn 1, and the limit is more what you can afford and what you have in hand. Over time your board position does improve, but that's a function of having access to more cards from your deck, rather than an escalating economy.

Deck building in our game is also much less restricted than in typical games, because we don't fall on a clear divisions in things like color. If you want to make a murder deck in our game, you can, and it can be brutal to an unprepared opponent. And, because all cards are worth Expense Value, you can afford to take a flier on cards without worrying as much about ever getting anything from them.

And so we're finding play and deck building to be diverse and interesting at a level of sophistication we didn't intend, but challenging (and even some times frustrating) at the introductory stage, which is something we had wanted to avoid.

[windforce]

I love Traveller CCG for its theme, its rules and its deckbuilding opportunities.
The only difficulty is that I have too many deck ideas, both serious (beating the official Solo Scenarios) and fun (creating themed decks, like all is Non-human, all has Expert skills or no has Expert skills, etc. etc).

Even with only the Core Set and the Aliens expansion, I have myriad possibilities.
So the difficulty is more in options than in deckbuilding itself. To make it clearer, I love to play Traveller because of its deckbuilding options. In comparison, a currently popular game like Keyforge, of which the mechanics are okay, fell flat for me because I cannot finetune my deck or create other ideas.

[Horizon Jeff]

Yeah, I think Ian touches on this in his article, but the fact that Traveller deck building isn't restriction on a factional basis like many other games (Game of Thrones, Legend of the Five Rings, etc) or due to resource types (Magic: The Gathering, Spoils, etc), can make construction harder.

To me, are a natural starting point, because their skills and abilities are going to have strong influences on what else the deck can do.

[Wargfn]

So we have had the game now a little over a year. In that time, I have found that deck construction for me is divided into building two separate decks. In one deck, I am trying to build an interesting challenge deck to see if I can get under 4 turns for 20 Victory Points. In the other deck, I am trying to build an optimized scoring engine. Since I usually start with the Adventure Deck, my Captain's decks are usually build around those cards. This works great for solo play but not so well for 2+.

I find that building Captain's Decks are a little more daunting because I haven't found a good ratio of card types that seems to be 'stable'. And by stable what I really mean is reliably predictable, because there are just so many cards. For example, in a Piracy based deck, there are three(3) cards that form a core win-con for collecting tokens. You are only going to draw one of those 9 cards (Assuming 3 cards at 3 in the deck each) .080% of the time on your opening hand. And within 5 turns, you will only see one of them 17%, assuming your hand size is 7 cards and you are burning all 7 cards. Turn 1) 7 cards (11%), Turn 2) 14 cards seen (23%), Turn 3) 21 cards seen (35%), Turn 4) 28 cards seen (46%), Turn 5) 35 cards seen (58%). Anyone whose played this game, knows that now you are just flirting with going bankrupt.
For those wandering about my 'core piracy win con' - Rhal'Kais Chop Shop, Black Market Investors, Sinister Reputation targeting Imlaii Ergarsuu or Baronet Cronin. My full deck is here Jolly Rogers.

Also, the other thing I find myself doing is dividing down my Captain's Deck into 60 cards with 1/3 being core, 1/3 being support and 1/3 being expense. So if we take a look at the Jolly Rogers deck above out of 60 cards only 3 have a 0 expense and 24 cards have an expense of 2+. While I have 21 cards at an expense of 2 and only 3 with a cost of 3 which are the Data Mining Consultants, which I was thinking about dumping for some .

Another Interesting thing while in Deck construction is that your Adventure Deck absolutely needs to be in tune with what ship you are piloting, but with the current card pool, you can easily pick up your Captain's Deck and play with any ship. Sure a couple of the aren't going to fit based on tonnage but if you were planning sleek at 100 Tons, pretty much grab any .

[windforce]

What I forgot to make clear in my reaction that I only (am able to) play solo.
Which implies a very different take on deckbuilding in comparison to playing against an opponent.