Introducing a new idea for a deck metric – APT

by Aurore · January 17, 2020

I’ve been thinking some more about how the DoK Efficiency metric relates to all the other metrics. I’ve come up with a yet incalculable metric: APT.

Efficiency is a multiplier

In my opinion, you can think about Efficiency as a multiplier. If you have decks A and B, and deck A, on average, gets to the shuffle twice as fast as deck B, then effectively all of the other metrics like E and A are doubled. If deck A reaches the second shuffle just as deck B reaches the first shuffle, then deck A has played every card twice, has gotten twice as much Æmber and has used twice as much A.

Expected Æmber

E in AERC score is a metric showing how much Æmber you can get on top of reaping with creatures and it doesn’t take into account efficiency. That is fairly natural, since efficiency is it’s own metric, but creatures reaping is a big part of how Æmber is generated.

If we were to look at creatures as well, then you would need to figure out how likely a creature is to reap, and how often it might do it. There are several factors that make a creature more likely to reap:

Being in a house with many other creatures – A creature is more likely to reap if it is in a house that has a wide board.
High power and armor – Makes it more likely to stick around.
A strong reap ability – More likely to reap than fight.
No strong fight ability – If a creature really wants to fight, it’s not going to reap much.

So in theory, if we could calculate some kind of average reap expectancy from a creature based on those parameters, we could add it to the Expected Æmber.

Æmber Per Turn

Or APT, would be the average expected Æmber you can expect to get each turn. If you had a deck with 36 blank cards with 1 pip, the APT would be equal to the average number of cards played each turn. I don’t know what that number is, as I’ve proven myself not very good at math, but I’m guessing somewhere around 3.

But that is of course not how KeyForge works. You APT would be a calculation based on efficiency multiplied but the modified expected Æmber mentioned above. I think the best way to find out APT is by playing a deck. I tried looking over Crucible Tracker data, but it only accounts for Æmber generated from pips or reaps, and on the other hand counts Æmber generated during the game counting retrieved captured aember, basically counting it twice. So I currently don’t have a good automated tool to calculate this.

But you can see average turns to win, and in the case of Bazi Biz-Toth, it’s 8.2 (you can see it if you uncheck losses). So I can assume it generates at least 18 Æmber on average in 8.2 turns, so the APT of Bazi Biz-Toth is at least 18/8.2=~2.2.

L. O”Grady on the other hand, wins on average on turn 7.8, making it’s APT 2.3, not that much higher.

Charflare, Cliff Luddite takes 9.6 turns for the win, but it is a combo deck, so it doesn’t exactly generate 18 Æmber, still, you can say it’s APT is equivalent to at least 1.9.

This is of course a very basic look at things based on incomplete data, since it doesn’t count Æmber stolen from you, or lost. I could start counting how much Æmber I generate every turn, but that doesn’t sound useful enough to be worth the effort.

Contact and afterward

I hope things gets you thinking, and who knows, maybe someone out there will figure out an algorithm to estimate APT.

I apologize for writing less lately. Lack of events to prep for and general dislike of Worlds Collide has halted my thoughts a bit. But as you can see, I did have some thoughts I deemed worthy of putting on paper, and I have some more I hope will come out, as I figured out why I dislike Saurians.

As always, you can follow me on twitter for updates. And join us at the Sanctumonious discord server if you’d like to chat with me, or join an awesome community of KeyForge players.

I also started streaming on twitch. I am still learning the ropes and I have a lot of dead air time. But I think I provide some useful commentary on the game and my decision making.