Tempo

I listened to an MTG podcast called Draft Chaff, and episode 19 is a very interesting interview with someone I am not familiar with but is obviously a big deal in the MTG community.

Anyway, they asked him what kind of player he is, and he said tempo. Then they asked him to explain what that means to him and he said: “I like to win when my opponent still has a full hand of cards and I just played my last card.” And I found that to be very interesting.

And I’m trying to think how that applies to keyforge, and well, I’m not sure it does directly. The idea with the above quote is “I used all my resources efficiently while my opponent was not able to use theirs”.

But in Keyforge you have infinite resources. You never run out of cards, and you mostly start each turn with the same number of cards. Could it be translated to mean to have seen every card while my opponent has not? This seems like what many players want out of fast decks, but I am not certain it fits the above, and certainly doesn’t feel like tempo play to me.

I think in keyforge if every time you call a house, you have creatures to use in addition to cards in hand. And every time my opponent calls a house they don’t have creatures in that house, I am winning by having more resources. Or in other words, if my hand + board is always bigger than yours, I win by tempo.

I’ll need to mull this over some more before it becomes a full article.