Category: Strategy

I have been spending far too much time scouring the internet for decks to buy, and am looking to start looking deeper into my collection, doing some deep dives on decks, and just enjoying what I have. As an example, I decided to sort my collection by E+F, and found this gem: https://decksofkeyforge.com/decks/866d550b-7ede-465a-a414-39e340c31109 According to TCO, I have played this deck once, won, and never played it again. It’s actually a really fun deck with multiple lines for big plays. Archiving either Mars for Battlefleet card burst or Untamed for aember burst.

I’ve been thinking about low efficiency decks lately and what they might need to have in order to be competitive. First, we need to consider that a lot of things I consider efficiency is not rated as such by dok, things that allow you to use creatures are not counted as efficiency. It is mostly card draw, archiving and recursion, which are very specific types of efficiency. Second, I like to consider how reusable cards are counted in a very static way by dok. If you consider a card like Library of the Damned, which gives a static 1.5 efficiency, but really the amount of efficiency it gives you is based on how often you are going to call Dis during a cycle. If Dis is a main house, that efficiency goes up dramatically. Reusable cards need to account for how likely they are to stick to the board. Artifacts are naturally more sticky, but creatures with high power and armor are pretty sticky too and you might get multiple uses out of them. Third, any card that simply does it’s thing immediately is an efficient card. Actions are naturally efficient, but so are things like Hunting Witches. While a Hunting Witch might stick around to do more stuff, it’s efficiency comes from doing the thing it came to do immediately, without a chance for your opponent to respond. Lastly, I think disruption can be as strong as efficiency. Coraythan himself says that disruption and efficiency are complimentary, and I agree. Making your opponent do less can be a strong parallel to you doing more.

Had a thought about win percentage and the reason for my losses. I don’t have crazy 80% win rates with any decks. My top decks are pretty low, like in the 60%, even ones like Aquaoxyl, the Monk Hacker which went 5-0 in TCO, is below 60%, though that’s probably because it took me quite a while to get the hang of it. Anyway, back to the topic. I think more important than how much I lost is how I lost. There are game losses because of various reasons: – Cards came up in a bad order. – Didn’t have the tools do deal with what my opponent’s deck does. – Their cards came up in a really good order. – I could have played better. Keyforge is random, and stuff happens. Sometimes you win or lose because of luck. What I try to get a feel of is how often I lose and think I could have done better. Because after practicing with a deck 50 times, I will do better. And in a tournament setting, I will do better. I just lost to a deck because they had double lifeward and my two Hebe the Huge were locked out from clearing their triple Professor Sutterkin. That’s just a bad matchup, and that loss should not decide whether the deck I was playing is competitive or not.