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Hecatomb presents players with a range of tactical decisions. When do we attack? When do we block? And most importantly, which of our cards do we play as mana? If a typical game lasts 6-8 turns, each player will draw roughly half of their decks, and play a third of those cards as mana, not their intended effect. Most decks include a few cards that often end up being played as mana: a group of expensive but interchangeable minions, redundant copies of gods or relics, even roundabout mana sources such as Martyrs. But it's rarely long before we find ourselves with a hand of nothing but cards we want to play but cannot until some are played as mana.
Refining a Deck
During the first few games of playing out a new deck concept, a class of less useful cards always emerges. Some cards are powerful in any context, so we're always happy to draw and to play them. Others are most effective in particular combinations, or are redundant with other combination drivers, so wind up getting played as mana nearly every time outside their optimal usage parameters. As you refine the deck, it becomes more and more tempting to replace this lesser class of cards with generally useful ones. Beyond wanting only useful cards to draw, every card habitually played as mana reduces the deck's variety of strategies, and therefore the range of problems your enemies have to consider.
Why Go Narrow?
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| The Amazing Bobo |
But you can also go the other direction, swapping weak cards out for narrow cards that aren't useful all that often, but are very powerful in the right situation. This reduces your deck's routine strategies, but every few games your hit your enemies with a surprise maneuver that can be devastating if they're not expecting it. An effective but rare maneuver can force enemies to spend a lot of effort avoiding combinations that you aren't even planning on putting together.
Intuitively it seems dangerous to include a lot of narrow cards because of the risk of starting the game with a hand of nothing else. But the odds of this actually happening are remote due to the number of cards drawn during the game and the limited size of the deck. If we design a deck with 10 narrow cards, we can view the group as we would a suit in a standard deck of cards. The risk of drawing a hand of nothing but narrow cards can then be compared to the odds of drawing a flush in poker.
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| Transfix |
Drawing a flush is an uncommon event, and the odds of drawing a flushlike hand in Hecatomb are much worse. First, drawing the first few narrow cards thins out the "suit" in the rest of the deck much more than drawing cards of a suit would in poker. For example, after drawing four narrow cards, the odds of drawing a fifth in a row are 1 in 6, compared to 3 in 16 for poker. Second, we're worried about drawing a "flush" in a particular "suit", not any of four possible flushes. If you cut the number of narrow cards back to even eight, the odds of drawing a narrow "flush" are closer to the odds of drawing four of kind in poker – not the sort of odds anyone plans for, or tries to avoid.
Smoke 'Em If They've Got 'Em Narrow Card Deck
As an example of designing a deck around narrow cards, consider your basic corruption-destruction deck that is built around the damage and destruction abilities shared by minions from these dooms:
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Smoke 'Em If They've Got 'Em Deck |
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Total Cards: 40
Gods: 2
Minions: 30
Fates: 8
Relics: 0
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In this deck, Nahual, Spirit of Malevolence, The Amazing Bobo, Tecciztecatl, Spiteful Flame, and Transfix are "gotcha" cards. Mecatl, Bringer of Sacrifice, Sanguimancer, and Tzi Tzi Tzo are cheap minions used to flesh out the curve.
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| Spiteful Flame |
If you simply write out the list of cards that fit the theme, you have a tighter group of cards, but with extra copies that just wind up being burned as mana. You can only afford so many Avasculates, Victimizes, other fates, copies of SET, and so on. Instead, we include Spiteful Flame for situations where we can't blast through a strong top minion, and Transfix, which replaces itself but is most helpful when you can afford to play the new card that same turn. Stocking lots of Breathstealers and Skintakers sounds like a good idea at first, but if they can get through at all, their extra abilities are often lost. Instead, we include a Spirit of Malevolence for the occasional situation where we afford to play a high-strength Guardian on top of it, and The Amazing Bobo for the occasional situation where it's really a bottom minion we need to pick off with direct damage.
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