Basic Deckbuilding
With the lore that Legends of Norrath is based on, and the fact that you can get packs in game along with really cool loots cards for your Everquest or Everquest 2 characters, it is a safe assumption that there are a lot of players out there who have never played a TCG before. Have no fear. We're here to break down some of the basics of deckbuilding and some other ideas that come along with TCG's.
The first step in playing a TCG is building a deck. This is probably the aspect of the game that will be most alien to people who've never played before. Hopefully, this article will help outline some of the things you need to know to get started.
The first question that most new players ask is "What ratio of each card type should I use?" Without trying to be cliche, there really is no magic formula. Unlike games like Magic: the Gathering, there are no resource cards in this game. That means there's nothing that you have to draw to be able to play things like lands in Magic. Because of this, your ratio of card types is almost limitless.
There are decks that are made up almost entirely of units. There are other decks that try to win by questing and play mostly abilities. There are decks that win through attacking the other avatar and play a solid mix of items, abilities, and tactics. The only general guideline to follow as far as card types is not to include more than about 12 or so tactics in your deck. Due to their one shot nature, they don't generally have enough power to warrant playing very many in your deck.
The most important thing in deckbuilding is focus. Decide what you want your deck to do and don't include cards in your deck that don't serve that purpose. Your purpose needs to be a little bit more specific than just "I want my deck to win."
You need to have a plan like "I want to play more units than my opponent can handle and overwhelm him with high damage bonus units." Or "I want to win by attacking my opponent repeatedly with my own avatar." Or "I want to set up a solid defense and then win through questing."
Once you have a focused plan, only include cards that help achieve that plan. Sometimes, you'll need to include a backup plan. For example, cards like Decoy are usually good to include in unit rush decks for their versatility. You can include a backup plan to give your deck some added versatility, but if you try to do too many things, you won't really be able to do anything very well. With only 50 cards in your deck, you don't have enough room to try to have a plan in place for every possible scenario. You just have to accept that sometimes, you won't be able to have an answer to everything. Just try to do what you want to do better than other people do what they want to do.
That brings us to another point. Try to keep your deck as close to the 50 card minimum as possible. This is often the hardest part of deckbuilding for newer players because they just can't bring themselves to cut any cards they wanted in there. But it's simple mathematics. The fewer cards you have in your deck, the more likely you are to draw the cards you need. I try to keep all of my decks as close to 50 as possible. Every once in a while, I will stick a 51st card in there, but for the most part 50 is where you want to be.
One of the things that you should keep in mind is a TCG idea called the metagame. The metagame in its simplest definition is the decks that are popular right now. It's important to know what decks other people are playing because that can help you make decisions when building your own deck. For example, heading into the February Qualifier tournament, White Wall, Priest Questers, and Scout AvA were popular decks. Knowing this would give you an advantage because you could make card choices based on the knowledge that you expect to play against those decks often.
The metagame can be an elusive animal, always shifting and changing as the popularity of certain decks waxes and wanes. Keeping up with the metagame and which decks do well against the current wave of top decks can help keep you one step ahead of the game. In fact, knowing how to predict changes in the metagame is one of the most important skills in a TCG.
Hopefully, this will get you started in the right direction toward building a solid TCG deck. These concepts are pretty generic to all TCG's. We will be discussing more advanced and LoN specific ideas as more articles get put up on the site in the next few days.
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