Constructed Class Lecture 1 - How to Read Cards

[Music] i know that trading card games aren't easy at the best of times back in the early 2000s when i started playing card games learning about the competitive side of any game wasn't as easy as following a few youtubers you had to trawl through hundreds of forum threads or even sign up to subscription magazines to get the latest decks and results

if you wanted to be at the top of your game you really had to put in the hard yards over the last 15 years i've spent every opportunity studying and learning anything and everything there is to know about card games ranging from the basics of making a new game through to using statistics to analyze micro decisions during the game and even the psychological tricks the professional athletes used to keep their focus and for me it paid off but i'm no star player instead most of my success has been as the guy supporting the team as a coach or

captain and i know that a good teacher can turn any student into a star pupil i get that it's not too appealing to think if you want to improve your game you need to do what i did and spend the next dozen or more years of your life studying the pro scene going through trial and error winning and losing watching and re-watching the top players and hoping that eventually something will start to make sense instead i've distilled the most important lessons i've learned over my career into a 10-part series of lectures

now i can't guarantee that watching these videos will turn you into the next world champion but i can promise that no matter how experienced you are you'll find something to take away from these lectures i'm going to be focusing on the recent smash hit from legend story studios the flesh and blood trading card game but no matter what you play the information in these lectures will be useful to you at the end of each lecture there will be a brief homework exercise if you'd like you can submit this exercise to tcghomeworksubmission

gmail.com and i'll grade and provide feedback on your work at the end of each week or two don't worry you won't lose marks for being late i'll keep checking for submissions until the end of 2022 so without further ado welcome to lecture one of constructed class how to read cards firstly let's get something out of the way this isn't intro to reading comprehension and when we talk about getting better at reading cards we're not talking about your literal understanding of the words printed on

the cardboard but before we go any further it's important that we establish the golden rule of trading card games rtbc otherwise known as read the bloody card some of you might know this as rtfc but this is not a parental guidance moment rtbc is a very simple rule that even top players break all the time whenever you're faced with a card even if it's one you've seen a thousand times before take the time to read it and read

it again let's take for example the card on screen black lotus one of the most infamous trading cards of all time up there with base set charizard and blue eyes white dragon everyone knows what this card does tap it sacrifice it add three mana or does it let's take a closer look this card actually reads tap sacrifice black lotus add three mana of any one color to your

monopole that's right you can't add a mix of colors to your monopole seems simple enough but i guarantee everyone who has played magic for a while has used this card incorrectly or has seen someone use it incorrectly these are the sorts of mistakes that can be solved if you just read the bloody card it literally takes a couple of seconds to do and will improve your game straight away when you're thinking about adding a card to your deck take the time to read that card properly because it can save you a

lot of heartache in the future and when your opponent plays a card in a crucial moment don't be ashamed to take the time to read and re-read it even if you're sure you could recite it with a gun to your head but that's all very surface level stuff let's get down to the nitty-gritty and focus on the first of today's two main studies card profile versus card text a lot of players don't understand the distinction between card profile and card text and even top players can struggle to articulate exactly what that

distinction is there's a very simple reason why it's just not something we tend to think about and over time it can be something that you understand on an instinctual level without having really needed to dive into it in any depth but really understanding the difference will give you another tool to level up your game let's define card profile and card text it's actually easier to start with the second term context means everything in this little box that isn't flavor text if you're new to card games flavor texts

are usually little snippets or lore or quotes from characters in the game which have no effect on actual gameplay what we're really focusing on are the effects of the card for example we have the card on screen snatch this card's text is very simple if snatch hits draw a card it doesn't get much simpler than that usually when we evaluate new cards or build a deck we tend to focus on the effect of a card more than anything you want to put the biggest and best effects in your deck so you spend the

majority of your time comparing all the different effects you can find until you find some cool combo or interaction that you want to play and that's fine but you're probably overlooking some very very important information let's take a look at two cards from the yu-gi-oh trading card game upstart goblin and jar of greed at first glance these two cards seem very similar as both allow you to draw one card although upstart goblin gives your opponent 1 000 life points in

exchange pushing you further away from winning the game but while one of these cards is unplayable the other is so strong that you're currently only allowed to run one copy of it instead of the usual three copies but just by looking at the card text with no other context you probably wouldn't be able to guess which of these cards is limited to one copy and even if you did take a guess most of you without knowledge of yu-gi-oh would probably pick the wrong card why because there's some information we

haven't looked at yet and that's the card profile the card profile includes everything outside of the card's text box that is relevant to gameplay so not things such as rarity or collector number this differs from game to game and includes things such as the cost of a card its name what type of card it is if the game has different card types and so on let's go back to our example of upstart goblin vs jar of greed these are two different types of cards being spell and trap cards as noted in the corner and by the corresponding blue

green and pink purple borders in yu-gi-oh spell cards can be played from hand with immediate effect but trap cards need to be played face down for an entire turn before their effects can be activated that difference is enough for upstart goblin even with the downside of granting your opponent 1 000 life points to be limited to one copy per deck while jar of greed is considered to be a below average or even unplayable card this gives us our first key lesson that

applies through all card games universally the combination of card profile and card text is what makes or breaks a card the right card text on the wrong card profile can make a card totally unplayable let's go back to flesh and blood in flesh and blood card profile is composed of five main things conveniently located around the border of the card we have the cost in the top right the pitch shown in the top left and also by

the color strip on the top border the attack value in the bottom left if applicable the type of card written in the bottom border and the block value in the bottom right corner if applicable when you find a card with a great effect you also need to take into account all five of these things card profile is actually much more important in flesh and blood than many other games because in this game cards can have up to three different profiles but if you've played for a while you've probably rarely or never seen anyone put

yellow or blue snatch into their competitive constructed deck why is that well yellow and blue snatch deal three and two damage respectively and it turns out that in flesh and blood most cards that go in your deck can easily block for two or three damage but there aren't a lot of cards that block for four since snatcher's effect triggers on hit you'll have a much higher chance of resolving that effect if you instead use the red version which deals 4 damage

in this case the damage of the card is far more important than anything else on the card profile and is the critical factor which in combination with the card text allows the card to see play so next time you're looking at a cool bit of card text don't forget to zoom out and take stock of everything else that's going on sometimes a small detail in the card's profile is what really matters now things are about to get very mathematical and highly theoretical but

stay with me we're going to be looking at a very quantitative method of designing and evaluating cards the base rate the base rate is an important part of the card design process that many players are unconsciously aware of but rarely use in their own card analysis different card designers use different terms including power level cost ratio and so on but i've always used the term base rate so i'll continue to use it here the base rate in a game is defined as the formula for the combination of card

profile and card text that is considered acceptable on a theoretically perfectly average card in some games it's very easy to determine the base rate of some or all of the cards in the game whereas in others it can be almost impossible in this part of the lecture we're going to attempt to very roughly reverse engineer legend story studios golden formula which they might be using to keep the power level of cards in check usually the best way is to look at

vanilla cards this means cards which have no card text and are just a card profile but before we go any further there's something important that we have to keep in mind the base rate is technically arbitrary and unimportant you can define the base rate in any game however you'd like what's actually important is how cards compare to that base rate otherwise said it doesn't actually matter how powerful any given card is all that matters is how powerful it is

relative to the other cards in the game this is great news for those of us who love the maths behind card games because even if we don't quite manage to reverse engineer the exact formulae being used we can still have an accurate card evaluation model as long as our numbers are correct relative to each other today we're just going to look at attack actions in flesh and blood the base rate for attack actions was established way back in the first set welcome to wraith by

the cards wounding blow and raging onslaught let's take a look at the red versions of each card both are generic attack actions which pitch for one and block for three with no card text the only differences here are the wounding blow costs 0 and deals 4 damage whereas raging onslaught costs 3 and deals 7 damage this gives us a very basic profile and we can very easily use these as starting points for figuring out our base rate we can even compare these two

cards for three more resources you can get three more damage or with simple division one additional resource is worth one damage let's see if this holds up elsewhere thankfully the designers over at legend story studios have made this very simple for us in crucible of war we got brutal assault and in uprising we got critical strike looking at the reds we now have a zero for four a one for five a two for six

and a three for seven all which pitch for one and block for three seems pretty perfect right in a moment we're going to introduce some complexity but before we do let's come up with one possible model for the base rate of these vanilla cards the base rate of an attack action is equal to its pitch value plus its attack value plus its block value minus its cost let's call this the simple base rate formula and apply it to the cards we've

just been looking at firstly winding blow has a pitch value of one an attack value of four and a block value of three and a cost of zero one plus four plus three minus zero equals eight looking at raging onslaught this card has a pitch value of one an attack value of seven a block value of three and a cost of three one plus seven plus three minus three

equals eight using just these two cards we can establish a possible rate of 8 the basic sum of the card profile of any flesh and blood card my initial conclusion when looking into flesh and blood's card balance was that every card might be able to be compared to this 8 rate and thanks to brutal assault and critical strike being printed in later sets this theory might hold up try applying this simple base rate formula to the card's critical strike and brutal assault on your own and see

if it still gives us the eight rate it should and that's because a base rate like any good mathematical rule should give the same output as long as the inputs the pitch attack and block values and the cost are correct and vice versa as long as the output is correct we should be able to predict the inputs now it's time to look at some of that additional complexity i was talking about before let's take a look at the red versions of

head jab leg tap and surging strike three ninja cards also from the first set welcome to wraith head jab is a zero cost three damage attack action with go again which blocks for two leg tap is a one cost four damage attack action with go again which also blocks for two and finally surging strike is a two cost five damage attack action with go again which also blocks for two you might notice a pattern here this is called a cycle we can actually pair these up with each of the generic cards

we just looked at head jab with wounding blow leg tap with critical strike and surging strike with brutal assault they look pretty similar don't they zero cost one cost and two cost attack actions with each increase in cost resulting in an increase in attack value but when we look at the base rate of these ninja cards something seems off hedjab has a pitch value of 1 an attack value of three a block value of two and a cost of zero one plus three plus two

minus zero equals six similarly leg tap has a pitch value of one an attack value of four a block value of two and a cost of one one plus four plus two minus one equals six and the same applies for surging strike one plus five plus two minus two equals six all of these cards seem to be well below the base rate of wounding blow and friends what's going on here did we get the base rate wrong from the start

should we actually be looking at a six rate instead of an eight rate well technically you could use a six rate rather than an eight rate like i said earlier your actual base rate doesn't really matter as much as the way that cards compare to that rate we're just using an eight rate because it's a nice number but have a little faith in me for a moment and let's stick with our eight rate theory from before there's something we haven't considered yet and that's this bit of text go again

when building a card or evaluating a card you also have to take into account the card effects also known as the card text if you just took an 8 rate card and slapped on some extra text your new card would be way more powerful and while that might seem cool it's not always a good thing when you're designing a card game one of the most important things is to give your players an element of choice make them think about why they want to play card a instead of card b if your card effects are just thrown onto your base rate cards without much

thought then you end up with cards which are obviously more powerful than their counterparts giving players no reason at all to place certain cards you need to rate your card effects appropriately so that they fit within the power level of your game when calculating a base rate or reverse engineering it as we're doing today we also need to consider the value of the effects in the card text our new formula will be as follows the base rate of an attack action 8 will be equal to the pitch value plus the

attack value plus the block value plus the effect value minus its cost back to the cards on screen it seems to me like lss have made a pretty simple decision go again is a pretty powerful effect by their reckoning so powerful that they've made the decision to remove one block and one power from wounding blow in order to put go again on head jab this seems to apply that go again has a value of around two let's apply this to

our ninja cards hedjab has a pitch value of one an attack value of three a block value of two an effect value of two from go again and a cost of zero one plus three plus two plus two minus zero equals eight and the same applies for leg tap and surging strike you can calculate these ones yourself this is a pretty small sample size to try and figure out the value of go again can we maybe prove this formula in any

other way well sure instead of comparing wounding blow and head jab let's compare wounding blue and leg tap both of these cards pitch for one and attack for four the differences being that wounding blow costs 0 and blocks for 3 with no text and has no effect value whereas leg tap costs 1 and blocks for 2 with an unknown effect value which is what we're trying to solve for again comparing these two cards it looks like without consideration of the card text leg tap is two value short and that suggests that go again is worth about

two this checks out right well maybe not time to go a little deeper sticking with wraith let's compare another two pairs of cards the brute cards smash instinct and pack hunt with the vanilla's raging onslaught and brutal assault there's a problem here these brute attack actions have the exact same cost pitch attack value and defense values as the vanilla cards but also have the beneficial keyword

intimidate so what's going on it looks like there's something else we need to think about as part of our base rate or are these brute cards just straight up better than their corresponding vanillas well if you're building a brute deck sure but what if you're building a warrior deck or a ninja deck as much as you might like to you can't include smash instinct or pack hunt in your deck so while smash instinct and pack hunt are clearly better than raging onslaught

and brutal assault they come with the restriction that they can only be played in a brute deck this is one of many types of conditions that the card designers over at lss and in other companies use in order to balance their cards relative to the base rate of the game a condition can be defined as any kind of negative effect or restriction that is used to balance out a corresponding positive effect you might have heard people say something like class cards are always better than generics and this is why because those cards are restricted to

certain classes they have to be more powerful this gives us as players an incentive to lock ourselves into a given class and the ability to play some cards while removing our capacity to play others if this wasn't the case the game would become extremely imbalanced and not fun at all imagine if prism could play crown of seeds pretty scary so looking at our current example it seems like the trade-off for gaining the intimidate keyword is simply that smash

instinct and pack hunt are conditionally locked into brute let's update our formula the base rate of an attack action is 8 equal to the pitch value attack value block value and effect value of the card minus its cost and minus the value of its conditions this looks pretty good to me let's call it the expanded base rate formula in fact this is the simplified version of the formula that i personally use to evaluate attack actions in flesh and

blood just one thing is missing though how do we calculate the numerical value of the intimidate keyword and how do we calculate the cost of the condition of being locked into the brute class currently all we know is that they're roughly equal i'll leave this as an exercise for you the student to solve try cross-referencing other cards to see if you can figure out a possible value for these two elements of the base rate formula and if you want you can submit your

answers in the comments section below or if you've got a very in-depth response you can submit it to tcghomeworksubmission gmail.com if you can do this try going back and reevaluating what the value of go again is in our previous example with the ninja attack actions the important thing to understand is that these kinds of formulae aren't useful unless you practice using them the hardest part about any card design or evaluation process is figuring out how to evaluate the effect value and

conditions personally i have a whole notebook full of keywords and conditions from the various games that i've played over the years which i use to give me inspiration and reference for the power level that i want when i'm designing a new card game if you're evaluating a card game or trying to reverse engineer a base rate you'll need to build up your dictionary over time for example in flesh and blood ask yourself how much is intimidate worth how much is phantasm worth how much is

go again worth how much is the condition if this hits worth how much is the condition if you have less life than your opponent worth and so on it takes some time and practice to be able to look at a card and fully rate it out and don't forget even the card designers don't have all the answers sometimes you simply can't be sure what the exact value or power of any given effect is and that can make it a bit of a stab in the dark whether or not the card you're designing or evaluating is

any good or indeed if it's too good that's why we need to test cards and it's also why we end up with cards which are just too powerful and define meta games or even get banned and why some cards with really cool looking effects are just too weak to be played this is true for all games including flesh and blood sometimes you just need to take a step back and instead of looking at things from a quantitative perspective try to be qualitative instead so if in the end sometimes the maths

just can't give us the answer what's the point well if you understand the base rate of a card you're already a step ahead and you'll be much better at identifying those overpowered cards if they just seem a little bit too good for the base rate while you shouldn't forget that there might be plenty of other factors that you can consider when evaluating a card looking at the base rate is a great and efficient place to start not sure if a card is good easy just check if it exceeds the base rate

in some way if it does it's probably worth taking a closer look at [Music] that's a good place to stop time for some homework choose your favorite welcome to wraith hero out of rhina bravo and katsu although i loved arinthia let's stay away from her for the purpose of this exercise choose a couple of attack actions and do the following first identify which elements of the card constitute the card profile and the card text

then break down the card into the simple base rate formula pitch value attack value block value and cost and see how it stacks up compared to a vanilla card then identify which parts of the card are effects and which parts are conditions in the expanded base rate formula for an advanced exercise propose a possible value for those effects and conditions try to prove your hypothesis by

cross-referencing with other cards in the game do you think your chosen card is under rate on rate or overrate so mathematically is your card a good card or not does this correlate to real world playability why or why not if you'd like me to review you can submit your homework to tcg homework submission gmail.com thanks for coming to class the next lecture will be on understanding your game plan

i can't wait to see you there