If you've been playing GU enough, you might have come across the term "tech card". It's not entirely obvious what it means at a first glance, so allow me to explain them to you. Essentially, a tech card is included as part of your deck as a means to increase your winning chances in a particular match-up (that your deck struggles with), usually at the expense of overall deck consistency and strength. How can including tech cards in your deck help you (or make your deck weaker)? Let's find out!
The Gist of Tech Cards
Every deck has bad match-ups. For example, a deck archetype like Aggro Nature performs terribly against Board Wipe Death. With the inclusion of a tech card, you can boost your winning chances in these typically bad match-ups at the expense of making it worse in other match-ups. Usually, this is done with the consideration that the inclusion of the tech card will boost overall win rates (duh!) maybe because the archetype that the deck struggles with is really popular at the moment.
Tech Card: Relic Removal
One of the most common types of tech cards in Gods Unchained is relic removal. You boost your winning chances against decks that have important relics at the expense of having dead/worse cards in your hand in matches against no-relic decks.
For example, take a look at these commonly-seen relic removal creatures:
They remove relic durability at the expense of stat points. The choice of including these relic removal creatures makes sense if your deck struggles with decks that have important relics, but otherwise, replacing them with other more useful cards would be better.
Tech Card: Against Specific Creatures/Spells
Sometimes, the deck archetype that you're struggling with has a specific creature or spell that you've identified to be the reason that you lose. Perhaps, it may be the Monolith of Storms, All-seeing Spire, or Pyramid Warden. If you find yourself cursing and swearing at a particular card often, it can make sense to include a tech card that deals specifically with it.
For example, in the case of dealing with Pyramid Wardens and All-seeing Spires, including a Munosian Infiltrator is a good choice.
If Polyhymnia decks get really popular, Grass Roots would be the perfect tech card to include in your deck. Grass Roots is also good as a tech card against buff-heavy decks.
Cutthroat Insight is a great tech card in many control match-ups, being able to wreck your opponent's plans with no counter possible.
In most circumstances, your deck probably already deals with most incoming threats reasonably well and you shouldn't need to specifically include tech cards for specific creatures or spells. Whenever you think of including tech cards to deal with specific threats, you should probably first see how many of these three points are applicable:
- Whether the card can be played reasonably in other matches
- Whether the bad match-up that you are targeting is popular
- Whether whatever card you are targeting is crucial to winning for your bad match-up
If the inclusion of your tech card ticks all three boxes, I'd say that it's a reasonable inclusion. Two ticks - still fine, although you might see more success by simply adding more cards that fit the theme of your deck. One tick or none - don't do it, it's most likely not worth it!
Tech Cards Make Your Deck Weaker!
There's a reason why these cards are called "tech cards" - because you wouldn't include them if you didn't have trouble with specific match-ups. These cards don't contribute to the overall theme of your deck and make your deck less consistent in other match-ups. For example, Munosian Infiltrator is simply a weaker Skeleton Heavy against decks that don't have low-attack, high-health creatures below 3 mana. The -1 health may not seem like much, but these small stat differences do change the overall win rates. It can be satisfying to win a match-up that you weren't supposed to win with the aid of your included tech card, but you shouldn't be blindsided by the additional losses that you have against the other once-favorable match-ups.
Including tech cards is a conscious decision that you have to make, and the changing nature of the meta means that it can be the right decision to include a certain tech card on some days while leaving it out in others. For the most part, you shouldn't be including more than 2 tech cards if you can help it since that will seriously hamper your ability to fight well against other match-ups.
In fact, many top-performing decks don't include tech cards or only include 1 or 2.
Taking this week's Weekend Ranked top 5 performers as a benchmark:
- mochimochi123's Control War tech cards: 1x Iron-tooth Goblin
- nhaiben's Card Draw Magic tech cards: None!
- Sifu's BWD tech cards: None!
- JKAN's BWD tech cards: 1x Portable Fortress
- ClementDanieli's BWD tech cards: 1x Return to the Cave
And a few other good win-rate decks that appear in the top decks list:
- alexsk8's Midrange Nature tech cards: 1x Photogenesis
- ???'s Order Deception tech cards: 1x Counterfeit, 2x Cutthroat Insight
- [Delta] K's Frenzied Aggro War tech cards: None!
Conclusion
I hope you gained some understanding on how tech cards work, when they should be included, and why you shouldn't include too many of them in your deck. They can be really strong in the correct situations, but always remember that they'll make your deck's overall strength weaker.
Thanks for reading!
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Some of the card images in this post are generated by GUListCreator, a tool I created for fast card list lookup and creation to write posts like this on Hive. Do check it out if you like to create content for Gods Unchained!