As it was recently announced that ZeroRequiem (give him a follow, great guy) and I will be hosting our very own Gods Unchained tournament. I thought it would be apropos that would do a post about deck creation or crafting. Seeing that it is something that is very much front and center in our tournament.
The goal of the deck, aka the win condition
This is probably the most important part of creating any deck, be it an aggro-, control-, midrange-, combo- or any other type of deck. And that is to know how will the deck take you to victory. Or if you will, what is the goal of the deck?
As I see it there are two ways to approach creating a deck. And it is important to iterate that both ways are perfectly fine. And what is important is to find the way that works best for you. And what works best for the specific deck your trying to make.
These two ways are to start at the finish, which is when you know what combo of cards you want to be able to play to win. Or your goal is to be able to buff this creature so it becomes unstoppable. Or you simply want to last your opponent to bits with spells. When designing a deck like this, with the end goal already in place. Now you just need to pick cards that will allow you to get to your end goal as fast as possible, and as reliably as possible.
With the goal of the game clear, you just need to find the best way to achieve it
The other way is to start from scratch and put together strong cards, or cards that synergize well with each other. Or really any cards you like. And then see what is missing, how will they be able to kill your opponent. Keep trying to fill those holes you find. And hopefully, you will end up with a deck that works.
Two examples
Let us look at two examples of decks that will highlight the process a bit better. Well, hopefully, it will. Or perhaps I should say that is the goal. The first example is a combo deck. This means it combines the effect of a few cards in order to kill your opponent. The goal is to get the combination of cards into your hand, and then play them.
Here is the deck code if you want to take a look at the deck: GU_1_4_BDWBDWCCYCCYKDKKDKBGyBGyBErBErBBxBBxBASBASBDMBDMBELBELKAfKAfCEoCEoBDrBDrBDsBDsKAvKAvBGCGAS
This deck utilizes the card Spellslinging Schoolteacher and combines it with one of the cards that let you summon two 1 health creatures for 1 mana. For every one of these creatures summoned you will do 2 damage to your opponent's god. But some quick math shows you that even if you have two Spellslinging Schoolteachers in play. and summon 4 creatures. That only gets you to, 2 for the second Teacher + 4*4 for the 4 creatures summoned, 18 damage.
While 18 damage is very nice, it is far from killing your opponent. This means that we are 12 damage short. Our 18-damage combo is also at the current moment costing us, 2+2+1+1, 6 mana to execute. That leaves very little room for finding the remaining 12 damage.
Let us look at the cards that are available to us, and see if we can not tweak this a little. There are a few cards that let you reduce the mana cost of a card or spell. Some of them are creatures and some other spells. The goal of our deck is to play low-health creatures. Playing other creatures seems rather counterproductive. As that means we need to get rid of them in order to do our full potential damage.
But the card Dimension Door lets you for 1 mana draw a card and reduce its mana cost by 1 if it cost less than your unlocked mana gems. This means that if we can know what card we are going to draw then we can play this card at the opportune moment and draw the right card and reduce its mana cost. This works well with the God power Clear Mind, which lets you forsee 2 cards.
Ok, now we have potentially reduced the mana cost of our combo. But how can we find more damage? There is a card called Clone, which cost 2 mana, that lets you copy the lowest-cost creature in your hand. If we could copy a Schoolteacher that would mean much more damage. And if we could copy two more, that might possibly fix our problems entirely. Let us do some quick math. 2+4+6+8*2 that would give us 28 damage if we had 4 Schoolteachers. We could combo that will a spell that do 2 damage to the enemy god and we would win. Doing 30 damage in one go.
But, Schoolteacher cost 2 mana. And Dimension Dore only reduced the cost by 1. That would mean that if we have the card that cost 2 mana and summons two 1 health creatures in our hand when we cast Clone. We could potentially copy that card instead. And that would not be not very nice. But there is a card that is called Warp Engineer. And it cost two mana, is a 1/3 creature that lets you pick a card that cost no more than the total unlocked mana gems. And reduce that card's mana cost by 2. That would mean we could get the Schoolteachers cost to 0. And if we then were able to copy that card we would have a really cheap combo.
I think you're starting to get the idea. In the end, what you end up with is a deck with a combo that revolves around being able to play 4 cheap Schoolteachers and one creature that summons 2 creatures, does 28 damage, and then do 2 more with a spell. You utilize foresee a lot in order to find the cards you are looking for. And when you have the cards you need you can play Lost In The Depths to basically get rid of all the 1 mana cards you no longer need. Draw any remaining cards for the combo. And then set it up and execute it. Hopefully without you dying in the meantime. As this deck revolves around being able to kill your opponent faster than they are able to kill you.
The other example is one of the decks I recently made, and no it is not a meta-breaking super deck, so do not expect any miracles. ^^
Here is the deck code if you want to check it out: GU_1_5_CDGCDGCBeCAuCEyCEyCATCATCCOCCOCGCCGCCCUCCUKBOKBOKBLKBLKDUKDUKBTKBTCBxCBxIATIATCCPCCPCByCBy
I started out wanting to do something with the recently buffed Loam Strider. A 0/4 creature with regen 2, that every time it heals gets +1 attack. I simply thought that smashing a massive Loam Strider into my opponent sounded extremely fun. But I also was not so blind as to think playing a Loam Strider and buffing it was the end all be all. So I looked at other creatures to see if I could find some synergies. Dagan, the Dawn Wolf was an obvious card. But it alas is not one that I have. And it is more expensive than my small stash of $GODS allow me to spend. So I simply had to find another alternative.
Guerilla Training is a card that I for some reason have missed previously. So I remedied that and put two of them in the deck. It gives the creature +1/+1 at the end of my turn. Meaning for 2 mana it has unlimited upside. So if you can play it on something your opponent is forced to deal with it or almost certainly loos the game.
More creature healing is also always nice, so Forrestheart Dryad will help with that. IT would allow me to attack with my Loam Strider and heal it at the same time, getting an extra buff potentially. I also put in two Moonlight Charms, as they can buff your creatures a lot. Turning anything into a monster basically.
I also put in Bark Skin Warrior, as I thought the upside of being able to buff them, clear enemy creatures, and do face damage at the same time was an interesting combo. Then I just padded the deck out with some cheap creatures, some removals, and some buff cards. While the deck is far from perfect or finished for that matter. It works at the current time. I do have some ideas of cards I would like to add to the deck to potentially have it work much better.
These two ways of approaching creating a deck are something I bring with me from board game designing, another one of my hobbies. There the approach is to either start with a theme, which I would equate to what I did with my deck. And the other is to start with a mechanism. This I find very similar to starting with a combo or win condition already in mind.
Iterations, the deck builders' premiere tool
This is also an important skill to develop if you want to become better at crafting decks. And that is allowing you to see that a deck is never "finished". There is most likely always room for changes or tweaks. Some meta change might mean suddenly every deck is full of relics, now you most likely need to figure out how to be able to fit in relic removal without compromising the overall integrity of the deck.
My approach to deck creation is based on the Engineering Design Process or the Scientific Method, both very similar in principle. Source: https://carlyandadam.com/
This you do by playing, changing things, playing again, and so on. This is what is known as iterations. This also allows you to have a different version of the same deck that is good in different metas. Or vs specific types of decks or Gods.
This also ultimately will help you further down the line when creating other decks. Because you for one will now be better at problem-solving. And if we boil it down, that is basically what the purpose of these iterations is, solving problems. You will also one able to recognize similar problems even if the deck is for a different god. If you have fixed a problem once. Then you know what to look for. And that is always a great starting point.
I hope that you have found this post about the two main ways I approach crafting decks in Gods Unchained. I hope that you will be able to at least take something with you, even if it is just an idea, into the game and your own deck creating. I would also love to hear if you have any special way you approach crafting a deck, if you have please share it with me and everyone else in the comment section.
If you would like to support me and the content I make, please consider following me, reading my other posts, or why not do both instead.
See you on the interwebs!
Picture provided by: Gods Unchained Media, https://pixabay.com/, https://carlyandadam.com/