Friday, November 23, 2012

Perfect Memory v2: When to Push

Alrighty then. For a little something something, here's a little article on how to decide when and how effective your big pushes are going to be.

First of all, what is the average amount of shield in most decks? Anyone? Well, in a deck that runs 4 Draw triggers and has a 14-11-8 set up, we come to around 5408 shield as our average, close to about 5K shield per card.

So, how does this help? Refer to an earlier article, the first Perfect Memory post. There, I explained the importance of keeping track of the opponent's drive checks so you have information on their hand. Well, the biggest flaw about relying only on drive checks is that you have absolutely no idea what the cards they draw in the beginning of their turn are. This is where the shield average comes in.

Shield average basically works like this. Every turn at grade 3, most decks will cycle through 3 cards off the top of their deck. Their draw, and their Twin Drive. This means you can presume an average of about 15K shield being added into their hand.

Quiz time~ If I Twin Drive into a 10K shield and a Grade 3, what can you assume my draw in the beginning of the turn probably was.

A) a Grade 3
B) A 5K shield
C) A 10K shield
D) The child of the Flying Spaghetti Monster

That's right. D. But because this is a card game, let's just go with B.

Now you can mentally check off that the card I drew in the beginning of the turn was a 5K shield. With a bit of development, your mind can probably be trained to remember the cards that are revealed to you, and the probable average of the unknown cards in your hand. If that's a bit to hard for you, you can instead think of it like this.

The opponent has 6 cards in their hand. You already know what 3 of them are. Because you know the average shield in a deck is about 5K, you can presume that those last 3 cards in their hand come to around 15K shield.

There, an easier way to guess at the opponent's hand. Little word of warning though, this works best in the late game, where the opponent stops throwing all of their 5K shields (grades 1 and 2) onto the board and otherwise messing with that average shield in their hand.

Now. Perfect Guards.

Perfect Guards are one of the biggest nuisances you probably ever can put up with when it comes to high power decks. However, there's a really easy way around them.

49/4=12.25~12 cards. Basically, exercise your right to be allowed to count the amount of cards left in the opponent's deck. And yes, it's very legal, you're just not allowed to be able to see or reveal to the opponent the cards you are counting off, so just be careful of that and punch the jackasses who don't allow you to in the face. Anyway, the point here is that there is probably a Perfect Guard for every 12 cards in the opponent's deck, which can come down to a lot of things really. The most wary thing is the halfway point for decks. Generally, you're going to expect to have the opponent go through 2 perfect guards by the time they hit 24/25 cards left in their deck, so if you have only seen 1 at that point, it wouldn't be completely wrong to assume another is in their hand. Let 12 be your magic number in this big picture of things.

If the amount of cards that aren't in your opponent's deck are anywhere from 1-12 (there are 1-12 cards in total in their hand, field, damage, and drop zone), you can presume they have already cycled through one perfect guard at that point, and thus if no Perfect Guard has been revealed to you (there isn't one in their damage, drop zone, field, or the hand you know about), you can probably assume that a card in their hand that you don't know about is a Perfect Guard. This will repeat for the next 13-24 cards, for every 12 that you don't see a Perfect Guard, you can guess there is a Perfect Guard in their hand. So the opponent has a Perfect Guard, how does this help you with your rush?

It doesn't, but atleast now you know a method to know when the opponent has perfect guards. To avoid them, you now follow a similar rule. 12 cards is the key for this as well. If the opponent is anywhere within their first cycle of 12 cards, and they have a Perfect Guard that isn't in their hand (like say, the damage zone, drop zone, or field), then any cards in their hand that you don't know about you can safely presume are not perfect guards. In their next cycle of 12, keep track of 2 Perfect Guards. If there are 2 Perfect Guards in this cycle that are in play but aren't in their hand, you can presume that any unknown cards in their hand aren't Perfect Guards, and so on. This is how you can safely wander into Ezel/Colonel like territories of power and manipulate the game in your favor through pure strength. If you can catch the opponent off guard without their Perfect Guards with high powered attacks, it can greatly change the game in your favor.

To sum it up, the average shielding of a deck is about 5K per card, and you should be wary of Perfect Guards every 12 cards. Hopefully, this teaches a bit of when to push and how to decide.

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