M:TG to Shadow Era: How to think in card advantage.

[Leeenath]

Thanks for your thoughts and guide Salivanth.Im totally sure that this will help me to become a better player overall.
Ps: I will mention your name when i will get the world champion's throne and the Oscar

[Salivanth]

Mongoosey: Thanks! Great to hear!

Leeenath: You'll have to go through me first, buddy :P Okay, fine, you can have the Oscar.

[SilenceDogood]

Very nice read, some helpful stuff in there for new players.

[NaharPT]

great job, Salivanth.

[Salivanth]

Thanks Nahar! That means a lot coming from you (Not sarcastic!)

[Preybird]

Excellent write up! It's always good to refresh the core concepts of success.

[Salivanth]

Ayup And a lot of new players have told me it's improved their game too, so it's win-win!

[psychobabble]

As others have said, a good article.

I'm not quite sure what you were suggesting with the MTG reference though. if you were saying that you thought MTG players might come to this game and look at a card like Bazaar/bad santa and think it was awesome card advantage, then I don't think that's right. Bazaar is exactly the same as Howling Mine, a card which has been around since alpha (with numerous other versions like the recent Otherworld Atlas), so MTG players should be quite aware that non-unilateral card draw engines shouldn't be used outside of niche strategies - interestingly howling mine is used in turbo fog strategies in MTG, which are very similar to millstalker strategies in SE.

The biggest single difference between bi-lateral draw in MTG and SE is maximum hand size. Bad santa would be universally bad in MTG (outside of some combo applciations where you don't care what your opponent is doing) because of the way maximum hand size works in that game, but the hard cap here means that you can actually exploit it to gain some card advantage. This play is only really powerful in on turn 2 though - gaining a net of 2 cards (ancestral recall!!) if you do a true santa bomb (on the play, after casting a T1 ally), is much more powerful than doing it with an empty hand late game when your opponent has 4 cards, where you actually gain a net of zero cards (you draw 3, lose 1 from playing the santa, your opponent gains 2) at the cost of also accelerating your opponent's game and giving them more options.

one interesting shadow-era specific card advantage question that I think about a bit is how to evaluate shadow era abilities. This can affect how you evaluate plays where you try to draw out shadow ability usage, or how to use it yourself. My general thought is that one ability usage = one card. Perhaps it's better to think about it as 3 SE = one card though (given that's how much you get from shadow font). I'm not quite sure how to think about this one given that it's a completely different resource, but has the sort of effect that you normally get from cards.

[Salivanth]

Shadow Energy is difficult, yeah. The M:TG reference was solely to establish my credentials: I've only been playing for a little over a week now, so if I didn't have my years of competitive TCG experience, I shouldn't even be writing a guide in the first place. I haven't achieved anything notable in Shadow Era yet, so I needed to establish I knew what I was talking about somehow. In fact, most Magic players seem to understand card advantage better than similarly-ranked SE players, because the game's been around so much longer and the players are so much stronger. (I'm sure Shadow Era will be that way someday too, not ragging on you guys!)

I'm aware of the Howling Mine / Bad Santa stuff, but it's still well articulated Thanks! (That being said, Bad Santa is way more powerful than I thought, as I've begun to learn. I always thought of Santa-bombing as a T2 play, but it has plenty of other applications too.)

[Speed Freak]

This article sucks!
You n00b!!

joking..great article man. These write ups make me think how "deep" this game really is. Good Job!