DunDraCon 2018

The DunDraCon demos went pretty much inline with other demos, so I’m going to focus on the tournament.

First, it was a very casual affair, as I played all three match rounds, Jeff played one and a half games before a late arriving player showed up to take over.

Because only Kickstarter backers had cards prior to the event, there wasn’t much expectation for finely honed constructed decks that would ravage opponents.  Two of us had constructed decks – Andy being the other player.  Otherwise, players were playing with the preconstructed ship decks.

Specifically, I was playing my Prepared Scout deck from the prior article, with a few card changes to diversify the some and one or two other Captain’s Deck card changes.  Andy’s deck was a piracy deck with a strong  control/removal aspect.

Andy started out 0-2 against precons.  The takeaway is that precons are reasonably playable, which is something I think card games should strive for with precons.

I made a comment to my last article, but I’ll reiterate.  The Prepared Scout deck is incredibly card intensive.  In my third match, I had 30+ cards in my discard pile in the second round with about two-thirds of my deck in play or in the discard pile before the round ended.  This deck has to win fast or it will not win.

In the second match, I won with no cards left!  None in hand, none in deck, none, none, none.  Also, all of my  should have been taken out by damage, not that it mattered.  In the first match, my largely noninteractive deck bankrupted my opponent through piracy.

I bring these things up because the next takeaway is that knowledge of the game mattered a lot.

I could have easily lost all three matches, two of them if my opponents pirated me a round before I won.  Earlier in the convention, I forgot that the Empress Marava’s ability is a resource phase ability and not just any time, and that ended up affecting my second match opponent at the end of the game as he could have gotten a  token to complete his .  However, not only would that have been something to do during the resource phase, but my Electro-Magnetic Interference hadn’t been revealed, so knowledge of likely  would have been highly useful.

Of course, you could say knowledge of games is always important, but sometimes it isn’t.  How many times have you played a game where everybody says that the first time player often wins?  Not that often?  Well, I hear it fairly often.  What I liked about how much decisions mattered is that complicated games like customizable card games should reward good decision making and should reward knowledge of the card pool.  We didn’t come up with a luck based game.

I wasn’t paying attention to Andy’s games, but it was good to know that just because he could keep taking out  that his opponents were still able to win.  On the other hand, his going bankrupt playing the Subsidized Merchant was a lot of his own doing.  Less risky  control decks are something I keep in mind when Jeff and I work on new cards.  I’m curious to see how the metagame shapes up in terms of responding to such plays.  Will people play more ?  More  restoration effects?  More Armor?  Lost and Found to remove opponents’ ?

Another takeaway was that I felt like we have answers in the card pool for things.  There are a variety of ways to mess with opposing , even ones that don’t involve inflicting 3 , like using the  Psychic Theft to steal skill tokens.  Engineering Kit is a way to mess with when you aren’t using piracy to blow them up.  are currently hard to deal with, but we have plans to make it easier.

Even though the card universe isn’t that large, there are lots of cards I keep thinking should be featured in decks.  Another good sign.  Some cards are going to be better than other cards, but I think there are more interactions, whether economic or just in terms of card abilities, going on than are noticeable at first.

Freelancer and Just a Little Longer … both enable some funkier plays, for instance, and were key to my winning my first match in ways the Prepared Scout isn’t really intended to embrace:  removing  and building up for a big piracy attack.

Hopefully, everyone had fun and we have lots more tournaments.  I want to see what you all come up with and how the metagame shapes up in wider play.