Deck Building Option!

[aprillo]

Hey friends, some of you may have been wondering what I've been up to for the past week, as I haven't really been on the forums. Well have I got a surprise for you!

I had found that since I acquired TP, SFF, HP1 & GH that the games lately have been leaning towards Hero victories more and more. Especially with TP. For one, the Heroes are definitely favored in TP in terms of new cards. Don't get me wrong, there are some devastating Zombie cards in there, but it's not enough to combat them, especially since hero upgrades are CRAZY and zombie upgrades are... yawn... sorry I kinda dozed off there. I read reviews with similar sentiments, but the only suggestions I saw were to mix the decks. Now If your mixing the original deck with the new ones, yes it waters down the heroes's deck, and the zombie deck still stays pretty strong, but suddenly cycling becomes literally impossible, and the Heroes have 0 chance of running out of cards.

So I thought do both, make two equally strong zombie decks, and two equally strong hero decks by splitting up all doubles, quadruples etc. of the various cards. That was okay... but still, not balanced, it meant the zombies still had about 72 cards which is definitely more than desired, and the heroes had the same number, and still tons of crazy powerful cards.

I came to the conclusion that the only way to restore balance, and still be able to play with some of the new cards vs the older ones would be to add a deck building component to the game. Initially I thought okay choose a range of deck sizes, and then go. I quickly realized though that whatever the range is, Heroes would put the maximum amount of cards, and only the strongest one, and zombies would put the minimum.

This brought me to the realization that the real issue is the lack of balanced decks. I needed a way to ensure that if you put to many strong cards as a zombie, you deck would be so large you wouldn't be able to cycle, no rely on getting any specific card desired. And I needed to make it that if heroes put to many strong cards, their deck would be dangerously small, and wind up costing them the game.

So I rated every single card, from the base game right up to timber peak, for both heroes and zombies. Then I recorded all the ratings in excel, taking into account things like frequency of usefulness, potential synergies with other cards, and stand alone strength. I even took into account the number of copies each card has, as even that could make 1 card seem more alluring than other ones. I divided them all by type, and made a detailed rating system, tweaked the card values until I was satisfied with the average deck size for each side. Because lets face it, zombies could easily do very well with a deck of 25 cards of their choosing, and heroes would be happy to include all the cards available, maybe excluding a few that they personally find less valuable.

I just finished it an hour ago. But I'm fairly confident no play testing will be needed as mathematically it makes perfect sense.

If your like me and have found the games less exciting lately, or maybe have kept TP out of your LNOE games, and have been playing them separately, perhaps this will be your solution too.

Enjoy guys!
Happy Deck Building

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Oh for those of you with BitF, I'm sorry but those cards aren't included in this list as I'm still missing that one.

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Here I've also included PDF Versions so that printing will be made easier.