Strategy in Cards Games and Cards that "Win Harder When..."
For the purposes of this post, I will divide cards (Specifically in collectible card games such as Yu-gi-oh!) into three categories:
Wins Harder When Winning
Wins Harder When Losing
Generally Usable
While I strongly suspect the competitive scenes of such games have terminology for these categories (At least one of them), I'm not personally aware of what the terms might be and in any event want to be very clear. More precise definitions follow.
Wins Harder When Winning (WHWW): The card is at its most effective (Or only functional at all) when the user is either specifically advantaged over their opponent or has an unusually large pool of one or more resources at their disposal. Specific examples include United We Stand (The stronger your position, the more it bolsters your position) and pretty much any big Monster that requires multiple Tributes, with circumventing this cost being forbidden. (Because to summon such a Monster requires you have enough cards on hand that you are clearly not in a desperate position) As a result, the card is useful for sealing victory once a strong position has been secured, but is of limited utility when things are going very badly.
Wins Harder When Losing (WHWL): The card is at its most effective (Or only functional at all) when the user is low on resources or specifically disadvantaged when compared to their opponent. Examples include Dark Hole and Torrential Tribute (They destroy every Monster on the field, regardless of ownership -obviously this is at its best when you have little or nothing on the field and your opponent has multiple Monsters), as well as The Fiend Mega Cyber. (It can Special Summon itself, which is fantastic, but only if the enemy has at least two more Monsters than you, which will usually mean you're currently on track to lose) Cards of this category are excellent for pulling the player out of a bad position, but are generally useless or counterproductive to play when the match is currently "anyone's game" or the player is in a strong position.
Generally Usable (GU): These cards provide an advantage to the player with little or no regard to current field conditions. The staple example in Yu-gi-oh! itself is Pot of Greed, which is pretty much always a good thing to draw and will almost always be played immediately, but the vast majority of cards fit into this category. At the abstract level I'm using here, Generally Usable is obviously the superior card archetype, but in actual gameplay it is often outclassed by the prior two categories in performance in situations they can both trigger in, because cards of the other two categories will often have a better payoff, a lesser cost, or both, and only be held back by the fact that they aren't essentially universally usable.
The above categories are a useful way of thinking of cards for the purposes of deck-building. A good deck should be made primarily of GUcards, with a small number of WHWW cards and also a small number of WHWL cards -ideally smaller than your starting hand size for each category, separately. (6 cards, in Yu-gi-oh!, as you have an initial hand of 5 and draw another on your first turn) Why smaller?
Well, if you have many WHWW cards, it's possible to draw an opening hand made entirely of such cards. This can work out fine, if you are able to parlay one of them into enough of an advantageous position that the rest of thing become relevant and consolidate your position, but it can also leave you floundering, waiting for cards that can get you into this superior position. At the extreme end -a deck made of nothing but WHWW cards- this becomes basically a luck-based mission, where you either pull ahead and stay ahead and probably win in short order, or you flail uselessly, falling behind and unable to catch up because you're behind, and ultimately lose. Worse yet, WHWW-heavy decks are prone to falling apart entirely if, at any point, the enemy does something to "reset" the field -in Yu-gi-oh! terms, using Torrential Tribute to annihilate all your Monsters, or Heavy Storm to wipe all your Spell and Trap cards, or anything else that clears the field, because once you're no longer at a strong advantage your WHWW cards are useless (or at least inefficient) unless and until you manage to reacquire enough of an edge that they become relevant again. If the enemy is better able to consolidate their position, this point is unlikely to come before they've defeated you. In short, WHWW-heavy decks are prone to "boom or bust" behavior, where they pull ahead of the opponent explosively and win decisively, or never get enough momentum to have any chance of winning, or they acquire said momentum and then fall apart completely in the face of their field being wiped, as if they'd never gotten the momentum in the first place.
WHWL-heavy decks have the same problem from the opposite direction. A starting hand full of WHWL cards won't do anything at all unless the opponent immediately secures a definitive lead, which can lead to the exact same kind of floundering as a WHWW-heavy deck. The difference is that when the enemy does pull ahead of the WHWL-heavy deck, the WHWL cards kick in and close the gap, possibly pulling the WHWL-heavy deck ahead of the opponent... at which point you're back to floundering, because most of your cards are useless or counter-productive, and can only hope that the lead you've established is enough of an edge to take down your opponent before they can build back up. This in turn runs into the problem that WHWL cards are poor at actually blocking the opponent's attempts to build up, meaning you can only hope they build up just enough to re-enable your WHWL cards, preferably your less self-destructive ones, no more and especially no less than that amount.
Not only that, but WHWL-heavy decks can fall apart completely in the face of very trivial problems -in Yu-gi-oh!, the Spirit Reaper is a Monster that cannot be destroyed by other Monsters attacking it, and can therefore stall even a large number of extremely powerful Monsters indefinitely. However, it is otherwise an easily destroyed Monster and weak in combat -but if all your options for dealing with a Monster that cannot be killed by other Monsters revolve around things like nuking the entire field (A classic WHWL behavior), then you can find yourself in the painful position of having to either sit there and let it live (Protecting the opponent's health and delaying your victory indefinitely) or nuke the field, thus wiping your advantageous position, all to take out what is really a very trivial Monster. Or you may have options that can destroy it, but only if the enemy triggers them for you -Newdoria is a Monster that lets you destroy an enemy Monster of your choice when it is destroyed by an enemy Monster... but if they're going to sit there with their Spirit Reaper indefinitely, they're not going to attack and destroy Newdoria, leaving you helpless.
Now, decks made of nothing but GU might sound like the obvious direction -why bother with these other categories if they can dead-end so badly, right?- but a deck made of nothing but GU cards is a very stable, predictable deck. That's not a good thing. For starters, an all-GU deck really struggles to pull itself out of extremely bad positions -it is entirely possible to be in a position where you have not technically lost, but you might as well give up because your deck simply cannot pull you far enough fast enough to salvage the situation, nor can it nuke the field to at least put you back on even footing with the opponent. (You need WHWL cards for that) But it also means you tend to have slow and steady growth -a deck with a few WHWW cards can pull a little ahead of you and spontaneously go from "slightly advantaged" to "beyond your ability to handle" because the WHWW cards are so powerful and suddenly relevant, and you just cannot catch back up because you are too stable!
GU-exclusive decks also tend to be, for lack of a better term, boring. This isn't a big deal if you only care about winning (Maybe you're in a tournament for the money), but if you're playing the game for, you know, fun, it's a strike against playing that way. Not that it's a good strategy for winning, mind, but if it was that would override "boring" for anyone who prioritized winning over everything else. It's also relevant to people looking at things from a game design perspective -if you want to make a collectible card game of your own, and you find yourself making nothing but GU cards, you're probably making a boring game, which is not exactly the path to success.
Rather, a good deck should be made mostly of GU cards -to maneuver, secure your position, block your enemy's moves, and just generally Get Things Done- with a few WHWW cards -to consolidate your position when you pull ahead of the enemy, if nothing else- and a few WHWL cards so you can still potentially win even if the enemy acquires a strong position. In fact, the three categories can synergize wonderfully: you end up behind, play a WHWL card, that "resets" the field, you play a GU card or two to get a lead, and then you play a WHWW card and in one turn you've gone from "probably dead" to "on track to win". Being able to identify which of these three categories a card falls under, and work on your deck's distribution of such cards, can dramatically improve your play.
This is also a useful concept for game designers to keep in mind -and not just for card games. But this post is already quite long, so I think I'll come back to that another day.
Wins Harder When Winning
Wins Harder When Losing
Generally Usable
While I strongly suspect the competitive scenes of such games have terminology for these categories (At least one of them), I'm not personally aware of what the terms might be and in any event want to be very clear. More precise definitions follow.
Wins Harder When Winning (WHWW): The card is at its most effective (Or only functional at all) when the user is either specifically advantaged over their opponent or has an unusually large pool of one or more resources at their disposal. Specific examples include United We Stand (The stronger your position, the more it bolsters your position) and pretty much any big Monster that requires multiple Tributes, with circumventing this cost being forbidden. (Because to summon such a Monster requires you have enough cards on hand that you are clearly not in a desperate position) As a result, the card is useful for sealing victory once a strong position has been secured, but is of limited utility when things are going very badly.
Wins Harder When Losing (WHWL): The card is at its most effective (Or only functional at all) when the user is low on resources or specifically disadvantaged when compared to their opponent. Examples include Dark Hole and Torrential Tribute (They destroy every Monster on the field, regardless of ownership -obviously this is at its best when you have little or nothing on the field and your opponent has multiple Monsters), as well as The Fiend Mega Cyber. (It can Special Summon itself, which is fantastic, but only if the enemy has at least two more Monsters than you, which will usually mean you're currently on track to lose) Cards of this category are excellent for pulling the player out of a bad position, but are generally useless or counterproductive to play when the match is currently "anyone's game" or the player is in a strong position.
Generally Usable (GU): These cards provide an advantage to the player with little or no regard to current field conditions. The staple example in Yu-gi-oh! itself is Pot of Greed, which is pretty much always a good thing to draw and will almost always be played immediately, but the vast majority of cards fit into this category. At the abstract level I'm using here, Generally Usable is obviously the superior card archetype, but in actual gameplay it is often outclassed by the prior two categories in performance in situations they can both trigger in, because cards of the other two categories will often have a better payoff, a lesser cost, or both, and only be held back by the fact that they aren't essentially universally usable.
The above categories are a useful way of thinking of cards for the purposes of deck-building. A good deck should be made primarily of GUcards, with a small number of WHWW cards and also a small number of WHWL cards -ideally smaller than your starting hand size for each category, separately. (6 cards, in Yu-gi-oh!, as you have an initial hand of 5 and draw another on your first turn) Why smaller?
Well, if you have many WHWW cards, it's possible to draw an opening hand made entirely of such cards. This can work out fine, if you are able to parlay one of them into enough of an advantageous position that the rest of thing become relevant and consolidate your position, but it can also leave you floundering, waiting for cards that can get you into this superior position. At the extreme end -a deck made of nothing but WHWW cards- this becomes basically a luck-based mission, where you either pull ahead and stay ahead and probably win in short order, or you flail uselessly, falling behind and unable to catch up because you're behind, and ultimately lose. Worse yet, WHWW-heavy decks are prone to falling apart entirely if, at any point, the enemy does something to "reset" the field -in Yu-gi-oh! terms, using Torrential Tribute to annihilate all your Monsters, or Heavy Storm to wipe all your Spell and Trap cards, or anything else that clears the field, because once you're no longer at a strong advantage your WHWW cards are useless (or at least inefficient) unless and until you manage to reacquire enough of an edge that they become relevant again. If the enemy is better able to consolidate their position, this point is unlikely to come before they've defeated you. In short, WHWW-heavy decks are prone to "boom or bust" behavior, where they pull ahead of the opponent explosively and win decisively, or never get enough momentum to have any chance of winning, or they acquire said momentum and then fall apart completely in the face of their field being wiped, as if they'd never gotten the momentum in the first place.
WHWL-heavy decks have the same problem from the opposite direction. A starting hand full of WHWL cards won't do anything at all unless the opponent immediately secures a definitive lead, which can lead to the exact same kind of floundering as a WHWW-heavy deck. The difference is that when the enemy does pull ahead of the WHWL-heavy deck, the WHWL cards kick in and close the gap, possibly pulling the WHWL-heavy deck ahead of the opponent... at which point you're back to floundering, because most of your cards are useless or counter-productive, and can only hope that the lead you've established is enough of an edge to take down your opponent before they can build back up. This in turn runs into the problem that WHWL cards are poor at actually blocking the opponent's attempts to build up, meaning you can only hope they build up just enough to re-enable your WHWL cards, preferably your less self-destructive ones, no more and especially no less than that amount.
Not only that, but WHWL-heavy decks can fall apart completely in the face of very trivial problems -in Yu-gi-oh!, the Spirit Reaper is a Monster that cannot be destroyed by other Monsters attacking it, and can therefore stall even a large number of extremely powerful Monsters indefinitely. However, it is otherwise an easily destroyed Monster and weak in combat -but if all your options for dealing with a Monster that cannot be killed by other Monsters revolve around things like nuking the entire field (A classic WHWL behavior), then you can find yourself in the painful position of having to either sit there and let it live (Protecting the opponent's health and delaying your victory indefinitely) or nuke the field, thus wiping your advantageous position, all to take out what is really a very trivial Monster. Or you may have options that can destroy it, but only if the enemy triggers them for you -Newdoria is a Monster that lets you destroy an enemy Monster of your choice when it is destroyed by an enemy Monster... but if they're going to sit there with their Spirit Reaper indefinitely, they're not going to attack and destroy Newdoria, leaving you helpless.
Now, decks made of nothing but GU might sound like the obvious direction -why bother with these other categories if they can dead-end so badly, right?- but a deck made of nothing but GU cards is a very stable, predictable deck. That's not a good thing. For starters, an all-GU deck really struggles to pull itself out of extremely bad positions -it is entirely possible to be in a position where you have not technically lost, but you might as well give up because your deck simply cannot pull you far enough fast enough to salvage the situation, nor can it nuke the field to at least put you back on even footing with the opponent. (You need WHWL cards for that) But it also means you tend to have slow and steady growth -a deck with a few WHWW cards can pull a little ahead of you and spontaneously go from "slightly advantaged" to "beyond your ability to handle" because the WHWW cards are so powerful and suddenly relevant, and you just cannot catch back up because you are too stable!
GU-exclusive decks also tend to be, for lack of a better term, boring. This isn't a big deal if you only care about winning (Maybe you're in a tournament for the money), but if you're playing the game for, you know, fun, it's a strike against playing that way. Not that it's a good strategy for winning, mind, but if it was that would override "boring" for anyone who prioritized winning over everything else. It's also relevant to people looking at things from a game design perspective -if you want to make a collectible card game of your own, and you find yourself making nothing but GU cards, you're probably making a boring game, which is not exactly the path to success.
Rather, a good deck should be made mostly of GU cards -to maneuver, secure your position, block your enemy's moves, and just generally Get Things Done- with a few WHWW cards -to consolidate your position when you pull ahead of the enemy, if nothing else- and a few WHWL cards so you can still potentially win even if the enemy acquires a strong position. In fact, the three categories can synergize wonderfully: you end up behind, play a WHWL card, that "resets" the field, you play a GU card or two to get a lead, and then you play a WHWW card and in one turn you've gone from "probably dead" to "on track to win". Being able to identify which of these three categories a card falls under, and work on your deck's distribution of such cards, can dramatically improve your play.
This is also a useful concept for game designers to keep in mind -and not just for card games. But this post is already quite long, so I think I'll come back to that another day.
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