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Polk5440:

--- Quote from: Titandrake on April 20, 2014, 09:09:15 pm ---I'm going to claim that endgame control and tactics are topics that this board doesn't talk about enough.

--- End quote ---

Hear, hear!

AdamH:
Here's something I've been struggling with recently.

One of the most difficult concepts in the game has to do with junking attacks. It's usually so strong that you have to go for it in conjunction with whatever else you're planning to do.

Except when it's not.

And this is the really hard part. Junking attacks usually have a high cost to the person playing them. It's a spectrum where Sea Hag is all the way on one end and Ambassador is all the way on the other -- Sea Hag does nothing for you, and Ambassador thins which is not only amazing by itself, but especially amazing/important in games with junking attacks. Witch is a great card, but $5 for just +2 Cards is pretty bad.

It would be interesting (to me, at least. If someone can't convince me why I shouldn't do it I might...) to put together such a list of all of the junking cards and try to order them factoring in the overall cost to your deck, and maybe the strength of the junking. Wow, that sentence was terrible. Did that make any sense at all?

Sometimes it's the right move to ignore cursing completely. I was recently crushed by WW because I went for Familiar and he correctly ignored it. I also fondly remember a game I played with Stef (game log) with Familiar and Apothecary -- he hit $3P on his first shuffle and bought an Apothecary, I said to him "Oh god, this is why I lose, isn't it?" and it totally was. I hit $3P on the first shuffle too and got a Familiar and got destroyed because it should have been an Apothecary.

It can be so difficult to judge what the right thing to do is because it depends on so much on the strength of what's out there to deal with curses and so many things. Sometimes I'm right on in my judging and other times I'm way off.

My favorite junking attacks to ignore are Sea Hag and IGG -- for me it's really easy to gauge the high cost of these attacks vs. the other things you can do with halfway decent trashing, but when it comes to other attacks, particularly Familiar, I have difficulty knowing what the right priority is to put on them, and I've been burned by going for a default in these cases (usually priority #1 or completely ignoring them are the defaults).

This is a really difficult question to ask, but I want to ask it anyways just in case someone out there has some knowledge they'd like to impart. What goes through your mind when you're considering the priority you put on a junking attack? If you ignore it, why? If you don't go for it right away, why?

KingZog3:
You mention Familiar, but that's a special case because of the cost. It's very slow and if there is any decent trasher you can usually outrace someone going for Familiars. Witch is different because it's much easier to hit $5 on your second shuffle than $3P and you can even open with a 5/2 start.

SCSN:
Even if I could compile such a list, which I can't, it would be little more than a passport permitting you to travel from one area of ignorance to another. Expertise just can't be spoon-fed. Commit to not getting a junker during the first 8 turns of your next 50 games that include one, and try to make the very best of each of them anyway. I'm positive that afterwards everything that now confuses you will be very clear.

AdamH:
Every junker has a cost. What I want is to understand those costs better so I can gauge power levels. Yeah that's a hard thing to do but after playing a game where I lose due to this I don't usually feel any closer to understanding how to do this, I just know that's why I lost that particular game.

Maybe I just need to play a lot more games like this like SCSN suggests? That's certainly not something I'm opposed to doing, and I realize I'm asking a difficult question here.

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