Ms. Leonhart, Or: How I Learned to Stop Whining and Embrace the Meta (Part 4)
by Dani Diaz
Part 4 – The One Where Dani Gets Into Theory
UniVersus is a game with a lot of moving parts. It’s easy to get caught up in the minutia of every interaction and overcompensate when presented with emergent strategies and techniques. For this stage of deckbuilding with Annie, I need to start refining the strategies that I’m going for and thinking about what my best and worst outcomes are in any given game. I’m also going to share the things I’m working on as a player
In the last article, I mentioned the mantra of “just kill ‘em.” This was our guiding phrase when cutting cards and shaping the strategy of the deck. The thought was that I don’t need as many answers to various strategies if the goal is to close the game out in turn two or three, which is consistent with making an aggro deck.
You may be familiar with the TCG archetypes of aggro, midrange, control, and combo. In my opinion, these tend to coalesce into three main categories in UniVersus; combo is present in pretty much every other archetype, so we make a triangle out of aggro, midrange, and control.
Aggro decks want to win fast and enable their offense as soon as possible. Generally, Air, Chaos, and Fire decks tend to be more aggressive. Midrange decks like to be a blend of survivability and raw power. They want to get their combo pieces out and wait for an opportunity to backswing. All, Life, and Order decks make for good midrange options. Control decks are all about managing the game state on both sides of the board. They want to tell the opponent “no” when they try to mount their offense and sculpt a perfect win condition. Water and Void are the premier control symbols.
Aggro tends to beat control, control tends to beat midrange, and midrange tends to beat aggro. You can think of this as a sort of rock, paper, scissors scenario, but there are many layers of strategy within each archetype. Familiarity with this triangle will help me get my point across better in this article.
Once I had decided that Annie was best suited for an aggro playstyle for my skill level as a player, it became easier to make cuts and try to make the deck’s strategy more consistent.
The biggest thing was reducing risk. If I sputter out during a string of attacks or fail an important defensive check, it could be over in the blink of an eye. So, for this I leaned (once again) on our teammate Richard’s strategy for mitigating risk and making gameplay decisions.
With an intimate knowledge of how your deck is constructed, you can assess the potential risks at any given time by reviewing your board state. The worst checks in any deck are the attacks. If you know you have 60 cards in your deck and 20 of them are attacks, you know there’s roughly a 33 percent chance that you check an attack off the top. Makes sense, right?
So if you have a stage of 3 backups and 4 foundations, a hand of 4 attacks and 3 foundations, and 10 cards in discard (3 of which are attacks), what are the chances you check an attack in a critical moment?
We subtract the 17 non-attacks (3 backups and 4 foundations in stage, 3 foundations in hand, and 7 non-attacks in discard) from our total deck size, leaving us with 43 cards. Then, we subtract our attacks (4 in hand, 3 in discard) from our total of 20, leaving us with 13. That means 13 out of our 43 remaining cards are attacks, which is roughly a 30 percent chance that we check a 3 when we try to play a card.
These chances shift constantly over the course of the game, so it helps to check your discard pile and get a mental idea of the board state whenever you’re unsure about passing a check. This technique is especially important on defense!
In the Annie deck, I only run 5- and 6-check foundations and only 3-check attacks. So, I know at any given time the minimum I could check is a 3. With sufficient analysis of my stage and discard pile, I can mitigate risk by using the strategies above. Annie’s ability to add two to her checks on every attack also helps even out bad checks!
Once you have built some comfort with assessing your board state, it’s time to start reviewing card choices. It can be tempting to run a little bit of everything in your deck so that you have something for every situation, but that’s usually counterproductive in the end!
For an aggro deck like my Annie build, the goal is to get the offense online as fast as possible while mitigating possible answers from midrange and control decks. For most of these situations, the midrange and control answers are to block with Breaker effects to disrupt your attack checks and to force non-attack forms using cards like Kaya’s Compassion and Eri Smiles.
Thankfully, we have answers of our own: Dark Ward and Pass Through Walls, which cancel cardpool responses like Breaker and Echo, and Breaker and Asset abilities respectively. If we happen to find multiples of these, we can answer most responses to our win turns.
So, do we run just Dark Ward, just Pass Through Walls, or a combination of both? If a combination, how many of each? For decisions like this, I like to follow the guidance of friend of the team, PippaSad.
She recommends playing test games using a technique called Counting Spots. When given multiple options for cards in a given slot (say, a 2-difficulty defensive foundation like Dark Ward/Pass Through Walls), you play test games with them incorporated into your deck and make notes on how the card performed in various situations. Were you happy to see that card? Did it overperform or underperform? Make a little note with your opponent’s character and the outcome of the game, and how the card felt to play.
Don’t get caught up in the game results – sometimes a card does absolutely nothing over the course of a set, and sometimes it clutches you a victory. Try to test it in a variety of scenarios before making more adjustments to the deck. Once you get more comfortable with your gameplay style and ability, you can iterate on your decklists a little faster. But as noted at the beginning of the article, there are a ton of interaction points in UniVersus and it’s easy to get lost in the sauce.
In addition, you can start note-taking during your matches, which helps to vibe-check how the deck is doing at a macro level. Write down your opponent’s character and what general gameplan they’re going for. Is it Hange Aggro? Beast Titan midrange? King Ghidorah control?
Note what your build turns look like, and if you had any notable plays. Shout out your successful plays and call out your misplays! Also keep track of how many turns the games last on average. These statistics can help guide how you fine-tune the deck going forward.
With all that said, I’ll be incorporating these three techniques into my playtesting as we creep closer and closer to the Louisville major regional. I appreciate you reading these articles and value your feedback! If you have any techniques that you use to level up your gameplay, please post them in the comments below.
Thanks for reading and as always – keep coping!