On Competitive Originality

Posted on Thursday, January 7, 2010

For the purposes of this article, when I say original I mean deck types that do not see a lot of play. I do not mean that the deck has never been done before.

I think one of the main things in this game that other games don’t have is the concept of being original. Competitive originality is a hard concept. The two words go together almost as much as mayonnaise and peanut butter. The idea for some people is to play lower tier decks because they think it somehow makes them better (at deck building) than a person who plays the higher tier deck or even the copied idea. The truth in this game is that originality is meaningless to how competitive games are played.

As other articles before me have said, you get no points for being original, playing different decks, or making huge unnecessary plays. The point of originality is not to take the moral high ground but to have fun or if you like me, you enjoy a sort of self-fulfillment or pride when you are able to do well with decks that other people have stated to be trash. The trick is to not let the mindset make you believe that you are better by playing original decks.

I do not think that the right attitude at all is to feel like a player is taking the moral high ground by playing something original. Rather, in order to be truly good at originality I think a player must first be willing to accept the fact that the higher tier decks are actually really good, and I also think that people also have to get off of the moral high ground.

The point of doing this is self-discovery and will also help to build better original decks without having a negative view on the people who do play the game with tier 1 decks or netdecks. With that said, I think that in order to be good at originality you also have to know how the top tier decks work and have a better understanding of them than the average player. What that entails is also playing with the top tier decks and not necessarily restricting yourself to one decktype.

The next step is actually building the deck. When building with competitive originality in mind you have to first ask yourself what your deck’s goal is. This is where I feel like a lot of players get the wrong idea. What usually ends up happening is a person will build the original deck but hinder on its true goal or ideal by mixing it with something else, not focusing on the goal entirely, or being just plain wrong on the goal of the deck. This is much different than building a deck with an engine in it (like a D-hero engine in the Codalas deck).

I feel like some examples of this would be the Harpy Anti-Meta deck that did well at one of the nationals competitions or Gravekeeper decks revolving around swarm and beat down. The main thing to realize when deciding on the goal of your deck is to ask yourself if there is another deck that can accomplish that goal a lot better than your deck. For example, the Harpy Lady Anti-Meta deck did accomplish what a lot of originality players set out to do, but then a person could ask themselves “does this deck accomplish anti-meta better than Gadgets or Little City?” When judging how to build an original deck you should build around what theme or idea excels at the most.

The next thing is play testing. Play testing with an original deck has two different steps rather than the usual one. When play testing with a deck known to do well (more than likely a better tier deck) you play test to play the deck better and analyze what the best plays are in certain match ups. The difference with an original deck is that play testing in the earlier stages ends up focusing more on what works in the deck and what doesn’t more than what to do in the specific match-ups. What ends up happening is testing with an original deck or idea takes more time than play testing with a solidified idea.

What it comes down to is that competitive originality is innovation. The idea is to take an idea or a lower level deck, and try to turn it into the best deck possible. Doing this can lead to some great new ideas, or some great new failures, the trick is doing it right.

~E.P.B.