Today’s repost is one of the articles that we reference frequently when training. BobbySapphire himself talks strategy and the Strategies vs Outcomes matrix. Enjoy!

Required reading: http://www.starcitygames.com/article/25607_Top-Right-Bottom-Left-JUSTICE.html

The above article outlines the Strategies vs. Outcomes matrix. If you’ve never played Magic: The Gathering and hate everything about it, simply Ctrl+F “The reality is that even” and you’ll skip right to the important stuff. What Mike Flores, who is a master of CCG strategy writing, does in this article is outline the difference between the four areas of the grid: Getting Lucky and winning despite your bad play, Getting Unlucky and losing despite your good play, making the best strategy and winning, and making the worst strategy and losing. I’m not kidding, go read that article, it’s amazing; but, the long and short of it is that the grid eventually looks like this:

The question is, where do you want to be?

Because we’re playing a dice game, the amount of luck we all face in a given game is astronomically higher than in the comparative M:TG context that the original article was written with. However, this doesn’t change the grid very much. It might push the X-axis a few tix up the Y-axis (because the luck outcomes sometimes outweigh the strategy you can employ), but I think this concept is very applicable to Star Wars: Destiny.

In the past few weeks I’ve adjusted my playtesting practice. I only play “new decks” against unknown TTS players, and once I’ve tuned things a bit I play with my teammates NJCuenca and HonestlySarcastc, or I solicit some of the players from our Patreon Discord Channel, many of whom I respect as deckbuilders and players. I originally teamed up with Nick and Joe because I knew Nick from my M:TG days and knew he was a solid card player. Joe absolutely dominates the Massachusetts tournament scene. I was very new to the game and wanted to get better so I surrounded myself with great players. Thusly, my game improved and I’m happy with where I am, but still feel I have a ways to go.

My playtesting goal, and it has been for some time, is to lose. I truly feel that only by understanding how we lost can we discover how to win. The converse is a much more difficult answer to ascertain, but we’ll start with it nonetheless.

HOW DID I WIN?

It’s really tough to figure out how you actually won in a game of Destiny (strategically, in terms of the matrix we are discussing) unless the game is very, very close. When a game isn’t close you had to have rolled pretty well and/or your opponent had to have rolled pretty poorly to get that much disparity in the result. There are a few things we can look for to figure out why we won that game once we turn on our fog lamps and gaze through the haze of luck. For one, did we kill the correct character first?

A lot of games are decided by the first character to die, but not so much when you kill the wrong guy, and one question that’s getting a lot of attention right now is who do you kill out of Unkar or FN. If you kill FN you stop all of the weapons shenanigans, and you could get a bit lucky and take FN out before he gets two redeploy weapons on him. Conversely, you could kill Unkar Plutt and make your opponent play with a very poor FN for the rest of the game. I don’t think either decision will hurt you too badly, but what about in Aurra/FN, or Anakin, FN, or Emo Kids?

Let’s say you decide to go after Kylo Ren when facing Emo Kids b/c your opponent slaps a Holocron and a Force Speed on him Round 1; Unless you played a round one Cunning, you should still go after Anakin. Our worst-case scenario vs. Emo kids is them resolving Force Speed special, rolling Anakin, hitting double special, then resolving them. If we allow our opponents to do 6 damage to us per turn while only taking 2, and splitting damage by focusing our fire on Kylo, we’re making a bad decision and we belong in the bottom left corner of the grid. Even if we fully acknowledge that Anakin rolling and resolving double specials every turn before we can mitigate them is extremely lucky, we still made the terrible decision of going after Kylo first. Many people will walk away from that game blaming the dice, and just like every game of Destiny, part of it is the dice.



Don’t be bottom left, bro. Kill me first #soemo

If we focus down Anakin instead of Kylo and still lose the game, we put ourselves in the top half of the grid; we gave ourselves the best chance to win, but didn’t get there. We should try to be in the top half of the grid every time.

Some decisions are even easier than this: You’re playing Unkar Plutt and are showing 3 value in your pool. Your opponent has four cards in hand, you know this because you played Friends in Low Places and there is a 0-cost card, and three 3-cost cards in his hand. You Plutt there, even if you hit the zero. Even if you hit the zero five times in a row, in these situations you always Plutt there.

Another easy decision: You have an FN with two redeploy weapons and 1HP left vs. your opponent’s Emperor with 2 HP left, who has already rolled in and is showing lethal damage. Your other character is Aurra Sing with a Fast Hands and 7 HP left. Aurra can survive whatever Palpatine has on table, but only barely, and not if your opponent drew a No Mercy. Aurra is 75% to kill Palp on the spot. You roll Aurra.

Both of these situations have come up over the past few days in games I’ve played. In both cases I made the decision where the odds were, and in each case I ripped the 0 with my Plutt, and rolled 1Disrupt/Blank with my Aurra.



Seriously, bro?

How Did I Lose?

The very first thing that ever prompted me to write about Destiny was a loss I took vs. Jango/Trooper/Trooper; I allowed myself to fall one action behind where I needed to be and lost the game because of it.

You can look at the reddit post that explains the “what’s the play” situation here: https://www.reddit.com/r/swdestiny/comments/5vj7md/whats_the_play/

It’s a pretty interesting dilemma, so hopefully you took a look. What I should’ve done was played around Armed to the Teeth by killing Jango. I played bad and got wrecked. It was still very early on in my Destiny career, but it was a great learning experience.

Figuring out what to play around is one of the best ways you can put yourself in the top half of the grid and playing strategically sound. My teammate HonestlySarcastc is really excellent at figuring out what I have in our games, and he’s been putting a ton of videos out for our $10 Patreon Subscribers – a shameless plug, but if you want to get better at Destiny I think Joe is one of the best players in the world, which is why I sought to team up with him. Signing up to get more content from him is an earnest recommendation.

I recently ran a best of three in some private GenCon testing. I need to omit some details so as not to give away the technology of my teammate, but it was very late in the game of an FN mirror. In the first game he was ahead all game, but instead of rolling to start the final turn, I rolled my FN and hit like, 2X on each of my four dice and the game was over. He lamented over having lost a game he probably should’ve won, and said that by doing so it “ruined” the testing element by logging an L instead of a W in the spreadsheet. In the next game, things were also super close going into the final round, and he chose to take some action rather than putting a Baton on his FN and rolling it to kill mine. I played a Rocket Launcher on my FN and had a 66% chance of killing his FN with no redeploy for his last character that was also close to dead. I whiffed, he hit on his Baton and won the game. He was thrilled to log the W and even commented that he thought his FN deck auto beat my version (to be fair, he absolutely crushed me in game three).

In these two situations, the W/L is the least important piece of information to come from these games. Maybe I’ve spent too many hours watching boring-ass baseball, but Wins and Losses are the stats least attributable to evaluating a pitcher.



[[Baseball digression: When Roger Clemens pitched for the Astros he was far and away the best pitcher in the Major Leagues (steroids is a helluva drug), but couldn’t get any run support, thus couldn’t get many wins, and got robbed of a Cy Young award in 2005. In 2006 Clemens only pitched 113 innings and thus didn’t qualify for any season rankings despite having the best ERA in the NL, a full point lower than the eventual CY Young winner Brandon Webb]]

Focusing on the wins and losses of those games puts us firmly on the right side the grid; we are purely focused on outcome and are not taking the poor strategy into account whatsoever. In my eyes, my opponent was operating on the bottom half, in the first game he played bad and got punished, in the second game he played bad and won. These are self-admitted mistakes keep in mind. There are plenty of games where I play terrible; I’m not here to judge. In fact, I love when HonestlySarcastc snidely points out my bad plays, I write every single one of them down when he does because I want to be in the top half of that grid. I want my strategy to be sound every time I put my character cards down on the mat. And when I look back on the aforementioned mystery games leading up to GenCon, I’ll be ignoring the W/L column and skipping right to the game notes column, where I wrote: “Opponent allowed himself to fall behind on actions vs. FN late in the game, gave us a chance to win.”

Lesson of that testing session: Don’t fall behind on actions vs. FN, especially late in games where everyone is close to dying. We could further evaluate this as well: maybe we shouldn’t leave FN as the last character on the board since with the pseudo-deletion of Fast Hands from the meta he’s one of the few characters that can roll and resolve in one action. However we choose to break it down, the actual result of the games have no bearings on our ability to decide whether or not each player took the best possible strategies.

I hope this all made sense, and I hope you checked out the Mike Flores article at the beginning of the post. Love him or hate him, his work is the best CCG-related writing I’ve ever encountered. I have a bunch of his articles saved if anyone is interesting.

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Thanks for reading!

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