Data Editor Paradise

by Mike Rosenberg

Data.

For many, it means crunching numbers, analyzing trends, and doing something when you’d rather be browsing Reddit or playing a video game.

However, data has its benefits of…well, being kind of important for a lot of jobs out there. It’s been pretty key for me while working as well. As a long-time gamer and writer, I’ve spent the better part of the past three years doing event coverage for trading card game tournaments on weekends. One of the things we are tasked with completing when doing event coverage is some data entry and data analysis. Specifically speaking, when it comes to constructed trading card game events, we record what people are playing, and then do a metagame analysis with that data.

Why do we do this? It’s valuable information to read. For many, following the tournament coverage gives them a leg-up at their local events. What’s doing well? What’s falling short from getting a tournament win? What do people like to play? We report this to them. We crunch numbers, tally up columns, and give people the what/where/when/how/why of everything from a tournament’s attendance to what people chose to play.

But for me as a player, I also like data because it can tell me what I’m doing right and what I’m doing wrong. How often has my deck won compared to lost? What is the percentage ratio of resources to troops/actions/constants? These are things I like learning as a player, since it lets me make my deck the best it can be.

And one of the things that makes HEX: Shards of Fate so great for guys like me, who churn through deck list after deck list for data or other sources for little ways to improve my own decks, is that the deck editor does a lot of this work for me.

Wait, what?

Deck Editor Tools

Let’s start with the basic deck editor that you will work with when tinkering on new Constructed HEX decks. If you haven’t gotten a chance to see the deck editor, see below for some cool screenshots!

Note: this is a pre-alpha design. Current design may change during development.

Isn’t that layout pretty?

The Deck Editor has a couple of key things to take note of. The top part of the layout is your collection layout. You can drag cards from your collection into your deck, which is the bottom half of the screen. When you mouse over a card, it is displayed on the right, like that Wild Source is being displayed in the screenshot above.

Then there’s your champion. You can customize your champion, its talents, and its gear for your PvE experiences on the Deck Editor screen.

The thing that really excites me about this screenshot is the filters. Need to find a specific card? Sort by the gem color and/or by card type. Know what you’re looking for? Just type it in. If you’d like to play additional filters on your searches, you can do that with the advanced search button, which lets you search by cost, threshold, and more.

And if you’re someone who likes looking at a more formulated list when putting your deck together, you can do that as well. The screen you see is just one of three different modes of viewing your collection and deck in the Deck Editor.

But as I said earlier, I love data. So let’s delve into that.

Deck Statistics

The Deck Statistics feature is easily my favorite element of the Deck Editor for HEX. When you bring this menu up, you can get a whole load of data.

Note: this is a pre-alpha design. Current design may change during development.

Costs: See the costs and thresholds of all of the cards in your deck. Find the right ratio of costs that will make your deck tick!

Ratios: See how your deck breaks down. What ratio of your deck is resources? What about troops? Find the right mix of card types by selecting ratio and see what spread of cards you’ve got lined up.

Resources: What types of resources does your deck need to function? This feature lets you see the exact breakdown of resources that your deck currently has.

Performance: Curious to see how your deck is performing? You can see your total wins, losses, and win percentage with the deck.

And then there’s my favorite part of the Deck Statistics feature:

Note: this is a pre-alpha design. Current design may change during development.

Note: this is a pre-alpha design. Current design may change during development.

How well does your deck draw? What sorts of opening hands will you get? The Test Draw feature lets you do just that: test how your deck draws! Would you like to see how skimming a few resources may affect your opening hands? What about adding a few resources? Perhaps you’re trying a deck that mixes two resource types together. How good are the opening hands? Can you play all of your cards a reasonable percentage of the time?

The Test Draw feature is hands-down one of my favorite elements of the Deck Editor. You not only get a chance to look at all sorts of statistics about your deck, but you can tweak things here and there and see how it plays out with a few simple clicks!

All in all, the Deck Editor feature is robust and offers a person like me a ton of different forms of data to process. I can look at the breakdown of my own decks and test draw simple changes, or when the game is launched, I can try other people’s decks and see how they draw as well. What if I made minor modifications to a friend’s deck, or the next tournament winning deck out there? The Deck Editor feature shows me all the data I need, and even lets me test out how my changes may impact a deck!

I’m excited to see fans out there using data to not only improve their own creations, but to show off to other people as well. What better way to show people watching your Twitch.TV stream than by opening up a boatload of statistics and options that help you explain what your deck is and how it works?

More to the point, think about all the work coverage guys like us did for tournaments to bring you decklists, metagame breakdowns, and more. When Cryptozoic provides tournament results and decklists to HEX fans everywhere, collecting registered decklists for an event becomes easy with tournament entries done online, players can get all of that data almost instantaneously. Interested in trying out the biggest deck? Go for it! The data that we work to provide you at live events is brought to you easier, faster, and there’s more of it too!

I’m very excited to see what comes from HEX. There’s a lot of great options for seeing how a deck ticks, and with the kind of tournament support the game will receive, there will be a lot of decks out there to look at, and a lot of data that you can break down with a few simple clicks.

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