I think it’s been a long time since I’ve written about evaluating how a deck operated in it’s first few games. A lot of the initial process is done during deck building with the card selection and building around your theoretical game plan, both of which I’ve written about before. Past that, we move on from the “theoretical” and on to “practice” and start to see what actually works and what we were absolutely wrong about.

Mulligans

What you’ll want to be looking for here is how often or easy it is to find starting hands that you are content with. If the building process went well, you normally won’t have an issue with finding a decent starting balance (not always, just usually) to start the game with. You’ll want to formulate your game plan during this phase so that you can best realize which cards you want to keep and which to throw back. Like it’s obvious that we want a die card and some mitigation usually, but how often do you look at your opponent’s team and think about how you expect them to play out the round and then adjust your mulligan based on that. Sometimes you’ll realize that you need an early piece of mitigation and only have 1 cost ones in hand and a 2 cost die to go along with it and you’ll need to decide whether to ditch extra cards trying to find what you “need”.

Sequencing

Think about how much flexibility or the lack of it that you have during each round. How often do you find yourself in weird situations like being too broke to pay for removal, having resources to play an upgrade after all of your guys are activated and thereby not getting to use it, or getting stuck in weird situations like “only being able to play an upgrade on the character that is being attacked”? A lot of that might be on your own play (or deckbuilding again) so you’ll need to critique yourself heavily in that regard, but if it is a deck issue, then changes are required. Being linear isn’t always an issue, but having a lot of flexibility in your ordering and maintaining threats (that you don’t have) is something that a lot of strong decks have. Pay attention to how often those things come up as well as how often the good stuff happens (pretty much your opponent being in the tough spot).

Explosiveness and Consistency

Beyond sequencing issues you’ll want to keep track of how well things are going for the deck overall. Is it performing how you expected? Are the rounds playing out pretty similarly or are there a lot of fluctuations in your output? Normally speaking the hope is to be very consistent overall with the occasional explosive output and seldom “dead rounds” where you didn’t do anything. Think about why things aren’t consistently going fine (assuming they aren’t) and what things led to that as well as what things you might be able to do in order to help rectify that issue. Be super realistic about what has been happening in games so that you can make proper adjustments. If you often find yourself to have dead rounds, but also crazy “high ceiling” rounds (like doing 12 direct Round 1) then it’ll be hard to justify leaving the deck as is and you’ll want to think about how to find a better middle ground or maybe come in a bit lower than the ceiling but as frequent as possible.

Close or Blowout

You may not have noticed, but I didn’t mention anything about whether you won or lost a game and the reason is because that doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things early on. You’re just looking to see if your combos / lineup are operating well and are refining that as best as you can. Once you’re through many iterations and things are running smooth, then you’ll start looking more at your win / loss column. Pretty much you want to heavily dissect the games you get blown out in, and then why of when you blowout an opponent. Are any of those throw a way games?? Like you had no removal and the opponent natural rolled max damage to spike your character Round 1?? The dream is that you win most of your games in blowout fashion, and that the leftover close games aren’t won just by luck. Unfortunately, that isn’t how it always goes, but the thing that you don’t want is to only win the games you blowout an opponent and lose all of the close games. Close games are expected so you’ll want to think if there are ways to shore those up and how you got into those situations. If you get a decent lead, you’ll want to be able to keep that up and finish off your opponent which is what happens in the blow out victories. Any time you have a good lead on an opponent and they drag it back into a close game or their favor you’ll want to disseminate how that happened too.

Last but not least, don’t stop trying to improve the deck or looking for weaknesses in it especially as the meta changes and gets narrowed down. When you stop trying to improve is when you stagnate and slowly start to die. There is always room to improve even if it’s just by a minuscule amount. Sometimes you just have to give up on a deck though and don’t find shame in that.

~HonestlySarcastc