Howdy, folks, and welcome to HowWL! Today we’re looking not at the exciting parts that make a deck stand out and shine, but rather the oil that keeps those parts moving freely, avoiding clunkiness: that’s right, we’re looking at backups! Whether gaining you CP turn after turn, or leveraging powerful abilities, the less combat-oriented characters of your deck are quietly putting in a ton of work, and today is the day we celebrate that! We’re going to dive in to their varying value as the game progresses, proper ratios for different styles of decks, how deep in a pack it pays to start taking them, and how taking some of them will continue to affect your draft decisions. Without further ado, let’s see what our support line has to offer us!

Because games of draft tend to be a bit shorter than constructed, due to the lower damage count and smaller deck size, it’s harder to eke out as much CP from each backup. Your standard 2cp backup has a real cost of 4cp, since once you play the card from hand you can no longer discard it to pay for anything. In order for such a backup to break even, you have to activate it four times before the game ends. This has a couple of implications, the first being that backups without strong abilities are dead draws late game. Some stay relevant late, especially those with strong ETFs. Cid (FFL), Waltrill, and Apururu are good examples, as they either directly affect the board, or allow you to convert less useful cards into stronger cards. Backups that are good both early and late game should be valued higher, as they give your deck the most flexibility during gameplay. The second implication is that the value of backups scales directly with the speed of your deck, with aggressive decks caring about their backline much less than grindier decks.

Decks with an aggressive bent can often get away with as few as 11 or 12 cards dedicated to the backline. They want to move into the late game almost immediately, and while they still want some amount of backups to help that along, and especially to make odd costs more bearable, it’s not uncommon for these decks to only drop two, or sometimes even only a single backup. When playing a deck like this, you are trying to close out the game before the opponent’s backups can start to accrue value. If your opponent plays a 2cp backup and you end the game after two activations, that’s two CP you denied your opponent. When attacking slower decks, this build phase is where they are weakest, where they have risked CP on investments and have to wait for them to pay off. If your backups allow you to heap on the pressure early like Red Mage, Reno, and Yotsuyu, you’re positioned very well to take advantage of the speed difference.

For the slower decks, a much higher backup count is desirable, as they want to be generating constant value. Your goal when playing a deck like this is to drown your opponent in CP advantage, and the quicker you can fill your backline the better. You want your backups to be as efficient as possible, cards like Prompto which can functionally cost less than two, or cards like Norschtalen which fetch you more backups. These decks can want their backups counts to go as high as 16, to ensure reliable early access to them. While efficiency is certainly desirable for this archetype, you will also want some strong stabilizers or late game plays like Machinist, Cocytus, and Dark Knight. Decks with a high backup count will also prioritize breakables. Drawing Lid late game can be a great way to replay your bomb, but if your backline is full then you can put a lid on that plan. Proactive abilities are much more flexible for this, as cards like Layle and Lunafreya can’t exactly be broken at will.

Most decks however will end up in the middle, enjoying the flexibility to play however the situation demands. This helps to avoid the variance inherent in pushing the backup count to either extreme. It always stings getting flooded with few in the deck, or starved when you loaded up. Your average draft deck will usually end up with about 13 backups.