As you may be able to guess from the title, I’ll be writing one for each of the major games I play. Next up is Wixoss, then Vanguard. That being said, I probably won’t bother reiterating some of the core concepts in those articles, so it may be worth reading this anyway, just so you have an idea of what’s going on. As for the main heading; a lot of newer players I see often have difficulty evaluating the true potential of a card. I’ll break it down a bit and make it easier to grasp. This sort of article is mainly for those who are still relatively new to the game; they know the rules but are still unsure of how to build their own decks or how to properly utilize what they have.

Why did you put value in airquotes?

Simple. Because there is no solidly defined meaning for value when it comes to card games. You can give examples of it (e.g. Notion Thief in response to Brainstorm), but there’s no quantifiable meaning to it. In particular, it’s harder to measure for card games because you have multiple different axes to measure along.

Something we have in the Magic community is known as “The Bob Test”, named after Dark Confidant, named after Bob Maher Jr, named after his dad. While he hasn’t been seeing as much dominant play recently (thanks to our new tentacled overlords), he is still widely regarded as one of the cornerstones of one of the best decks in Modern. In fact, some would argue he is one of the best creatures to have ever been printed. The reason we apply The Bob Test to new players is to see whether they can see the “true value” of a card. A new player is more likely to think “this card makes me lose life, it can’t be that good”, whereas someone more experienced with card games might think “wow it draws me cards it’s insane”. In Weiss, we have a similar parallel, actually. Riki-like effects are surprisingly effective because they do a very similar thing; you trade damage for card advantage. Any good player will know that as long as you aren’t dead (and Riki effects usually apply in the early-game where damage is irrelevant), you need cards in hand to win the game.

In general, seeing whether or not a card nets you overall card advantage or causes your opponent to have card disadvantage is a good first measure of how much value a card provides. The reason we look at cards before things like how alive you are or how much board presence you have, is because it’s very difficult to quantify card advantage in terms of ratio. To elaborate; we see Riki as just 1 damage. You lose when you reach an aggregate 28 damage. Thus, Riki’s cost is 1/28 of one resource, but grants you a card in hand, which we can’t measure. If we take hand size to be the limit, then that’s an additional 1/7 that you wouldn’t have otherwise. Combine this with the fact that he can at least attack for 1 soul in your field means he grants an additional 1/5 of value of board presence. It’s why Ancestral Visions is better than Heroes’ Reunion; 7 life out of 20 isn’t as large a scale as 3 cards out of 7. Obviously during your turn you can go beyond hand size (as long as you play cards to fall back in line by the end of turn), but you also have to remember the value of those cards individually too. Inazuma usually searches out Shimakaze, which provides both minimal deck thinning, as well as consistency for your climax combo (which then goes on to search again). Dark Confidant may draw you a land, which you can pitch to Liliana’s +1, or a removal spell that you can destroy their blocker, or a Tarmogoyf which will apply the beats.

Paying the Price

One major point that I didn’t touch on above (because it’s not as relevant as in Magic) is the cost of things also applies to the value. It’s why Opportunity versus Jace’s Ingenuity is not a very difficult choice to make. In Weiss, the costs are more subtle; paying stock is different to tapping lands because of the rate of regeneration. That, and the fact that in general costs in WS are much lower. One clear comparison is in the average red event; either 2/2 to salvage 2 characters, or 2/1 to salvage 2 characters and then discard a card. One is an overall +1, the other is card neutral. On paper, you’re paying that one more stock to maintain that extra card. In reality, the 2/1 is better because hand filtering is a hidden quality, and when you’re playing an event like this, you usually are mindful of the stock you have (so you can actually play what you salvaged). A more subtle comparison is that of Mako vs Musashi vs Fate vs Saber.

You play these cards primarily for their second effect. But one is printed 11k power with a drawback, whereas the other is only 10k with a beneficial effect. The turn it comes into play, Mako is effectively Musashi (probably more power if anything), but it can also side attack if you plan on playing a climax and side attacking a Level 2 for 1 damage plus potential burn (if you read this guy’s blog then you’ll know that just going all in is better). The advantage comes in your opponent’s turn, where you can throw an Ashigara at them and suddenly Musashi doesn’t get clock kicked (this is kind of a bad example since KLK also has an anti-clock kick counter altogether, but you get my point). Saber is printed with less power, but her version of Mako’s power gain is more consistent. In fact, if your field is full, it’s stronger than Musashi. The draw back is that if your field isn’t full, then it’s worse. Fate doesn’t get any power, but she’s probably the best one out of all of them in a vacuum, just because she can guarantee the damage even further; Fate gives herself +1 soul, and if your opponent has a cost 1 or lower in the front row, can even direct attack for 4 damage. The only “problem” is that she isn’t so good at taking down the board. This is a very hidden cost because you’re expecting the game to end the turn Fate comes down, but believe me, Akagi has consumed her fair share of magical girls.

Very few things in card games are free, with the exception of Tron vs Jund, Gadgets searching Gadgets, and the original 5 Moxen.

Is it worth it?

Let’s look at a certain category of effects, shall we?

I don’t blame you if you only recognize one of these cards. But basically they all deal 5 damage for some given cost. The baseline we’ll take is the event, since that has no other requirements and doesn’t do anything else. 3 stock and a card in hand to deal 5 damage. Pumpkin has the exact same; 3 stock and discard a card. The requirement is that you have to have Mirror Girl Kokomi in play, but we’ll pretend that’s not there because that’s not really a requirement (read my previous article on GFB to understand why). Akane’s requires you to discard an extra card, but doesn’t have any requirements; it’s also on attack as opposed to on reverse. That’s slightly relevant. Himeno’s is a bit more out there, because it’s a climax on-play, and you can only have 2 characters at most in the front row. That said, the cost is the lowest; no stock, and you discard a card. Notably, it’s only Level 2.

Let’s start by acknowledging the fact that these characters all cost stock to play as well as stock to deal damage (except Himeno). So at a glance, they already “cost” more than the Event. Especially Pumpkin, because you also need to spend the 1 more stock on Mirror Girl Kokomi. But Akane and Pumpkin both heal. That’s actually worth something, which we’ll get onto later. Himeno also comes with power tacked on. Not bad. The climax is a gate, which means you might not be playing it for the combo alone. Also these being all characters, they can actually attack for damage. But the characters are all AUTO effects for burn 5, so they can be stopped by anti-damage. As you can see, there’s a lot of factors to consider. So it seems kind of difficult to actually judge all these cards side-by-side. In reality, the way they’re arranged up there is their actual quality, from worst to best. The event is nigh-on unplayable because that’s all you’re getting. At least with the other three, they’re characters that you can at least attack for soul damage (and in the Level 3s’s case, heal) with, with an optional burn 5. Here, you’re spending a card just for the 5 damage alone, which itself is not good value because any player worth their salt should be relatively well compressed and will cancel the 5 damage, meaning that card you’ve given up over an attacker may not pay off. If they don’t cancel the 5, then they’re more likely to cancel your attacks (which could only be good if your field was all Musashi), but this won’t happen enough for it to be relevant.

Himeno is better because it’s at least a character, meaning that as discussed, it contributes to field presence and can attack for damage. Her downside is that all of her requirements are a bit too restrictive; a climax combo, on play rather than on attack, and you can only have 1 other character in the front row. There are two setups for this; have 2 in the front row and some supports, or if you hate yourself and want to make your opponent hate you as well, you can put one in the front and two in the back and try and deal 15 damage (I highly recommend you do not do this). There’s a reason you don’t see many top Da Capo lists using Himeno*, but she’s not unplayable. Someone on a budget or someone with a limited card pool may play one or two copies seeing as they’re already using the climax. It’s not worth it to go out of your way though, because like the event, you’re giving up having a character in play for the chance at dealing some damage.

Akane is a bit of an unfair boost, because Vividred as a set doesn’t have a whole lot of options at Level 3. Wakaba’s the best, but the rest are kind of “eh”. The main benefit of Akane is she isn’t tied to anything. If you’re playing red, you can just play her as a healer that may or may not be able to put out some extra damage. In fact, the heal is one of the main reasons to use this or Pumpkin. While I mentioned earlier that damage is not a big deal when it comes to value or costs, being able to not die in the late-stage of the game suddenly becomes very critical. If you take the early game idea of “there’s no point cancelling if there’s nothing to play”, then for Level 3 you can reverse that “there’s no point having cards if you’re dead”. The reasoning behind this paradigm shift is because at Level 3 is where cards like Yami, Akagi, Musashi start coming out. I won’t rattle on for too long about Pumpkin’s merits and why it’s a good card and why it’s costs are basically negligible. In the context of this direct comparison, Pumpkin’s only drawback as mentioned is not really a drawback because your level assist should be in play anyway. Thus, it’s basically a 3/2 healer with the event’s effect tacked on. Also did I mention Pumpkin procs in your opponent’s turn, giving you more control over when and how you want to burn them out?

*the reason is that you don’t see many Da Capo lists topping events period

A more vague example

So far all we’ve been doing is comparing individual cards in a vacuum. When really, what we should have done was consider lines of play with respect to a context. You’re playing Puyo. Which is the better move, using Amitie and the Whirlwind climax to force through damage and kill his Level 1s and potentially plus, or using Witch to guaranteed get lots of cards but have a tiny field in your opponent’s turn which he will take advantage of?

Well that depends. What do you know is left in your deck? What would you salvage? What does your opponent have left in his deck? How likely are they to salvage? How likely are they to be able to respond with their own Level 1 climax combo if you commit to Witch? Let’s say you go for Amitie because they already have 6 climaxes out and you don’t want them proccing Mikan next turn. What do you salvage? Do you grab your 3/2 Amitie and start prepping for the late game? Do you fetch a third Witch so that you can retaliate with a combo next turn? Do you play it safe and grab the Sig brainstorm so you can make a better choice later?

This is just a play example but the idea of seeing what gets you into the best position as “value” applies also to deckbuilding. Let’s stick with Puyo for a bit. Which brainstorm are you going to use? Sig salvages and only rests one, Draco rests two but deck searches. They both boost the middle slot in some way. Do you need more Yellow in the deck for Arle? Or do you need more red for Amitie? Spoilers, Sig is almost always the better option, but in terms of raw value, they’re about evenly matched. Sig’s anti-reverse effect is marginally more useful (because of the low average power of Puyo’s characters as a whole), and the fact that you can do two in one turn means that he’s more value then Draco. However, what if you know that you can go through your deck extremely fast and refresh often? Then maybe Draco is better because when you search you’re going to be going through a larger card pool? Or is it that you want the earlier brainstorm, where your deck is still quite large? Maybe you want to search because you want to pull off your early game combo, whereas your late game (Arle) already has a bond effect. Can you search for the bond or do you search for Amitie?

“That’s not good value”

Quite a lot of sets recently have anti-change backups. Most of them involve sacrificing a character. If you use one to actually remove an early-play, then that’s marginal value because you’ve discarded a card from hand to trade character for character in play. Except for the fact that most early summon Level 3s give some form of advantage on play (draw 2 discard 1, search, salvage, heal etc.), and if they attack with the Level 3 first, they’re still gaining stock. It’s only beneficial to kill a character if you desperately don’t want your front row reversed or you want to deny the “give +4k at the beginning of opponent’s turn” effect. But there’s also the option of just sacrificing your own character so that your opponent can’t proc their on-reverse effects (like clock kick or Pumpkin). The question then is, is it value to trade your character to deny them an effect? Usually the answer is yes, but let’s look at why.

The most obvious scenario is if you’re about to die; if you know you have all 8 out, at 3.4 while they throw a clock-shoot at you, then yes, not losing the game counts as value. Doesn’t even matter how good your card is. It doesn’t do anything if you lose. Even if you aren’t losing, usually when you factor in what will happen if you do or don’t, the choice is pretty clear. Versus something such as Marika, you’re basically saving yourself 4 points of damage, usually. Sure, they end up not spending their stock or discarding cards, but they’re not necessarily planning for the turn ahead (they should be, which means that they’ll likely have their counter no matter what). As long as you have 0/0s in hand and aren’t just having the turn passed back to you with no open play, the relative cost to you isn’t as high, which makes that line of play very good value.

Another situation is when you’re either digging for something or trying to put together a certain combo. One example can be in Nisekoi, where a lot of your cards rely on having Pendants in memory. The only way to get them there is to play them, and the only way to play them is to have them in hand. So if you’re in a situation where you need Tilting Head Marika or Onodera early-play, you need to make the decision over whether it’s worth spending stock and other resources to aggressively dig for the Pendant (or usually the Pendant bonders since they’re more easily accessible outside of the draw step), or just biding your time and playing other characters to deal damage and farm stock in the meantime. Let’s say you’re starting your main phase at Level 1, 6 damage, a healthy number of cards in deck, and 5 cards in stock, the second from the bottom of which you know is a Pendant. You don’t have a Chibi in hand and there isn’t one in your waiting room. There are no other pendants anywhere. You have a Brainstorm in hand, a Kosaki Store Mascot Girl, a Tilting Head Marika, a climax, Maiden’s Heart Kosaki, and Maiden’s Heart Marika. You have nothing in play except Summer Colours Chitoge. How do you try and dig to enable your Tilting Head Marika. What’s your line of play to maximise value? If you play the Tilting Head first and reveal a climax, then at least you know the Brainstorm will succeed and you can search for a Chibi. But then you’re losing out on the Tilting Head. Likewise if you Brainstorm first and miss, then that’s poor value. You definitely want to search last because if you search first then that minimises your chances of a successful proc of Tilting Head Marika. You definitely want to brainstorm last because once you’ve taken everything else out of your deck you’ve maximised the ratio of climaxes to non-climaxes. Except if you brainstorm, you’re relatively likely to mill a Pendant, successful brainstorm or not, so you could always search for the Chibi off the searcher if you fail the Brainstorm. But that’s 2 stock, a card in hand, and a card in play. That Pendant had then better do some work. And that’s assuming you aren’t paying out the one in stock to enable Onodera either. There are a number of lines of play here, and without a bit more context around the whole situation it’s hard to tell exactly which one is correct or incorrect. The only thing you can really measure is the total change in cards moving around; one of the lines that will guarantee you at least a Pendant in memory will leave you with almost no hand and has a high chance of only netting you one or two cards in play.

I’m sure that for a bunch of you reading this everything I say will be very obvious, but I’ve seen even some good players – myself not exempt – tunnel vision down some lines of play thinking they need to focus on one aspect and end up leaving themselves with no way out a few turns down the line because they didn’t properly value their cards. This is most apparent in people transitioning into properly built decks, who just throw their Hibiki or Inazuma wildly at things and hoping that proccing it as soon as will pay off. They don’t realizing that side-attacking for no damage means that your opponent is either forced to play around it, or will have to reverse it on their terms, giving you more information on how you proceed (or you can side with Hibiki first, then trigger a climax later, enabling you to pay it out with Hibiki, for example). Unless you’re aware that your opponent has clock-reversers or stock-reversers, or you desperately need that 1/0 6k vanilla/Shimakaze in hand, it’s usually better to extend the utility that a card can give you.

Too much of a good thing

There’s almost never such a thing as “too much value”. For real. Let’s say for example you’re at Level 1, and you’re still using Level 0s in play to beat your opponent. You just happen to be cancelling a lot and they are only reversing one or two of your characters a turn (for the sake of example). At some point, you will become over hand size. Maybe you were busy setting up for your Level 2 which just isn’t happening. So now you have parts of a Level 1 game in hand (like your climax combo), some early plays, and a small part of your Level 3 end game all taking up 9 cards worth of hand size. You could throw away these Level 0s since they’ve done their job in order to play your Level 1s which might last a bit longer or net you some more cards later, or you could just go “fuck it”, discard the Level 1 combo and just start focusing on the late game hoping that they’ll eventually reverse your Level 0s with easy targets for your Level 3 on-reverse effects. Both of these are fully reasonable lines of play, and I honestly can’t tell you which is better. Maybe if you’re GFB versus Nisekoi it’s better to stick the Level 1 combo in case they try to surprise Marika you and you at least have a 6.5k wall as opposed to a 4k Level 0. If you’re up against something with Musashis, then maybe you don’t really care. The more cards you have, the more options you have.

That all being said, this doesn’t mean that value should be your only priority. Sometimes it doesn’t even need to be your top priority. In the same way that we discussed above that it’s okay to lose some benefits of an anti-change counter if it means you don’t die, it’s 100% okay to throw cards away if they directly contribute to your opponent dying. In Monogatari, if I have excess of cards in hand, I will gladly waste them all to power up the Hanekawa clock kick to ensure that I can get over their backup power. In fact if I can afford it I’ll even spend stock on characters (there is one case where the 3/2 Mayoi is actually worth playing over; that way you can salvage it instead of having it send itself to memory). What’s that? I have 3 copies of the new Level 3 Honoka in hand? I also want to play my clock shoot Nico? Just play over the Honoka. Her effect is only on-play, so as long as she deals damage, then she’s already served her purpose (especially if you know that the clock shoots will be 1 damage off killing your opponent). This scenario requires a bit more thought, however. Because you don’t actually know that committing all these cards does actually guarantee a kill. Maybe they have an sac counter in hand. That would suck. Unfortunately, you’ll never know 100% whether or not something contributes to your opponent’s death until you actually play it out. You might be able to get a feel or an inkling that “maybe I shouldn’t all-in right now” or “I think they’ll take this damage”, but most of it is just calculated risk. In general, it’s better to play conservative and know that you could have killed them than risk being in a position next turn where they either kill you or you can’t end the game any more because you’ve wasted all your resources. Of course, then you need to consider: “Will I be here next turn?”

“Expected Value”

Occasionally among some circles you’ll hear the term “EV”, which is short for “expected value” which is short for “I’m fairly confident but this phrase helps cover my ass for if I get it wrong”. Expected Value basically means if you total up the results of each decision tree and aggregate it based on how likely each outcome is, what the final result will be. Here’s a worked example: you have a 3/2 Hanekawa in play (which has successfully resolved). You also have a 3/2 Hitagi in play with the Gate in hand. You also have for argument’s sake a 1/1 in play. Your other card in hand is 3/2 Mayoi. You have a few options here:

Don’t do anything and just attack (this is probably not the correct option under any circumstance) Play the climax only and attack, using the Hitagi combo Attack with Hitagi first Attack with Hitagi second Attack with Hitagi last Play the 3/2 Mayoi Give the Soul and cancel effect to Hanekawa Give the Soul and cancel effect to Hitagi Give the Soul and cancel to the 1/1 Give the Soul and cancel to itself

Note that the last two options also let you choose whether to attack with the Mayoi or attack with the 1/1. So to figure out the expected value of each decision, you need to consider how likely it is that they can dodge Hanekawa with a sac counter, how likely they are to cancel each bunch of soul damage, and how much total damage you are likely to output. Now this question is a bit of a bullshit trick because Mayoi’s specific wording means that if you give it to the Hitagi and they cancel her climax combo’s bun, that will also proc the cancel burn (note that the cancel burn is only once per turn overall, but the idea that Hitagi has two chances to proc it rather than 1 is the dumb part)*.

*if you weren’t aware this was how it worked, you’re welcome.

On balance I would probably opt to play Mayoi, giving the boosts to itself and attack with it with the climax out; this way all your characters are attacking for an even 4 (total) damage each (3 soul base plus climax for Mayoi, 2 base plus climax plus combo for Hitagi, 2 plus climax plus clock shoot for Hanekawa). Putting the trigger on Hanekawa leaves you with an imbalanced 4/3/2 split, which makes them more likely to cancel the 4 but less likely to cancel the 2. You could throw the Hachikuji in front as well so you have some combination of 4/3/3 with a cancel burn, on attack burn, and a clock shoot somewhere. This is all ignoring where Hitagi attacks. For the sake of simplicity we’re assuming you played Hanekawa before Hitagi, so Hitagi drew you the card that Hanekawa revealed (so you don’t know what your incoming triggers are). I really can’t be bothered to do the maths over how likely your opponent may be to cancel these attacks given X number of climaxes left in a Y card deck, but your goal is to output as much damage as possible. That’s also assuming you aren’t playing for a conservative game. Otherwise you would be semi-forced to give the Mayoi Soul and Burn on one of the Level 3s (or put it in the backrow) so that you can play something on top of it and salvage it later if you need the heal or the additional damage. The long-term value play is to prevent the Mayoi going into memory. But in terms of damage output, your EV for each branch is actually quite similar. It should be rather obvious that factoring in cancel rates and whatnot that attacking with Mayoi is probably better because more soul damage is better. It’s also kind of dependent on how much damage they’re on. I probably should have specified that earlier; obviously if they’re on 3.6 then you give the effects to Hitagi, see whether or not they cancel (assuming they can play around Hanekawa, otherwise you just clock shoot for easy game).

A more common scenario you’ll encounter EV is in regards to using a Brainstorm. If it procs, maybe you’ll be +1 or +2 cards. But you can’t (usually) guarantee a brainstorm succeeding. Relative to a standard searcher (on play, pay 1, discard 1, deck search), for example, which puts you at overall neutral, at a higher cost, doesn’t provide compression, but does at least guarantee you will have what you’re looking for. Let’s say the standard searcher is our baseline/control, so we can assign it an EV of 0. If an option has higher EV, then we can say it’s better. If an option has worse EV, we can say it’s worse. So let’s pretend we have 6 climaxes left in a 30 card deck, just because I like easy calculations. Take my word for it that the probability of 4 successes is so minuscule it isn’t worth factoring. The probability of 3 successes is about 2%. The probability of 2 is about 15%, and the probability of 1 is about 44%. For those curious, the probability of failing the brainstorm is about 39%. We calculate missing a brainstorm as -1, because you’ve paid stock and rested a character (at least one), which means that you have no return on investment. Thus, the value of a success is the number of hits minus one. Which means our overall EV is calculated by 2*0.02 + 1*0.15 -1*0.39 = -0.2. This is a bit lower than the searcher’s EV, because we have such a high chance to miss completely. Some would argue that the compression is worth it alone, and the fact that you’ll probably already have the brainstorm in play anyway means it’s the better play already. But I hope the numbers illustrate my point. If you having that card is critical to winning the game, just play the searcher, because it’s guaranteed. These numbers obviously fluctuate based on your climax distribution in the deck and the number of desirable targets left, of course. If you’re dealing with Clock Swap or Salvage brainstorms, or if your climax ratio is better, there may be a situation where Brainstorming is the preferable option. Watch this space.

Wrapping up

This ended up being a lot longer than I intended it to be; I guess that’ll happen when you spend 3 days writing an article instead of working on your Final Year Project (if anyone knows WebGL I would appreciate some assistance). Anyway, hopefully someone found this article useful and I didn’t just write a handful over 5000 words for absolutely no reason. As said, there’ll be a Wixoss edition coming soon, and a Vanguard edition coming after that. Stay tuned for those if you’re interested.

As always, I’m easy to reach. Peace.

~ Zystral