Today I wanted to talk about something different from the usual. Normally my column is all about control decks and how I’m playing them against various meta decks that exist. This article is going to be much more theoretical in nature, as I’m discussing a topic that is more integral to the game as a whole. The value of a charge.

There are many TCGs that exist, both digital and paper. One of the things that distinguishes Hex from all other mainstream TCGs is the champion’s charge power. For those of you who may be hearing about this for the first time, in addition to choosing the cards in your deck for a game of Hex, you also select a champion, who has an ability that can be activated at the cost of charges. These charges are gained, generally, whenever the player plays a Resource card. There are other cards that add charges to your champion, specifically a cycle of cards in Shattered Destiny that have an on shard effect and gain you a charge.

In TCGs, and specifically Magic: The Gathering, there have been vast amounts of articles written on the theory of the game, and these can apply not just to Magic, but to other TCGs, like Hex. The current theory that goes on in these style games boils down to three principles: Card Advantage*, Tempo**, and the Philosophy of Fire***. I’m going to summarize these as briefly as possible so that we can all be more or less on the same footing going forward in this article.

Card Advantage

Each player starts a game of Hex with a maximum of 7 cards in their hand. These cards are the only way to advance yourself towards your goal of defeating the opponent. When you use a card from your hand, you no longer have that card in hand, so you are down by one card. You draw a card each turn.

The theory of card advantage is that one of the best ways to win a game is by having access to more cards than your opponent, so that you can continue to do things while they are stuck unable to act. This is applied in many ways, some of the most visible of which are card draw and board wipes. If I cast Oracle’s Song, I am losing one card from my hand, and drawing two cards. This means that my net cards in hand are +1, or I am gaining 1 card. Similarly, if my opponent has 3 Troops in play and I cast Extinction, I am spending one card from my hand to remove three Troops from play, making the net change in cards between us +2 in my favor. By applying these ideas, we can work towards a game state where our opponent can only play one card per turn, and that is the card they draw on their draw step, whereas we can be sitting comfy on our hand of four or more cards, stopping them from playing Hex. This is the driving force and desirable end game of a control deck, and close to my heart.

Tempo

Tempo is a much less tangible concept that isn’t as well defined as card advantage. Tempo is based on actions within a given amount of time advancing you towards a desired end state of you defeating your opponent. Let me pose a few situations. In the first, imagine you spent your first turn of the game playing a Ruby Shard and a Baby Yeti. You attack, of course, and then pass turn. Your opponent plays a Blood and passes back. You now have the advantage on board, and in 19 turns, if nothing else happens, you win. You play a Sapphire Shard, attack and pass. Your opponent plays a Blood and then a Darkspire Priestess. Pass turn. Your pause kicks in, and on their end step, you cast Time Ripple of the Priestess.

What just happened? You just spent your resources stopping them from doing what they intended to do. This, functionally, means that you used Time Ripple as a way to skip their last turn. This idea is the concept of tempo. By having a threat, and using your resources to buy extra turns for that threat to work, you are gaining tempo advantage.

On the other side of things, if I’m playing a Ruby-Sapphire Chimes Combo deck and I spend my second turn of the game casting Scheme, I’m gaining pseudo card advantage (this is something I want to discuss in another article at some point), but I’m losing tempo because I don’t affect the board state, and I gave up a turn now in the hopes of increasing my likelihood of winning several turns later.

Philosophy of Fire

The best way of explaining this is by quoting Mike Flores, quoting Adrian Sullivan, the creator of this idea. I will substitute the referenced Magic card for an equivalent card in Hex.

Basic Principles of the Philosophy of Fire:

Burn is the Baseline. Ten Burn’s/ten cards deals 20 damage. You start with 7 cards. “Go.”

And there it is. Simple, elegant, clean. Burn your opponent to the ground. Makes me sick…

Now that we’ve completed our background section, it’s time to get into the new stuff. So let’s talk about charges. The first thing to note is that not all charges are created equal. Sure, a Crackling Vortex will give every player who plays it two charges, but when that is played with Poca, the Conflagrator as your champion, when you have Storm Cloud and two Arena Regulars in play, you are getting much more value out of it than when someone plays it in their Dimmid deck after casting Extinction and on an empty board. So we will have to accept that there isn’t going to be as general an answer for charge value as there is for another aspect of the game.

What this tells us is that charges are going to be something that contributes to these three forces driving the game, as opposed to creating its own category. If that is the case, let’s look at each of the theories and see how charge plays a role.

Charge in Card Advantage

In the simplest form, charges are something extra that a card gets. They add something to a card that balances its power. From experience, 1 Resource for 3 damage is a bit too much, and 2 Resources for 3 damage is a bit too little. One medium between these two is to add “gain a charge” to the weaker of the two cards and call it a day. This the idea behind the Crackling X cycle in Shattered Destiny. Each of the effects on the card is too weak to be very playable at the given cost, but if you gain a charge when you play it, it suddenly turns Crackling Vortex from strictly worse than any given Standard Resource to a 500-700 platinum card.

Cards like this gain you a lot of advantage when they are played in conjunction with other cards that work off of charge gain. So in Poca deck, Crackling Bolt seems to be a card with .75 net loss when you cast it (since 1 charge is 1/4 of a Poca activation which, generally, deals 3 damage, or as much as a Crackling Bolt). But when you have an Arena Regular in play, it’s almost like you’re getting 1.75 cards out of it, as you get to deal 3 damage to a target (1), cast half a Burn on your opponent (0.5), and get 1/4 of a Poca activation (0.25). This means you’re conserving resources, while still netting the same outcome in terms of board advancement.

So the way charges interact with card advantage is positive. It depends on the champion you have, and the cards you have in play, which means that the true worth of a card that gains a charge is determined in a major way by the deckbuilding step of Hex. A card that gains you a charge can be worth as little as slightly more than an equivalent card without charge gain, or worth more than twice that equivalent card.

Charges in Tempo

As with the idea of tempo vs card advantage, the effect that charges have on tempo isn’t going to be something we can do math to like we can to charges effect on card advantage. That means that all of my discussion for tempo will be qualitative, and likely more subject to error or opinion than something I can quantify. With that in mind, let’s dig in.

Tempo is mainly affected by cards that affect the board state. Charge are inherently something outside of the games board, so they do not play a role in tempo without outside action. This means that, as with card advantage, the tempo gain or loss of charge will depend on how you sculpt your deck. Currently, there aren’t many effects that really interact with tempo and charge gain. The only one I could find is Highlands Shinobi. Pulse Reactor sort of works that way, but it isn’t just the use of charges, as you have to expend resources.

In the case of Highlands Shinobi, getting it down on turn 2 lets you spend the rest of your turns (assuming you make a resource drop that gains you a charge) exhausting a single blocker, meaning your opponent needs to extend more Troops in order to stop losing life. This also means that you only need to have real removal like Solitary Exile for troops beyond the first one your opponent plays. Taking advantage of this gain in tempo is very easy, the Troop that is enabling the gain can attack! Highlands Shinobi may be the only real tempo advantage charge card, but it is a very good example.

Charges in the Philosophy of Fire

This one’s pretty easy to discuss because it is always in context of a deck dedicated to burning your opponent out. Chances are your champion will be Poca in this style deck. That means that every charge gained equates to 0.75 damage, dealt in increments of 3. Coupling that with Reactor Bot and Arena Regular, each charge actually has a minimum value of 0.75 point of damage. Building your deck to take advantage of this is something people figured out pretty much from the Day 0 mark.

Of all of the areas of theory, the Philosophy of Fire is one where I think the current value of a charge is highest. Since the value of a charge is dependent upon the environment of the format, we need to evaluate it in context. Right now, Charge Bot, Arena Regular, Poca the Conflagrator, Storm Cloud/Gore Feast of Kog’Tepetl, and Goremaster are the cards that make the most impact on the way I view charge value.

So then overall, what do I consider the value of a charge to be? Since a charge is most impactful in a Burn deck, I will answer it in that context. Given some rough estimates on the likelihood of Arena Regular/Charge Bot being in play as those are the most common ones I’ve seen, and assuming Poca as the Champion, I would say that the approximate value of a charge in units of other Hex resources is at least 2.59 damage, or 1.29 Resources, or 1.29 cards by the principles of the Philosophy of Fire. That is my final answer for the value of a charge in the current Standard format evaluated in the context of a Burn deck. If you want to talk math, comment here or on Reddit and we can discuss how I arrived at these numbers.

[quote_center] “… I would say that the approximate value of a charge in units of other Hex resources is at least 2.59 damage, or 1.29 Resources, or 1.29 cards by the principles of the Philosophy of Fire.”[/quote_center]

In other news, I hope you all enjoyed your holidays! Mine were fantastic. I got some wonderful gifts, including the magnificent present of a 3DS XL and Pokemon: Omega Ruby, which I have logged an embarrassing >110 hours in since I opened it. Hopefully you all saw the announcement of the upcoming Budget Cup, presented by Hex Primal (you may have heard of them). If you read the announcement you also may have seen that the person hosting the tournament will be one, Ombra (you may have heard of him as well). Make sure you follow the directions to sign up! If you aren’t planning on playing, definitely come out and watch (listen to) me (hopefully) do a wonderful job of hosting the tournament. I really liked parenthesis today it seems. See you all in game!

If you are interested in reading more on the theory behind card games, here are links to articles on the Magic: The Gathering website detailing each of the basic principles I briefly overviewed in this article.

*Card Advantage

**Tempo

***The Philosophy of Fire