New week, new season, new foils, and new challenges await. Which is good news for those of us that had a rough go of it last season. I only won one of the five arenas, despite getting five wins many, many times. But this week, the drought has been broken through a combination of skill, math, and luck. I found my way to six wins in my third run, and it feels good.

My final win was a total steal, which makes sense given the format. Behold: Smuggling Route! Where you can get some of the best cards for free. You can also get some of the worst cards for free as well, and I’m here this week to talk you through all of that.

Format Rules and Technical Data

The scenario rule for Smuggling Route ensures that your deck will always grow bigger.

At the end of each player’s turn, that player automatically acquires the cheapest card in the trade row.

We’re playing with the Colony Wars starter, along with Crisis Heroes. Those heroes are a fascinating aspect to include, because it decreases the average cost of the cards in the trade deck.

There is a bit of hidden rules text this week. If you end your turn with multiple cards in the trade row with the same cost, you will always acquire the left-most card. This will matter once or twice during the course of an average game, but when it does it can be critical. Knowing which card you are likely to acquire at the end of your turn should shape your decisions during the turn…

Also, if the card you acquire for free goes into your hand, you still discard it as the turn ends. This is a difference between the physical version of the game and the digital version. You still get the card, but you won’t get to save it in your hand until your next turn.

Doing The Math, So You Don’t Have To

This format ensures that you are going to get a free card every single turn. Maximizing that is, of course, the key way to win this format. You will be tempted to make purchasing decisions based on what could be, as opposed to what certainly is. Having an efficient deck, one that is likely to hit ally abilities, is the main way to get ahead in Star Realms. That is still true here. How do you deal with that in a format where you will get a random card each turn? Make it less random.

Blob’s trade-row scrapping gives you the power to control the luck, a bit. You can scrap cards before buying, to try to find something better to buy. Or you can scrap after buying, to change what the least expensive card in the trade row is. Over the course of my Arena runs this week, I developed a strategy for when I should scrap from the trade row.

Is the free card in your deck’s factions? Usually worth keeping, even if the card is only so-so in terms of power level.

Is the card’s cost less than the average card remaining in the trade deck? At the beginning of the game, with all 92 cards from Colony Wars and Crisis Heroes, the 92 cards in the trade deck are worth a combined 280 trade, for an average of 3.04 trade. This number will go up and down over time, and you can track it if you really want to. But most of the time, if you scrap a card that costs 1 or 2, you are likely to replace it with a better card. Of course, this only matters if the other cards in the trade row cost more than two trade…