Here we are, the final installment in the Gen Con deck series. We’ve gone over all 8 decks, examining their strengths and weaknesses. Now it’s time to look at them in comparison with each other, and make some conclusions on which decks are the best, and which are the worst.

When I examine decks, I try to evaluate them on three key competencies: consistency, efficiency, and effectiveness.

Consistency deals whether your deck can overcome the random nature of the game and provide a consistent performance across games. Key factors for this competency are an appropriate resource base, card draw, and multiples of cards.

Efficiency deals with whether the cards in your deck are the most efficient they can be given the strategy of the deck. Key factors are whether the cards in your deck provide card advantage, are efficient for their resource cost (card value), and whether your cost curve is appropriate.

Effectiveness deals with how the makeup of your deck effectively works against other decks (can it win, can it beat the meta). Key factors include whether answers for format defining cards are included, does the deck have a strategy that will win games in the meta, are the cards included of sufficient card power.

Now, if you go back through the other articles you might notice that I brought up certain issues such as removal or card draw, and see how that can relate to the competencies above. I would like to say what follows is based on a careful evaluation of each of these factors for all the decks, but since I have had no time to test, I can only go off of my intuition (and a few test draws) to make my comparisons. In the end, I decided just to pair up each deck and see what I felt the win percentage would be for each combination. I then averaged the likely win percentages for each combination (assuming that you are equally likely to face any of the decks) to get an overall score. If you are interested, I can show you my work, but let’s just see what my final results were:

1 Ruby 66% 2 Diamond/Ruby 59% 3 Blood/Ruby 57% 4 Diamond 54% 5 Blood/Wild 50% 6 Sapphire F 44% 7 Blood 40% 8 Sapphire A 28%

So ultimately, I feel that mono Ruby is by far the strongest deck. It is the most aggressive, has burst damage and removal, and has I feel is the most consistent and efficient. The Diamond/Ruby and Blood/Ruby decks I also felt were very strong, with Diamond/Ruby being perhaps the most effective of the decks, but the way the resource bases are made seem to detract too much from consistency to make them the top. I also feel mono-Diamond can be a strong contender, but the more aggressive decks are likely to be the winners of the day.

As for the losers, I don’t think it is a surprise to anyone that the Sapphire artifact deck is the big loser. There just is not enough protection from troops to ensure that your final objective of building awesome doomsday machines will be met. The other Sapphire deck being all flyers has its appeal, but the troop size to cost ratio is just not efficient enough. The blood decks don’t have enough aggressive troops and rely on drawing key troops to carry the deck, so I feel they may be hurting in consistency and in effectiveness.

I would like at some point to test these decks and see what the actual match-ups are like. But, what do you think? Do you think my conclusions are wrong, do you feel that a certain deck is better? Cast your vote in the poll below. And for those who attend, I would be very interested to hear your thoughts on how the actual decks played out, and how you liked the game! I hope you enjoyed this series, and if you did, please let me know!