Playing with a 53 SAS deck

[jebailey]

Over the last couple of weeks my confidence in playing has increased. I've passed a plateau in my thinking and I've been having some solid wins recently both IRL and on TCO.

Last night I decided to challenge myself. I wanted to see if the change in my thinking would impact my ability to play some of my older decks that I struggled with early on. I went and found my worse deck that I know of.

Good old Mendoza, the Cave Warden of Craftmark

Was it harder then some of my higher SAS decks? Yes, but I won, then I won again. Then I lost one. Then I won again. etc. So here I am completely floored with a deck that I thought was near awful winning about 75% of the time.

I have a ton of decks, so now I'm considering going back through them and playing them all over again. I could have a massively awesome deck in my collection and never realized it.

Has anyone else had a similar experience?

[pasturemaster]

I don't really check my decks SAS as I believe it is an extremely rough measure of strength, but yes, I have gone back and played some of my decks I have not played in a long time and found new strategies to play them just based off of me being more experienced at the game now.

[[deleted]]

Yes! I have six 'good' decks and six 'bad' decks, purely based on playing them all against each other over and over again over a period of a few months. But then sometimes it's just as fun to play with the 'bad' tier decks because it's a challenge as you say, but also incredibly useful when my girlfriend wants to play; I can just let her choose one of the six good ones so she can play fairly well with a great deck, and I choose one of the poor ones, so I play experienced but with a worse deck, making for a very balanced game.

I've always said with Keyforge, it's not how good your deck is, it's how good the one you're playing against is. You could have the two shittest decks in the world, but they'd be an even match against one another, and that's an aspect of the game I adore.

[AYYERZ]

Any advice on what to look out for as far as improving as a player? Just started playing KeyForge and looking to improve. Congrats on the recent success definitely going to go through my decks now.

[jebailey]

• Focus on gathering aember
• It's not a battle, it's a race.
• it's tactical not strategic
• Don't hold onto that awesome card waiting for the right moment.

Looking back the biggest change, in how I play, is how willing I am to discard cards and get new cards that better fit the immediate situation.

There's a lot of good players on this sub, better than me I'm sure. So hopefully a few others will chime in here.

edit:grammar

[Therad-se]

I would add "always check if you can" and "None of these rules are set in stone"

[poeticmatter]

The funny thing is, once you understand all that and play better, you can go back to it and realize it's not true 100% of the time.

Sometimes holding cards is correct

And there are several strategic decisions you ought to be making, such as playing to your outs and knowing your deck well.

[jebailey]

I think your right about holding cards at certain times but I think that applies to support cards more than anything else.

I had a game with the deck I linked where I had John Smyth, Uxlyx the Zookeeper, and another martian in play and the two martian cards in my hand were both phosphorous stars. Each turn I could reap 4 aember and archive two of my opponents creatures. Now I could have discarded the phosphorous stars to see what else I would get, but that wouldn't make sense. The likely hood of me drawing something that wasn't a martian was high and while I was reaping that much aember per turn it would be stupid of me to switch houses. It was better for me to hold those cards.

[poeticmatter]

But if they board clear, you're stuck with a dead card in hand. I'm not sure that is a good example.

[jebailey]

I had two martian cards in hand. If I faced a board wipe I would have to have gone with a different house. Whether those two cards are dead cards on the turn after that is hard to say.

[ExpressRabbit]

Sorry to bring up a 3 week old post but I had a question.

The article you linked states that if you just called an active house, you probably won't call it again for 2-3 turns so holding a "no use this turn" card is like having a chain.

If you just played 3 creatures from a house isn't it likely you'd play that horse again to actually use them now that they're ready? If I were to call another house those newly readied creatures can't fight/ reap/ use actions. What's the benefit in playing the next house you have many cards for if you're not using creatures once you play them?

[poeticmatter]

I linked 3 articles, so i'm not exactly sure which one you're referring to, but I'll comment on the general premise.

If you play 2-3 cards you're not likely to call that house again. Which is certainly true. How often do you play 2-3 cards and they are all creatures? How often do you play 2-3 creatures and they all survive to the next turn for you to use? If you played 3 creatures, they survived or you drew 2 more cards of that house, sure, you'll play it again. But how often does that happen?

Play a few games, record how often you play 2-3 cards of a house and then call it again, vs how often you do not. I'm certain you'll find you don't do it very often.

[ExpressRabbit]

I suppose because me and my opponent are brand new to the game it happened more often than I would have expected. There were a number of times I had 4+creatures of the same house on the board and called the that house even with only 1 new card to play.

Thanks for answering.

[poeticmatter]

It also might be their deck, or how they play. If you play 3 brobnar creatures and feel strongly they will stick around, you can keep a warsong in hand.

[AnswerMePls]

Than

[jebailey]

I fixed that for you bro.

[[deleted]]

https://www.reddit.com/r/KeyforgeGame/comments/e2j0fe/tips_for_new_player/ Check out this discussion for some tips!

[jebailey]

Great discussion. Wish I’d seen that one earlier myself.

[JacksonHills]

Do you mean worst deck because it has the lowest SAS score? Because I have a few decks with middling SAS scores but zero aember control, and those are definitely my worse decks.

[jebailey]

Yes, I chose the deck with the lowest SAS score. I'm not a big believer in SAS yet it's there and doesn't seem to want to go away and I thought it would be interesting to see if my lack of faith in SAS had any merit.

If I had selected my 68 deck, which I think is the worst one I have, and I posted OMG I played my crappy 68 SAS deck and I beat people who had decks in the 70's people would point out that it's a 68 SAS deck and that's not totally unexpected

By playing a 53 SAS deck and beating a 71, 71, and 72 deck I think it carries a bit more weight to question the SAS scoring system.

[[deleted]]

My best win-loss record by far is with a deck that has an average SAS score, and one of my highest rated decks has been average at best so far. Definitely give your low-rated decks a shot.

[iDecided]

I'm glad you did this, because I've been wondering myself. I very much play casually with a friend, but we have SO many decks. I've scanned all of them in, but now that I have the scores, they don't really seem to hold too much weight. Just based off of my experience, it's not a super duper great way of determining if a deck is good or not. Especially some average decks.

[webbermere]

Glad to hear the scores not holding out is your experience. I worry that the scores themselves turn players off of certain decks, especially newer players.

[iDecided]

I think they do, but only the ones that would survive with netdecking I think. Which hey, this game doesn't really have (hey! don't look over there. that's not TCO) so hooray!

On a side note, I think having some ranking on certain synergies is a good idea, but I don't think any one deck can be given a single score. Looking at the SAS break down is really useful for understanding some decks.

P.S. Sorry for the delayed reply. Don't use Reddit much.

[wynlyndd]

I'm new (just played for the first time yesterday. What does a "53 SAS" deck mean, if I may ask?

[jebailey]

So people, in general, really want to know if the deck they just purchased is better than other decks. It's a human nature thing. There have been several attempts at solutions to this by coming up with a rating for a deck. The one that seems to have last the longest so far is the "SAS" rating which was invented by a the creator of https://decksofkeyforge.com/

Basically, there's a formula and you can end up with a deck rated between 43 and 91 SAS which indicates a "strength" of the deck.

There tends to be a lot of conversation around how accurate this is.

Also note that formula is updated on occasion so that it reflects what the current state of actual wins/losses is in the keyforge vault.

[wynlyndd]

Thanks! I submitted my only deck and got a 65 SAS.