Strategy – Library size

I have hesitated writing strategy articles in this blog before since I don’t see myself as anything else than a mediocre player. But when it comes to balancing a library I think I have come pretty far in my thinking. I use to hear “I think you have built this deck as good as it is possible” from good and experienced players when they see my weirdest decks. Let’s just ignore the fact that they add “But you probably wont win any tournament with it.” for now and concentrate on the fact that one of my least weak feats in Jyhad is the ability to build a well-balanced deck.

All the time people build 90-card libraries and I am not only talking about inexperienced players, people still win tournaments with 90-card libraries all the time. So far in 2010 43/123 decks in the TWDA have 90-card libraries and quite some are close with more than 80 cards. The way I see it almost no library at all should contain 90 cards. The only exception I can think of right now is decks exploiting Guillame Giovanni’s ability to increase hand size by one for every location controlled.

So, what is the reasoning behind my thesis? A library of 90 cards is never exhausted (unless target of some serious mill tactics but in that way 90 cards doesn’t help either). The fewer cards to shuffle, the lesser risk of drawing big chunks of one type of a card at the wrong time. In other words, a 60-card library gives it’s player a more reliable distribution than a 90-card one. This is simple (maybe not so simple but still) mathematics. Still normally intelligent people and players that are better than me argue that 90 cards is the way to go. I understand the inexperienced player, I was there when I restarted playing Jyhad late 2007, in that he want so many cards and its painful enough to lower the desired deck-size to 90 cards but players constantly active since 1994? I just don’t get it.

At the summer of 2008 I started to build 60-cards libraries and my results improved a little. Problem was that I went from strict 90 to strict 60 and that is actually too few in many cases. Late 2008 I tried 70, 75 and 80 cards but it wasn’t until late 2009 I entered a tournament with a library of a number not dividable by 5. This is not important for this article but it shows how I locked myself thinking “I shall build a 60/70/75/80/90-cards deck”.

What I have been doing the last months is to try and build every deck a 60-cards deck and increase its numbers after play-testing if needed. This way I get the best possible distribution when testing and rebuilding my deck. I also know what amount of cards is right from experience of having just a handful cards left when winning a standard 5-player table. I break this rule now and then claiming to “know” that 60 cards is too few but I promise to be better following my own concept in the future. As a meaningless fact I can tell you that the 7 decks I have in my bag for the moment contains 60, 64, 70, 72, 73, 76 and 76 cards.

What to think of when building small decks? I try to study actual games to see how many cards of a certain type I actually need and not how many I want. Of course you always want to deflect every bleed that hits you but how many times do you want to have your hand size decreased by 1 for the bounce card, pay one blood to bounce and stay untapped or keep a wake at hand to be able to bounce? Maybe not as many times as you think. This is just one example that is possible to apply to many different types of cards. How many times do your combat deck actually need to play Taste of Vitae during a game and do you need a Blur in each round or is it okay to just hit for 2 with your Magnum some times?

Probably this is nothing new for most of you and stubborn players keeping every deck at 90 cards wont be convinced by reading this but hopefully there are some details in my writing worth taking into consideration for some of you.

Good luck fellow deck-shrinkers!