Harry Potter Card of the Week
with Alex Rockwell

02.01.02  Card of the Week (Out Of Control)
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Well, time for another card of the week.

I got a number of suggestions for cards that people wanted me to focus on. I decided to choose one that two different people both sent me, which I think has some potential, but also has some drawbacks.

Also, I want to go through the process of building a deck from an idea again, so that everyone can see the beginning of the deckbuilding process.

That card is:

Out of Control
10Q Spell
Do 6 damage to your opponent. Then your opponent chooses 4 cards in his or her hand and discards them. (If there are fewer than 4 cards in your
opponent's hand, he or she discards them all.)

Well, this card is obviously powerful, it can deal damage and help you win matches, but it also removes 4 cards from your opponent's hand.

Its drawback is its cost. 10 lessons is a heavy price to have to get up to, and clearly, if this is the only powerful spell you have, the price just isn't worth it.

So what are some other high cost cards that are powerful that we might
want to use?

A few to consider (there are probably more)

Golden Snitch (11 Q) You win after 1 turn if your opponent doesn't have 10
more cards in their library than you, otherwise they win.

Potions Class Disaster (12 P) Your opponent must discard 5 from hand and
play, (5 between the two, meaning that if they have no hand, its 5 from
play!)

Potions Exam (10 P) Your opponent must either discard a potions lesson
from play, or three other cards from play.

Fluffy(10 CMC, sac2) 12/21 creature

Transfiguration Exam (10 T) discard all creatures from play

Titillando (9T) deals 3 to a creature, and opponent discards 3 cards from
hand

Well, those are a few to start thinking about. Obviously, there will be
some cheaper cards we'll want to use too.

One important consideration will be how to get the lessons to play these.
Probably, we'll want items to give us some of the power, preferably, a
powerful wand which provides 3 or more by itself. A cauldron and a wand
is helpful, since then we get to have 2 items in play. Brooms are also a
possibility, since they provide quiddich lessons, which we need for Out of
Control anyway, and also provide useful abilities.
Finally, we might want to use the spell Bravado, since it gives us the
ability to play cards for 5 cheaper, for one turn. This is very good if
we have more than 2 actions.

Another consideration is who to use as a character.
In general, it is good to use one of the lesson provider or Hermione,
since they allow you to get out lessons faster. If we go with Hermione,
we want to use lots of lessons, and items aren't quite as helpful since
they reduce the number of lessons we can use (since using lots of lessons
AND items just leaves no room for the deck).
However, if we use Hermione in combination with Hufflepuff and Practice
Matches, and damage spells, to draw lots of cards, then we could get lots
of lessons and play them quickly. That sounds pretty good.

If we use Flitwick, then we get to pull a charms card out of our discard
once, and we get a free charms. However, we still cant use the big wands
without putting charms in our deck.

If we use Hooch, we get the Q lessons for free, and a free broom, which is
like guaranteeing a second free lesson (this one we just have to use one
action for). Also, we can get a Comet 260 and prevent 1 damage from a
creature every turn, or a Nimbus and do more damage with our Q spells. In
this case, it looks like we wont be using lots of damage spells, so we'll
go with the Comet. (Obviously, this choice depends on the deck).

If we use Minerva, we are resistant to adventures and get transfiguration
for free.


I think it will be a very good idea to include Transfiguration exams and
tests in our deck, to wipe out lots of creatures at once. Also, in
combination with a Comet 260, Transfiguration test is quite good, since
its cheap and it leaves you with only one creature to deal with which is
doing less damage.


So lets put it all together.
I'll choose to use Hooch for this deck, with a Comet 260.

We'll need Charms lessons to use wands, Potions for Cauldrons and the big
potion spells (which are GOOD).

We'll need transfiguration if we want to destroy our opponents creatures.
Now we're running into a problem, needing too many types of lessons.

When trying to use Out of Control, we want to make maximum advantage of
its card discard ability, and that means using potions class disaster,
since they are such a great combo. Then when we add in all the other
types of spells we need it becomes too much, as we need lots of charms to
use a big wand, which is very important to getting enough to use the big
spells.

Its very hard to construct a deck which requires lots of lessons to cast
its spells, as we can see.

We can try:

Madam Hooch
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1 Comet 260
2 Dragon heart Wand
2 Phoenix Feather Wand
4 Pewter Cauldron

(9 items)

10 Charms Lessons
9 Potions Lessons
7 Transfiguration Lessons

(35 lesson producers total) (This may be too much, to find out, you must
playtest. Remember, we need a LOT of lessons, and we need to have 3
different colors of spells.)

4 Potions Class Disaster
4 Potions Exam
4 Out of Control
4 Transfiguration Test
2 Transfiguration Exam

(53 total)

We use the Potions Class Disaster and Exam and the Transfiguration spells
as our main defense, destroying the cards our opponent has in play. Out
of Control helps out with the hand destruction as well as dealing some
damage.
Now we need some more cards for damage, to aid Out of Control, and maybe
some more healing or defense.

How about: 3 Draught of Living Death
4 Burning Bitterroot Balm (great for recycling the big spells)

(60 total)

That finishes our deck. Of course, its just a start, and only testing can
make it good.
What I have done here is only the beginning of making a good deck. No
deck will be good without testing and refinement, so I'll leave that up to
you.

Of course, there are many other ways to make use of Out Of Control, this
is merely one that I thought of. I'll leave it up to you to make your
own. Just remember than any time you have an expensive card, its is very
hard to build your deck to accommodate it, and it has to really be worth
it.

Thanks for reading,
Alex



P.S.
If anyone would like to see a certain card featured on card of the week,
just send me an email and I'll think about it.  rockwell@u.washington.edu