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Megaman

Maximizing the Curve
by Sith Dragon
October 03, 2005

My last article I gave you a rough template on how to construct your characters by the drop, but what about each individual drop? How many different characters do I run per drop? Is it best to have all of one character or a couple of several?

Many decks will answer this question on their own, as they either don't have many characters on certain drops or the ones they have are not very good other than one, maybe two, characters. Yet there are some teams that have many characters that all seem to be just as good as the others. Here are some things you can look at to help you decide.

First look at your theme. If there is a very specific thing you are trying to accomplish then many times this will eliminate some of the characters simply because they don't fit the mold of the deck. Beefy attackers are of little use in a stall deck, or making an archangel/polaris deck you want everyone to have flight.

Select the characters you know you want in the deck.
Is there a pattern? Do you seem to have a lot of attacker with even costs and defenders with odd costs?
This can also help weed some characters out if your deck fits a mold like this.

How many of a character are you running on different drops? Don't ever run a lot of one character that will trip over themselves. This is when a character has multiple versions within a drop or two of each other. My beloved Gotham team suffers greatly from this. They have a slew of characters that could all see play, but most of the characters are two or less drops apart (Huntress, Batgirl, Batman, Spoiler among others). You don't want to have to give up you four drop because your five drop is the same character.
Even running a three and five drop can be very risky.
As you get to turn five and up the chances of the previous drop surviving grow slimmer, so it can be a bit safer. In the case of the Gotham deck I take the cards I know I want in there and that will eliminate many other characters as the other version may be good, but with them only a drop apart, they can't be run.

So how do you pick what characters to run and how many? The deeper the pool of characters you can work in the more stable your deck will be. It will also make it harder for the decks out there that get bonuses when a certain character comes out as you have other options. Lets look at an X-men deck. Of all the teams I think X-men have the deepest character pool of any team out there. There are generally at least 3 good, playable characters per drop and they don't trip over themselves like Gotham Knights. If you can run a couple of each you get a very diverse pool of characters. Another advantage to this in later drops is that if you are running 2-3 six drops, it wont hurt quite as bad if you should miss your seven drop, hopefully one of the two six drops can deal with your opponents seven drop with some help.
If you run all of one character on a certain drop, missing the next drop will hurt more as you wont be able to play a character only a drop behind. Instead it may be a couple drops smaller, which could really hurt.

OK, so we run a couple of multiple characters on every drop right? Not quite. As you look at your character choices for a drop, is there a character that is either so good or so needed for your theme that you must have it? In these cases you will want to run 3-4 of that card and let it dominate that drop. For
example: My current Gotham build is based around hand drawing. On the three drop I let Oracle dominate that slot by running 4 of her. I need her out so I let her dominate the 3 slot.

Another good idea is look at the character that dominates a certain slot. To round out the drop try to pick a character that is opposite of that character. Since oracle is not an attacker, I don't want to get hosed when I get stuck with initiative on the odd drops, so I use 2 three drop batmans (5att/4def). If your team has a search card that can also help you go get the character you only run 1-2 of on a drop. Another good example would be a blob/feral rage sabertooth combo. One is an awesome defender and one is an awesome attacker.

The other advantage to diversity is since there is no side deck to accommodate mid-game adaptations to an opponent's deck, throwing a couple interesting characters that have abilities that will help against main stream decks is always a plus.

So to sum up this rather long-winded article, you want your drops to have some diversity to give you some options, but if a character is essential to your deck idea them feel free to max it out. If you have any comments or questions, as always feel free to email me at Sithdragon13@yahoo.com. Just remember everything is an experiment so be patient with your decks. BATTLE ON!


"Are you threatening me, Master Jedi?"