Hello, my name is Parker, and my name is Ned. And this is The Force Unlimited, yet another Star Wars Unlimited Podcast. This is episode 8, number 13, we're recording on April 14th. But tonight might be a slightly shorter episode, because while Ned is a man who believes in math and science, I believe in woo-woo, so in the interest of keeping the 13th episode risk adverse, we're going to go fast and quickly. I hope you've got your taxes done.
One format change, dear listener, going forward, Ned and I will be releasing on the second and fourth Tuesday of the month, which will cost you two episodes a year, so I'm sorry. That's two fewer episodes a year of Ned and his math, but it does increase the predictability of when we have an episode on a Tuesday. So if you're a listener, you can look at a calendar and know if we're releasing an episode.
If you're a garbage roller, you can know whether or not you should release an interview with a developer within an hour of when we release an interview with a developer. Ned, since the last time we recorded, we started getting shadows of the galaxy spoilers. That's exciting. I know. It is. Let's talk about them. Yeah, pumped. But wait, hold on. One moment. One moment.
Okay. You told me, and my understanding was when we were going into this, that we're the McLean Alaron Neil News Hour, that means that we don't talk about spoilers. That's for folks who are not on the news that's fit to print side of that. That's a dumb policy, Ned. I don't like that policy. Well, I'm aware of that, but that was your policy that you outlined. I think to me a couple of episodes ago. I hate it, but yeah, that's true.
We don't generally talk about spoilers on this episode, but they were spoilers for shadows of the galaxy. They were exciting. Yes. So, what, another thing that was exciting, this is kind of crazy to me coming from an LCG background, but I was with my son at Powell's books, The One Incedre Hills. Okay. I was going to ask that.
I had talked, so I'd been in a red castle doing my sealed escalation leak, and the employee there, Matt, seems like an awesome guy running the thing, doing great job running it, mentioned that he needs a couple extra packs in case people drop out to be able to onboard new people because they don't just need the weekly packs, which he had set aside. But if somebody new joins, they need enough packs to catch up, and he didn't have that.
And he had heard Powell's the main birdside branch was selling packs at MSRP, so he just sent somebody down there to pick him up, which, I mean, that's amazing customer service, because he's paying, you know, more than, he's paying MSRP, which is, yeah, when you're in retail, bad.
It's a support, those of us who are already playing, but so I was in the Seater Hills branch, which for those of you who know Portland know that that's the more sci-fi, it's the second biggest of the Powell's, and which it's a, the size of a Barnes and Noble, it's a normal bookstore size. But I was like, I wonder if they have any packs, and low and behold they did, and I, you know, went up and I was like, hey, how much are those?
I was just picking a number, like, $7, $8, $9, and she's like, well, they're $4.99. And I was like, what? And so I got some. And fun fact, Ned, as you noted during our Mr. Su case episode, the EV, the expected value of a package generally negative in a world where market forces are able to interact as the EV of a pack goes up, then the price of a pack goes up. Generally speaking, yeah.
I was just speaking right, if people, people will pay more, if there's a lot of value, if there's an infinite amount of packs, then the price will, you know, the EV will come down. But yeah, because in a world where packs are going on eBay right now for like $8, $9 a piece, if you, you know, when you can get them at MSRP, the actual value of the pack is much higher just by virtue of the fact that, you know, maybe that mask's wrong, but I feel like it's right. I've got a arbitrage there.
Yeah, exactly. Right? I open a surplus loop, which basically paid for the entire endeavor. And I've arranged to exchange that for cold hard cash. But the big note that I was excited about almost made me run, because you know, Han tonight, but not quite in our match, as I finally have got Millennium Falcon, which, I don't care about the Millennium Falcon, fine card, whatever. I hate upkeep, so I will probably never enjoy playing it ever. But that is the last holdout.
So while I don't have a place that I now have at least one of every Spark of Rebellion card. And that was felt momentous to me. Beautiful. But I did not play, because you know, Han tonight, Ned, why don't you tell us about the match that we played and the cards that I did play? It was an interesting match. So I was playing a Jin Red, a home brew against Parker's semi-home brew, Crenic Green. And I respect the Jin Presence. Yeah. Well, there were a couple of cards that interested me.
Like there's a lot of weird synergy, like side synergies that interested me between sneak attack, wing leader, K2SO, and heroic sacrifice. So I thought, hey, let's try and get a stew going. And a stew was made, but it was not pipe and hot. I took one game off of you, which I am proud of. But honestly, just like the top, I was not fast enough to get under you. And your top end is just so much more powerful than mine that there was no way for me to squeak things out.
The blue green villainous ticking clock is allowed taking luck. Do you think you got enough value out of Jin's ability to justify running that deck with Jin? So I think that that's an interesting question. There were definitely a bunch of moments where I was able to trade up in a way that felt really good, where I was able to, for example, trade or throw a subignan into a short trooper and keep my subignan.
Well, I was able to, you know, have a lot of that one you would have happened or not happened not to the cell block guard. Yeah, I'm just scared. There were, there's kind of an understanding that Thrawn, any Thrawn deck right now in Sparkle Reborn is probably just a better deck if you run boba in it. Yeah. You just swap out the leaders leaves of 50 cards in tech.
And I was kind of during our game wondering, you know, trying to keep track of my head of how often you were getting value out of that trade. You definitely got some good trades at the low end. But I'm wondering if the burst value of just being able to get Millennium Falcon out on turn one, you know, or something like that. Maybe.
I mean, this is where we kind of get into the weeds is that I feel like, I'm like, like boba and Thrawn, boba is, and like you can build your deck around Thrawn, but Thrawn is kind of like an incidental value and boba feels a very similar way. We're generally, you're not building your deck around maximizing the value that you're getting from boba. You just like from the leaders, you're just built. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You're just realizing value from boba passively.
This is more of like a passive value leader where you're using her to try and nickel and dime out little extra advantages. Whereas Han is a leader that has like a very build around field to him. And so if I was, I would not run this deck with Han because I would be running something different. I would be running something like casino Han, I think, is demonstrated to work very, you know, pretty darn well. Although I haven't looked at the deck list, but apparently blue Han did well.
Next weekend, that's the one case, which very interesting. I'm interested about that deck list. Yeah, exactly. I have a chance to look at them. Any takeaways from the bottom of the deck list? No, bombing run is good. Yes. If we look at the times when I was able to bombing run for reasonable value, I felt like I was getting about comparable value to your overwhelming brushes, which is good because they're both five resource cards that are multi target removal.
That said, I felt like I had to structure my plays a little bit more, strangely, in order to realize that value from bombing run. Which in a sense, so as expected, because bombing runs a one aspect card and overwhelming rush is a two aspect card, you would expect it to be slightly better. This drum I will beat, I know you don't necessarily agree with that. Which is funny though, because OB's kind of generally perceived to be pushed. I would totally agree that OB is pushed.
I think that OB is a very, very good card, and I'm happy to have longer discussions about OB, but I think that this comparison between bombing run and overwhelming rush is... Well, I want to do my takeaway. I'll show you this. I think it's really value for about half of our listeners. The half of our listeners who are here for me as opposed to here for you. And that is playing a less good deck that is better for you, yields better results. And I'm increasingly convinced.
I have been trying to make Iden Green work, and I have been failing. I have been just whiffing in the Space Arena and Granarino Web Cam League. I just have not been having success with Iden Green. And I'm increasingly convinced. I like blue. I'm like Green. I'm coming around to that. I like villain, although I think that's more a Sparky Rebellion thing than a Star Wars Illuminati as a whole thing.
I like that deck, but the playstyle of Iden feels a little more planning, control, and intelligence. Even though there's a probably 30 plus card, overlap 40 plus card, overlap with Crenic. Crenic's playstyle and the few cards that it has, like the Scout Pike Trooper, feel a little more mid-rangey, more just like big B-fee trades, which is more my playstyle. And I've been having more success with Green Chewy, Green Crenic than I did with Green Iden.
Even though I recognize that generally, I feel like conventionally accepted that Iden's a better leader right now. But playing to my playstyle, playing to my strengths, is yielded far better results. And that tonight just really kind of, I felt even when I was on the back foot in losing, not to take away your win or anything, but that was something like that game I had.
I was just trying like all of my Super Laser Technicians, I drew like three Super Laser Technicians and two resupplies in the space of like three turns. I was just like getting nothing to solve my, you know, decreasing hit points. I didn't feel like I didn't know what to do where I was lost or the deck was failing me. That's my takeaway. But yes, tonight's first of two main us topics, Ned. So I put this one on the topic.
I wanted to talk about, because one thing you and I enjoy is pedantically defining things. Oh, man. It's, I mean, between a person who has practiced a lot, one point in their life, and somebody who is heavily involved in mathematics, pedantic technical definitions are extremely important. I mean, if you don't have those, what do you have? You have a bunch of... It's just chaos, yeah. Big hand waving. Yeah, exactly. It's chaos.
It's one of those areas where your and my mentality is, and this has nothing to do with force and limit. This is just you and me in our insufferable lives. So I want to put this on because not to spoil the ending, but I feel that there is an infinite amount of just recursive pedantry available in this topic, which is the distinction between better and strictly better. Yes. And especially with now we have set one, it's complete. You can talk about cards.
We're going to get into set two at some point, and you know, people are going to start comparing cards from set two to set one, and we're going to be able to say, well, this is, this card is better generally, but then they're, you know, strictly better. And that term gets bandied about. And normally Ned, in the interest of like there's a credit dialogue, you make me start off with the definitions, but why don't you start off with the definition of better versus strictly better for two cards?
I am going to reference Game 3 here, and I'm going to say a strictly better card is a Pareto improvement over a non-strictly better card. So what that means is that there in every aspect, this card is at the level of or superior to the card that it is strictly better than. Okay. Okay. So it's better all the time. It by different, by the extremely technical definition of strictly better, it must in no case be worse, because otherwise it is. And I assume it has to be better in at least one.
Yes. It must be better in at least one, in at least one, one, one metric. One metric. And it cannot be worse in any metrics. In that card, that thing is strictly better. Now when we're applying things to card games, I think that... Well, I suspect I know where you're headed and I don't want to go there yet. So whereas better would just be if you have to choose one or two, you're generally going to choose one versus the other, and that's a better card.
So let's, I wanted to start by talking about Echo Base Defender versus Cell Block Card. And for our audio dear listeners, the Cell Block Card is the Vilnis III and III with Sentinel. And the Echo Base Defender is command and heroism, but it's, and it's got that extra point of power. It is a 4-3 for 3, also with Sentinel. So on its face, I would, I think it's a fair assertion that Echo Base Defender is better than Cell Block Card. They do the same thing. Yes. They cost the same amount.
And yet, Echo Base Defender has an additional point of power, which makes it better. Yes. Yes, I would agree. If you are looking from the, like again, if you think about that game topography, right, decks, if you can include Echo Base Defender in your deck versus if you could include Cell Block Card in your deck, if for some reason you were playing decks that could include both of those, you would pick Echo Base Defender over Cell Block Card in the vast majority of circumstances.
And so I guess that's the question. So first of all, let's just clear that out. Yeah. This assumes that cards are available. Yes. Right? Yes. We're assuming that nobody is considering this with the aspect decks, right? Right. So Echo Base Defender versus Cell Block Card is a hypothetical example because right now there are no decks that can run those both without asking the aspect decks. But when you can run one, which one would you rather run? Echo Base Defenders, just a point of power better.
But to that end, if I guess there's, the first question is, so aspects are ruled out. So what I tend to be care about traits, right? Traces matter? Yeah. I mean, so even if a target deck could run Echo Base Defender, right, for some reason. Yeah. It doesn't have the Imperial trait. Right. So then it fails to be, do I understand that it fails to be strictly better? Right. So this is where we get into the layers of how better do we have to talk about first strictly better?
So you can, if you want to use a very well situated definition of strictly better, one that conforms to most people's normal understanding of the term strictly better. What you are doing is you are taking as a basis some set of a deck, right? So you wouldn't be talking about a vacuum because the vacuum, you get all of these situations, but you're talking about a deck and you might talk about a meta.
So you might say, for example, in my deck that I am playing, Sabine is strictly better than Lothal in search of. Okay. Right. And that's not going to be actually true, right? You would say, say, being is better than Lothal insertion, but they differ in a number of key ways. But going back to... So, sorry. I mean, hey dear listener, it's editor Parker. You can tell because my shirt's a little more unzipped. This episode is what we in the editing booth refer to as a train wreck.
So, score one for woo-woo. I struggle with the idea that there's a subjective definition. Like I get that, you know, Vader cares about villainy, talking cares about. I'm not just an impure, but I've built my deck. I've got 47 out of 50 cards, and I'm trying to pick the last three of. And okay, well now I'm subjective on the level of what are the other 47 cards in my deck, when I'm trying to find what is better, but, you know, it's versus strictly better.
But then once you get into, okay, well there's a meta, right? There's a format. What sets are available. There's the meta. And then there's my local meta that I know. And then all the way down to, I'm probably going to be playing Sally and Sally always runs this deck, right? Like, it's a struggle with the idea of comparing two cards in a white room on one end of a spectrum. And then all the way down the other end of spectrum is considering everything, right? Like, it feels.
Right, and this is, yeah, and this is where it gets hard, right? Like, when you are talking about things that are strictly better, if you are considering like a pure white room situation, then there is no possible card that is strictly better than any other possible card. Okay, good. Yeah, so that's better. Yeah. So that gets to, well, first of all, before we get to that Ned, it's a trap.
Oh, no. And the parlons and the parlons and Star Wars, because I'm going to force you to talk about spoilers. So with shadows of the galaxy, we got a spoiler for phase three Dark Trooper. And I picked this subject in large part to get around our policy of not discussing spoilers. Because, I mean, so for those of you who aren't following along with spoilers, we'll throw it up on the screen.
This one, because I, you know, it is a spoiler, which we generally avoid talking about, is not that we don't talk about cards, haven't been released yet, we just don't break them down. It is a three cost, three, three in command villainy. The phase three Dark Trooper is an imperial and trooper, just like Selok Guard. It's also a droid. It has sentinel. And it has a trigger when combat damage is dealt to this unit, given experience, token to this unit, if it survives the damage.
So on its face, this immediately jumped out, echo based offender and Selok Guard are not easily comparable, because currently no deck can run them both at cost. But a phase three Dark Trooper, in a deck that needs one, three cost sentinel unit, just and is running command, which is a non-trivial, but also omnipresent question. This feels a lot closer to strictly better. I would tend to agree.
I would say that the number of circumstances in which you could say that I would rather run Selok Guard over phase three Dark Trooper is not large. Right. So yeah, and I guess that's the question.
And the reason why I want to talk about this is that given a long enough tale of magic Christmas land situations and weird hypotheticals, essentially boiling gals into the puzzles that the outmaneuver are putting out, there are these corner cases where something will always be worse than something else. The one that came to mind is, at first I was trying to keep limited to hypotheticals. What if, as a general rule, we agree more power is better than less power.
More HP is generally better than less HP. Right. But to the more power, if I'm running Grand Inquisitor, that's actually not true. If I have a unit of three power versus a unit of four power, I would rather have the three power unit, assuming I'd rather have a three power raid one unit over a four power unit because my ability doesn't work with four power units. Oh yeah, oh sure, absolutely. I was just singing something even more hypothetical. I just defeated a unit with six or more power.
Well that's a knock against higher powered units. Yeah, exactly, Grand Inquisitor. And another spoiler is calculated leadality. This is also from shadows. It's a four cost event. The key point, we're not doing a four breakdown, is defeated non-liter unit to cost three or less. And then for each upgrade that was on that unit, given experience token to a friendly unit. So that card is more penalizing against a dark trooper than a cell block guard.
And so if that card is prevalent in the meta, suddenly maybe you want to run cell block guard. So I guess, when you take into account the entirety of the meta, even down to traits, it gets very difficult to truly say, like categorically something is strictly better. Right. And this is why we get into these really pointless argument, semantic arguments. And this is, you know, to give like a real stupid example, right?
Like let's imagine that there was an open fire but deals one less damage card, right? The cost exactly the same as open fire, exactly the same aspect as that open fire but it dealt less one less damage. I could certainly construct some theoretical considerations in which I would rather, you know, I would wish that the card in my hand was not open, open slightly less fire than open fire, right? Right, right. Eclipse fire, yeah.
And I guess that's the, so I guess from a purpose of reasonable conversation, right? There's essentially now we have three definitions. We have, right, better, which is pretty subjective, but we can kind of generally agree that people like better cards. On the other end, you have the almost impossible, platonic ideal of strictly better. Right. But then in the middle, we have the reasonable person definition of strictly better, which is if we assume that better is good.
Yes. Then strictly better, right? Right. Yeah. But then even then, I mean, I feel like you probably do have to take into account. I was thinking in my example that like I can imagine set three, Twilight of the Republic, the Clone Wars focused set, will have some amount of droid hate, also probably some droid support. But there's gotta be, you know, you can imagine a card that just, you know, when played to feed a droid, right?
So then you're still taking that into account with those dark troopers, right? Is it better, you know, is it strictly better? Well, if that card's running rampant, no, it's actually much worse, right? But as a general right now, given the 252 Sparkle Rebellion 10 shadows of the Galaxy cards we've seen, we can say that for a reasonable person definition, face-free dark trooper is strictly better for sublock card index that can run. Right.
And so what we need is we need a term that would be like strictly prime better, which means not actually strictly better in the sense of a Pareto improvement. Or perhaps we ought to change this and we talk about like the Platonic improvement is a Pareto improvement. Right. Like this card is Pareto better than this other card because in every role of an aspect, it is better and it is no worse in any situation versus strictly better.
Yeah. But that's I think getting normal people to use Pareto and I that is, you know, one of the reasons I like hanging out with you, that is a word that's very much in my passive vocabulary, not in my active vocabulary. And I don't think we're going to get the TCG discourse at large to use that. I think there's some of you said for just accepting that like there's this Platonic ideal is strictly better that will never be met.
And asking to conversations to meet in the middle and say like, are you a reasonable person? Which if you're on discord or read it, no. But if you're at your LGS, then yes. And if you're on discord or read it, then you are chasing that Platonic ideal of strictly better. And if you are at your LGS, if you are just engaging, you know, with normal people with normal concerns and you're going to use the reasonable person, let's assume that better cards are more desirable.
And now this card is strictly better. Yeah. Yeah. I would say that another way that you could think of it is this idea, I mean, to go back to where this problem of Pareto improvements was first heavily discussed, it's in like trade. People talking about trade and Ricardo, the economist talking about the ideas of trade is you can come up with situations in which it is not, and this is maybe digressing a little bit too much.
But the general argument that is made for trade is if I can do thing X better and you can do thing Y better, then it is, and we can exchange, then even though it might not be a true Pareto improvement, we can generate more total overall value before yadda yadda. And I guess I'm going way off into the problem. No, you absolutely are. But that's okay. That's why, I mean, this is episode 13, people have shown up, I know this about us. So okay, so yeah.
But the reason why I wanted to bring it up is because I think we're about to, especially seeing, I can't imagine this is the only card going back about three episodes ago. Yeah. And I've also considered my suspicion that every one aspect card that even one that's simple, every one aspect card will eventually be eclipsed by two aspect card.
And again, I'm going to defend here the position that probably so, but not necessarily because one of the beauty of game design technology is when you make a thing, you can make things both better and worse in a way that makes them better for some circumstances and worse for other circumstances. Sure. So that you get like niches for card different cards. And I agree with that. But I think the fact that you can tack stuff onto it, right? Like, whale is about a simple event as you can get, right?
It does one thing, it does one thing well, simple, same with open fire, right? And they're both mono-aspected cards. But there's actually room where you could have a heroic whale that also heals you for two while doing it, right? Like, you know, some small triviality that isn't breaking, but then is better than whale. Right, you can, but I can't. And you still need that whale for the other cards, right, for the other decks that can run that aspect.
But anyways, as we get more cards, I think there's an increasing frequency where we're going to see mono-aspected cards that do something simple like cell block guard, ectfced by a dual aspected card that does something just ever so slightly more. Right. And what I point to, yeah. Is that four decks that can run Phase III Dark Trooper, you would probably run Phase III Dark Trooper over cell block guard.
But if I'm running like a red, blue, grand inquisitive deck, I'm going to run, yeah, not a choice. Well, and you know, and something that's something that's going to point out on my LGS that I thought was really compelling kind of a final note was applied is that any deck that can currently run cell block guard would probably just take six cell block guards if it was a choice. Yeah. It does great off of unit Vader.
It triggers, you know, some kind of deck that's in some sort of ramp, like grand inquisitive and showing life, yeah, running cell block guard. And if you're trying to ramp in Palpatine, yeah, absolutely, you'll take some more of that, some more Sentinel that slows the, you know, comes the game up. So funnily enough, even though one is better than the other, just you're actually acting something else completely. Yeah. So, well, okay, let's jump to another segment.
Sorry about that, bit of a technical hurdle, bit of a mishap there, but we're going to jump into our second segment, niche keywords. Ned. Yeah. When we talked to Ryan, you mentioned, you referred to grit as a niche keyword. Yeah. And I did, I didn't want to jump in. We were in the middle of interviewing a dev, there's no high stakes, but I was, I wanted to follow up on that one.
It's just you and me and we can kind of grind things down into the dirt and kind of get you to, let's start by getting you to define what you meant by a niche keyword. So I'm going to classify keywords into like three buckets. And these buckets, the contents of these buckets change over time for a given game. So like, so initially you, you have like obvious keywords. So obvious keywords, I'm going to use an analogy that's going to make sense for precisely one person, and that's me.
And that's in group theory, there's this idea where you can sort of map. I'm doing a really bad job, but essentially, the group theory is, you describe operations and sets. And if you do an operation on an element of a set, you get another element of, or if you do an operation on, on an element of the group, then you get another element of the group. So obvious keywords are like, you have like a very set bag of tricks and then you just apply them to members of the group.
So that's like the first kind of categorization. Can you give me an example of this? Yes, so overall, I think, yeah, overall, I think is like a really obvious keyword. So like Sentinel, I think, is a really obvious keyword where we have combat, we have combat, we want to make restrictions on combat. And so what are some restrictions that we can do on combat? Well, we can have a restriction on combat, the Sentinel is, okay, it restricts your target space, right?
So it's a restriction of target space, right? And overwhelm is like an expansion of target space, right? Where we have combat, you have a powerful unit, there's this kind of like obvious mechanical and thematic like. So you're going to take these assumptions of combat that, for example, that maybe rules or strategies.
So in the case of Sentinel, the rule is you can attack anybody you want and you thwart that assumption, you thwart that rule, or in the case of overwhelm, normally you're looking to make reasonably efficient trades. You don't normally want to throw your 9.9s into 1.1s. Exactly. But that's a strategy, there's no rule you can't. Yeah, it may. But what if we made it go ahead? Well, overwhelm makes it actually strategically very viable. Okay, so that's sort of those are the obvious ones.
The next ones we have are what I call domain expansion. So the idea behind these are they take an area of the game that has previously been considered to be like not obvious or not mechanically explored, it makes it mechanically explored. So smuggle, I think, is a really perfect example of a domain expansion where resources are a thing and we have previously interacted with resources in very limited ways with like hansibility in the millennium, falcon kind of and land. Landau.
Yeah, but we're taking that and we're saying, okay, this is an area of space that we have not explored extensively and now we're going to add that into like our standard bag of tricks. So similarly, I think that a lot of the recursion that's been happening so far where the recursion of like home one or what are the the snow speeder where you're getting cards back. It's not keyworded and I understand why this is so. So, so, so, you're not snowing a rogue skirmish, right?
You're a skirmisher, yeah, thank you. Yeah, you're a skirmisher. So, so, in that case though, then so you've got the obvious ones, which are just basic assumptions about the game, we're going to twist them. You have domain expansion, which is here's a corner of the game and there's a whole bucket of things. We're going to blow it out. Right. And sometimes, yeah, and sometimes these things, so a magic example I think is plus one plus one counters, right?
Well, I want to step back that even within domain expansion, I mean, I don't want to reuse our word, but right. Right. Lower case obvious, like those places, there are obvious domains where like the resource row, the discard pile, right, your deck, right? These are, yeah, and some of these become obvious in retrospect. So, like, for example, I think in magic, the gathering, scry and other like top deck manipulation keywords used to not be obvious, right?
But then it became obvious when you started messing with it. Plus one plus one counters, I think is another example, you know, in Star Wars experience, like every unit is exactly the same as the stats that are printed on it. So, you know, we're going to add this new mechanical feature to enable us to disambiguate between units and that is experience like tokens essentially.
Right. So, I think there's somebody who said for the fact that like also a keyword might be a domain expansion keyword, but once that domain is expanded upon, yeah. Now other keywords, not the original obvious, yes, yes, yes, oh, well, we allowed to play in the sandbox, yes, then the obvious. Precisely. Right. So, like, for example, I think that a space that Star Wars has not gotten into that I would expect them to get into at some point is the concept of token cards, right?
Like, so many games have these tokens where they're pieces of cardboard that are put into play by other game effects that aren't like a full piece of cardboard and they don't have like complete. So I'm going to take the a lukewarm take. I'm going to make a lukewarm take. So especially with the SHD, the shadows of the galaxy previews where they were very explicit that here are the tokens for shadows of the galaxy and they showed off to gorgeous pieces of art of experience and shield.
The tone and phrasing and the fact that these are the tokens as opposed to these are the versions of the always existing tokens. Yeah. It makes it very clear that future sets will have other tokens as an auction. 110% right. And on top of that, if you do, I mean, I feel like you're going to do a Clone Wars set. Yeah. One one you battle droids is maybe the most obvious token, you know, token units. Yeah. Okay. I love them. Yeah. Right. You know, they're great. They exist. But like, that's ground.
It hasn't been broken yet. I'm going to do more obvious keywords and interactions with those. In the last sort of categories, what I called niche keywords and what I mean by a niche keyword, niche keywords aren't necessarily bad, but they are the space that they can take up is much smaller. Right. So like an obvious keyword tends to be able to go on lots of things and you can kind of riff on it a lot.
And the domain expansion keyword, maybe it only exists in one set, but it opens up this space and then you can have other like obvious keywords that the trigger offer that niche keywords. So like, let's talk about grit, right? So things that make grit niche in my mind, it can't go on every unit. Like fundamentally, there are some units that it doesn't make sense on any unit that has a relatively small hit points. It's just grits a terrible key. Why would you put grit on that unit?
It doesn't make any sense. And you can say, oh, it's a challenge for players, you know, like figure out a way to do that. But I mean, and the payoff is dangerous, you know, something that Ryan talked about and I think that that is very true is that grit really rewards you for stacking a lot of stuff onto a single unit, right? Like a bigger unit with a, you know, the bigger your unit is, the more grit impacts it and you can eventually get these huge, completely monster units.
And within the context of the game, they seem to be very hesitant to have straight up Kila Kila unit. Like, right. You got vanquish, but everything else, super laser blast, but even takedown, which is a pretty kind of, it's the cheaper version of vanquish, but it references hit points. And in general, they seem to be kind of at least for the first satin, what they've talked about so far, a little bit hesitant to have a lot of Kila person or Kila unit straight up. No, no nothing.
So, I'm going to push back because I love your buckets. Right. I like that mapping that those three categories are perfect for me. I feel like once you expand into the implicit, like once the rules expand just by virtue of the nature of the game into the domain of persistent damage, yes. And grit, grit, I think falls into an obvious category. Grit, I think, is actually one of those domain expansion, ergo obvious keywords where the domain expansion happened in the actual creation of the rules.
I feel like heel was kind of the obvious domain expansion there where heel, like we care about once we have persistent damage, he lets us interact with persistent damage. But he was just like something similar to a life steel, but capped, right? Like, or life link, but capped. Yeah. But, I mean, for me, grit is, oh, once we have to, if we're putting tokens on units to represent damage, yeah, what if we did something with those tokens? Like, that's a domain, a simple domain expansion question.
And then what's the most obvious thing you could do with tokens on, on a power mob, right? Right. Oh, what if they were, what if they were power, right? Like, they obviously can't be hit points. No. Right. Yeah. So, you can't represent plus one am I so on the same time, but whatever represent power. And so then it just, in my mind, becomes obvious. I acknowledge that, yeah, like a one one, I mean, I think the same, to me, said, you know, to some extent, it's also true for overwhelm, right?
Like a two two with overwhelm. But how is a two two for overwhelm less of useless, but challenge to the player card than a two two with grit? I think that the core reason why is grit, and that this is just sort of my, my sort of native heuristic is that power boosting effects are something that is, are kind of desirable and square stat boosting effects are kind of desirable, but but boosting effects are generally kind of bad.
And so like grit, like overwhelm, I can see playing a deck where I'm playing some kind of crummy overwhelm units and like electrostabs or, you know, light sabers or whatever. You know, like imagine guarding to the wheels, but with overwhelm, right? Like you put your slap a light saber on that gentleman and then you've got yourself a real unit. Whereas like, okay, let's say that I'm going to make that two two with grit. All right, well, I'm going to put something that boosts the size of its butt.
Sorry. Resilient. Yeah, resilient, right? And but I think, I think resilient absolutely, it's not amazing, but in the right decks, I think it does see play. Because, and I think due to the back and forth nature of the game, the fact that, yeah, even without grit, like resilient just wrecks people's math, right? Like, I've got a five five, you've got a three three and two two, you run your two two or your three three into my and confident that I'll do something with it.
And then you'll be able to hit me with the other thing. You run your five, your three three into my five five, and then I play resilient. Right, but there's one step that we've kind of left off about grit and that is you can't turn, turning it on yourself is more difficult, right? Like you need your to have your opponents units be able to bump into it. Right, like you need to bump your unit into your opponents units or they need to bump their units into your units.
And so like grit on a small unit, I don't know, I'm sure that they will do it at some point, like to the extent that grit becomes evergreen. So yeah, that goes, I guess, I also have to assume that all of the, and maybe this is an errand assumption, I have to assume all of the spark rebellion keywords are evergreen.
Probably, and dear listener, for those of you who don't play magic, evergreen is a term used to mean keywords that will just always show up and are always available to the developed rights. And he given set as a finite number in traditional TCG design, a finite number of cards or of keywords that you can't, you don't want to have 19 new keywords in one set. So you got a couple right case in point, shadows of the galaxy has two.
It has bounty and the associated capture mechanic, which is not a keyword, and it has smuggle. Mm-hmm. Those are only the two new ones introduced in Chazza Galaxy. So I have to assume that all the spark rebellion ones are carrying forward. I can't imagine that they're done next. That's my guess. I imagine that probably at least, and again, they've designed five sets out. So probably, I'll pet check.
I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly, the artist who illustrated today's preview, yes, dear listener, we have jumped forward into the future, who illustrated today's preview of, this is the way. Yeah. Posted that he illustrated that card back in 2022, two years ago, and that he is currently working on illustrations for set six. Okay. So they are currently pulling in art for set six. So yeah, that's the level of advanced design.
You think you question if all the spark rebellion cards are in set five? I think that probably all of them are, but I think that as games roll forward, and I feel like given that they're designing so many sets out and given how much I feel like the game has legs, games have a way of needing to revise early keywords. So I think I'm going to point to two.
So I'm going to point to hearstone charge, they got rid of, or they have heavily discounted charge in favor of rush just because it was a problematic keyword. And for those who don't play hearstone, charge was basically haste to get to it or ambush, you get to it, not ambush. Super ambush. Yeah. And there's play ready. Yeah. And there's play ready. Yeah. You can attack with it, the turn that it comes in play and you can attack unit or bass.
And rush, and I got out of hearstone, but I'm assuming rush, if I recall through NERD osmosis, was essentially ambushed. Exactly. You can attack the turn that comes into play, but only other units. Right. I think that's one of the reasons why they have ambushes a keyword, but they don't have like a haste equivalent, like entrance play ready is not keyworded. Right. So like charge versus rush, and who's to say like what abilities are going to come problematic.
But the other one from again, the dawn ages of magic is banding. Banding was the white keyword for quite a while. It has a bad reputation. It's really not so bad, but I appreciate that there's a lot of rules overhead. It led to a lot of dumb arguments. And so it was like. Two keywords, Ned. Banding. And bands with others. And bands with others. Bands with others is an expansion keyword, right? Like, like, banding was in the original set and bands with others is a twist on it. But yeah.
Bands with others was when I got into magic. So I just didn't. And it kind of as much as I like healing, and I'm very excited that Vigilance is both the car, the aspect of removal and of healing. I can never get into white and magic because of banding, like, scarred me for life. Wow. Yeah. It was a rough keyword when you're trying to learn the whole game. No, I mean, that's the cost of that keyword, and that's why they faced it out.
And I, you know, none of the keywords from Spark of Rebellion strike me as being particularly problematic with, you know, maybe, right? I mean, like, that's a hindsight question. Right. But I would say that of the keywords in Spark of Rebellion, the one that I would point to as most likely to be problematic in some future set is great.
Essentially because if you have some kind of a way to make, like, essentially it allows for power bumping, and especially if you can find a way to keep units from dying, like we've kind of explored a little bit with churret, right? Like, let's imagine that you give leader churret grit. You know, there's a lot of self limiters on this, and there's, you know, there's not currently a lot of good self damage sources. Yadda, yadda, yadda.
But I can imagine in some distant future set 12 universe where somebody discovers some completely ridiculous, like, grit interaction. I mean, I don't think it has to be that ridiculous. I suspect that you're, you know, you tend to find the busted places that keywords are often found in TCGs is in their interaction with other keywords, right? Yes. For example, magic has life link, which is, for those who don't play magic, is restore, where it's restore X, where X is the power of the unit.
And I think that was a wise choice that FFG made, where they made the value of the heel independent of the power of the unit. But, you know, so life link is fine. It's not always super competitive, magic, as I understand it. But where it gets, you know, those weird infinite life combos come from also, you know, that's why you have other abilities. Similarly, like, if grit's going to be busted, it's because we haven't seen an easy way to get grit and overwhelm on the same unit.
I don't think that's possible right now. But the moment we start having upgrades to provide either grit or overwhelm, then Chubaka, Chubaka, that leader becomes completely ridiculous. Yeah, right? Like, if you can give Chubaka leader overwhelm through some upgrade, that's going to be, right? I have to assume, I mean, like, right, if you want to have an obvious, an upgrade that gives overwhelm, yes, has to exist at some point. Right. On a leader unit, right?
Like, and being on a leader is really significant because the number of, they generally seem really hesitant to let you straight up remove a leader. Like, yeah, not to get in the spoilers or break it down. Like, so we've seen Moff Gideon has overwhelm, so now, you know, like, I think that was the missing leader keyword. I think every other keyword is present. But I'm saying, like, infiltrator, right? One, one, grand saboteur, that's a devotion, right? Grants restore too.
Yeah. I mean, I think that grants keyword, it feels like, it's not a card. It's so obvious that it's an item, right? Yeah. At which point, we're going to see a grit and an overwhelm keyword upgrade. Right. And then once we do, then we get to the kind of test the limits of the card. Okay. All right. Well, I think you and I might not be able to find agreement on, I accept your taxonomy of keyword obviousness.
I don't know that for me, grit feels more obvious, like, yeah, pretty obvious once you get, once you're putting tokens representing damage on a card that feels pretty obvious to me. But I accept it. You do not. I mean, I, it makes a lot of sense. I don't think that it's a huge, rich, or a keyword. I just feel like it is much more niche than all of the other keywords in Sparkler Rebellion. Okay, okay. Yeah. Granted. But that, I guess, leads me to my follow-up question. Ned, what is your name?
My name is Monday. My name is Monday. I'm a mathematician. I was recently tooling around and on Reddit as one does. And credit to Reddit user, whose name I forget, but they pointed out that I'm not a Reddit out, that since we're going to be talking about shadows, spoilers, there is a three-card combo in shadows of the galaxy that I want to, I want to put a time out, Ned. We do talk about spoilers. We just don't break them down. We don't review them. Oh, yeah.
But I mean, our podcast existed before the game came out, which meant that everything we were talking about was, although not spoiler, there was a request from one of the devs on Discord to refer to these as previews, because spoiler and voice. Previous. Yes, no. But yeah, so we talk about, we just don't do the traditional, here's our thoughts, but yes. So we're talking about previewed cards. Right.
And of the previewed cards, there was a note that if you combine DJ Death Star, the new wanted card and resupply, you can potentially on turn to accelerate yourself to five resources. Which, you know, why don't you just, because not everybody's on right, it walked through the combo. So the essence of the combo is that one on turn, let's see. So it would be on turn two, on turn one, you bounty, or I guess you don't have to bounty, whatever. On turn two, you have three resources available.
If your leader is Boba Fett, and you put into play the DJ Death Star with energy conversion lab, they have ambush. They can attack your opponents unit. If that unit has wanted attached to it, wanted has to help, and has to help, wanted has the text that it gives the unit that it's attached to bounty, already two resources.
So if you slam your gentleman into your DJ Death Star, your Death Star Superlacer Technician into their unit, you will defeat their unit and you will defeat your Death Star Superlacer Technician, assuming that their unit has at least one power. When your Death Star Superlacer Technician is defeated, it becomes a resource.
Because you get to ready two resources from wanted, plus one more resource from your Boba Fett leader ability that takes you up to four resources, and then you can put into play a resupply, which will take you to five resources. Then once you have five resources, you can deploy Boba Fett. If we continue this train of thought into the complete depths of magical Christmas land, you then attack your Boba Fett into whatever unit your opponent played to conveniently set this interaction up.
You defeat their unit, you ready yourself two more resources, and you will then have a total of three resources with which to deploy a perfectly reasonable three cost unit like unit Boba Fett. Okay. Again, the most magical Christmas land. Magic Christmas land. Right. Okay. Wow. That sounds... And you know what? That's going to happen once. Yes. The person is going to feel so good about... Yeah. So, yeah. So how magical Christmas land is that, then? Well, so this is where we get into the details.
So I had previously written a very simple calculator for combo odds, and that was a hypergeometric calculator. So to review hypergeometric distributions, hypergeometric distributions are a way of describing if I have so many of a particular type of card in my deck, and I draw so many cards, what are my odds of seeing at least so many copies and I can specify it of one of the cards in my deck.
So I had previously written a hypergeometric calculator for estimating my odds of being able to do the Palpatine change of heart shenanigans that were so near and dear to my heart. And the answer was... How many cards do you need to draw before you have... So, nearly as short odds of drawing change of heart as well. Yes. Exactly. And dear listener, to be clear, hypergeometric calculators have existed since geocities. You can go just Google it and find out...
How many cards do you need to draw to see one copy of one, two, three, four cards in your deck? That is well-trod territory, right? Yes. That is completely well-trod territory. The trouble with hypergeometric calculators is that hypergeometric calculators are assuming essentially independence where if you're drawing cards, it's not making any claims on the contents of your hand, the existing contents of your hand.
So if short gamble, like how many cards do you know, like do Mulligan, what are the odds you're going to see as certain... How confident can you be that you're going to see a certain card by a certain point? Right, but if you need a certain card. Right.
But if you need two certain cards, right, that math becomes a lot trickier because you need to see card A and card B. And the simplest way to do this, and it's pretty accurate, is essentially you do your hypergeometric for card A, you do your hypergeometric for card B, and then you add the probabilities together. And when you add probabilities together, you multiply them. But that's not exactly right, right?
Because if you saw card A, by definition, one of the looks for card B had to yield card A. Right. So you are... So you're looking at fewer cards? Yeah. You're guaranteeing that one of the cards you're looking at for card B is a no. Right. Because it's card A. Right. Okay. Okay. I'm tracking. So that make... And you can do it. You can do it with just pure hypergeometrics. But that math gets you a lot of...
And doing a lot of this for most people, being off by a half percentage point, a percentage point is fine. Yes. But I'm not most people. I'm not most people. And so I care about this. And I also want to extend it because for a two card combo, it's not so bad. But if you're talking like a four card combo, a four card... A four card... A four card... Then you're having to talk...
Like there's significant amounts of the probability space that you would normally assume that are essentially four close because they're income possible, right? Okay. And like... So this combo requires what? We need boba leader and ECL, but those aren't in main data. Those are... So who cares? Those are four gone. You obviously have those. Right. So you need... Superlizer technician? Yeah. You need... Wanted. Yes. You need... Re-supply. Re-supply. And to get... And so those three are required.
There's an unquantifiable variable that your opponent needs to have played a unit that's killable by DJDestR, so it was one or two health. That can't... I assume that's beyond math. And then... So that's three cards. And to get to the truly magical Christmas land, you need to have the most busted three drop in the game, boba fat unit. Yes. Okay. So... Well, we can't do that with hybrid geometric calculators, Ned. How can we do that? We can turn to our Monte Carlo machines.
So for people who have... I love that like math has... I mean, Monte Carlo just sounds like a James Bond thing. It just sounds so awesome. It's fun. Yeah. Yeah. I made my bones writing Monte Carlo simulations for nuclear reactors. And so I have an inordinate fondness for the technique. It's a very powerful technique and it kind of melds the worlds of math and games in a way that I find very satisfying. And so it's one of my go-to...
It's the sun-exclude driver of my toolbox to cross universes briefly. Yep. Yep. Okay. So there is a small additional challenge. And the small additional challenge. So to talk about how Monte Carlo technique works, essentially what you do is... You simulate the situation a vast number of times. And by simulating the situation, you can come to a pretty reasonable estimate of the probability. So the classic example of Monte Carlo. New policy, Ned. Yes. New policy. I'll keep explaining Monte Carlo.
But we'll explain it once more in 2024. Yep. And then Monte Carlo will join our list of... We'll put it on the ForceInlimited.com and we'll assume you know what we're talking about. Like... Yep. Because you've explained Monte Carlo once before and it's not fair to expect Dear Listener to be current on every episode. But also for the Dear Listeners who do keep up, it's not fair to ask them to listen to it in explanation of Monte Carlo every time you do it.
Because I assume you're going to do it a lot because you made your bones doing it. Yep. Yeah. So anyways, so you run the art a bunch. Right. You do it a bunch, right. And so for the sake of the simulation, I generate a list. The list contains cards that I label. And the cards are either labeled cards that are part of a combo or they are card labeled miss. And you shuffle the list and then you draw hands from the list and then you draw... So this comes right card.
So this is the same... I mean, this is the same math then for our RRMB episode where you... Yeah. I mean... That's right. Yeah. It's the same technique, right. Like that's the beauty of Monte Carlo is that the technique holds. And it's... If you just evaluate randomness over and over again, you eventually get pretty close enough for human being to what the actual rendition is. Exactly. Right.
You're not analytically calculating the probability, but you are simulating the probability and assuming that you have a sufficiently large number of trials and we can talk about what a sufficiently large number of trials is on a subsequent episode. But for a sufficiently large number of trials, in this case, I think I did a million trials, you get something that is a reasonable estimate of efficacy. But there is something that I have left out.
And that thing that I have left out is another feature of hypergeometric math and that is the Mulligan. So the classic example of hypergeometric math in SWOO is how many turn one units do I need, right? And we have answered this on our previous episodes, but fundamentally the way that one approaches this from either a Monte Carlo or an analytical technique is... Well, let's talk about it from the analytical perspective.
If you're using a hypergeometric calculator, the way that you handle this is if you consider that you are always going to Mulligan for a turn one unit where you define turn one unit however you want. Like is Greedo a turn one unit? Sure, then throw them in the bucket even though there are one cost unit. Is R2 a turn one unit? Yeah, sure throw them in the bucket. Is Sneak Attack a turn one unit? Maybe not. Or Event, but yeah. Yeah, it's up to you. But yeah, you get to define that's a... Right.
Right. So if you are willing to always Mulligan, essentially you draw two hands and you have to miss with both of them. So what you do is you take the probability of missing with one hand and the probability of missing with another hand and you end them together and you get the odds of you not seeing a turn one play. And as a review for people, you need...
If you are always willing to Mulligan for a turn one play, you need 11 turn one plays in your deck to have a grade of the 95% chance of seeing them. And that's just reading that you keep any hand with a turn one play regardless of the contents of the rest of the hand, which I don't think is necessarily a valid thing. Which is actually absolutely inaccurate.
Because I've definitely drawn a hand with like the scout like pursuer and then like two vaders and Avenger, you know, a reinforcement walker and a super laser blast where you're like, yeah, got to toss that one back. Like I could play something on round one. Right. But I'm like, then I'm dead. Right. So, so that is the one that math is... 11 is the floor assuming that you are always willing to Mulligan for specifically a turn one play and you are keeping any hand that has a turn one play.
And obviously, the number... As the number of turn one plays increases, you can go forward. But when we're dealing with an N-card combo situation, you have a question. Let's say that I have a three card combo and I draw my starting hand and I have one of my three combo pieces. Do I keep the hand or not? And that is an analytically... That is a calculable, simulatable thing.
If you want to maximize your chances of the combo and you are willing to ignore everything else for a three or a four card combo, you need to... You ought to, the optimal odds are that you should keep any hand that has two or more of your combo pieces. For a two card combo, you should keep any hand that has one or more of your combo pieces. If you want to maximize your odds of drawing into your combo, completely ignoring... By when? I turn two. Period.
If you want to maximize your odds because Mulligan, right, it doesn't matter how far out you go, right, like you're starting off from a higher percentage of odds and you're always keeping according to the small look at Mulligan. This is purely the answer to the question, do I keep hand one? Yes, do I keep hand one in the answer is, does it contain one or more of your combo cards for a one card combo or two or more of your combo cards for a larger card combo than the answer is yes.
And this is assuming 50 card, then one. What's a one card combo? Sorry, a two card combo. Okay, so one or more for a two card combo and two or more for... Obviously, if you're looking for a combo and you have the combo, you don't toss it. Correct. Okay, so one or more and two or more for three or more. Okay. A one card combo might conceivably be, I need this unit by turn n. You can think of that as being a one card combo. I didn't do that for that.
Sure. You either keep it or you don't, but that doesn't inform the toss Mulligan question. Okay. So if you are looking for a three card combo, so this is the magical Christmas in Metland, but not complete magical Christmas land, your odds of doing it by turn two, assuming that you follow the Mulligan rule that I have specified are 7.7%. One in 10, right? Not like reliable, but that's not a totally freak of current. That's going to happen in a Swiss of 32 if enough people are trying that.
Yes. For a four card combo, your odds of seeing all four of the cards by turn two, assuming that you follow an optimal Mulligan strategy, is 1.69%. That's entering real fluke territory. Yeah. So I'm sorry to say that given the restrictions of the current card pool, I don't think that this is viable. Well, I mean, it's not, well, let's go back to that, but yeah, it's not viable.
If, and this is where we get into a little bit more space, if instead of looking for something that you're trying to do by turn two, if instead you're looking to do something by turn five. I think that right now there are any hyper Christmas land combos, but even a four card combo, you have about, again, following optimal Mulligan rules, you have about a 16.5% of seeing a specific four cards by turn five, assuming that you are hyper focused on those four cards. Yeah. Something like that.
That's every other match, right? Yeah. I mean, that's every third, every two to three matches. That's all. I mean. Yeah. So I want to come back to that though. Yeah. And because I want to ask you, I don't want to get two into the weeds on wanted because that's a preview and we don't talk about, we don't dive deep to deep on previous, but green boba running East. Yeah. Is obviously running boba unit is obviously running super laser technician. Yep. Probably safely running.
Resumé. Yep. That one's maybe not quite as much as land dunk, but still not a crazy pick. So you need this new card wanted to make the combo work, but if wanted proves to be viable outside the magical Christmas land. Right. And you and I have talked off air about does boba who can already ready one to two units. One or two resources. One or two resources by virtue of being boba.
So care about writing even more resources with wanted and that's an excellent question that we can leave to better people. But if that is a non crazy pick to put in a boba deck, that that I mean, that does, you know, one in even a one seven percent chance, right? One in 12, one in 15. If you like all of those cards. Yeah. Then magical Christmas. That's going to happen. Pretty often.
Yeah. And against magical Christmas land, I think is that you're putting, if you're putting in cards that are only good during Christmas, right? But I feel like this combo is like ham. Like yes, it's great at Christmas, but it's actually pretty reliably good all the time. Right? Yeah. Okay. Okay. So I need to have sandwich right now. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So okay. So so so we've got our odds. So be in your in your GitHub. We can throw up just a little PNG of the chart.
If you or they'll be here, they're obviously here for our. Yeah, the chart is for two cost units because there's not like a good way to show like I can make a chart, but I don't think it's going to be that informative. I can make a data table and put it in. I like to see. Oh, I said, no, I think that's a material. But the general idea is don't put magical, you know, your odds of getting the combo dropped pretty fast. Three card combos get. Yeah, three card three to four cards.
Three card combos are not real likely again. If you're looking by turn five and you're looking for specific three cards, you have an assuming you're and sorry, this was caveated on you have three copies of each of the relevant cards. Yeah, obviously, if you're looking for the combo, you want to have a maximum amount. Okay. But, you know, with a particular three card combo, you're at 30% by turn five.
So if there are sufficiently strong three card combos, I mean, if it's just a good by itself, one in three chance of Voltron is good odds. Not bad. Yeah, not bad. Okay. I mean, heck, in a best two out of three, you're likely to pull it off every match, right? Assuming your match goes to three games, which mine always seem to, I can't close it out. So Monday, do you have anything else to add?
I don't think so other than there is one more caveat that I'm going to put on here and that is card selection. Right now, there's not a lot of tools for additional card draw in card selection that see play. Now, sorry, that's not true. For a cause I can believe in, does see a lot of play and inferno force use a lot of play. And those are card selection effects. I did not simulate with card selection effects, but card selection effects are effectively like moving you, giving you more draws.
So a thing that is going to make these combos, like multi card combos viable is when you get a lot of kind of free or cheap card draw and card selection, the more of that that you can throw into your deck, the more you're getting more draw. The easier is to assemble combos. And I think that's leaving Math Landon into, I think, General TCG theory, right? But that feels known. I know it. So I assume most good players know it. The more cards you can look at, the better you'll do it.
The better your odds are. Yeah. All right. Well, I think that's all she wrote. This was episode 13 on Lucky 13 of the Force Unlimited. We're recording the weekish of March 15th. Dear listener, if you have any thoughts about the episode, please email us at the Force Unlimited at gmail.com. Now, do you have any final thoughts? I do. And that is, please look at my GitHub. Like, I'm maintaining it. Apparently nobody looks at it, but it's there. It's real.
Spectacular. Yeah. It's like taxes that if you don't maintain it, people will look at it. Oh, yeah. If you keep it nice and tidy, nobody will. Which is, I realize as I say that I allowed incentivizing you not to keep it tidy, but keep it tidy. And with that, dear listener, we will see you in two weeks.