There's a kind of tension for players who are concerned about playing well, and it's this: if you care a lot about victory and defeat, and you're grinding out lots of games to try and improve, you'll naturally start adopting patterns of play. Developing patterns is mostly good: save mental energy by formulating frameworks and strategies to follow, right? You had a great run with a specific card, so every time you see that card, you remember what synergies generally worked and try to replicate them.
But adopting patterns creates problems when you start to accept too many things as a given. For example, "thin decks can be good with certain cards" can easily become "always keep your deck thin". Or "This card combo is pretty strong" becomes "I see this combo is available, so I'll ignore other potential strategies".
Read moreOutracing your opponent means focusing more on acquiring cards that are easy to obtain/use (but tend to be weaker). End the game before the opponent's plans come to fruition. You'll likely still invest resources in early scaling, but you need to be able to switch gears before your opponent has time to outscale or outlast you.
Outscaling your opponent means focusing more on acquiring cards that are stronger (but tend to be harder to obtain/use). You must predict how "greedy" you can be with investing your resources in scaling effects before your opponent wins. You must plan to start cashing in on powerful card synergies/effects before your opponent closes out the game on their terms. Some games provide block/heal effects that slow down the enemy long enough to get your own engine rolling.
Read moreAll of your deckbuilding decisions rely on the fact that your starting deck is absolute garbage. Which makes sense. The appeal of deckbuilders is about seeing improvement over time, so an awful starting point makes buying cards feel way more rewarding.
After playing even a single game it gets pretty obvious that your starting deck is awful - so the big skill curve in deckbuilders is figuring out what you can actually do about that.
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