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| So powerful...but so expensive! |
The first few turns in particular, I find it generally more useful to get yourself cheap characters, especially ones with no or low fielding cost, ones that will speed up drawing, or ones that I can buy two of in a turn. If your strategy revolves around getting some really expensive characters, like If Looks Could Kill or Piotr Rasputin, and your opponent's squad doesn't involve a weenie rush, I may consider buying an action die or two.
Why Weenies?
There's a few reasons to hammer on the cheap characters early (many of which Dave talked about when he recently brought up Opening Moves):
1) You have immediate damage-dealing/defensive options, very important if your opponent is playing a rush deck with Gobby or Tsarina or something; cheap-to-field characters are an advantage here, as they won't inhibit you buying other things as much
2) It gets you larger energy gains to let you make your bigger purchases later on (or lots of smaller purchases, maybe to react to your opponent's bigger purchases, or to field a swarm of characters)
3) It fattens your die pool so your increased draw options are less likely to cause you damage through decking yourself*
1 and 3 are pretty straightforward, but I think the second point needs a bit more explanation. And here's where math comes in.
No, Not the Math!
Consider a sidekick die; five energy faces, one character face. 5/6 chance of rolling energy, 1/6 chance of rolling a character; your expected energy gain from a sidekick die is therefore 5/6 of an energy. Realistically, if all you care about is getting some flavor of energy, you can reroll the die, which brings you to a 35/36 chance of getting an energy - very close to one, in short.
Now, consider a character die. We'll ignore that the character faces are an energy cost for the moment; you have three character faces, two faces with two energy, and one face with one energy - the same five energy over six faces, so the same 5/6 expected energy. The magic comes when you consider the reroll; if all you want is energy, there's nine cases where you'll end up with a character providing zero energy, eighteen cases where you end up with two energy, and nine where you end up with one. That adds up to 45/36 - you expect to get one and one quarter energy out of a character die if you are exclusively rolling it for energy, about 30% more than you would out of a sidekick die.
Action dice are even better, and that's one reason to consider them if you're not too pressed for getting characters early. Half the faces of an action die are 0 energy, and half are 2, for an expected 1 energy out of a single roll, or 1.5 energy considering the reroll. If you want to get some energy into your pool but can't fit a Beast or Black Widow or some other 2-cost die into your squad - a likely issue if you're playing sealed deck - the 2-cost Invulnerability might be worth considering if you don't need something else.
Putting the Math to Use
With these numbers, you can get a general picture of how many dice in your pool you'll need to probably have the energy you'll need to be able to buy that 6- or 7-cost capstone you have - around 4 character dice and a sidekick, or 3 characters and 3 sidekicks, for 6, and one more sidekick on top of that for a seven. Do note that this doesn't include energy you may need to field your characters that don't roll energy! That's another advantage of several of the cheaper characters - they have multiple zero fielding cost faces, so you can most likely make use of them without impacting your purchasing power. This may be very important when you have a squad of Tsarinas breathing down your neck, and you need to muster some kind of defense while you pick up that Professor X you're counting on to help stem the tide. It's also not counting energy you might want to have hanging around to use global abilities, but that's a topic for another time.
You don't need to be very good at math to see that this is going to take more dice than you'd normally draw on most turns to have a pretty good shot at picking up the big-ticket characters. This is where things like Mutate #666's ability will come in handy, but more generically, you'll be expecting to use knocked-out characters to help bolster your energy pool (hopefully not in a way that leaves you extremely open to attack). This is one of the big advantages of 'churn' - the second podcast will be featuring that, so keep an eye out for it! It can be tricky to balance using your characters for energy and mounting a semi-desperate defense against a determined, rushing foe, but what it really comes down to is knowing what your opponent is likely to get, what you're likely to get, and knowing just how much life you can afford to sacrifice in the interest of getting out your gamewinners. Expect how to do that for one of the first of my intermediate strategy articles, but stay tuned for a look at fielding costs in Squad Building 3: Field Day!
*Full disclosure: I've yet to manage to deal myself damage via overdraw, even when playing a deck that favored stalling and had multiple draw aids, so I think it's only really an issue if you're fielding lots of sidekicks and not buying anything. Yes, I'm looking at you, Gobby.
Great post again, Evan. Playing the probabilities makes a whole lot of sense in a game that's basically driven by them. I love thinking about unconventional ways to do things, like the whole energy efficiency of the action dice. That's a great point.
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