Objective Cards and You

David’s back and he’s armed with even more stats!

Hello again!
I’m David and today I’m going to be using probability to come up with a definitive answer on how many of each type of objective cards to include in your Grand Clash winning objective decks.

(Please note what follows includes maths, so if you ever asked the question to your maths teacher off; “When will I ever need this in my life?” the answer is now.)

Before we jump into the number fun there is a few things to go over:
In general there are three type of objective cards based on when they score; Instantly, End Phase and Third End Phase. We will look at each and how many of each you should include in your deck.
I believe you should aim your deck to the perfect scenario of scoring the whole thing, so this underlies what data we look at and how we measure success.
Finally, probabilities are measured on a scale of 0 to 1, with the closer you get to 1 the more likely it is to happen. I am choosing for consistency and ease of reader to express these as a percentage on a 0 to 100% scale. If this level of maths is too much for you then here is my 2 month old son’s favorite video for you to watch;

(Just skip to the conclusion at the end.)

Ok then, first up;

Third end phase cards

The ideal situation here is to end up with all of these in your final hand and you want to avoid drawing them first round. While you could just not include any of these, the opportunity to score big on glory for fairly simple(ish) tasks is too good to miss out on. So we want to try to fit in as many as possible.

The above shows how likely it is to draw these cards in the first hand. Even adding one means that 1 in every 4 games you end up with one in your starting hand, and while we could discard and re-draw that is definitely something we would want to avoid, so will not plan for it. As soon as we have two in the deck we are getting one in our first hand every other game. This would be too much of a hindrance towards our goal of scoring all our cards having one clogging up our hand for at least one round.

Hear we look at the chance of drawing one in your first two hands, this could ether be when you re-draw or just round one and two. As we are planning for the ideal we will assume it is your round one and two draw.
We can see here that even with just one card in your deck, half the time it will come out before the final round, so in half your games expect to have a useless card in hand during one of the first two activation. By adding in a second this explodes up to 4 in every 5 games, that mean with two in your deck most of the time you will have a useless card in hand within the first couple of rounds. This feel to me to be a large and significant sacrifice. Add in that for 1 in 4 of your games both cards will appear before the final round and you have put a nail in the sacrifice and well and truly buried it.

Conclusion: Just take 1

The number of score immediately cards in your deck will increase the chance of you seeing these third end phase cards early. The adds to us not including more third turn objectives, but how many of the score immediately do we include?

Score immediately:

While score immediately are amazing cards to boost your glory they mostly all suffer from the same problem, that you have to interact with opponent to score them. (The ones that don’t are just amazing, as we all know from playing vs Cursebreakers #playingoneasymode)
Revisiting our ideal would have us hoping for 1 or 2 score immediately in the first round, where we may struggle to interact with opponent more than once. 2 or 3 in the second round would be good, as by then you are in the thick of it. The third round is fairly neutral on if we want them or not, so we will ignore it.
A minimum of 3 must be included in the deck to allow us at least stand a chance of scoring all cards, so that is where we will start. The main restriction at the top end is the number of this type of card you can score with your chosen warband.

So if we want at least one score instantly card in our first hand then we need to include at least 5, this would result in only one in every 7ish [Mathmatically accurate] games not fulfilling this criteria. More would be better as this increases the reliability of getting the desired result.

We are not wanting to overload our first hand with score instantly, as ideally we want a ‘safe’ end of phase card in first hand to prevent us from not scoring at all. Hence the number of included cards is limited by us not wanting to get our starting hand to be all score immediately cards. A big jump point happens between 7 and 8, where including 8 cards makes it an all too common occurrence.

Conclusion: Take between 5-7, with more Agro builds wanting the higher end of the bracket.

So that’s it then, we just fill up the rest of the deck with our end phase scoring cards, job done…

…no, we are still going…

…what more can there be to say?

End Phase cards:

Not all end phase cards are equal. These can be nicely split into three types; safe single pointers (Fired Up), easy two pointers (Escalation) and big scorers (Supremacy). So how many of each of these do we include?

Going back to our model situation: We want to take this deck, score all the cards and win a Grand Clash with it. With the present scoring system in place you will need to score big glory, coming out of each match with about +20 difference. To achieve this consistently we need our deck to be able to score about 18 glory in each game. (This is worked out from you needing a +10 glory difference each game, and most opponents can score 7ish glory you can not guarantee stopping even when winning. Hence the 18.)
Knowing this and considering we have room for just 5-6 end phase card, we need those cards to score on average 2 glory each. (3 glory from final phase cards, 1 glory from each score instantly leaves us about 10 glory short of 18)

Conclusion: take two glory cards, for each three glory card take a single glory card.

Final conclusion:

(So if you have just skipped to the end welcome back, hope you enjoyed the video)
The game winning method then is:

1. Take only 1 third end phase card.
2. Take between 5-7 score instantly cards.
3. When filling the rest of your deck out with end phase cards aim to have the total objective deck glory equal about 18.
4. Roll more crits!

Please note, these are more guidelines than concrete rules (apart from 4, that’s a rule [AGREED]). Think of them as a starting point and let your deck evolve away from them through game play if that feels right.

[So while I only advised on this, me and David came to the same conclusions. I’ve been building all my decks this way for months which has helped me win many a tournament. Statistics do work!]

I hope you found this useful, thanks for reading,
David

[If you enjoyed David’s article, please let me or him know. Check out his first article here. David can be found at many a UK tournament lamenting his choice for playing Eyes of the Nine and asking why they can’t roll a crit?]