The title might seem a little odd here. How would tournament prep be game theory? With FFG’s World Championships coming up, I wanted to go over some more advanced things that players do to prepare for a tournament this size. There are three things I wanted to cover here: Metagaming, Teams, and Gauntlets. Most of you are probably already familiar with these concepts; feel free to skip this if you’re already doing all of this stuff. For the rest of you, let’s get started.
Metagaming
If you know this term from playing tabletop RPGs, you probably smirked when you read this word. Well, Metagaming isn’t a bad thing in Star Wars: Destiny and TCGs as a whole. It’s actually integral to being competitive. Metagaming in a competitive environment is the act of trying to anticipate the other decks you’ll most likely face in a tournament, then changing your own deck choice to give you the best chance of winning.
For example, let’s say you’re going to an event this weekend, and expect to see about 15% of the field playing deck A, 10% playing deck B and 3% playing deck C. You’re choices of decks are deck D, which is good against A and B, and deck E which is good against B and C. Which deck do you bring? The correct answer is deck D, because it has an advantage against the two most popular decks. What about your games against deck C? You just have to play your best against those decks, if you even face them.
You usually won’t have as hard of numbers as what I gave in my example, but with a defined Metagame you’ll have at least an idea of what to expect. If we look back a couple months, if there was a big tournament, you probably had the highest chance of seeing Jango/Veers. It was hugely popular this past winter, and from what I read online, a lot of people were playing it. Your best bet was to play to counter a heavy ranged based deck, so putting a playset of Dodge (AW155) in your deck would probably be a good thing to do. Luckily, due to how this game works, not facing a ranged deck isn’t a big deal, since you can discard Dodge to get a re-roll. What about the rest of the decks though?
Planning for every deck is impossible; most decks can’t cover every possible match-up. If a deck CAN do that, there’s a huge problem, and is one of the reasons I stopped playing Magic; the format got stale after one or two decks outclassed everything else, not through tech choices that can handle everything, but because the deck itself was just way too strong. Nothing else could really keep up. Trying to cover every angle is just going to make you weaker at everything and strong at nothing. So covering the most popular decks is the best bet, since those are the decks you’ll statistically see most often, giving you the highest win rate to get through the Swiss rounds of your event. How do you figure out what to bring though?
Testing is Better with a Team
The easiest way to get a lot of testing done easily is to form a team! How do you go about doing that? I’d start with asking your friends. It’s worked for me in the past. Though, there is a little more to it than that. You typically want to have an even number of people, so that you can have everyone playing, though you can watch games as well. After that, you need to make sure everyone on the team has a similar mindset about the game. You might be wanting to get ready for World’s, while another member just wants to play goofy combos and play casually. There’s nothing wrong with any of that though, people can enjoy this and any game in anyway they want. Having differing goals is bad for the team though, unless everyone is on the same page, nothing is going to be gained.
Once you have a good group and a goal in mind, start playing! Get together on your usual game night, or on a separate day or as many days as you want. Be sure to play as many games as possible, and TAKE NOTES. These games won’t mean much of anything if you don’t write down things you learned and share with the team. What kinds of things are you taking notes on though? That would be how your deck does against your Gauntlet of other decks.
Not Just a Video Game
The Gauntlet is the most important part of preparing for a big event. Without it, you’ll have an iffy time overall. A Gauntlet is your own copies of the top decks you expect to see at an event or in a format. Having every top deck is usually very pricey, and you shouldn’t feel that you have to shell out a ton of money to get everything. Darth Vader (AW10) isn’t cheap. That’s where your team comes in. You all should pool your cards together to get any decks you may be missing. You also need to be comfortable with lending out your cards, chances are at least one of you has a top deck assembled. Why do you have to let other people play yours and other people’s decks? Well, you REALLY need to learn everything about each deck, inside and out. You can’t really learn how a deck plays until you’ve played it yourself.
A Gauntlet isn’t just a list of decks you play against, but decks you play with, decks you know like the back of your hand. Just reading about each deck on blogs like this isn’t enough. You have to know how they work, which cards to play, which characters to defend or which you’re able to risk losing. You need to know each deck as well as your own. This could even change your choice in deck, which is fine. Play whichever deck you feel is best, there’s no reason to lock yourself into a deck early on. A lot of players don’t choose their deck until they register it.
This is just the beginning of my content for Worlds. I may not be going myself, but that doesn’t mean I can’t help you guys! Next time, I’ll write, or podcast about which decks you’ll want to include in your Gauntlet. So get your teams together, and pick a really good team name, maybe even buy shirts. World’s is only a few weeks away!
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