Absolutely no reasoning was applied in reaching this conclusion; all my attempts to solve this one analytically met dead ends. Instead, I copied the ML-based approach gjm won Defenders of the Storm with—except using gradient descent to search deckspace instead of trying all possible options—and got an answer I have no way to explain or evaluate. I’m very curious to see if this works!
Misc insights:
As a general rule, a more diverse deck leads to a better outcome. (Our opponent has the most diverse deck; this is worrying.)
Victory seems to be more down to synergies within a player’s own deck than counters to their opponent’s cards.
Apparent synergies: Angels like Lotuses, Emperors like Dragons, Pirates like Swords.
Having too many of the same card is always bad, but the diminishing-return point and the level of damage caused by homogenity both depend on the card. You need >4 Angels for it to start hurting you, but having eight of them sends your odds of victory to <20%; meanwhile, Vigilantes aren’t that great, but you can have a deck that’s two-thirds composed of them without your win chance going below 40%.
The four obviously and inarguably evil cards are bizarrely middle-of-the-road in terms of average effectiveness. Banality of Evil?
A GBM with treedepth=2 beats one with treedepth=1 and one with treedepth=3. This (weakly) suggests there are two-way interactions between cards, but no three-way interactions.
ETA:
I had a transcription error in the original draft of this post: it should have been 3x Hooligan, not 3x Minotaur.
My deck:
2x Angel, 3x
MinotaurHooligan, 3x Pirate, 4x Sword.My reasoning:
Absolutely no reasoning was applied in reaching this conclusion; all my attempts to solve this one analytically met dead ends. Instead, I copied the ML-based approach gjm won Defenders of the Storm with—except using gradient descent to search deckspace instead of trying all possible options—and got an answer I have no way to explain or evaluate. I’m very curious to see if this works!
Misc insights:
As a general rule, a more diverse deck leads to a better outcome. (Our opponent has the most diverse deck; this is worrying.)
Victory seems to be more down to synergies within a player’s own deck than counters to their opponent’s cards.
Apparent synergies: Angels like Lotuses, Emperors like Dragons, Pirates like Swords.
Having too many of the same card is always bad, but the diminishing-return point and the level of damage caused by homogenity both depend on the card. You need >4 Angels for it to start hurting you, but having eight of them sends your odds of victory to <20%; meanwhile, Vigilantes aren’t that great, but you can have a deck that’s two-thirds composed of them without your win chance going below 40%.
The four obviously and inarguably evil cards are bizarrely middle-of-the-road in terms of average effectiveness. Banality of Evil?
A GBM with treedepth=2 beats one with treedepth=1 and one with treedepth=3. This (weakly) suggests there are two-way interactions between cards, but no three-way interactions.
ETA:
I had a transcription error in the original draft of this post: it should have been 3x Hooligan, not 3x Minotaur.