A couple of people have already pointed out similarities to mtg/hearthstone so I thought it might be a good way to think explicitly about the rules/specific cards (some reasoning behind it, but these aren’t predictions, just a way to solidify my intuitions):
- Hearthstone-like mana system since no lands (Lotus works like innervate?) - Creatures regenerate like in mtg, otherwise bigger creatures could just be traded off with 2 or 3 smaller ones and it wouldn’t be so big a deal to lotus one of them out - Starting life total is balanced in a way that good aggro decks and good control (that is lotus ramp) decks have approximately even odds against each other
- Archetypes: - Good guy tribal: Battalion is some sort of lord for guards , knights, vigilantes and copies of itself (making it one of the inexpensive cards that doesn’t do too badly with lotuses, because it makes sense to ramp out things that lord each other) - (intuition stats: guard: 1 mana 1⁄4, knight: 3 mana 3⁄3, vigilante: 3 mana 4⁄2, battalion: 2 mana 2⁄2 and buff all others by +1/+1. something like this would explain why battalion/guard > battalion/knight > battalion/vigilante)
- Lotus ramp: Lotus out a big thing, big thing clears the board and wins the game. Dragons seem worse at this than Angels, emperors are slower than both - (intuition stats: Angel: 5 mana 4⁄6, Dragon: 6 mana 5⁄6, Emperor: 7 mana 7⁄7, Lotus: gain 2-3 mana this turn only)
- Evil equip: Sword of shadows is presumably some kind of equipment you put on Pirates, Hooligans or Minotaurs to give them stats and it can be reused when the creature has died (or maybe it’s an anthem sort of thing, but that would go against its name). Pirates have a high winrate in general, and work well with both Swords and Angels, so I would expect Pirate to be overstatted for its cost and slightly defensive-leaning. Minotaurs don’t have a great winrate and are not great with Swords, but are the other “low-cost” thing that works reasonably well with lotuses, and game nr. 185896 gives a hint of what minotaur does (mainly, having a minotaur unopposed gives you a short clock, 2-3 turns maybe?). - (intuition stats: Pirate: 1 mana 2⁄3, Hooligan: 2 mana 3⁄2, Minotaur: 4 mana 7⁄1, Sword: 0 or 1 mana +2/+1 equip for 0)
- presumably, Swords technically also work with Dragons and Emperors, but those are big enough that it doesn’t make much of a difference, same with Angels and battalions.
Strategy:
- diverse decks do well because it’s important to curve out. Yugi’s gonna be hitting the perfect curve, which means we have to defend early and outvalue late. With my completely made-up stats Yugi’s curve would look something like: Pirate/Sword into Hooligan into Lotus Angel into Minotaur into Knight/Battalion into Dragon into Emperor.
- one way to do the “outvalue late” part of the plan is going with angels and at least 1 emperor. Which means we’ll need lotuses. For the “defend early” part, this strongly depends on how exactly lotuses work. It might be that if we have, say, 5 Lotuses and 5 Angels, we can double Lotus into Angel turn 1 which already stops the aggro cold. But if you can only play one Lotus a turn or something, we’re gonna need some smaller creatures.
- especially for smaller creatures, exact stats and things like whether double-blocking is a thing are hugely important. The first idea would be to just take a bunch of pirates, but then a pirate with a sword probably just eats those and it’s not clear whether the saved life total makes up for the lost value.
- another way is stacking swords on things and hoping that that suffices to at least trade with Yugi’s big creatures in the later turns or, depending on the cost of swords, to out-aggro him (seems unlikely against a perfect curve)
- starting Hand size is really hard to speculate on, but we can try anyway: Main observation is that lotuses don’t work with aggro cards. If the starting hand size was something like 7, there would be no reason for that. It seems like, unless they have a sword/battalion or some good high-cost cards, aggro decks quickly run out of steam. Aggro can stay aggressive for about as many turns as it can double-spell to keep board control and it would seem that that limit is reached pretty early on, if a lotus decreasing that number by 1 is more relevant than a big boost in turn 1-2 board control. So my guess would be something like 2-3 cards in opening hand, with one drawn every turn. Yugi loves a small hand size, so this is something we’ll need to keep in mind.
One thing to clarify in case of ambiguity in the specification:
I know the scenario is putting you against an obvious Yugi expy, and that Yugi canonically always draws exactly what he needs to, but despite that your goal is not actually to optimize against an opponent who is perfectly lucky. Your goal is to optimize against a regular opponent who is playing Yugi’s deck—we’re assuming that if you can get that win rate high enough it’ll help against Yugi.
I know this is not entirely satisfying, but it was necessary to make sure that the games from the dataset could be meaningfully used to optimize for your use-case.
A couple of people have already pointed out similarities to mtg/hearthstone so I thought it might be a good way to think explicitly about the rules/specific cards (some reasoning behind it, but these aren’t predictions, just a way to solidify my intuitions):
- Hearthstone-like mana system since no lands (Lotus works like innervate?)
- Creatures regenerate like in mtg, otherwise bigger creatures could just be traded off with 2 or 3 smaller ones and it wouldn’t be so big a deal to lotus one of them out
- Starting life total is balanced in a way that good aggro decks and good control (that is lotus ramp) decks have approximately even odds against each other
- Archetypes:
- Good guy tribal: Battalion is some sort of lord for guards , knights, vigilantes and copies of itself (making it one of the inexpensive cards that doesn’t do too badly with lotuses, because it makes sense to ramp out things that lord each other)
- (intuition stats: guard: 1 mana 1⁄4, knight: 3 mana 3⁄3, vigilante: 3 mana 4⁄2, battalion: 2 mana 2⁄2 and buff all others by +1/+1. something like this would explain why battalion/guard > battalion/knight > battalion/vigilante)
- Lotus ramp: Lotus out a big thing, big thing clears the board and wins the game. Dragons seem worse at this than Angels, emperors are slower than both
- (intuition stats: Angel: 5 mana 4⁄6, Dragon: 6 mana 5⁄6, Emperor: 7 mana 7⁄7, Lotus: gain 2-3 mana this turn only)
- Evil equip: Sword of shadows is presumably some kind of equipment you put on Pirates, Hooligans or Minotaurs to give them stats and it can be reused when the creature has died (or maybe it’s an anthem sort of thing, but that would go against its name). Pirates have a high winrate in general, and work well with both Swords and Angels, so I would expect Pirate to be overstatted for its cost and slightly defensive-leaning. Minotaurs don’t have a great winrate and are not great with Swords, but are the other “low-cost” thing that works reasonably well with lotuses, and game nr. 185896 gives a hint of what minotaur does (mainly, having a minotaur unopposed gives you a short clock, 2-3 turns maybe?).
- (intuition stats: Pirate: 1 mana 2⁄3, Hooligan: 2 mana 3⁄2, Minotaur: 4 mana 7⁄1, Sword: 0 or 1 mana +2/+1 equip for 0)
- presumably, Swords technically also work with Dragons and Emperors, but those are big enough that it doesn’t make much of a difference, same with Angels and battalions.
Strategy:
- diverse decks do well because it’s important to curve out. Yugi’s gonna be hitting the perfect curve, which means we have to defend early and outvalue late. With my completely made-up stats Yugi’s curve would look something like: Pirate/Sword into Hooligan into Lotus Angel into Minotaur into Knight/Battalion into Dragon into Emperor.
- one way to do the “outvalue late” part of the plan is going with angels and at least 1 emperor. Which means we’ll need lotuses. For the “defend early” part, this strongly depends on how exactly lotuses work. It might be that if we have, say, 5 Lotuses and 5 Angels, we can double Lotus into Angel turn 1 which already stops the aggro cold. But if you can only play one Lotus a turn or something, we’re gonna need some smaller creatures.
- especially for smaller creatures, exact stats and things like whether double-blocking is a thing are hugely important. The first idea would be to just take a bunch of pirates, but then a pirate with a sword probably just eats those and it’s not clear whether the saved life total makes up for the lost value.
- another way is stacking swords on things and hoping that that suffices to at least trade with Yugi’s big creatures in the later turns or, depending on the cost of swords, to out-aggro him (seems unlikely against a perfect curve)
- starting Hand size is really hard to speculate on, but we can try anyway: Main observation is that lotuses don’t work with aggro cards. If the starting hand size was something like 7, there would be no reason for that. It seems like, unless they have a sword/battalion or some good high-cost cards, aggro decks quickly run out of steam. Aggro can stay aggressive for about as many turns as it can double-spell to keep board control and it would seem that that limit is reached pretty early on, if a lotus decreasing that number by 1 is more relevant than a big boost in turn 1-2 board control. So my guess would be something like 2-3 cards in opening hand, with one drawn every turn. Yugi loves a small hand size, so this is something we’ll need to keep in mind.
My PvE list:
5 Lotus
3 Angel
2 Emperor
2 Pirate
One thing to clarify in case of ambiguity in the specification:
I know the scenario is putting you against an obvious Yugi expy, and that Yugi canonically always draws exactly what he needs to, but despite that your goal is not actually to optimize against an opponent who is perfectly lucky. Your goal is to optimize against a regular opponent who is playing Yugi’s deck—we’re assuming that if you can get that win rate high enough it’ll help against Yugi.
I know this is not entirely satisfying, but it was necessary to make sure that the games from the dataset could be meaningfully used to optimize for your use-case.