Strategies in Altered

     Game and Tech Focus have just put out a very interesting episode 2 of their You Tube podcast series which talks about the Magic the Gathering article ‘Who’s the Beatdown?’. The first comment I have about this is that in Altered there is no beatdown. However, it does beg the question of what the fundamental strategies are in Altered? Let’s have a look at how I would categorise the Altered strategies.

Speed

     This strategy is to play lower cost, higher power cards as quickly as possible to win the game before the other player has really set up. In this case. The idea is often to win the first or second day on both sides whilst the other player is setting up landmarks and other bits and pieces whilst you gain a lead. Then all you need to be able to do is ride the win by winning one side each turn. This strategy is mainly seen in Bravos, but Muna can also do it. The premise is simple, but it can go wrong due to a lack of card throughput. You expend most of your resources early and run low on cards later, meaning that you end up with having a lack of selection in plays.

Poster Child – Kojo and Booda

Endurance

     This strategy relies on Anchoring down a card to get more uses out of it on a later turn. So instead of having the normal two uses from a card (once from hand and once from the reserve) you can get four or more uses for that card. This means that the cards you have stretch further and you can play more larger things out each turn. The strategy does mean that you are relying on a light amount of board control from the opponent and can suffer if they take out your anchored creatures.

               Poster Child – Arjun and Spike

Overwhelm

     This strategy involves having more resources than your opponent and overwhelming them with those resources. Those resources could be creatures (mainly tokens) or extra cards in hand. This strategy has two subtypes within it.

• Token Swarm – here you are just putting out tokens and playing boosts. It is the more straightforward strategy of the two and less resilient to removal. Since the strategy needs to have some fairly expensive landmark cards to really get going, the deck is often slower to start, but comes back later with a vengeance. Also, it is currently resistant to removal as removing one small token for a higher mana cost will be inefficient and probably not still enable you to win. Currently, the only effective cards against this strategy are Kraken’s Wrath (which can take out up to 4 characters) and Robin Hood (which makes them pay more for their characters.

Poster Child – Sigismar and Wingspan

• Card Efficiency – This strategy utilises a card drawing engine to ensure that you have more cards in hand / reserve than your opponent, so that you have the tools in hand that you need to win a side. Often this card efficiency engine needs setting up or comes with a drawback which can make it tricky in the early game to win both sides. This strategy often has a bit of token swarm within it as well.

Poster Child – Treyst and Rossum

Control

     I’m going to divide this category into two. Removal control (Spell based control) and Law control (Creature based control).

• Spell based control – This strategy relies on using spells to remove your opponent’s bigger threats (either by removing them from the board or sabotaging) and having smaller creatures that survive through to win an unoccupied side. It’s quite weak early game and suffers if the deck comes out in the wrong order or if the opponent takes out the one creature that you have put out.

Poster Child – Afanas and Senka

• Creature based control – This strategy relies on having creatures with annoying one-sided abilities on them (laws) such as Robin Hood who forces your opponent to pay more to play each creature. In terms of Magic the Gathering this would be a Death and Taxes style of deck. It tends to suffer if the key controlling creatures are removed.

Poster Child – Waru and Mack

Go-Large

     This strategy involves you having large creatures with impressive biome stats. This is another category I’m going to divide into half as essentially, they are doing the same thing, or at least the result is the same, but they are doing it in different ways.

• Ramp – This strategy involves getting your mana orbs out faster and being able to play bigger creatures and more stuff than your opponent faster. The deck needs three components in it to work (mana boosts, small early plays, and large later plays) and it can come out in the wrong order. It is also very susceptible to removal and really needs some way of giving the characters lots of the Tough keyword so that they can survive the removal.

Poster Child – Atsadi and Surge

• Boost – This strategy involves having medium, reasonably costed creates and boosting them up with boost tokens to become really large. It can suffer in the same way as the ramp strategy with having all your eggs in one basket, but as the boosts are often (but not always) provided later there are some ways that you are not losing as much mana invested in cards, but you could be risking more cards if that thing was removed from the expedition.

Poster Child – Basira and Kaizaimon

      All the strategies can to some extent be mixed in a deck and I’d suggest that for any deck you could create might be a mixture of some or all of the strategies. I have an idea that a deck could be represented on a pie chart to show how much of each strategy is contained within it.