Base Power Ratings 1

     Most players of trading card games instantly want to know what are the strongest cards that you should be playing in your deck. This often leads to very similar ‘net decks’ that often dominate tournaments. However, the Altered TCG gets around this in two ways. Firstly, the deck building system by rarity forces you to make some hard choices. Rares are more powerful than commons, but you can only have 15 rare cards in your deck. So, you need to pick which rare cards to add in. This in itself is hard because a) OOF rare cards give you access to things that your faction might not normally do and b) the strength upgrade of a rare card over its common version might mean that you might be better off sticking with the common and you can save to put your power elsewhere. The last thing you need to think about is how the cards synergize with your hero’s ability. The more they synergize, the better they will be in your deck.

     The second reason is the presence of Unique cards. The three Unique cards that you are allowed to put in your deck can have any ability tacked onto them. These mean that no two decks will be identical, and you cannot just copy all your deck from someone else’s list. So how are we going to rate their power?

     The answer is that we need a power system that not only rates all the individual parts of cards, but also get a rating on how much stronger a particular rare is over a common and how much more powerful a particular Unique version is over the rare.

     The system I am proposing builds up a card’s power rating from the individual blocks of biome stats and abilities on the cards. The power of the card is therefore the sum of its abilities divided by the cost in mana. Where there is a cost for the play from hand and from the reserve, we will average it out to get the base power rating (BPR). So, to be able to work this out we need a view on what biome stats and abilities cost. My assessment on what a number of the basic components in Altered costs are given in the table below.

     This is not an exhaustive list but is a start on the full list we will need for all the full number of abilities that will encompass everything in Altered as well as looking at things like skewed stats and synergies.

    Let’s use Ratatoskr as an example from common to both the rare versions and then look at some Unique versions (as these have already been shown by Equinox).

     The common (Bravos) version is quite easy to cost up. For 1 mana from hand, we are getting 1 mana’s worth of stats. Divide that by the 1 mana we are being charged and from hand this has a power rating of 1. On the play from reserve side, we are getting 3 mana of stats for 3 mana. Three divide 3 gives us a power rating of 1 for the reserve play side. Average these out and our Squirrely friend has a common BPR of 1.

     The rare version of Ratatoskr has a hand power rating of 1 and from reserve we are getting 4 mana worth for 3 mana. This gives us a power rating of 1 and 1/3 mana. The BPR being the average of the two then comes out to 1.1666. This means that the rare Boost value is 0.1666 for Ratatoskr.

     We have two Unique versions that we can apply the same idea to. I’m going to have to cost some of these abilities on the fly here but let’s try and cost them up. The one above is slightly easy to cost, so we’ll start with that one. The stats are worth 1 and 2/3 mana. When played from hand you are getting a 1 mana discount on your next card (worth 1 mana) , so from hand you are getting 2 and 2/3 mana for your 2 mana investment which gives us a power rating of 1 and 1/3 mana. When played from reserve you are getting an extra 2 boosts for your 3 mana, so here we are getting 4 and 2/3 mana for your 3-mana investment or a power rating of 1.555. Now you could also alternatively use this to remove fleeting from another card by removing Ratatoskr from reserve. Removing from reserve is losing you a card (worth 1 mana for a resupply). In theory this ability could be used on any other character, so it could give you any sized creature. Let’s assume that on average this is 4 mana’s worth, then in this instance you’re getting 4 mana’s worth for 3 mana, or 1.333. We’ll always take the higher value for BDR, so this power rating is 1.4444. The Boost rating for this Unique is therefore 0.2777 over the rare version and 0.4444 over the common.

     The Unique example above is harder to cost, but we will give it a go. The biome stats give us a costing from the hand of 2/3 mana, but then we have the Unique ability to try and cost up.  This allows us to remove fleeting from another character if a non-boosted character gets a boost. I am going to assume that this ability means that a character that doesn’t have a boost ability on the card for where it was played from (this is not clear). So, gaining a boost from Haven or Basira will trigger this. Now you can’t have this trigger on the same character that gained the boost, so you’ll need a second character in play with fleeting to trigger this. I’d suggest that losing fleeting is worth 1 mana but that it may only trigger about half the time, so I’m going to give this ability a score of 0.5 mana, giving it a power rating from hand of 1.1666. The ability is still alive from reserve and (since you can then apply it onto Ratatoskr) is more certain to trigger. The stats are worth 2/3 mana, the card draw is worth 2 mana and the fleeting removal ability is now worth 1 mana. This makes it 3 and 2/3 mana for 2 mana spent or 1.83333 power rating. Average these out and we get 1.5 BPR and the tale for this Unique is below. There is also an ability to retrigger a reserve play ability, which I'd suggest is worth about a net of 2 mana.