Evaluating Cards in Altered

     One of the key skills in Altered is going to be evaluating cards. Not only to see which are the strongest cards, but which are the most synergistic to go into your deck. This will apply doubly to evaluating Unique cards. Your card evaluation skills are needed to decide which cards you are going to upgrade to rare cards in your deck as well as what you need out of your Unique cards.

     I’ve spoken before about assessing the raw power of a card and seeing just what it will give you in terms of the amount of mana you are getting from the card for the mana you are putting into it. I have a separate article on my Base Power Rating for a card. This will tell you if the card is powerful enough to go into your deck, but not whether you should put that card in your deck.

     I touched on this before, but certain hero abilities push you towards certain strategies and I’ve tried to give this a value. However, what I haven’t done is broken this down into the constituent parts of what makes a card go with a deck.

• Better costs from reserve – If you have a hero that is going to resupply a lot or an ability similar to that (Fen) then you really want to use characters that are cheaper and better from the reserve than from the hand. Fen, Treyst and Subhash all have effects that want to play cards from the reserve. So, all these heroes have a distinct advantage with cards that play better out of the reserve than the hand.
• Boosts – Some heroes have particular abilities that play well with boosts. Basira, Afanas and Teija (through anchored characters) all have boost interactions, and you could argue that Arjun also has a more modest synergy with boosts.
• Dice Rolling – Very much associated with Nevenka at the moment, but all dice rolls have strong synergy with that hero, since you will be wanting to play Ouroboros with that hero anyway.
• Mana ramping – If a hero wants to have particular high costing cards in the deck (Atsardi) then you really need to have more mana orbs than your opponent, so anything that ramps up your mana outside of the normal one mana orb per turn will synergise with this deck.
• Going wide – Heroes that want to go wide (lots of creatures as opposed to big creatures) want to have cards that give them multiple creatures in one card or boosts multiple creatures. Sigismar and Gulrang are the two heroes that need this, and these types of cards are particularly synergistic with those heroes. I’d argue that Lindiwe wants some of this as she needs some smaller creatures to sacrifice.
• Creature or Biome Types – Some heroes are looking for certain creature types in the deck or biased towards certain stats. The former here would be Waru (who needs Bureaucrats) and the latter here would be Rin (who is looking for good forest stats).
• Card Type – Some heroes are looking for a particular card type in the deck to make them kick. Sigismar wants lots of creatures, Afanas wants more spells in the deck and Sierra wants more Landmarks in the deck. 

     When you look at your deck you have to look at how the entire thing will play. You don’t just want to fill your deck with everything the same as it will invariably have some weaknesses. Part of evaluating cards for your deck will be to look at what your deck is missing and trying to fill those holes or accepting that some of those holes will be there and that you hope that you won’t come across problem decks with those things in them. Hole filling like this might make your strategy slightly weaker but make the deck overall stronger. Potential things that you might have issues with: -

• Removing pesky strong landmarks your opponent’s play
• Removing very strong or annoying creatures your opponent plays (Robin Hood, Hydracaena)
• Running short on cards in hand and reserve (Card draw or Resupply)
• Interacting with a strong strategy to resupplies (Sabotage)
• Protecting your creatures from being removed from the expedition (Tough)
• Having enough mana to be able to make your bigger plays earlier (Mana ramp)

     The first way you can fill holes in your deck is by looking at OOF rare cards and seeing whether any of them will help you fill those gaps in your deck. If there aren’t any good ways to do this, you’re either going to have to accept this as a weakness of your deck OR scan the Unique cards in the market to find just the right one that you want to fit your deck.

     Do you upgrade a rare that is already strong to a Unique version of that card, or do you find a weaker card in your deck to upgrade to give you a larger power boost? These are the interesting choices that Altered TCG gives you when deck building.