Magic lost my interest a few years ago. When I discovered the WoW based card game not too long ago, I decided to check it out. To be honest, I wasn't expecting much, as I've never found a game that lives up to what Magic was in it's prime. Until now, that is. I've been playing for around three months, and I'm having a great time.

One of my favorite parts of card games has always been deckbuilding, and I thought it'd be a perfect starting point for me to get a blog going. So, for starters I'll reveal a simple trick I like to use when building decks. I'm sure it's obvious to the pro's, but for those beginning deckbuilders out there, it's a simple and solid way to get you thinking in the right direction.

If you played magic, you may have heard about the 'mana curve' of a deck and how important it is to consider it when stacking up your sixty-card killing machine so that it runs at optimum efficiency. The same concept applies to WoW.

In a nutshell, you want your cards to vary in cost, so you end up with cards you can play on turn 1, turn 2, turn 3, etc. The goal is to be able to optimize your resources, and the best way to do that is to build your decks with a resource curve in mind. If you have no cards that cost 1, 2, or 3 resources to play, you won't be doing anything until turn 4, and by that it won't matter how many big bad allies you've got because Gorebelly and Morlug will have you bleeding all over the floor.

I'm not the uber spreadsheet data-mining guru, but my respect goes out to those of you who are. I used to think worrying about a resource curve was beyond the time and effort I was willing to invest into my creations, until I stumbled upon an amazingly simple way to design a deck with the resource curve in mind.

I throw together an inital 60 card deck that has a basic concept in mind (I try to stick to 4x of each card to start). Then I sort the deck into piles. First pile is quests, second pile is all cards that cost 1, third pile is cards that cost 2, and so on. No more charts needed, with those piles of cards sitting in front of you, you've got your own piled high resource curve bar graph.

With these piles in front of you, you'll be able to immediately see glaring weaknesses. Happen to have a tower of 4 drops, but nothing in the 2 spot? You might want to consider dropping some of those Axe of the Legions for a Perdition's Blade instead.

I find that doing this really makes the difference when trying to choose between those last few cards you need to answer the local meta. Give it a try next time you're building the next big original deck (Equipment Mage, anyone?) and it might just make the difference.

- Vindictus

Tags: Wow Deckbuilding Resource Curve