by BananaCrapshoot

Hello Troopers. I hope everyone is well. As we anxiously await more news about Star Wars:Unlimited I wanted to continue the new player friendly topics by tackling advantages. What advantages can you gain in card games, what that looks like and why that helps you be successful. I will be looking at other card games for examples where I can’t draw from already revealed cards and hopefully that will relate to SWU. This is aimed to be an entry level write up so I will explore the basic concepts and any subtypes or deeper dives we can tackle at a later point.

There are three main advantages in most card games and they are Card Advantage, Resource Advantage, and Board Advantage. Each one can be built around and put into various deck Archtypes to build a gameplay for victory. First we will look at Card Advantage.

Simply put Card Advantage is having more cards (options) than your opponent. This is most commonly achieved through card draw effects. One we see in SWU already is Grand Moff Tarkin. His ability to search and draw 2 Imperial Units when he is played. If you had 5 cards in hand, you play Tarkin, draw 2 imperial cards, you are now at 6 cards in hand. If your opponent has 5 or less cards in their hand you now have card advantage. Why is this important? More cards means more options, in almost every card game, having access to more tools is always a good thing. Drawing more cards than your opponent can help keep you on curve for your drops, or makes you find your removal pieces you need, or find the combo pieces for your alternate win strategy.

Gaining card advantage can also help you come back when you are behind, as seen in the On the Run Plot Twist (event) from VS System 2PCG, you play this card during your build phase and if you are behind on the board it allows you to draw 2, having you go +1 with cards in hand, and the build phase is also the step where you recruit characters (play them to the board) so triggering this when you are behind on board presence can be a game changer allowing you to draw into your units tonight back or take over board control for yourself.

Next we will take a look at Resource Advantage. At its base level, resource advantage is having more in game resources than your opponent. Having more resources available to you, if your opponent is playing on curve, allows you to ramp faster and play more units per turn or get to bigger units sooner.

In MTG it’s having more Lands out giving you access to more mana a turn. In FFTCG it’s having more backups in play allowing you to generate more Crystal Points from the board than your opponent. In a more recent game like the mobile Magic Spellslingers you can gain resource advantage by playing cards that give you mana crystals. This allows you to play bigger, more impactful units, or events faster than your opponent.

In VS System 2PCG you start the game by drawing 7 cards and placing a card in your resource row. Each turn you draw 2 cards and normally can add 1 card per turn to your resource zone. For VS system 2PCG, which I’m using a lot as an example because the games seem very similar to me, there’s a few cards that help you “ramp” or gain extra resources. Mantis becomes a resource when she’s defeated. And Hunter searches out a location for you which adds a resource. Nick Fury is another card that can gain you resource advantage. These cards could all be played together to ramp up fast and play a boss monster or bomb unit to the field, like Dark Phoenix, who is the ultimate boss monster in VS System 2PCG. She is so ridiculous she removes a whole aspect of the game from play. GG.

There are other types of resource advantage, life/health pool, deck size, all can be leveraged as a resource advantage. Those are 2 I won’t dive into today as this is aimed at a more entry level write up.

Lastly we will take a look at board advantage. Board advantage is having a stronger board state than your opponent. It can mean having more smaller units flooding your side so that your opponent can’t keep up. Or it can mean having more larger, impactful units that will stick around than your opponent. In Spellslingers a lot of early rush decks ran Goblin Fieldrusher because when you played it it also summoned a 2/1 goblin with haste to the field. Getting 2 units for one card on the board and being able to attack the turn it’s played is big and a decent way to gain board advantage.

In VS system 2PCG one card that gains board advantage is Multiple Man, each turn it can search for a copy of itself to put into play. Another way to gain board advantage is to play units your opponent has a harder time interacting with. Raiden for example has flight, if he’s played in your front row he can fly over your opponents front row to attack characters in their back row. Unless a front row character your opponent controls also has flight then they would protect that back row character. So playing flight or ranged units when your opponent can’t interact with their own stuff is another way to gain advantage on the board state. This relates to SWU in regards to the space and ground arenas, since we are managing 2 areas having cards or abilities that can interact with either or both I think will be important for maintaining board control.

What’s interesting is all of these advantages could be utilized by any of the Archtypes I wrote about before. Coming up with a gameplan for your deck and utilizing tools to gain advantages to achieve that gameplan is pivotal to success in card games.

Hopefully this article helps someone newer to card games gain some insight on some ways to gain advantages over your opponent. Thanks for topping by and we will see you in the Arenas!