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Deck Thinning In Depth

A common strategy in Magic the Gathering and other trading card games is deck thinning, moving lands from the deck onto the battlefield early in the game. In some ways, deck thinning is troll math. In others, it’s an optimal strategy.

Example: A player taps Bloodstained Mire to use its ability Sacrifice Bloodstained Mire: Pay 1 life, discard Bloodstained Mire into the graveyard, and search the deck for either a Swamp or Mountain, put the land into play, and shuffle the deck. This card lends itself to Red-Black decks as it gives players the option of searching for Swamps or Mountains.

Players maintain that Bloodstained Mire and other deck thinning cards in dramatically alters the probability of drawing certain cards. Lands are removed from the deck and played early in the game, and non-lands are abundant later in the game. A 1/15 chance of drawing a desired card increases to 1/14.

However, 1/15 is only for a hypothetical deck in which every card exists as four multiples. 1/14 is only if you a lucky enough to remove four of the same exact card (unlikely), and that won’t happen with a single deck thinning card.

The probabilistic benefits of deck thinning are next to nil, but spending a few mana now to deploy lands needed later is worthwhile. However, deck thinning cards are only useful if a player can play them; while in the deck, or in the hand but without sufficient mana, they merely take the place of an otherwise useful card.

Deck thinning cards are just as likely to be drawn early in the game as they are to be drawn late in the game. If a deck thinning card is drawn early in the game, a land would have been as profitable as the thinning card (or more profitable considering the price of activating Bloodstained Mire). If a deck thinning card is drawn late in the game, it’s a complete waste; sorceries, instants, and creatures would be better.

Deck thinning can be a false economy. A 1/14 chance of drawing a certain card is hardly an improvement over 1/15. Bloodstained Mire is particularly undesirable, as it requires draining a life point and sacrificing itself. It also must be tapped to be activated, and thus is affected by land tapping spells such as Manabarbs.

A good way to change the odds of drawing certain cards is to have more or less of them in the deck. Instead of Bloodstained Mire, use Badlands. Badlands directly serves as a swamp or mountain land as the player wishes, does not drain health, does not have to be discarded after use, and does not shuffle the deck.

Scrying, fetching, and other draw cards are highly useful in their own right, just not for deck thinning / probabilistic reasons. A card that removes some from the deck and places them on the board, a card that puts two or more cards in the hand, a card that lets players search for any card in the deck, and even a card that puts cards in the graveyard is useful, recursion permitting.

Update: This post was originally titled “Deck Thinning: A False Economy”. It has been revised to acknowledge the direct benefits of fetch cards while still refuting the main of deck thinning theory: that probabilities are drastically altered, and that this is the primary benefit of deck thinning.

Update: Garett Johnson confirms by Monte Carlo simulation that deck thinning is next to worthless.

Wolf Team Review

I’ve played a number of free first person shooters. Wolf Team deviates from most shooters: it lets players morph into wolves and claw enemies. A cool concept, really, but the execution is flawed.

First of all, Wolf Team is part of the Aeria Games collection which means it requires players to register and login before they can play the game. Logging in is not intrinsically a bad idea but Aeria’s login interface is crummy. There’s no way to save your password or even your username, so you have to re-enter both every time you play. Like a lot of systems, Aeria has stupid password constraints. Pro tip: a password that has two digits is easier to brute-force.

Besides the login interface, there’s the weird channel interface. Players select a channel devoted to their skill level and locale. Within a channel, players can visit the shop to buy better weapons (more on that later), though the shop should be available outside of the channel selection list. (I went with Channel 1 – Boot Camp for newbies. If I can cream them, you can too.) Players then choose a game to play. This is where Wolf Team really un-shines.

While players wait in the lobby, they click the Ready button to signal the game master that they are ready to play. The Ready button does not change, so some players will reflexively click it several times. Only when their status above declares “READY” are they truly ready to join the game.

At this point the game master clicks Start Game. I’ve been the master for a few games. Nearly ever time I click Start Game an error message informs me that the game has not yet begun. THAT’S WHY I CLICKED IT, MORON!

Eventually, the game begins. Players default to human class and shoot each other with a variety of ranged weapons. By pressing 3 they can switch to wolf form, optimized for melee combat. I found that many games are unbalanced. When one team is forced to be human and the other forced to be wolf, the ratio of humans to wolves determines the outcome.

If the humans vastly outnumber the wolves, the humans will win. Wolves do start out stronger, and they attack more forcefully, but as a wolf I most often was shot down before I could approach close enough to swipe claw. If the wolves outnumber the humans, they storm the spawn point and don’t let any humans escape. For this reason, the game can get incredibly boring.

When players can switch between wolf and human at will, the game is much more balanced and much more fun. I like sneaking up on people and clawing them. I like getting bonuses for different kinds of kills: Sneak Attack! Sniper Kill! Double Kill! The voice for these shout-outs is pretty good, but his script is lame. During base-capturing mode, he announces over and over, “Both teams have the same number of bases.” Better would have been, “The teams are tied.” When a player kills, he gets wolf points: “Baby Wolf!” I laugh my ass off every time.

When you play as a human, you can use a primary weapon (typically an assault rifle), a secondary weapon (pistol), and some grenades. Don’t use the default Stout sniper rifle. The damage is very small and the reload time is long. The scope provides no more magnification than a Ziploc bag.

When you play as a wolf, you can run on walls, but only sideways. For some reason you move faster on walls than you do on the ground. It’s still not fast enough to avoid getting shot, so I rarely play as a wolf. Also, wolves operate in third person view for some reason.

One thing that bugs me is that leaving a game triggers a confirmation dialog: “Do you really want to blah blah blah?”

The dialog warns players that they will lose 100 Gold and have a match loss on their record if they leave. This is such a small penalty that I never care. But sometimes that penalty adds up, in the case that I’m playing some games that never end. Wolf Team’s rounds are typically 30 minutes, a bit long in my opinion. Some games immediately begin a new round when the old one is over, so you can’t ever leave without taking a penalty.

The Store

I hate it. Whereas Modern Warfare 2 rewards players in a fashion which encourages them to keep playing, Wolf Team hardly incentivizes players at all. I earned some Gold Points and Aeria Points by playing a couple of games. I have a reasonable amount of each of them so I visited the various stores to buy upgrades. There is no unified Wolf Team store. Instead, there is a NEW store, a Wolf Coin store, and a separate web browser-based store. They’re completely disorganized.

Though I have enough money to buy upgrades, there’s no point. I used the handy Compare button to look at a dozen weapon statistics. None of them are better than the statistics of weapons I already own. The worst part is that once I accrue enough Aeria Points to buy something, Wolf Team takes it back after a few days; “purchase” really means “rent for exactly one day”. Some of the items for sale are just stupid. Of the few permanent items, I can buy a tattoo for my character. Willikers! I can also buy a box of random crap.

In conclusion, Wolf Team is a neat concept but the design flaws are too much for me. I’d rather play other free FPSs.