[Takket]

For arguments sake this is a "3 draw, 3 free play" type deck. Non-

i usually end up with around 8-10 people per-free-reporting-engine and i'll sprinkle in a few people that don't report for free if i have an obvious skill gap.

but if you had, say, 10 copies of transporter phobia to try and mess with people, and a bunch of kivas to fuel card draws, well the more verbs you add, the more you dilute your pool of nouns. Anyone have a "rule of thumb ratio?"

[boromirofborg]

3 free play, meaning 4 plays a turn, or 3 plays in general?


I would always be aiming to be drawing as many as my total number of plays as a minimum.

So if I can have a potential of 4 plays, 3 of which have to be personnel, I’m keeping the non personnel to a minimum.

[BCSWowbagger]

Two cents: The ideal ratio of of non-free personnel is 0, and that should be devoutly pursued. It is sometimes unavoidable, but can very quickly rip apart a balanced play-draw system. The more complicated and fast-paced your deck, the more important it is to keep your deck pure and smooth, but the rule of thumb is always the same for me: zero.

Also, I think "play 3 / draw 3" is the wrong paragdigm. The game's pace 2010-2016-ish was about 7 per turn, and you only needed enough draw to sustain that. (An advantage of DS9 was that it needed little draw to sustain this but had plentiful draw anyway -- lots of room to play other cards, as long as they were free, like and .) For some affiliations, that meant 2 plays, for others, 3, for others, 4.

By now, I think the pace has become more like 11 per turn, maybe higher, but some of last year's bans (like Cyber Expert) may have helped corral it a bit.

I should sit down and analyze this someday to get real numbers. Not today.

[abargar7510]

Two cents: The ideal ratio of of non-free personnel is 0, and that should be devoutly pursued. It is sometimes unavoidable, but can very quickly rip apart a balanced play-draw system. The more complicated and fast-paced your deck, the more important it is to keep your deck pure and smooth, but the rule of thumb is always the same for me: zero.

What’s the opportunity cost though of playing a personnel that could otherwise be played for free using your more valuable card play?

[BCSWowbagger]

Usually pretty low, I find. Most personnel in 1e are just regular skills, and you can usually build a sturdy skill matrix within your free play engine(s), so what are you missing out on by using all free-play guys instead of card play guys? Something, yes, but not a lot of something, and you gain a ton of flexibility and redundancy. There are a lot fewer possible bad draws if every card in your deck is a free play -- which, in turn, means you don't need as much "backup" drawing power!

[PantsOfTheTalShiar]

My rule for deck ratios is to (approximately) match the ratios of the cards I want to play each turn. Three free plays + normal card play + one Barclay's (on average) per turn is five cards per turn, thus the starting point for deckbuilding would be 20% of each free play engine, 20% Barclay's, and up to 20% normal card play stuff (ships, card draw, etc.).

The ratio for card draw depends on how often I need to play it in order to draw as many cards as I'm playing each turn (in this case, five). Let's say you would need to play a KFC on 2/3rds of your turns: then 2/3rds of your card play slice (which is 20% of the whole deck) would be KFC, which works out to about 13%.

Now I don't actually calculate deck ratios precisely; I just work with ballpark figures and fudge the ratios as needed. The important thing is to know which direction to fudge the ratios. For each category of card, is it worse to have too much of the card, or too little? Card draw is worse to have too little of, so let's fudge that ratio up a little, maybe up to 15-18%. Normal card plays are worse to have too many of, so it's usually better to reduce them down from the theoretical ratio (unless that would result in cutting into your card draw). One of your play engines might have worse personnel than the others, so that would be the one to fudge downward in order to make room so you can draw your other cards more reliably.