Jae Kim, on 04 July 2010 - 05:17 PM, said:
You guys can calculate the figures yourself using a handy calculator I linked on my blog/Youtube video.
I think the premise of the original article is wrong (though it has been debated repeatedly). The guy just completely glossed over the benefits of an increased deck size without even addressing them really. A 0.4% difference in drawing a card is statistically insignificant compared to the significant benefits that Love.Hate. alluded to and other considerations as well (that weren't brought up).
I'm sure other opinions sound completely stupid when you ignore the merits of them and focus only on the drawbacks.
I am not still posting on the ETC forums, but I check in from time to time to see what's happening, and I was amused to see that people are still talking about what I said. I don't have much desire to start an argument about this, but I did want to respond to what you said. I'll admit that I no longer play the game, and haven't actively played since 2007, but I still believe the basic premise of my argument is correct. It is true that I did not address any specific decks in my original article; this is because I wanted the article to be somewhat timeless, and in addition because I didn't have full knowledge of the decks being used at the time of writing either.
However, that does not detract from the actual premise, which is simple: I assert that in a deck of more than 40 cards, not all of the cards are equally valuable, and so in general it makes the most sense to keep only the 40 most valuable cards. This is an argument based on logic, not on experience: if you will admit that not all 42 or 44 cards in your deck are equally important, then you
logically
must admit that, in general, it makes more sense to discard the weaker cards, because there's no non-arbitrary limit in the other direction. If you'd take 42 cards, why not take 44, or 64? After all, if you're willing to take a 40 card deck and intentionally add worse cards to it, I don't see where one logically can draw the line. It also makes sense because it's true that in general (barring concerns of losing by deck out) you would want to have
less than 40 cards if you could - after all, in most cases (if not all) not all 40 cards are there for the theme of the Deck, and are simply there as support cards.
If you accept the logical argument made above, then I have no need to focus on the "merits" of having more than 40 cards, because you've already conceded that you're actually hurting your deck, in general by adding them. I won't take the time to argue about every single example, nor do I need to in order to defend the validity of my thesis; however, I will respond to the "Synchro Cat" example mentioned above (keep in mind that I have zero clue what that deck is). The author makes the point that cards in said deck work poorly when they are drawn in the same hand. He then concludes that because of that, more cards should be added, to reduce the risk that those cards are drawn together. The logical flaw in his conclusion is that adding a few more cards does not preclude the possibility of those being drawn together; it only makes that situation slightly less likely. The premise of my argument, though, is that by adding cards to your deck above 40, you're making it weaker by throwing in worse cards than the "amazing" ones listed below. So, I won't go into details about whether it's worse to draw multiples of your amazing cards, or only have single copies of them in your hand at the expense of having worse cards thrown in - but I don't need to know the current status of the game to know that there are very few possibilities where the former is worse.
This post has been edited by Einstein: 07 July 2010 - 01:18 PM
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Posted 01 July 2010 - 10:35 AM
