Hello and welcome back to Illumination, the Disney Lurcana podcast.
My name is Max.
And I'm Sam.
And we are here to take some advantage of having this podcast.
Some card advantage.
If you're still listening, thank you so much.
Appreciate you hanging in through that pun.
If you haven't listened this your first time, welcome on in and thank you for listening
as well.
Really appreciate everybody being here and the fantastically welcoming reception we
got with our first two initial episodes.
So this particular episode, as I alluded to, is going to be all about card advantage.
And what that means, this is a term you will hear thrown around a ton when it comes to
trading card gains.
And I'm not just talking about Lurkana, every trading card game typically has some form
of card advantage and decks seek out trying to take some advantage of said card advantage.
Sam, what is card advantage?
Card advantage is drawing cards, making sure you pretty much consistently have more cards
in hand than your opponent.
That's a very good and I think kind of bog standard definition that someone would give
to that question.
What we're here to do is expand on that a little bit and explain a little bit and give
you some examples of what we're talking about so you can learn hopefully how to deck build
a little bit more consistently and increase your playability if you're playing a deck
that wishes to seek out, taking some card advantage.
So card advantage simply put is having more access to cards, access to cards than your
opponent.
And there are a few ways that trading card games accomplish this.
The first one is the most obvious and Sam named that one already.
And there's kind of a card I imagine that typifies this Sam.
What is the first card you think of when I say card advantage?
Friends on the other side.
I kind of figured you'd say that.
And I think that Lurkana has done a really nice job of not making cards go too crazy
with no difficulty, no barrier to drawing cards.
Friends on the other side, probably one of the strongest examples of card draw.
Otherwise, it's usually what we can refer to as a can trip, which is draw a card attached
to an effect to see this on improvise or nothing to hide or stapled onto a character body.
When it comes into play, you draw a card.
We see this on Maleficent and Merlin rabbit.
Some other ways to take advantage of cards, cards that bounce other cards back to your
hand.
We've seen this with the Madame Mim cards, Madame Mim Snake, Madame Mim Fox.
They bounce the cards back to your hand and they generate access to more cards through
cards like Maleficent and Merlin.
Now that is a form of card draw as well, of course, but this bounce can also let you repeat
other effects to take advantage of seeing more cards in other ways too.
We see this with repeating Lady Tremaine's things like that.
And one of the new ways we're getting is going to be self mill.
We're getting our first real big payoff with into the ink lands by way of the card Chernobog.
So we actually have a reason to put a bunch of characters into the discard pile, which
is really exciting to see.
So you can actually do something more than just draw card and discard a card and steal.
And of course, another one that may seem a little out of whack is discard because that's
kind of the opposite of drawing a card isn't it?
It's making your opponent get rid of cards.
But these are all examples of card advantage.
One other word you're going to hear flung around a lot and I'm going to just touch on
it very, very briefly to delineate the difference is something called tempo.
Tempo is cards that are already in play and on the board.
We're talking about characters, locations, we're talking about items, things that are
already on the board and generating you advantage by them being on the board, not so much in
your hand.
So gaining a tempo advantage would be playing a cheap character that quests for a lot.
You are Lilo, you're Pinocchio.
Those things are considered to be tempo advantage.
Tempo is anything on the board or in play that is generating an advantage to keep you
ahead of your opponent.
We are talking about card advantage, which is just simply access to more cards, not
getting ahead in the game or progressing towards winning the game, which is what tempo is trying
to do.
There will be an episode on tempo advantage at some point, I promise you.
That is not this episode and I don't want to bog down the episode any further.
This is already a heavy topic.
What kind of decks care about card advantage in Lurkana?
It's going to be the control deck.
The mid-range deck can also do this and gain flexibility.
I will talk more about that towards the end of the podcast.
Also in other games, less so in Lurkana, but combo decks care a lot about drawing cards
because they are trying to execute some kind of a synergy and the way they do that is through
cards.
We see this a lot with SteelSongSile decks, that their game plan is another closest thing
we get to a combo is these heavy synergy decks.
So that's what the decks that care about card advantage tend to look like.
It's not so much the aggressive decks that are looking to just win the game very quickly
with limited access to cards.
The tempo decks, the aggro decks are trying to win fast to stop the control and the combo
decks from taking time to seek out card advantage.
Make sense, right?
Sam, what are the benefits of card advantage?
What do you think?
When you think of card advantage, you love playing card advantage decks.
So what are the benefits?
If you're trying to sell somebody on, you want to play a deck that generates card advantage.
What are you telling them?
What are the benefits of it?
Well, you get to see more of your deck so you get to your good cards quicker.
You have more options for what's in your hands that you want to play.
Depending on what the opponent's doing, you have that flexibility of deciding what you
want to do because you have more cards in your hand.
I think that's pretty well said.
I have it as flexibility, options, and consistency are all the things that cards can offer.
Flexibility obviously allows you to adjust your game plan accordingly.
We see this very, very precisely in the Ruby Amethyst decks of the current time.
This would be the rise of the Floodborne meta.
The decks are very accustomed to being able to go, okay, I'm going to be the aggressor
or whoa, I got to slow this game way, way, way, way down almost to a snail's pace so
that I can then overwhelm.
It can do that because it has access to so many cards.
Options, same thing for the most part is flexibility.
It's not so much focused on changing your role, but giving you the ability to make the
optimal plays each and every turn.
You're always inking and not feeling the pain of a small hand.
You get to do a lot and it gives you a lot of options and that's why more experienced
trading card game players tend to lean toward card advantage based decks because it gives
them more choices they have to make and gives them more inflection points typically in the
game.
Then of course, consistency, right?
This is what the combo decks are looking for is if I need these two cards to be in
play to win me the game, I got to find them every game.
That's my goal and I need to get them out and that consistency is offered by way of
card advantage.
This card does this in the opposite direction, right?
What you're looking to do is you're gaining advantage over your opponent by whittling
away their options, whittling away their flexibility and whittling away that consistency.
You're taking all of those fantastic things and robbing them of that while keeping more
cards in your hand.
This is why the Prince John card is so key to the discard decks because while you're making
your opponent run out of cards, you're compounding that card advantage for yourself by drawing
even more cards so you can really make this spiral out of control very easily for your
opponent through the strong discard engine that Prince John can generate.
That's the way that we're trying to benefit ourselves with a controlling style deck.
Sam, what do you have gripes about when you're playing a controlling style deck?
What are the weaknesses of these card advantage control style decks?
It's slow.
You're not getting off to a quick start.
Actually, my biggest complaint about the card advantage decks is when you don't get your
card advantage, you kind of falls apart.
You're not going to win if you don't draw cards because it's not the way the deck wins.
That's very valid.
Also, I have exactly that slow to respond.
Opponent plays Lilo on turn one, turn two.
They play Pinocchio and you're just like, uh-oh.
I have four friends on the other side in my hand and some other cards that cost six and
seven.
It's going to be really hard for you to win that game.
Turn spin on card draw is another problem.
You're not adding to the board.
You're not adding to any kind of tempo.
The random number generator, good old RNG, doesn't so much help you out with those wrong
cards and characters that the controlling decks or the synergy card advantage cards
tend to play are typically on the underwhelming side of the stat block.
When it comes to pure numbers, they're not doing too much.
Like Maleficent is a great example, Maleficent is a 2-2 for three that when it comes into
play, you draw a card.
I can name a million 2-2s for one in this game in every color.
They don't draw you a card when they come in.
So you are paying a premium here of two additional ink to have the benefit of a 2-2 that drew
you a card.
Obviously, there are compounding pieces of advantage here because Maleficent can sing
songs like the aforementioned friends on the other side, which makes that very, very powerful,
not just in and of itself, but looking at those cards side by side.
2-2s that quest for one cost one in this game.
Maleficent is not.
It's an understated card on board, but drawing a card and replacing itself means that if
it challenges and has to trade with another opposing character, you don't care because
you already replaced Maleficent.
You didn't lose a card.
They did.
She done her thing.
There are some inherent weaknesses there too, along with the benefits.
There was all upside.
There'd only be one good deck in the game, and it wouldn't be a very good game.
So moving away from weaknesses, benefits, things like that, now that we've talked about
card advantage and kind of how it works, I want to give you some quick examples and then
get into more specific cards.
But some cards, in addition to Maleficent that help, are these bounce characters that
we've seen in Rise of the Floodborne, these Madame Mim based cards that really help keep
consistency up and make sure you can do things.
Just very strong, powerful, dense threats on the board can be a way to leverage card advantage
in certain aspects because you get to just spend time.
If I have a surfing mini-out and she's just doing her thing, my opponent is trying every
way they can to answer it or trying to spew cards out while I can just build up a board,
build up a board.
If I really attempt to race by assembling four or five creatures, I can kind of slow
the game down at that point because I've had the benefit of just being able to chill and
draw cards and use one card to keep pressure can drop down mini and use all of this card
advantage to just let her surf and serve and she doesn't care, she's just all surfing.
And doing her thing and your opponent has to dig and try to find threats or find a specific
card that has a vasive to be able to answer, it can be a lot of hoops they have to jump
through.
And by that time, they may have given up a couple of cards or inked some cards that might
have been way better in the late game because they needed to get down something very fast
on that turn.
So you're squeezing them on the benefits, right?
You're taking away that option and flexibility the same way a discard deck does.
So card advantage on the whole, you can see where it's just like, oh, you never really
had to try sometimes.
You can look at your opponent and be like, they just had cards in their hand the whole
time.
They're lowest.
They had five or six cards.
The rest of the time, they just had a big giant hand of cards and you can see why decks
like this tend to lean on cards previously in the first chapter meta was magic mirror.
And if you were in the red purple face off, you leaned on your magic mirrors to just who
could magic mirror more.
And I know Sam got annoyed with me during the first chapter meta when she would get
excited to play a card and back, no, no, no, just draw off magic mirror.
And she's like, I don't understand why you just keep drawing off magic mirror.
It's funny you're bringing that up and I forgot about that card because we don't see it anymore.
Right.
So it's really interesting to see, but the first chapter meta was so clunky and slow
that it really did matter.
Yeah.
Like to the point where you were using brooms and befuddles and using broom to sweep your
befuddles back into your deck so you could befuddle your broom back to not mill out because
that was a way that you could lose that game very realistically was to mill out because
it was so common for the first chapter, red purple decks to end up going to time in time
events because they were just very slow and card advantage was critical.
It was everything to that deck success.
So you can see it inherent, especially in that particular build at that particular moment
in time with the game.
Moving into some non obvious examples of card advantage.
One card that does this that I mentioned lightly, but didn't name specifically is be prepared.
If you're not familiar with be prepared is a seven cost song in the ruby color that
allows you to banish all the characters in play.
That's what it does.
Pay seven or sing it for seven and banish all the characters in play.
This card can generate you card advantage in the way that you get to leverage your cards
at a different point.
It doesn't give you tempo advantage because it sets the board back to zero.
It's tempo neutral, but your opponent played out three or four cards and you got to answer
it with one.
And now you get to deploy more cards that you can use to a more specific advantage.
Now this isn't directly card advantage, right?
This is something that's a little bit higher on the card quality scale, but the way it
plays in Lorcan is a little different than the way it affects like this play in other
games and actually can grant you a form of card advantage because while your opponent
had access to these cards, right, you had access to maybe the same amount of cards,
they didn't get to leverage these characters in a way that they were hoping to.
They didn't get to quest with them.
They didn't get to use them to challenge.
They didn't get to take advantage, true advantage of leveraging their abilities.
So you got to take advantage with a nice well placed board wipe.
Right.
In Ruby Amethyst, you could have rabbits out or coos goes out that is going to draw
you cards when you do it as well.
Right.
You can use that here and disadvantage to gain an advantage, which is really, really
important.
And the other card, one of the more difficult cards to explain to a new player, which blew
me away the first time I saw this.
And I think there was that line of people who saw this card and were like, Oh my God,
this is the most one of the most powerful cards I've ever seen in a trading card game.
And other people who are like, I do not understand why you people think this is good.
And that is a whole new world.
A whole new world is a five cost song in the steel color that can be sung, obviously.
And when you do each player discards their hand of current cards, however many it is,
be it 19 or be it zero, and then draws seven cards.
Everyone does this.
And now you can say, well, Max, that's, you're both at seven.
That's the same number.
There's no advantage here.
The way you use a whole new world, the most effectively in Luricana at the point of recording,
which again is right before Inklans comes out, is you deploy a bunch of threats or create
a lot of ink resource before your opponent has a chance to do that.
And then while your opponent's stuck with maybe like five or six cards in their hand,
you maybe have one, two or three.
So on your discarding cards, you had access to four or five, six cards.
They had access to two, because remember, it's about access to cards.
That's why I said it's going to come up later in the discussion.
Access to cards is a big part of this particular card.
It's the access to the cards.
What are you doing with the cards you see?
Sam, I know you particularly have a disdain for a whole new world being a control player.
I just have trouble with that card because it always catches me.
I want to say off guard, but not really.
I know it's coming.
And there's just nothing I can do about it because of what I mentioned earlier.
Right now I'm playing Ruby Amethyst and I just can't get things down quick enough.
So on turn three or four, when I get played a whole new world against me, it kind of just
wrecks me.
Right.
It doesn't give you time to ink out your small characters that you're bouncing back to your
hand with Madam Mims because you bounce them back to your hand or you do the really
cool like play Lady Tremaine, the red Lady Tremaine that makes them sacrifice a character.
And then you pick it back up and then you're like, I'm going to do that again next turn.
Then your opponent goes whole new world and you're like, oh no.
Or you have two or three be prepared in your hand that you've been saving and now they're
gone.
Yes.
So being able to whole new world means that I have tried to play cheaper, more aggressive
cards on board to gain the tempo advantage.
And then I'm going to neutralize that by making us both have the same amount of cards
again.
So now I'm having access to more cards than my opponent who's just merely discarding
them.
So unless they're on like a mill, like a self mill strategy, they're getting no value
out of their cards.
So that is a huge card advantage.
Right?
I'm taking advantage of my cards better than my opponent.
So when you're building a deck and if you're thinking that the deck predicates itself on
being able to have access to cards, especially to win the game, be it by a combo or slowly
controlling the game over time, being able to keep your options, your flexibility and
your consistency up, you need to make sure that you understand cards that really give
you trouble and you understand how to wrestle back and to keep your opponent low on advantage
or as low as you can on their advantage while maintaining as much advantage as you can be
it by a board wipe, something that resets like a whole new world or just pure card draw.
Right?
Like Rapunzel is a great example of a card that can draw a bunch of cards.
Right?
There's a reason it was the most expensive card in the first chapter initially because
there was nothing like it.
It added a serious threat to the board with tempo while replacing cards and healing someone.
Yes.
Exactly.
So, you have cards on board better and replaced itself by adding cards back into your hand,
which is just so, so powerful.
So that's kind of a brief primer on card advantage, what it means to different decks
and how you can eke out a card advantage yourself.
So, Sam is there any other cards you want to call out in this card advantage discussion?
No, I don't think so.
Good.
Well, that means we covered a good swath of them.
If you need to reach out to us for any...
I do have one more.
Oh, she has one more.
I have one more.
High room, Flavisham.
Flavisham is the keynote speaker at the Popsicles party.
He's my favorite.
Yeah.
So, I'm surprised I forgot about him.
Yes.
Very, very powerful and consistent.
He is a card draw engine in and of himself, right?
He generates by him, well, not by himself completely, but with items that also like Popsicles give
you card advantage can further escalate your card advantage.
And the more cards you see, the more likely you are to find more items to be able to continue
to draw more cards.
It's a self-fulfilling engine.
So, it is extremely powerful and not a surprise that it was the most popular deck coming out
of the initial meta for Rise of the Floodborne because it's just a powerhouse onto itself.
So, yeah, those are great call outs.
And I think a really good way for you to take advantage of getting a bunch of cards in your
hand or trying to figure out how you can make an advantage with the cards that you've played,
feel free to reach out to us.
The best way to do it, probably on YouTube.
You can hit us up on our landing page for the website, anything you need to just reach
out to us.
We're communicating super-illuminal entertainment.
The best way to do that and keep it out for Illumination Podcast on your socials as well
as we expand the Illumination Empire.
Sam, keep questing.