What are deck building games like? I've never played one before and have only heard of them fairly recently...

What are deck building games like? I've never played one before and have only heard of them fairly recently. What are some good ones to acquire and play?

Did you enjoy the tedious task of constructing, tweaking, and fine-tuning your Magic deck? Now imagine if someone made an genre out of that one aspect and you have deck building games in a nutshell.

That doesn't sound too fun.

Dominion is solid and easy to learn, but don't expect any kind of theme.
Ascension has a bit more randomness, but generally that just leads to more varied decks between players, plus it's a bit more thematic.
Thunderstone is, sadly, out of print.
Star Realms is tiny but brilliant, sadly only 2 players out of the box.
Legendary I don't have much experience with. I know setup/takedown time is a bit long, but it has some awesome flavour in all its incarnations.

I like deckbuilding games quite a bit. Starting off with some basic cards and then slowly turning those into better ones, building a point-getting engine.
It's way less like building a magic deck than you might think.

...

If you are familiar with CCG Drafts, then deck builders are basically playing a game while you are still drafting. Your deck starts small and grows as you acquire cards, the specific mechanic for which is usually built into the cards.

The game is adorbs and I really like the mechanic for scoring cards outside of your deck.
Also scrapyard maid op, pls nerf.

dominion is all you need. all other deck building games try to add stuff to make the game "better", like market row or making all cards worth victory points but it doesn't work. the point of victory points cards are a strategic element. do you want to buy more actions to make your deck better? or do you want to buy that duchy to get slightly ahead of your opponent, yet clogging tour deck? it's a good little brain teaser. the only downside I could say there is is that out of the ten kingdom cards that are in play at a time, very rarely will you actually use all of them. and there are plenty of cards that have the obvious advantage over others. dominion owns, but I suppose it's not for everyone

>Thunderstone is, sadly, out of print.
Any chances for a reprint eventually?

It doesn't seem likely.

Star Realms is awful due to extreme variance. I guess you are free to believe otherwise.

How do you mean?

This can be a problem in any unfiltered randomization of available cards for a deckbuilder. Even Dominion has this problem, as a handful of cards (cough*Pirate Ship*cough) utterly change the flow of a game when they appear.

Not that guy but I also have a beef with Star Realms, which suffers mightily from the problem of really unbalanced cards and a refilling store. By unblanced I don't mean broken but there is a very small subset of cards that you really need to win and buying cards other than those cards is usually more harmful than helpful because it gives you opponent the opportunity to purchase the good cards as they come off the deck to replace the just bought ones.

Ascension also suffers from this but it's not quite as bad since all the cards are much closer in utility/price ratio.

Pirate ship isn't that bad. Stupidity happens with shit like Ironworks and Nobles, that combo with themselves. Treasury has a tendency to get goofy as well.

Basically just play Dominion, unless you really care about theme. In which case I don't know what to say to you, because your thought process is alien to me. I haven't seen a deckbuilder that doesn't seem mechanically inferior to Dominion. Setting up the game and carrying it around is a massive chore though, but the online client isn't awful.

Even if they do have a lot of impact on the game, they don't introduce the whole "hope cards that fit my strategy appear" thing that a lot of other derivations suffer from. Dominion is a card game, so there's certainly a fair degree of variance (5/2 splits, 4/4 splits, terminal collisions, missed reshuffles, and Knights, Potions, KC, Fool's Gold, Young Witch and Swindler as examples of individual cards), but I find it to be a lot more healthy than ones with a random deck.

Millennium Blades if you've ever gotten big into a CCG like Magic or Yu-Gi-Oh.

Dominion basically started the trend and mastered it. Some cards are bad. Real bad, but unlike Competitive Deck Builders with a market row, everyone has the potential ability to get one. With market rows, there's a higher variance in what's available and what everyone can use. If you like your games swingy as shit or being rendered impotent halfway through the game because another player saw a particular card before you did, then yeah, Ascension, Star Realms, DC Deckbuilder and Marvel Legendary are good. Otherwise, pick up Dominion.

Mind, that's for competitive deckbuilders. There's the Legendary Encounters deckbuilders that are actually good in that since everyone is legitimately trying to work together, it's more about strategizing acquisitions from the market row between players rather than simply tying to hoard things into the deck for points.

Ive heard good things about Valley of the Kings as a deck builder too.

Is more of a drafting game/tableau builder than an actual deck builder.

You can download and play Dominion for free. Google it and see for yourself.

>what is Hearthstone

A remarkable demonstration that showed one can somehow churn out a CCG with even less soul than MTG.

Dominion is pretty fun, but can have serious balance problems if you random your action cards at the start.

The two big issues:

One is the common one for most market row style deckbuilders. There's a fairly good chance that one player who manages to grab the only good economic cards or scrappers from the market row, while flipping bad card for the next player to replace it, gets a way too big an edge. The always available Explorers mitigate but do not solve the problem. Being able to pick something like the 4 gold Freighter on your opening two turns can mean being able to pick up even 7-8 cost power cards after your first shuffle, and that can snowball hard.

The second is really that while all deckbuilders have a decidedly random element in that what you draw from your deck is a very real source of randomness, how Star Realms cards work the power of your drawn hand can hugely change based on whether you draw your cards of same "suit" to the same hand or not. Obviously, once you've scrapped a to make your deck lean you increase the chances, but in the early to midgame one player simply can draw his stuff together where the other player draws his stuff apart.

And then there's the normal issues like cards combining high victory point values (or attack in this case) with strong abilities, which is a basic sin of way too many non-Dominion deckbuilders. There is a good reason DXV has Duchies and Provinces giving you VPs, but nothing else.

Honestly I'm much more interested at games using deck building as a mechanic within the game, not as the whole game (see: Mage Knight as an example). Dominion did so much correct on the first go that pure deckbuilders after do more wrong than right trying to improve purely within the genre.

These games are all shit.

After playing a few games, you'll soon realize cards that gives you free draw + 1 action point (so that the card literally replaces itself or nets you a free +1 card) are superior, along with cards that lets you remove shit cards from your deck permanently.

Just grab a bunch of those, pick high value cards from the board and you'll win most games.

I've played this strategy a lot and honestly it's not that good. Sure village is essentially a free card once it is in the deck, but it does not increase the power in your deck at all. The +2 action is a nice one, but in many, many many cases it does not do anything. You need to already have a bunch of powerful actions in your deck for village to be good, at which point the game starts to be over. I've usually lost to players just buying gold and silver since those actually improve their deck and fast.

But you're right in that cards like festival and market are super powerful, since they add up free money for the deck. But Dominion does not need to be balanced, since you can always just use a setup without the cards you don't like.

And even when some cards are clearly stronger than others, the big thing about how Dominion is set up is that those cards are equally available to buy for all players, which avoids the big pitfall of most market row -style deckbuilders.

Dominion was astoundingly boring all six times I played it. I have no idea how t became so popular. Basically all you do in it is force as many copies of one or two cards as you can, and usually one of those cards is the coin.

>I played this game 6 times and have a comprehensive understanding about its strategy.
yeah okay bud
I don't even know 'the coin' is supposed to be.

If we talk just core, Garden Rush is probably the strongest strategy, and Witch is better than anything that gives bonus actions. Even if we include expansions, which generally encourage engines more, you're still going to have a large number of boards where other strategies are more viable.

Yeah, I think it's a mechanic that has a lot of interesting applications within larger games. Orleans seemed kind of fun from what little I've played it. The dice variants don't really appeal to me, however.