Waste Not, Want Not. A Lesson in Efficiency

As most of you should be able to see, the majority of my posts here, especially recently, have been about decks and the metagame. With Regionals behind us (and not knowing when the next one will be), I would like to move more to the strategy side of the game today. I want to cover something today, that most people do without thinking about it, but don't know why. Understanding this concept can help you take your game to the next level. That concept is maximizing your resources.

Now, maybe I should clarify this and say maximizing your cards since resources are their own thing in this game and when I say resources, I mean not only those cards you placed in your resource row, but also those in your hand and in play.

Let's start with resource efficiency. Resource efficiency is a simple theory. Every time you start a turn with resources that aren't exhausted, your resource efficiency goes down. You want to use all of your resources every turn. One way to picture resource efficiency is to give each player one point every time they exhaust a resource. Ideally, you will score one point on turn one, two on turn 2 and so on. If one player uses all his resources every turn and the other does not, the first player's resource score will obviously get higher. The bigger the discrepency in resource scores, the more likely this is to determine the winner. This is one of the reasons I like It's a Secret to Everybody and A Donation of Wool as quests in control decks that don't have any other turn 1 plays. This is an important concept in deckbuilding. Not using your resource on turn one isn't a huge setback. But if your deck isn't designed to get maximum efficiency out of your resources from turn 2 through at least turn 8 (unless you plan on winning before then) you are going to be at a severe disadvantage in World of Warcraft. So how do you go about designing a deck with resource efficiency in mind. Let's look at a great example in the Elendril Hunter deck. This deck will have the best resource efficiency score in the game. It will play an ally on turn 1, another on turn 2, and then either one or two more on three. It will use all of its resources initially to play allies. It has a solid early curve with usually 12 1-drops, 10-12 two drops, and then fewer allies as the cost goes up, topping with the super-efficient Fury at 5. When the allies start to run low, the deck can still use all of its resources to complete quests which will let it then play more allies, continuing to use all of its resources every turn. But what if you don't want to play beatdown. Control decks tend to have a more difficult time maximizing resource efficiency. Since they may find times when they have cards that won't always be useful at all times a control player can somtimes find himself with nothing to do during a turn. This is why control deck need some proactive solutions. No, I don't mean that control decks are teen pop stars who need their acne cleared up. I mean they need cards that can be played even when there opponent doesn't do anything that needs immediate attention. In World of Warcraft, having quests is a great proactive ability. Any time you don't need to address an opponent's threats, you can just use your resources to complete a quest. Another great source of resource efficiency is re-usable effects. Horde control players know the power of Hierophant Caydiem. But one of the beatiful things about her ability is the resource efficiency it enables. You will never end an opponent's turn with more than 2 resources ready. One other way for control deck to maximize their resource efficiency is to use more cheap abilities and allies. This allows you to double dip and use all your resources to accomplish more than one thing. This is a good strategy for control decks that have access to a lot of card drawing like the Mage and Warlock as they can use up their card by playing more than one per turn and then use their great card draw to keep their hand size up. For control decks that don't rely as much on card drawing they rely on more efficient cards.

After, resource efficiency is damage efficiency. Damage efficiency is how well you maximize the amount of damage you are able to deal. Using Lightning Bolt to kill Apprentice Teep is bad damage efficiency since you waste 3 damage. Using Chain Lightning to kill Fury, Latro, and Teep is great damage efficiency (as well as great card advantage, which I'm going to discuss next week). Sometimes, you simply have to waste some damage because you have no other options. But the more damage you waste, the more likely you are to end up losing the game. Let's look at an obvious example that probably comes up quite a bit. You have Apprentice Teep and Latro Abiectus. Your opponent has a ready Parvink. Most people know the right play here, but I'm just illustrating the point. The correct play (using just these cards for this simple example) is to attack Parvink with Teep. This way, you don't waste any of Teep's damage as she is killing a 2 health ally with 2 attack, but you also force your opponent to waste one damage as Parvink deals 2 to Teep when only one is needed. Let's look at it from the other way and see what would happen if you didn't make the right play here. If you were to not attack Parvink with Teep, leaving her to protect against Latro. In this scenario, you waste a resource while your opponent gets maximum efficiency out of Parvink. Your 3 atk is one extra, while Parvink does exactly enough to kill Latro. One thing to consider when examining damage efficiency is allies vs. abilities. Abilities have a finite amount of damage, while allies, theoretically can deal infinite damage. So when you're looking at killing an opposing ally, either through trading with one of your own allies or using an ability, remember Frost Shock can only ever deal 2 damage. Taz'dingo can attack for 2 per turn. So allies can be a well of damage you can keep going back to over and over. What about when you can kill an ally but not lose your in the attack. This is a special circumstance where you're techinically wasting damage, but not really. Since your ally is still around, you can still get more damage out of him. So while this is wasted damage in the sense that the extra damage you did will have no effect on the game, the fact that you still have your damage source alleviates that loss. It's still not a good idea to waste much damage, say running Tewa Wildmane into Taz'Dingo unless you have no other choice. But if you're talking about 1 or 2 excess damage, the card advantage you get from keeping your ally will make up for the lost damage.

The next time you're playing a game of World of Warcraft, or when you're designing your next killer deck, keep these conservation ideas in mind. If you can maximize your efficiency, your game will show it.