Competitive Talk - Threat Assessment
Hello to you all Realm Runners and welcome to another of my Competitive Talk articles, my final one before the Spirata Fall GT this Saturday!
Hopefully by now you’ve got a solid idea of your palette list and have given it some thorough testing ready for the challenges to come. So this time I thought I’d go into something more playstyle-focused; Threat Assessment.
In any competitive game it’s an important skill of any player to know how you can answer your opponent’s plays with the cards you have at your disposal. However it’s also important to consider the different ways that you’re able to do so and which way will net you the most value.
To best illustrate this let’s create an example scenario. Say your opponent has an Ignis and Vast Volitarus in play whilst you have Sorcerer Pifarius and Rabid Dog with a Fireball in hand.
Now you could Fireball the Ignis then go to your resolve to protect your characters, holding back your Rabid Dog for another threat however it’s most likely the Vast Volitarus will easily help them recover the shards they lose from your cards’ effects. So, to get the most out of your cards in this scenario, you’re better off using Rabid Dog to crash into Ignis then use Fireball to erase Vast Volitarus; true you have less of a resolve, but you’ve also removed the key parts of your opponent’s canvas so they have to invest more shards to recover which then furthers your chance of winning.
This scenario might be relatively obvious but, hopefully, it demonstrates that there is always an optimal way to play your cards to win. What players often call a ‘misplay’ is when they realise they could’ve played it out in a better way.
On the flip side of all of this, it’s also important to consider that your opponent may be going through the same thought processes as the above so it’s important to consider how you deploy your own cards; throwing down your legendary with no back-up plan on turn 1 will mean you are risking your opponent having an answer in their opening hand, whereas deploying your smaller cards to apply pressure, especially if they’re relatively high impact cards for their cost like Ruber Draco and Monastery Nest, and holding back your legendary for when your opponent is lower on resources, can turn out better for you in the long run.
It’s also very important to know how your palette can respond to certain threats and its limits; you will always have difficult matchups where you have to be careful what cards you use or where you have to hit a particular card as soon as it gets deployed so take the time to consider these things, this is what extensive testing shows you as well. Naturally speaking, a custom palette will always have an advantage over pre-cons from the sets.
Best of luck to all of you going this Saturday! I won’t be attending this time, unfortunately, but I hope you all have a fantastic time whatever you choose to take with you!
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