Sword Girls Deck Building Formulas and Tips

Sword Girls Deck Building Formulas and Tips by pocketdragon

Figure I start a generic deck strategy post for us to share deck building tips, opinions, ideas. I don’t mean things like “use card X” but the basic stuff like “this many followers, this many spells”. I know some special decks have special needs but I think it’s useful to have a middle ground we all agree on being ideal for an “average deck” or a “3/4/5 Heavy deck” or a “1/2/3 Heavy deck”.

When I say hand I don’t mean your starting hand, I mean the hand you have at the round start.

Some things I’ve heard, observed, learned…

• you should have at the very least 15 followers (some suggest 17 followers as ideal)

• out of the 15/13 spells you should be very skimpy on the debuffs, particularly situational ones (eg. Shrink, Armor Break, etc). Reasons: they are useless in your starting hand. The more you have in hand the less options you have on that turn, so ideally you should minimize their frequency.

• it’s better to have more diversity of debuff spells, or have very generic ones. 3x Armor Break or 3x Shrink are unlikely to be useful 3x times in a match so 2x times you are wasting them, and you also now have 1/10 chance of it being in your hand when you don’t need it.

• for a lot of cards it’s better to have 2 or 1 if you would never throw more then 1 on the field (eg. Pintail)

• you shouldn’t have more then two 5’s since you can’t use more then two, so getting a hand with 3 of them is useless

• your deck should not be designed around shoufling on round 1, or getting some perfect positioning on round 1. Shuffling on round 1 won’t win you the game, shuffling later in the game when you’re in a pinch will probably save you the game.

• the more size 3/4 followers you have the less useful grave powers are; to use grave powers in a 17 follower setup: 4x I’s, 4x II’s, 4x III’s, 3x IV’s, 2x V’s. Why are they less useful with higher cards? Because even if you throw them out when you have 1 life you won’t get that much out of the ones you got in your grave, since you have very few; at most spells — so follower based grave powers are even less useful.

• when in doubt have only 2 copies of a card; a more balanced/diverse field is stronger because it’s less vulnerable to the same trick. If all your followers have relatively low attack then a debuff on attack is very effective and has potentially crippled all of them.

• your field should be 8 in size, depending on if you have a lot of 3 spells 7 in size at most. In general you should have some empty room on your field to buff. Consider that when thinking what cards you’ll use in your deck. Too many size 4’s will mean your size 3 spells are unlikely to ever get used. Especially when your size 4’s die hard. If you put a bunch of defensive cards then you might die slowly but by the time you can do anything again the may already be lost.

• you should have different themed cards for each size. If all your cards are focused on def then you might have issues killing things before they get out of hand, if you focus too much on attack then you might die too quick, stam usually means you can’t put that much on the field as you would otherwise. If you focus on only one type, sweaping debuffs will usually make you very vulnerable

• to some extent defense based cards work better with any stamina buffs because a card with defense makes more efficient use of the buff. So you should think of cards like Omnivore as more valuable when you have a lot of cards with defense in your deck

• “offense is the best defense” a card with enough attack power to kill an enemy in one blow has the best defense because there’s no counter attack; on the other hand most defense cards will always get damage back. The more spells (buffs etc) the enemy casts the more effective a simple offensive strategy is at keeping your defenses up. The inverse is also true, a stam buff on your followers is potentially denying them first string or even 2nd strike, are they really going to gain life or even stay alive? — see notes for some statistics

• solid defense is not bad either, as long as you’re defending. But it’s reliant on you tacking the first hit. Let’s say you have 5 Atk and 10 stamina. And the enemy has 5 Atk. If you attack first you do 5 damage, and take 5 damage from counter. Then he attacks you and you die. So you did 5 damage. If on the other hand you build the deck so most of the time he attacks you first then you do 5 damage in counter then another 5 damage with your attack. So now you’ve done 10 damage. This is why I’s seem to do little damage and why V’s with their large stamina pool seem to do monster amount of damage. On certain decks it may be more viable to actually somehow disable your characters from attacking at all (eg. use of Crux’s Entry Denied)

• if you focus too much on offense then you’re likely to get 1 shotted back before, however, the difference in spells between you and your opponent is essentially free shots

• strategies involving two spells going off one after the other typically fail since the spells won’t go off the right order most of the time and even if they did you just gave your opponent 2 free strikes at your followers. So don’t build your deck around “synergy casting”, keep things simple, you get better results.

Card Offense/Defense Stats (see “offense is the best defense” bullet above)

• Out of the 17 Size I’s.

• Out of the 20 Size II’s.

• Out of the 25 Size III’s

• Out of the 24 Size IV’s

• Out of the 20 Size V’s

Basically balance works something like this 1 Atk = 1 Stam, and 1 Def = 1 Atk + 1 Stam. For basic cards: If the card has +1 something ability to it will also usually have -1 something in stats. So the first swing when it buffs itself usually doesn’t matter. This only applies to the basic cards.

Generally considering only the Atk/Stam values, the balance (basic) version for every size should be: 5/5 for I’s, 6/6 II’s, 7/7 for III’s, 9/9 for IV’s and 11/11 for V’s. Almost every card’s stats are more or less a variation of this based on the balance formula previously stated.