Lyrics of the Night : Card Ratio

Almost all my decks have a crypt of 12 and a library of 90. The only reason I felt that the library should be less than 90 is when I'm lacking the numbers of certain key cards to make up the required ratio where the chances of drawing that card will be good enough for the deck to work. Since my community over here play with a max library of 90 I tend to want to maximise my library resource. The issue of building (or tuning) a deck is not just about which card to include, but more importantly, how many of each card should be in the deck. The number should ensure that you hold a hand of 7 useful cards most of the time, or at least should have a majority of cards that contribute to your strategy or defense. It's no point having the library full of a certain card and find it most often than not clot up your hand. I have this problem of want to include as many resources in the library as possible in order to fulfill the different function integral to a good deck - offense, defense, pool gain etc etc. But 90 is not a very large number, and multiples of certain cards must be provided to ensure recursion of the action, or the abundance of defense/offense made available by the card. For example, if you only have 2 Majesty as the defense for your Vampire, not only are the chances of ever drawing them pretty slim, but you can only handle 2 combat. So multiples of cards should be included if that card is going to see use either frequently, or is important enough that you want that card in your hand as soon as possible. Therefore, it is imperative for you to figure out what your local environment is like, so that the functions can be broken down, and that will impact the number of cards that you need to include - for example, if you know that the environment has few stealth decks, then perhaps light Intercept cards would be enough - perhaps there isn't even a need to include Intercept Heavy cards such as Enhanced Senses, or maybe a few of these cards would be sufficient. That said, the ratio of the cards is still a problem to ponder. We know that typical games usually last about 12-16 turns, so you shouldn't have a lot more Master cards in your deck than necessary unless your deck is build to handle that. This is probably the only type of cards that has a good guideline for ratio, all others are very dependent on the strategy of the deck. The number of cards to include in a deck eventually leads to only 3 classification - just 1, a couple, many many. The decision to put each card in which is determined by the recursion, the importance and the effciency of the card. The recursion of the card is determined by how many times you want to use it (or how many times you can use it). A gun deck will probably need a lot more .44s than a bleed deck, while the bleed deck will need way more bleed enhancers than a combat deck and vice versa. If the card is to be used again and again, than it should be in great numbers - up to 20-30 for very specialized decks (Night Moves or Cryptic Mission) but usually about 15 if - such as combat strike cards which cycle very quickly. If the card is useful but not needed in every occasion, then perhaps somewhere near "a couple" - 3 to 6 will be good enough. The importance of the card will dictate how quickly one needs to have that card in hand. Certain deck requires a particular card to be in hand in order to work - for example, a Soul Gem deck needs to have either the Soul Gem, Vast Wealth or other form of cards to retrieve it from the deck (such as Magic of the Smith), and therefore these cards, though inefficient, should be in great numbers to ensure early appearance. 8 or more is usually what I do. If a card is "good to have" or simply for fun and laughter, then perhaps it should be kept below 3. Certan support cards also fall into this category, for example, Engling Fury is good to have, but does nothing but to keep your Vampire healthy, so a full hand of 7 is not going to do much for you. I define the efficiency of the card as the potential uses of these cards. Some cards are unique, and therefore, if you're lucky to have them in play, a second copy is not going to help at all - for these cards, unless they have a burn option that can be executed by the opponent, or they're too important and have to appear quickly, or else I normally would only have 1 copy of these cards - most Hunting Grounds fall into this category. Very flexible cards that serve multiple functions will generally be more forgiving to include multiple copies since they can be used up pretty quickly anyway -things like Swallowed by the Night, Aura Absorption all have multiple uses, and one usually wouldn't having having a couple in hand. Very specialised cards will be limited to 1 or 2 unless I'm expecting to face such opponents in the games to come - things like Delaying Tactics for example. For what I call "Surprise" cards are also usually limited to 1, just for the wow factor, but these can keep your opponent guessing and sometimes even win you a VP. (o.o)y