A Colloquial Tierlyst
For Evaluating Cards & Archetypes
Overview
With spoilers for the upcoming Unearthed Prophecy expansion come reactions with varying amounts of sense talking about how that person believes the revealed card will or won’t affect the game. What I see happening very very frequently is that ‘we’ default to talking about cards in terms of their overall power, mostly to the exclusion of everything else. But of course there are other things that matter aside from whether or not a card will help us get to #1 in S-Rank; cards can be fun, interesting, flavorful etc as well and talking about cards in terms of a spectrum from ‘weak’ to ‘strong’ not only leaves out a lot of other factors we feeble humans tend to value, but it also tends to leave us with a very abstract notion about how ‘good’ any one card is.
Let’s say you made a scale ranging from 1-10 with 1 being the worst and 10 the best score: how do you place a card on that scale? How much better or worse is Obliterate than Sunforge Lancer for example? And how does this relate to the way we actually tend to talk about cards as humans?
When I think of cards I tend to think of things like whether or not I think a card is fair, or if it’s viable, or a meme card etc; power is just one of several variables that I’d use to describe a card, and that got me thinking about how best to classify cards in this game we call Duelyst. I thought it’d be fun to have a little collaboration to see if we could come up with an evaluation system that anyone could use to quickly ‘rate’ any card in a way that generally makes sense and fits with our collective frame of reference.
I’ve whipped up a system proposal as a starting point for discussion, refinement, other ideas and whatever else to maybe get to a point where we develop a shared culture that promotes discussing cards (and deck archetypes by the way) in broader terms than simply ‘is it good or bad for laddering’ that is so common nowadays.
Be sure to mull things over and share your thoughts!
My Proposal
Put simply, I’ve taken all the common phrases I could come up with that we use to evaluate cards and tried to figure out how we could use them for a system of thought. I ended up moving away from scales or tiers etc because I couldn’t get things to make sense even when using two axes (for example Ubiquity x Power) to evaluate a card in an overall way. Instead I thought it’d be best to just tag cards with at least one of the descriptors that I’ve laid out below. This makes my approach very qualitative, but I think that’s appropriate. This’ll start to make sense as I start discussing the ‘tags’, I promise. Just remember for now that you can evaluate each card using at least one of these tags to get an idea of how ‘good’ it is from a certain perspective. In no particular order:
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Auto-Include
This one should be easy: an auto-include card is one that you would almost always include in your deck, regardless of what it is (perhaps barring very specific builds). These are cards that you can typically add to your deck list before even thinking about your build because they’re so generally good that they’re no-brainers. Examples might include Chromatic Cold, Rasha’s Curse and Makantor Warbeast. -
Answer or Die
Answer or Die (AoD) cards are kind of weird because they don’t necessarily have to be ‘good’ in terms of overall power level. Excelsious is an example of a weak AoD card for example. The defining characteristic of an AoD card is that if you don’t deal with the threat before it has its chance to activate you pretty much always lose the match. AoD cards can be healthy for the game, for example if they require a lot of setup (like Obliterate), but are typically complained about if they are strong and/or they can be played very early in a match, like Grandmaster Variax. -
Top Tier
This is a phrase almost everyone should know. These are cards that players should be running if they want to play the strongest possible decks. Top Tier represents the best cards in terms of power level, these are the cards competitive players will gravitate towards. Think Azurite Lion, Saberspine Tiger and Dreamshaper. -
Viable
Viable cards are just that: viable. They don’t push decks to the top (by themselves) but they’re good cards in terms of power and you can play them and do at least reasonably well in terms of win-loss rate. Viable cards orbit around average in terms of power, but not at the top. Cards might include Bloodtear Alchemist, Lantern Fox and Gro -
Niche
I like this category because it’s very nuanced. A Niche card is typically part of a very specific deck and is often part of combo decks. These are cards that are at least Viable or even Top Tier, but only within the specific confines of their decks. Trinity Wing and White Widow are Niche cards. -
Meta
Some cards are only good because of the state of the meta, and would not be played otherwise. Meta cards typically become popular because of some kind of imbalance in the meta game and vanish again when the tides shift. A lot of entire decks behave in a similar way, but I’m thinking of cards that require a certain established meta to do well. Cards like Lightbender, Night Watcher and Soboro come immediately to mind. -
Trash
You’ve probably heard of ‘Trash Tier’ and that’s pretty much this category. Trash cards are not played for their power; they can still be played because they’re fun or just for the memes, but if you’re looking to win matches you’re not looking to Storm Aratha, Rae or Silverwing. -
Fun
There are certain cards that we like to play because they’re a lot of fun separate from how good they are at helping us win matches. Maybe they promote an interesting style of play, or they allow us to do big cool moves (Mechaz0r) that feel awesome etc. Prismatic Illusionist is good, but it’s also very Fun. Auroras Tears isn’t that good, but it ís very Fun. You get the idea I hope. -
Meme
Meme cards are often also Fun cards but distinguish themselves through their hilarity which is often also RNG-based. Meme cards make other players go ‘oh c’mon’ but in an enjoyable, non-competitive kind of way. Meme cards are printed to create awesome, ridiculous moments that are great for showing off to other people. Examples include Khymera, Valknu’s Seal and the not-very-Fun Joseki. -
Gauntlet vs Ranked
It’s easy to forget but some cards are waaaay better for use in Gauntlet than they might be in Ranked, and I think it’s important to keep that in mind. Picking a weaker but consistently usable card makes a lot of sense in Gauntlet where you can’t build decks around certain cards. Sunriser is great for Ranked decks but typically terrible for Gauntlet decks, for example. Any Niche card is likely to be far better for Ranked than for Gauntlet and many Trash Ranked cards can be Viable in Gauntlet.
Examples of Tags in Action
WIP some examples to show off some more complex analyses to illustrate how awesome my proposal is but I ran out of evening to type them up in.
In Conclusion
Share your thoughts and ideas below! I’ll update the OP with refinements and links to different and/or better systems you came up with.
Cheers.
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