No. My point is that a 1650 player with the default deck will beat a 900 rated player with any deck. The difference is large enough that deck can't make up for it. They'll probably beat a 1200 player too. Match up two 1650 players, give one a default deck and the other any deck they choose, and the customized deck will win nearly every time. Deck strength definitely has an effect.

The problem is there are players with artificially low ratings; be it because they tanked their early games to deflate their ratings, or they've improved their play rapidly enough that the low uncertainty is preventing their rating from rising fast enough. Regardless of reason, these low rated players often have very good decks, better than their "similar peers". Maybe they're gaming the system and giving themselves nicer cards from their "real" account. Maybe they've just improved to the point where they're using the right cards now.

One way to address these artificially low rankings is by deck strength. Decks just aren't being taken into consideration and I think they ought to be.

There is still a problem that rarity of cards does not always match up with strength.
If rarity is taken into account people will just try to find the best common cards and win with those, and rares will get a lot less popular and drop in price.

I don't think it is necessary to take deck strength into account, because it already is taken into account. The current ranking is based on a combination of deck strength and skill (what makes you win).

I might be in favor of a game mode for newbies specifically so they can battle other people that are getting used to the game and not feel intimidated by veterans. This could be arranged by looking at games played or how long the account has been created. That way newbies won't play veterans who happen for whatever reason to have a low rank but otherwise know what is going on.

And that's why cost is a better indicator than rarity. What's the most powerful common card for each domain? Probably creature removal / damage dealing cards. Ascent, Volcano, Lysis, and Sunburst are probably the among the most expensive commons and I wouldn't be surprised if they already went for more than some uncommons. And I also suspect you're vastly overrating the effect of a deck strength rating component on market prices. Before the ladder, did anyone care much about similar match ups?


The current rating is soley based on your past performance. While it may take into account the strength of decks you've used in the past, it doesn't take into account the deck you're playing with now in a similar matchup. Again, a player can now lose a bunch of games with the default deck. Tank their rating. Switch to a deck loaded with Trunk Hermits, Hardarck's Thrones, Hill Giant Contractors, Caravans of Dreams, Ivory Spires, Dire Cave Crickets, or any other deck filled with 200+ gold cards, and they're suddenly much, much better than their "default deck rating" would indicate.

A 10,000 gold deck vs a 100 gold deck should not be a similar matchup unless the ratings were wildly disparate.

I think you overestimate the impact of expensive cards. This game is very well balanced in that everything has a counter, and there are cheap counters to every expensive card you listed. Also, the randomness in which cards are drawn and the terrain affect a battle more, so a cheap deck that gets lucky stands a good chance.

I am not against matches based on deck strength, but I think it is more difficult to implement than its worth, does not completely solve the problem of new people getting beat by people who tank their rating, and may have negative unforeseen consequences (having to wait longer for a match because all similar players are using different strength decks).

Of course every card has a cheap counter. But if one player has twelve uber creatures, there simply aren't enough cheap counters to take them all out. You can't take luck into account here as it affects everyone the same way.

Difficulty in implementation would depend largely on how these things are already being stored. If in any sort of database (and I strongly suspect they are), it'd be a trivial matter.

The key is how fancy you want to get in making comparisons. Right now there's a very simplistic measure of similarity that's ignores a lot of relevant information. If you wanted to keep it simple, you'd just add some number to each player's rating based on their deck strength. If price based, you'd just add 1 rating points for every 10 gold in deck value. This could result in more similar matches taking place as a highly ranked player could use a less expensive deck to make a similar match with a lower ranked player with a more expensive deck. If you wanted to get fancy, it'd probably be a 95% confidence elliptoid region along axes of player rating and deck rating with similarity taking place when those regions overlapped. A tiny bit of math involved in working out the formulas but a trivial calculation and little code involved.

This would also push for increased variety in deck creation, meaning more cards used, more cards bought, and more money spent and in more cash in TFW's bank account.

not bad i found ouut about this game on kongregate.com im planing to play a bit for now to test it make sure you tightly nit your selfs with the community