Line-Up Theory
We’ve all been in a position where our opponent plays a card that has us scrambling to dig through our deck for something to deal with it, or even worse knowing we simply have no response to it.
On the other hand we’ve all had an opponent who seemingly has an answer to every single thing we’ve tried to do, so how do they manage it?
Not every card in our deck can be used to answer every threat in our opponent’s deck, each challenger has limitations on what it can cleanly take out and each removal spell comes with a cost. Handling these resources carelessly can lead to you losing the game further down the line feeling like you had no out, because you’d already used up your key card.
Some cards can have a wide range of answers, such as a cheap character, and we can comfortably deploy cards to tackle the problems it presents to us. Other cards, particularly ones with mechanics like Ward, Evasive or Resist are tricker to answer and require us to either have access to specific mechanics or deal with them inefficiently (if we can deal with them at all).
Efficiency in ‘answering’ a threat refers to how few resources we need to spend to deal with the problem being presented. Challenging with a single character rather than multiple is more efficient, particularly if that character isn’t banished as a result and we still have access to it. Spending less ink to answer a card is a more efficient way of answering, but if it costs us more cards to do so then using the renewable resource of ink is likely more efficient overall.
Line-Up Theory introduces the concept of considering the usage of our resources carefully, not just because the amount of cards we have are limited but because we need to match up our answers to our opponent’s threats and use the right tools for the job each time.
If you were to lay out yours and your opponent’s decks, you may find that you have a couple of direct removal cards and a few Evasive or Alert characters but if your opponent is running a suite of powerful Evasive cards then you’re going to want to match up your use of these cards with theirs and not use them frivolously.
If we were to use a direct-damage card early on in the game to more comfortably deal with a bulky character that’s a bit tricky to deal with, such as a Calhoun — Marine Sergeant, we are permanently down that card for the rest of the game and cannot use it to deal with an evasive character that our deck has limited answers to. Challenging into it may be inefficient in the moment, but if it preserves a key card in our hand or deck that we require to ensure the game stays in our favour then it may be worth it.
The same concept applies at a hand vs hand level, should we have information about what they are holding (perhaps through cards like Mowgli, Mother Knows Best or Daisy Duck — Donald’s Date). If they are holding a problematic Ward character like Merryweather we should opt to be careful with how we use our larger challengers as they are one of the few things that can line up into it.
You won’t be able to make a simple one-to-one lineup, as there will be lots of crossover between different threats and answers, but being able to think of cards in terms of how broadly useful they are or if they are one of your few ways of dealing with a specific threat help shape your long term game plan when faced with choices during the match.
Matchup Example
A common matchup in the Winterspell meta was Amber/Emerald Dogs against Amber/Amethyst Midrange. In this matchup, The Horseman Strikes! very cleanly deals with Go Go Tomago — Darting Dynamo but it doesn’t answer any other cards at all and at the same time there are many answers to her. As a result we can use The Horseman Strikes! much more liberally, inking or using it whenever it’s beneficial to do without worrying about losing out on options later in the game.
Cheshire Cat — Inexplicable however provides an answer to many cards, as it can meet the two damage threshold needed to banish a large amount of the un-exerted threats presented by the Dogs player. There are also not many cards in the deck that can deal with the cards Cheshire Cat can, so being careful to use Cheshire Cat efficiently and not lose it recklessly becomes pretty important. If we do lose it, we might struggle to deal with recurring cards like Lilo or banish questing threats like RC Car before they have an impact — opening the floodgates for our opponent to turn up the pressure.
Counterplay
On the other side of the table, knowing the scope of our opponent’s answers is also extremely useful. If we know they have limited efficient answers to a key card we’re holding then we can look to draw out those answers by pressuring or tempting them to use them up on other cards, clearing the way for us to put out our true threat uncontested.
Not every card we play will draw the attention of our opponent’s resources. Understanding which cards demand an answer, particularly one that is also an answer to another card, becomes key to manipulating the resources your opponent has left available to them.
For example, Lilo — Escape Artist will continue to come back into play if not answered correctly. Putting her into play at the right time invites your opponent to use into-the-inkwell removal on her (as it is one of the few answers that lines up efficiently) despite the fact that it’s also one of their limited answers to large non-exerted singers like Tramp7.
Meta
This kind of analysis also helps form our approach to the wider metagame, where cards that have limited answers currently being played become more viable and cards that answer a broad range of threats being used are more favourable.
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Cards like Brawl provided removal (an answer) to a huge range of cards fairly efficiently, making it a staple of red decks and encouraged players to find threats that weren’t able to be answered by it. On the other side of the coin, Snow White — Fairest In The Land found an effective place in the meta after rotation because there were not many cards being played that could deal with her, but once Cheshire Cat became popular she became a much less efficient threat.
Layers of Threat & Answer
As game states get more complex, you may find that your opponent presents that they have an answer to your game plan (such as having enough characters on board to play strength or Under The Sea) and in fact you need to use an ‘answer’ to their ‘answer’ to clear the way for your threat — either removing a character on board or playing hand disruption like Mowgli.
This concept of clearing the way for combo pieces or manoeuvring your opponent into a less favourable position is a whole guide in itself and I won’t go into much more depth this time.
Practical Analysis
This all sounds great in theory but can we produce meaningful, repeatable insights for deck matchups that accurately reflect how those matchups play out?
To answer that question I built a matchup analyser that takes into account the different ways a card can be answered, with the aim of revealing which cards demand more specific answers and which can be dealt with flexibly, as well as which ‘answer’ cards are the most flexible or narrow.
If a card can be banished by an action, or challenged by a character then it can be ‘answered’ and the more cards that can do so will reduce the card’s ‘threat rating’ as we don’t need to be holding specific cards in response. Conversely, if an answer is one of only a few cards that can deal with a threat then it should be rated higher and used more conservatively.
How efficient those answers are considered to be is given a weight (detailed in the tooltips) and aims to favour cards that:
- Answer a wide range of threats
- Answer threats that other cards couldn’t
- Present threats with few available answers
- Do the above efficiently (with minimal challenges and without losing board presence of our own)
Thinking about the AA Midrange matchup versus Dogs I would expect a static analysis to conclude a few things like:
- Under the sea is one of the most powerful cards Dogs has
- The Horseman Strikes is one of the weaker cards AA has
- Mowgli is pretty useful on both sides to thin out relevant threats
- Most 1-cost cards aren’t super relevant as ‘answers’
And that is more or less what it concluded when looking at that matchup!
While this tool doesn’t go too far down the rabbit hole of mechanics (like Support making other cards more efficient at their roles) it’s a reasonable proof of concept that this way of trying to analyse decks has some merit. While we can’t use it to tell you which cards to play and which cards to hold back, it provides a more analytical framework for thinking about when you play out your cards as responses.
Conclusion
We won’t always be able to be so particular about which answers we use when. If we find ourselves on the back foot due to the pressure our opponent is putting out, then we may have to elect to use whatever answers we have available even if we were hoping to use them in a more targeted fashion. Line-Up Theory helps guide our decisions so that we can leave the most opportunities available throughout the game and be aware when they are no longer an option for us or our opponent.
