Deckbuilding on a shoestring: WS Macross Frontier

If you, like me, only have enough to buy one measly box and maybe a couple more boosters, fear not! You can still make a working WS deck that flows really well. All it takes is a basic understanding how WS works. And you have to get rid of the notion of “my deck can only be made from 2 colours or it’ll suck!”

Chances are from one box, you’re not going to get complete play sets of every card and your rares are most likely in 1’s or at most 2 copies. So what do you do? How are you supposed to build a kick-ass deck from 20 boosters? Here are a few things that I found out about the game while fumbling over the cards and the translation website:

#1: Pick a theme.
A workable deck has a central theme. In WS, this is more important than you think. A theme can be anything, it can be a working around a specific keyword, a single colour, or even a particular effect. In my case, I wanted a deck that focuses on mecha. Most of them come from Blue and Red so those two will be my primary colours.

#2: Know how colours work.
You know that you need at least one card of the same colour in your level slot or the clock to come out with something with Level 1 or higher. That being said, there’s nothing stopping you from splashing other colours into the level 0 slot, because level 0’s don’t have colour requirements. You want that level 0 RR inside your deck? No problem. It doesn’t have to follow the majority of your colours.

Based on this as well, your Level 1 and above is highly reliant on your level 0 selection. You need to ratio your odds in having a particular colour available in higher levels and put a reliable number of level 0’s as your base to launch the card. I find that 6 is a good number to splash another colour at a higher level.

#3: Know how colours work… in Climaxes. And using them.
Let’s face it, other than clocking or having a bad Refresh, your Climax cards will never even hit the clock. So what does that tell you? You don’t have to conform to any single colour when choosing your Climax cards. 90% The colour of your climax cards doesn’t matter. What matter in choosing Climaxes however:

a) What does the Climax do?
b) Is there a high number of your cards that rely on a certain Climax to trigger awesome abilities?

I’m hazarding that your Climax triggers don’t matter much as well. You’re more likely to actively put down a Climax card than hoping for a trigger that will help you save the day. I’m pretty sure you’re happy if a Climax shows up while you’re taking damage instead, in which case, the triggers don’t matter as well. It’s also a good idea to choose Climaxes that fit what the rest of your deck are doing.

i.e: You might find yourself building a deck with a lot of discard character Encores
from hand or focuses on counter punches a lot. The problem is you need to have a usable hand while maintaining your steady drop of characters on the table (most of them have a life expectancy of one turn).

In that case, run Climaxes which put cards in your hands, like Obelisk and Macross Attack (or any of your series equivalent). While you can include Climaxes with the book symbol, it doesn’t reliably give you the ability to draw when you want it.

In my case, I’m running a deck that has a lot of activated actions using stock costs. So I stuff my climaxes with the “put top card to stock, all characters +1 soul” kind, regardless of colour or name. I just want my stock to be full as fast as possible so my level 2 mechas can come out unhindered.

#4: Level ratio
There’s no good way to do this, but since all of the mechas on Mac F are level 2 (well, except one, but that one sucks), my level 2 ratio is quite fat. Do remember that having a large base of level 0 is not a bad idea. Having a healthy number of level 1’s makes mid-game control a lot more easier. But you should always test and build your decks to fit these two conditions:

a) You can always bring out the cards in your hand onto the table every turn.
b) Your Stock can always support your cards in hand every turn, making every card playable.

I find my deck to be lacking in stock generation at first, that where Climax selection becomes important. Now my stock is always enough for me to activate character abilities (some of them require 4 costs to work) and buy a slew of level 2’s when I need them.

I’ll post what I came up with next time, since I need to find out what some card titles mean :p