Deck Building Tips II: And Now for Something Completely Different
By Game Designer Chuck Kallenbach

In the article, Deck Building Tips I, I offered some basic deck building advice. These tips were designed to make a well-rounded, effective deck. Now that you've mastered that kind of deck building, it's time to get crazy. Remember all those balanced and safe ways to construct your deck I discussed last time? Let's do something different.

We're not going to break any rules, but some of the fun of deck building comes from going against the accepted way of doing things. We're going to take some chances, and that means you'll want to practice with friends in casual games before going to a tournament. It might just inspire you to invent your own cool new deck type.

Skip a Bit, Brother
I told you before to make a balanced team and cover all four skills. The rules don't require you to do that. You can plan your team and other hero cards to actually skip a skill. If your hero cards are weak in one skill, they'll become stronger in the other three. For example, if you take out your Science boosters (goodbye, Merrin) you'll have more room for cards that boost the other three skills.

Your mission pile must still have three missions for each skill. What do you do when you draw mission cards for the skill you're missing? Skip them. Assign nobody. Hope like heck that your opponent doesn't have a nasty failure obstacle to play. You can stock cards like Iris, Zat Gun, and Hazard Suits that make it hard for your opponent to use failure text. R and R is an event made for the mission skipper.

Best of all, when your hero cards get better at doing missions, you can include ones that have higher difficulty. Why make things tougher for yourself? First of all, low-difficulty missions have game text that is nasty to your hero side. You'll find more neutral, and even beneficial, text on missions with higher difficulty. Secondly, high-difficulty missions have higher experience values. That means winning the game more quickly with an experience victory instead of slogging through missions to get seven glyphs.

Your team characters may betray your secret skip strategy, so choose carefully. If your team has a total of zero in Culture, then it's obvious to a savvy opponent that you're skipping it. She'll figure it out after a few missions (especially if the first couple are the ones you're skipping), but there's no need to make it obvious for her.

Villains Are Skippy Too
All the strategies I've discussed for skipping a skill on the hero side can be applied to the villain side as well. The upside is that you'll be ready to hammer hard on the three skills you're still protecting. The downside is you could be conceding three missions to your opponent, and that's almost halfway to victory. It's more dangerous to skip a skill on the villain side, but if you're willing to take the risk, the payoff can be outstanding.

One more thing about skipping skills: If you really want to walk on the wild side... try skipping two. Your hero cards only have to complete six missions if their experience values are high enough, and you're sufficiently crazy. If it doesn't work, you didn't hear it from me.

Forewarned Is Forearmed
There are many ways to take a peek at the next mission, such as DHD, Walter Harriman, and UR versions of Vala Mal Doran, Daniel Jackson, and Jack O'Neill. Mission manipulation is a key strategy in the game, and it's even more important when you're skipping a skill. Those nasty failure obstacles don't bite so hard when you put their missions on the bottom of the pile.

If you haven't played with cards that manipulate your mission pile, take a look at some right away. They'll let you avoid the missions you can't do, and even let you put your easier missions on top. You'll be able to maximize your glyph-earning strategies, and make sure the next mission has enough experience to win in the late game.

Team Characters Are Picky
I didn't talk about glyphs in the previous deck building article, but it's obvious they're important to victory and also to team characters. They get better when you give them the right kinds of glyphs, and you'll find a wide array of requirements:

• Any kind of glyphs in quantity (Balinsky)
• Lots of different glyphs (Charles Kawalsky)
• A specific glyph (Cameron Mitchell, Eager Adventurer)
• Two specific glyphs in combination (Daniel Jackson, Linguistics Expert)
• Several glyphs providing different effects (Teal'c, Enemy of the Goa'uld)
• Glyphs that match others (Martouf and Samantha Carter, Invaluable Asset)

This quickly gets confusing. Basically, it's good if several team characters like the same glyph, and it's also good to mix characters that want certain glyphs with characters that like any glyphs. While you're playing lots of practice games, watch carefully each time you earn a glyph. How many of your characters could benefit from that glyph? Can you swap that mission for another with a different glyph that fits your needs better?

No discussion of glyphs is complete without mentioning the event card Tight Knit Team. This handy tool lets you move a glyph from character to character, even during a mission attempt. It's cheap, flexible, and in the right situation, amazingly effective.

Your Two New Best Friends
Playing practice games and searching through your collection are two things you should do often. You can find cards to improve your deck by searching for key words and phrases. Here are some keywords I look for when choosing obstacles:

• Blocked
• Incapacitate
• Move a glyph
• When you play this obstacle
• Destroy a gear (I'm looking at you, Makepeace!)
• Skills -1 (Hathor is a great card. Ask anybody.)

Some of my hero card favorites are:

• Destroy an obstacle
• Adversary (Filter for hero cards first.)
• Ready (Use "ready all" to find the best ones.)
• Skills +1 (Or maybe "skills +" alone, just to catch Antoniek Armband.)

Creative shopping can find a cool card in your collection you weren't even aware of. It's also a good way to find cards like the one your opponent just played to defeat you. Sometimes, the best way to beat 'em is to join 'em.

When you discover more cards that do the things you like, your deck can become more flexible by finding new ways to achieve the same effects. Maybe there's a cheaper way to move a glyph or destroy a gear, or a way that's tied to a skill you're searching for. Your deck can also become more focused, as you find additional ways to do the same things. When you make a deck filled with obstacles that incapacitate, your opponent feels like she walked into a buzzsaw.

All of your time searching through your collection increases your familiarity with the card set. That means you can respond to changes you see in the decks you play against. TCG players call this the "metagame," and that means the play environment that you are currently experiencing. Hero cards that kill adversaries don't help you if your opponent isn't playing adversaries. The opposite is also true. A good player knows his local meta and how to beat it. When you go to the Stargate World Championships at Gen Con, it's open season from all over the world--but you have to get there first.

Bigger Is Better
In the first article, I told you that I build decks with 20 hero cards and 30 villain cards, for a total deck size of 50. I used to be one of those TCG players that always played with the smallest possible deck to be sure to draw the cards I needed. I started playtesting with the 40-card minimum, but now I'm playing an 80-card deck.

If you try the 50-card deck and revive adversaries more than once or twice a game, you might run out of cards. That is a disaster in this game. It's not immediately over like in some other TCGs, but without cards in your hand to stop your opponent, it'll be over soon, and you'll lose.

If your deck runs out of cards, add some more and play again. Eventually you'll find a "sweet spot" that lasts until the end of the game but still is as small as you can make it so you draw the cards you need, when you need them. The perfect situation is drawing your last card on the turn you win!

If you get only one piece of advice from me, try this: The more you play your constructed deck, the better it gets. Okay, it doesn't do that by itself, but you'll learn more about what it does well, what it does poorly, and how to improve it. At the same time, you'll increase your skills as a player.