Editors Note: Around the same time TCO's year end Wrap Up contest was announced, Vikram aka Vikramas began soliciting writers to help him have content when he launches his new website. This article was submitted to Vik first, and may be reprinted when he launches his site later this year. When we have more details on Vik's site, we will let people know. This article has been published with Vik's Blessing.

The first thing a lot of the people who take a look at UFS say, as I certainly did myself, is “so many numbers!”. Between control, speed, block modifiers, control, damage, vitality, hand size, and momentum costs, there really are quite a few of numbers and resources to look at in this game. So, between the numbers and the symbols, just how do you decide what cards should be included in your build?

This article is only one way to go about building a deck, but it is one that does tend to work out fairly well. I’d like to say before starting off that this is definitely not the only way to go about building a deck, and should never be viewed as such. If you have a method that works for you, by all means use it.

The first thing to do when designing a deck is to figure out exactly what it is your deck should do. There are 4 basic classes that I tend to use when categorizing decks: Aggro, Control, Hybrid, and the much less common Combo. Basically, the first thing you should do when starting to select cards, though it may seem elementary, is simply choose what kind of deck you wish to make. This will, more than likely determine your symbols.

This next step can be done one of two ways. You can either choose a character now, if choosing a character is an easy way for you to determine what to do with a deck, and it’s been working for you, then choose the character first. Personally, I feel the best thing to do is to figure out EXACTLY what the deck will do, and make a decision on a character based on that choice.

However, if you, like many players, choose the character after the deck has already been created, then let’s look first at the “bread and butter” of any deck, as my coach would have put it: Foundations. There are many reasons for you to choose certain Foundations for your deck. The choice usually comes down to simply two factors, Stats and Abilities. It may sound like a “duh” kind of statement, but let’s look at it in practice. More often than not, if you are already running a set of a foundation in your deck that has a difficulty of 4 (say Chester’s Backing, for instance), you are often less likely to include another 4 difficulty foundation in your deck. Three cost foundations are usually kept to one or two sets, if that. In short, since they are the only type of card besides your character that can help you pass control checks, you want cheap ones that come out fast, but expensive foundations (like Chester’s Backing) will be ran due to the same reason you run low check attacks: Power.

Speaking of attacks, let’s take a look at them next, since they are one of the most important types of cards, considering that most decks win via damage from attacks. There was once a time where 2 control attacks were seen as dangerous to run, even if it was only 4. As time has progressed in UFS, the power of attacks has drastically decreased, to make so called “dangerous” attacks (like the 1 control Feline Spike) the absolute correct choice for a kill card in many decks. Also, with throw attacks becoming more and more balanced in terms of damage and their inherent ability of dealing half damage when blocked, the speed stat of cards is becoming more and more important. In fact, with the decrease of damage on throws, speed boosts and discard abilities have become more and more popular. So, how does all of this knowledge actually help in the creation of your deck? Quite simply, the choice of attacks usually comes down to either a large attack that can be forced through on speed or aggressive discard abilities, a throw with tons of damage pumps on it, or multiple attacks that force your opponent to block too much. However, most decks, more often than not, run a mixture of these attacking strategies to push damage through. This is often the best way to ensure damage will be dealt, since most decks will have protection against certain strategies more than others, and by running a combination of them, you are more able to penetrate any given weakness in the opponent’s defensive plans.

After you figure out exactly what it is your deck will do, and how it will win, the next step is figuring out the deck’s inherent weaknesses. Many control decks have the issue of needing to set up, leaving them open to early damage. Some also rely far too much on foundations, remaining vulnerable to a well placed Begin Anew. So, how do you deal with these issues? This is what I like to call getting a defense plan, or protecting your game. Basically, you run a slew of utility cards that are useful in situations that put your deck’s purpose in peril. After you know what your problem is, you find cards to address those issues. If blocking a large attack is your problem, you can either run cards that reduce the damage to near nothing, such as Rejection, or you can run a card to make blocking easier, like Superior Witch. If your problem is protecting your foundations from destruction, from cards such as Begin Anew or Olcadan’s Mentoring, then you will likely want to put cards like Kung-Fu Training to deal with Begin Anew, Oral Dead to deal with Olcadan’s Mentoring, or Red Lotus of the Sun to deal with both. Basically, you need to find out what your weaknesses are, rate how high of a weakness that particular issue is, then put cards in your deck to deal with your problems accordingly. As far as combo decks are concerned, the things to protect against are usually much more narrow in the case of what stops a combo deck, so we will go over that another day.

If you’ve chosen to run a deck in which you decided to choose the character at the end, this is where the character choice would be made. In this case, the character is simply supplemental to your deck design, not central. Good examples of decks that have this type of character choice would be ::Ibuki:: or :Ibuki:, characters that are used in a tool-box style deck, or decks that have a combo built into the deck that does not require the abuse of your starting character card. One thing that should be noted about choice of character is that if you do choose a character at the end, you may want to look back over cards that are only usable by that character, or that have abilities exclusive to that character, as they may help your deck more than some other choices. Character only cards and abilities are another type of card that may influence your character decision.

Well, that concludes part one of this series. Tune in next time for the second installment, where we will take a look at the different types of resources used in this game, including resource symbols, momentum, and the all important control checks. Until next time, keep flopping the cards.

Images Courtesy of Two Headed Dragon