Every writer and most players have their own opinion about what sort of decks you should play and why. Some players prefer complete control, while others prefer aggressively built decks that can kill on turn 1 or 2. Others prefer a hybrid of the two with ability to finish a game extremely quickly while having staying power in the mid-game and late and still finish explosively at anytime depending on the draws, while some players will play combination decks that mask as control decks. My personal favourite archetype is mill, because it attacks players on a different level and catches most players unprepared.

Players are playing what they like to play, both in general concept and in the specific cards, and it's hard to point to their choices and call them unplayable. Allow me to do it anyway. A lot of what is being played is unplayable, because it's just not on the same level as the top decks, but with so many decks out there it becomes hard to see that. The bulk of the field still believes in playing UFS "the way it was meant to be played" with decks that, at their heart, are fair and they win by dealing damage. As I've said many times before, that's crazy talk! Never play fair when you have a choice, and if there is one thing you have in block 2 and block 3 right now it is a choice. The last string of major events had players are using decks like aggressively built order decks as some of their most popular choices. They're attacking for four and pulling nice loops and spamming attacks and sometimes using feline spike as a finisher. That’s nice, but I would prefer to attack people in the places where they can’t block and their damage negation is useless.

The main problem I have with killing with damage is that form of winning revolves around interactivity. Interactivity is also highly dangerous on principle because you're counting on your opponent to care. He might not care, and if he doesn't you are dead. The more diverse the field, the more it will reward those who don't bother interacting. The narrower the field, the more you can pinpoint the right interactions that matter to enough of your opponents. Right now, interacting is silly. It brings all sorts of elements of your opponents' deck into play, often rewarding them for cards they have no business playing. By ignoring them, you force them to rely only on their clock and on the few things that can stop or slow you down. Force them to play your game. When there are lots of games, what's the chance they're prepared to play yours?

I find that in general attacking opens up too many interactivities between your opponent and yourself. You allow them to activate their defensive foundations and sometimes use their offensive foundations on your turns. You are also depending on your opponent’s ability to improperly defend themselves. You also give them some virtual advantage because you allow them to have uses for cards like rejection and holding back cards used to block, and you give them hard card advantage because you allow them to draw more cards on their following turn, slightly filter their hand and allow them to get to the cards that matter. By attacking their deck instead of their vitality, you inadvertently have created a virtual card advantage by making many of their cards useless.

By playing the mill archetype, you also secure more slots for your decks as you don’t have a need for attacks and low checks, thus ensuring that your deck plays out the most amounts of foundations because you can reliably check a 4 or higher without fear of failing your foundations. In my old mill Yun-Seong, I usually played 5-6 foundations and assets on turn 1, and once I even played 9 foundations and assets on my 1^st turn. The main thing is that I don’t have my card pool cluttered with expensive attacks, and I rarely have to commit a foundation to pass my checks. And so my deck flowed right and was extremely explosive from turn 1 and onwards. Because most mill based strategies are combinations of order, all, evil, death, and void, the symbols naturally head towards card advantage, foundation lockdown, and defence through lowering attack values and negation of the opponent’s abilities. The mill archetype is a true control archetype because it has the slots to devote to things that other decks don’t normally have space for or the tempo to play such cards.

I am a big advocator of the theory of card advantage. The basic theory is that the person, who draws the most cards, gets to use more cards and has more options in their path to victory or in at least preventing their opponent from winning. That is why many good players have problems playing characters like that have 5 Hand size or lower and do not play well above their hand size limit. A prominent character in the old block 1 scene was 8 hand size Dhalsim, was able to kill players on turn 2-3 by out-developing their board and getting rid of their hand on the kill turn. This character was fairly dominant and was the poster boy for card advantage at the time. Many great players were known for being Dhalsim Players during the start of their UFS career including Canadian Nationals Champion Jon Herr, Canadian Team Nationals Champion Kin Tong Chan, and South Arena Champion Vik Sareem.

Virtual Card Advantage can be explained as such:

A player can gain card advantage even when no one loses any cards. There aren’t too many cases of this in UFS, but one main example was Revitalize. When I play revitalize and I’ve already lost a considerable amount of life, I haven’t made my opponent lose any cards, but I have practically undone and negated all the previous work they have put into killing me, and they must redo all the work done before in order to kill me.

Another aspect of "virtual" card advantage is the concept of "dead cards." If your deck has no assets (or if you haven't drawn them yet), then every asset destruction effect your opponent draws is as good as discarded. The same happens when your opponent draws reaction negation but your deck has no reactions.

An example of this would be if a match between Mill Voldo and Evil Ibuki. Every time Ibuki draws a rejection or broken leg (now banned), the mill Voldo has effectively made the card useless by never attacking Ibuki, thus making Ibuki draw sub-optimal cards.

Another example of Virtual Card Advantage would the card US airbase. The card punishes strategies that repeatedly use the same card over and over such as Shinobi Tradition, Ibus Minuet, Vast Resources, and incredible Shooting Capaoera to name a few. US Airbase does not directly hurt or stop the cards, but subsequent uses become increasingly harder. By playing with US airbase, you haven’t created any card advantage, but you’ve effectively shut off those foundations and sometimes your opponent’s character, depending on the match up and your opponent’s reliance on certain abilities.

The zones or card areas are especially important for mill based strategies. There are a few zones that you care about depending on your build. For the purpose of your strategy, the removed from game zone and the staging area are the same thing and we’ll call them the Non-deck zones. They are cards that your opponent have permanently removed from their library and cannot get back. Discard pile/library is pretty much the same thing to you, as you want to lower the cards in the library and increase the cards discard pile forcing your opponent to eventually cycle and run out of cards in their deck (your win condition). The card pool is not that important for this match up, the only thing you have to worry about is defending yourself from attacks and certain control foundations. Through experience, my playgroup and I have found that after a person cycles twice, they will usually run out of cards very quickly and the game will be over shortly after.

Let’s do some math, and we can quickly see that you don’t have to do that much work to actually “mill” your opponent:

Decks are usually 60 cards. So when they cycle once, they will usually have around 10-12 foundations in play and 10 cards have been removed from the game, and maybe a tag along and some Kung Fu trainings, so a total of safe total of 24 cards are in the “good” zones. That leaves with roughly with 35-40 cards left in deck after the first cycle. If they continue to try to build a position with foundations and assets, they increasing your chances to win because a) they are increasing the number of cards in their non-deck zones and b) they are making control checks both which play towards your win condition.

If they attempt to attack you, you should still be in a favourable position because a) you should be able to prevent a majority of the damage, and b) you should be able to beat their board position because of your superior control aspects. When it comes time to cycle again, they will have roughly played 8-12 foundation/assets because not doing so will impede their ability to draw into their attacks and relevant threats and you will win via contemplation or what ever method of your choosing. So their deck should be at roughly 15 cards after the 2^nd cycle, which should only give them around 7-8 checks left if you don’t disrupt them with forced card draw or contemplation.

Although block 3 is still incomplete, it seems as if the Designer of the game has pulled away from the alternate win condition. In block 3, there are still some hidden gems that most people will miss. Some of hidden gems are, collecting data, flying powerbomb, and Promo Bishimon; hopefully we’ll see what set 12 brings us.

Until next time, this is Shajir Islamuddin and hopefully, I’ll see you in the arena, just don’t be annoyed when your deck is in your removed from game pile.