Rush in an Elevator

"I am sorry to write such a long letter. I didn't have time to write a short one.”  ― Mark Twain

For the last 2 days, I have been working on post about pure combat constructs.  I needed to get away from the subject.  I found the post was getting too long to be easily digestible and Twain’s quote was scratching at me like a burr.  So I finished the first part of the blog on “pool gain” to distance myself from the combat subject.

Afterwards, getting some ice cream, the thousands of words on combat crystallized into an “elevator message” and I had to get typing immediately. 

For those not deeply entrenched in a private enterprise:

Elevator message (n): a concise, simply worded series of statements delivered to corporate executives as your shared elevator descends from their lofty office space.

Rush in an Elevator:

In order to secure a game win, any deck design must be capable ousting 2 other decks.  Pure combat decks must effectively oust a 3rd deck (their predator) if they are to be successful.  This additional overhead places even the best combat design at a significant and immediate disadvantage. 

Cross-table rescuing negates many benefits derived from a successful combat, compounding that disadvantage.   That no analogous (cardless) function hampers bleed-based or vote-based decks adds insult to injury.

It’s still a little longer than I like, but it does encapsulate the need to backrush and why that’s inherently inefficient.  It touches on the inequities of cross-table rescuing.   But it’s unfortunately impossible to distill the concepts 1-player isolation (e.g., a One Cap Hack deck), 2-player isolation (e.g., a Legacy of Pander deck) and unrestricted interaction (e.g., [CEL] guns deck) into 5 sentences.

We’ll cover those topics in a later blog.  Tune in next week, for another exiting episode?