The Art of Friendship: tactics for common situations

This guy has a plan for every situation and readily adapts on the fly.

I've given you lots of advice on how to build your deck.  This time, let's examine some common game scenarios and what you can do to turn things around.  Many of the options you can do will really have to a lot to do with how your deck is designed, because you'll constantly be planning for the future (unless you've entered the late game, in which you sometimes have to see if you can win that turn or solidify the game).  In learning Chess, I was taught to evaluate the opening, midgame, and endgame.  The opening is how you plan on getting your forces out of the gate immediately and start the foundation of your strategy.  In the midgame, players have already claimed a problem or two, maybe even had a problem faceoff already.  Troublemakers are known to extend the opening for a while if they're especially, ahem, troublesome.  In the endgame, it's a race to see how you can get those bonuses quickly while preventing your opponent from doing the same.  Here's some scenarios you will likely encounter.
(Please forgive the strange word coloration.  Something's going on after I post links and I can't undo it without basically rewriting the whole article.  It's late as it is and I have work early on Mondays.  Maybe I can edit this later.)

 1/1 Problems

Starting problems requiring 1 and 1 are very commonly played.  The main reason for this is that it's very easy to get a starting position for continuous points.  You can play two 1-drops on the very first turn and start racking up points immediately.  They all require 4 from your opponent, so it will take some time before they can contest you there.  It's also entirely possible for a main character to just move in on the next turn to get boosted (although Rarity might want to wait a turn to try that).  Meanwhile, the longer you can maintain control over the problem, the more points you can acquire (especially in a control deck).

Bank

 Another common technique is to just pass on your first turn.  If you're playing a lot of expensive cards, this is basically all you can do.  Keep this in mind for more than just your first turn, though.  Basically, if your actions do not have a clear impact on the board position, you're better off saving your action tokens, lest your opponent end up making that all wasted.  This is especially useful late in the game, when action tokens start coming up in abundance.  Passing just one turn when you can't otherwise accomplish anything ends up benefitting you greatly.  To get back to opening strategies though, passing on the first turn often allows you to get your main character boosted more effectively the next turn.

Fortify

Remember, you should always be on guard for the double-problem faceoffs.  Those are where the game swings drastically and resets the board position.  If your opponent has been going heavy on one problem, better to go after the other one and at least get the bonus points from that.  Otherwise, if you force a faceoff when you know you're at a disadvantage, your opponent will be able to move to the new problem before you, and probably get the bonus points from that one.  You'll find this strategy is used when players have cards that affect multiple characters, such as Forest Owl, because their strength will get magnified for each character.

Troublemakers

Troublemakers can cover all sorts of different roles. As I stated, people usually play 1/1 problems to start, so an early troublemaker will make it that much harder for your opponent to confront it. It instantly makes a 1-point problem require about as much effort as 2 or 3-point problem, depending on the strength of the troublemaker. Their effects can also be considerable, such as the commonly played Yellow Parasprite. They can even be used late-game when you are about to force a double problem faceoff. Because your opponent will have a clear board, they will probably not be able to deal with the troublemaker right away, and so won't immediately be able to score those last points from confronting the problem (or at least not both). This is obviously a very short-term tactic, as they will probably be able to stop it the next turn for even more points.

Then there's the problem of challenging troublemakers in the first place. I have seen far too many instances where players will challenge a troublemaker when they have equal or even less power than it. Know your deck, know your opponent's style of deck, figure the avg. type of strength that's likely to show up, and see what effects you have to alter the results. This came up at a tournament today; my deck runs a lot of villains, and it also has a very large amount of high-power cards. I actually decided to confront my villains when I had slightly less power. I knew that my deck was likely to flip high, and my opponent with his swarm of low-power cards was likely to flip low. I managed to win a faceoff against my villain despite my having less standing power. I understand this is an anomaly though, and most of the time players end up flipping rather low numbers if they're not lucky enough to hit an event. To maximize your chances of beating the troublemaker, you'll want to have significantly more power than it does. The risk for failure can be expensive. I watched a player spend at least 6 action tokens on moving their characters back to my troublemaker before deciding it was better to fortify first. That's 6 tokens that probably could have been spent far more effectively.

Villains

Villains have a whole set of rules to them, and present entirely unique opportunities.   When they are flipped, they frighten all friends at that problem.  If the opponent had a face-up troublemaker there, it is dismissed.  Take advantage of both of these.  Yellow Parasprite is very commonly played for how much havoc it puts on the opponent.  Any villain will eat it up for the cost of 1 token.  It is also worth playing a villain on a problem your opponent has fortified so as to frighten their many characters.  The current villains also make nice combos with other cards.  Nightmare Moon combos well with Yellow Parasprite (or another NM, which actually happened with me today) and other discard effects.  For Ahuizotl, when you start to make your move on him, white and purple's movement control can really screw up your opponent's plans.

Access Denied

Control decks seek to prevent the opponent from really playing the game.  They all have different ways to do it, but the goal is to have a decent position yourself while you do it.   If you manage to get control of a problem early on and keep your opponent from confronting it as well, you can just sit there getting points while your opponent struggles.  This exact strategy is basically the principle behind Rarity, Truly Outrageous, which brings it to a truly absurd level.

Empty Hands

It will happen eventually that you are facing discard effects.  Maybe you're playing against an orange deck themed on this.  Maybe it's troublemakers getting to you.  Whatever the cause, you find you just can't draw any cards and keep them.  Well, the answer lies in your action tokens.  If you're finding just one repeating discard action, you could stockpile a bunch of cards in your hand so that the cards you like have less chance of getting discarded.  Otherwise, if you're facing multiple, it's probably better to just sit & bank tokens until you have enough to draw and likely play what you've drawn.  At the same time, evaluate the kind of cards you'd need to play and the time which you have to play them.  The key point here is that discard effects can't apply if you have nothing to discard, and I don't believe any card makes you discard during your turn (I'll edit this if I find out otherwise).  Bide your time and make one powerful turn to punch through what's keeping you down.

Play with Purpose

Kind of getting back to the bank strategy.  When I was learning Chess strategy, one of the first things I learned was that every move you make has to have a purpose.  The same applies here.  Never play cards just for the sake of playing cards.  If it doesn't accomplish anything for you, leave it be.  When faced with discard effects, there's some value in playing cards before they are discarded, but even then, you have to evaluate how much they really offer you.  If the benefit is minimal for what the current board position offers, you're better off saving your action tokens.  How can you tell if it offers you anything?  Here are some questions to ask yourself:

* Does this gain me any points?  If so, am I forcing a problem faceoff that I can reasonably win?  (No sense getting a point when your opponent also gets points.  That just speeds up your loss... unless you already have that much of an advantage.)

* If an offensive move against the opponent, how much does this actually hurt him?  I could play my Tricksy Hat, but if my opponent has Mr. Beaverton Beaverteeth, I'd better really really need someone gone that turn or else need Mr. Beaver exhausted on their next turn.  Otherwise, I've just wasted 3 tokens.  I could play Too Much Pie, but if it's only on a 1-power friend, I'm usually better off saving it for something stronger.

* Is the effect relevant?  Playing Lady Justice may not necessarily get me any points, but if my opponent has a bunch of characters ready to attack my troublemaker, I've just shut him out of tons of power.   It's little use playing her on an empty problem.

* When dismissing characters, there's a whole world to consider.  How bad does he need that color?  How badly does he need that effect or power?  If my opponent has 5 power in one color and 1 in another (not the main), I'll go for the 1 if I know they need that color.  However, if someone in the 5 color is particularly powerful, it may be wise to forgo eliminating the color.  That one comes down to knowing the opponent, though.

* In the worst-case scenario that I'm playing a character with no relevant effect and that won't help me confront any problems, I'd be anticipating a faceoff that I am desperate to win.

Judgment

There is no golden rule to anything.  In my favorite Chess book growing up, the ABC's of Chess, it listed 64 commandments.  It listed a lot of very good rules to follow, but often it would follow up by saying you can ignore it if the board position goes against it.  I did not understand this at first.  I thought "why is this even a rule?"   I found that they make very good rules, but ultimately your evaluation of the situation should trump everything.  I've been playing tabletop and competitive video games for a long time.  I've accumulated many lessons from many different games, and try to apply them to each new situation I find.  Strong play in any card game comes from a combination of a good deck, which previous articles here have attempted to help, and a skilled player.  Skilled play comes from trying things that may not necessarily be good, but you find good things among them.  Just keep at it and remember your experiences.  That cat will stop attacking you when you stop playing with its tail.

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This week's rules question

Q: What happens when my opponent plays Pinkie "Responsibility" Pie on a problem while I have Bright Bulb there?  Am I allowed to react by moving her away?  If I do, can she dismiss Bright Bulb?

A: Pinkie Pie's "when played" effect is an automatic trigger, and has to resolve completely before any reactions can occur.  By that time, Bright Bulb is not in play, thus Pinkie Pie is completely safe from everything Bright Bulb can do.

Remember, if anything about the game's rules confuse you, I'm here to help.  Send any rules questions you may have to mlpblogrules@gmail.com.