It's always darkest before the dawn...

Equestria Daily has previewed a card from the new set today, as well as the beta multiplayer rules.  I can't say I'm much of a fan of the multiplayer rules, but we'll have to see what happens when I can a chance to try them out.  What I can do is give some commentary on the new card, and for those who want to be completely surprised with the new set, I've left it below the break.  Keep in mind that this card review is probably not going to be accurate when the set is released.  As I said before, all cards are as powerful as their environment allows.

The all-purpose tool kit

Today, I'm going to be examining cards that everything I've heard qualify as "staples" for all decks.  For those not familiar with the terminology, a "staple" is a card that literally all decks should use, or at least a heavy majority of them.  I'll give the reasons for including them first, and then I'll go for the counter-arguments.  If you want to hear a bunch of things you already know because I speak ever so elegantly, you'll probably enjoy yourself.  If you think I'm about to give you a bunch of bull and you just want to watch a trainwreck, I hope I give you some interesting thoughts.

Sun Tzu understands friendship's power

I mentioned in a previous article that I have a "play to win" mindset.  I find the fun of the game is in doing everything legal to win.  Encouraging other people to do well only helps me.  The better they get, the better I have to be in order to beat them.  I fear I haven't done so well on the encouragement part lately, but that's something I'll have to work on socially.  As far as actual strategy goes, I've been a big fan of David Sirlin's book pictured above, which you can read for free at his website http://sirlin.net/ptw.  It uses some of the famous Art of War by Sun Tzu and applies it to gaming.  Where he kept things general to apply to all games, I'll attempt to get specific for our game (and no, while I can write a lot, this definitely will not be a full book).

Spectacular Failures

These cards are the most limiting, useless piles of trash you could possibly find.  I'm not necessarily going to tell you that they are thoroughly unplayable (though one certainly is at the moment).  That's the beauty of well-done CCGs when there are so many possibilities that even the worst cards can have their place in the right deck.  In most cases though, you're probably better off avoiding them.  Keep in mind, this is assuming you have infinite resources at your disposal, so I'm accounting for all the rares, ultra-rares, fixed cards, and promos that are legal to play.

So Bright & Shiny

Finally, I get to start writing about individual cards!  I've been keeping everything so general lately, because I want to raise the overall strategic quality of people's decks.  Of course, no CCG strategy section can be complete without single-card evaluations.  I really don't like doing individual cards for whole articles though, so I'll try to have a bit of a theme with this.  This week, I'm going to go over what I consider to be the best and worst Ultra-Rares in the set.  Maybe I can watch my ego inflate as my opinion ends up shaping card prices.