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Basic & Empire Deck Design

I'm sure that most of what I have to offer on deck design and play tips are obvious to the old GE hands, but I'll offer them anyway. New players may benefit from at least knowing what cards will help out their deck designs.

Your most important strategy decisions will be made when you design your deck. What will your deck do? What are its weaknesses and how will you compensate for them? With this in mind I have put together some thoughts on deck design, both general and tailored to specific empires. If you have any thoughts on any of this, zap me a line.

Basic Deck Design

There are certain general principles I recommend. Approximately 25% of your deck should be ships and another 25% should be terrain. Unless you have something specific in mind, these two categories should comprise a minimum of 40% of your deck. (Yes, that doesn't add up. These are very rough guidelines.) The remainder should be at least half reaction cards and half other sorts of support cards. There are some cards that are nice enough that tend I include them in almost every deck, but there are no cards that I feel must be in every deck. My top cards would probably be

• C6 Prophet
• R/C9 Temporal Engineer
• H1 Time Warp "a million household uses!"
• R/L3 Unlucky Targetting
• R/L6 Lucky Maneuver
• R/L7 Temporal Correction
• R/L8 Targetting Error
• R/M9 Luck Demon
• R/O1 Time Skip "a million household uses!"
• R/O8 Cessation of Fire
• R/S1 Ship from the Future "a million household uses!"

If you can get them, I would also say that the following cards are pretty close to "must have" as well as probably the most powerful cards in the game.

• O10 Time Portal
• C10 Time Knight

Recognizing that not everyone can get their hands promotional cards, I'd consider these cards for the list if they were part of a regular expansion set:

• H3 Divergent Anomaly
• T4 Reactionary World
• T4 White Dwarf

A good way to balance your deck between resource production and consumption is to total the number of each point required by all of your ships, bases, dragons, crew, psys, installations etc. (don't forget ammunition and other special ship systems as well as terrain which must be engaged). Then attempt to match the output of your terrain as closely to that mix as possible.

Do not rely heavily on economy points. Economy production is not efficient: in general you will get fewer economy from any given terrain than you would other resources. Economy is also susceptible to several "hoser" cards: everything from A4 Terrestrial Overgrowth to O8 Galactic Depression can cause more than enough trouble.

It is also important to include cards in your deck which will allow you to draw and play extra cards. This will give you a speed advantage over your opponents and also increase your options when you need a reaction card. See the Cardbase for lists of cards that perform specific functions. When your opponents start pounding on you and you begin burning through your hand full of reaction cards, you'll appreciate the ability to refill your hand quickly.