kpr_ep24_tokencreaturevariance

[00:00:00] Did you know that if you're playing a winds of exchange and you tokenize a key card that you really needed later, but it turns into a token creature, and it's also sad. You know, that's your fault, right? Let's get sweaty.

Welcome dear listener to KeyForge public radio. My name is Zach Armstrong, and if you're not subscribed. That's silly. We are talking today about token creature, variants and winds of exchange. KeyForge is six set came with a very cool mechanic that we talked a lot about in episode two. So if you need to know all about token creatures in your, in the essential guide, check out episode two here on KeyForge public radio. And this mechanic introduces a lot of variants into decks and how you play, how you make a token creature in winds of exchange is when an effect instructs you to make a token creature who take the top card of [00:01:00] your deck and place it in your battle line. And then you can check what it is. This is a very cool and honestly, pretty intuitive way to integrate the classic trading card game mechanic of token creatures. Into KeyForge. However, it introduces a lot of variants because if you need a board wipe to blow up your opponent creatures, you need a bit of Amber control. To, to keep them off of that key. What if it turns into a token creature and you can't get it back now, I of course accused you of being now. Of course, I accused you of it being a, your fault here in the start. And I mean, that's true, but we're going to have some grace with it. As we talk about how to manage this token creature variance. And whoa, this is KeyForge public radio. We're here to help you become a better KeyForge player, or at least as good as me. I don't know quite how good that is. So if you haven't subscribed, go ahead. And do that follow on your preferred podcast platform so that you can hear this kind of stuff. As soon as it drops.

So when you make a token creature in winds of exchange, you are accepting the [00:02:00] risk of trading, the most important card left in your deck for a exhausted creature that you've just put out. Now, this is kind of a funny risk to talk about, right? Because, well, you knew this. I'm not telling you. Anything, you didn't know when you go. Oh, I'm so sad that that was tokenized. You know, you, you knew that, so I'm not telling you any new information. But what do I want you to do with this information? Because when's, the exchange is high variants. When you're in that situation where you have a card you need, and then it becomes tokenized and you can't retrieve it with a way to bounce tokens, right? Like San topper or a transport or platform. But when you make that token creature, you're saying, okay, I'm accepting the risk of tokenizing that most important card for a small exhausted creature. And what you want to make sure is that when you're tokenizing one, you accept that risk. And two, that really the math needs to be, that you need that token creature. It's going to give you more possibilities to move towards a win. [00:03:00] Then the card that was left in your deck, right? So this isn't an easy choice to make discarding a tokenizing card feels bad. If you've got something that makes a token, an action card, perhaps, or you have something like recruiter and Ekwidon, that makes it after a reap without a choice, you're often you're faced with a tough choice.

One, it feels bad not to use an action card when you could do it. If you don't have a choice with making the token, like with recruiter, that's a tough choice because you're. Missing out on a whole Amber that you could have otherwise. So that starts to come into all these calculations. So really what happens is these calculations start to get pretty intense or pretty complicated as far as saying, let me analyze the matchup. Let me think about what is left in my deck. Let me think about what is going on in the board and the hand. Wha what risk is acceptable for? One of my key cards later become a token creature right now. If I use this, make a [00:04:00] token creature. Ability. So that is a whole lot of math to math. Right here in winds of exchange. So sometimes when you're playing casually this is totally fine. Just keep playing your cards, have a good time. Use those token creatures. But if you want to kind of. Take this analysis very seriously and start to, you know, have some smoke pour out of your ears. You've got to start to do some of this math and you've got to start either not using or discarding your tokenizes depending on the situation. If it's something like Ecuador visible hand that reveals your hand to your opponent and you make two token creatures. Maybe you're saying, you know, I don't need a whole lot of token creatures to try to go for victory here. And I don't want, really want to reveal my hand. I'm going to go ahead and discard this. I'm going to go ahead and discard this. That's a perfectly good choice. If you know that it's not worth the risk of tokenizing, your really good Amper control. You want it to draw later or your board wipe, right? Or your board wipe. So you can [00:05:00] go ahead and discard it and it kind of feels bad, but it might be the right kind of conservative, you know, less risky choice to make. Now you might hold onto something like the visible hand, you say, you know, I'm going to take the risk where I'm not going to draw up the card. I would have if I got rid of this at the end of the term, but I really want to hold on to this to get those out. And I'm just going to really roll the dice here. On seeing if I draw what I need so I can play visible hand without risking tokenizing that card. I really wanted to, so this isn't easy, this isn't easy. It gets a bit easier with artifacts like a neon outpost or mark to generator both over in Mars, because once those artifacts are out, you can just choose to not use them. And then your you're good to go right there. You're not really sacrificing anything by not using them, except for the token creature you would have had out, which is a part of your calculations. Anyways, that's a part of your calculations anyways. So really what I want to encourage you to do as far as looking at the choice to make a token creature is what [00:06:00] if you want to take it seriously and start to do the math. You've got to consider discarding or not using the token creature generator.

If, you know, you need that card that is in your deck and you need to find it and use it. thinking this way, starts to slow your deck down. You've got what are essentially dead cards because you are deciding that this is a dead card. I'm not going to use it. I don't need this effect right now. Let's get rid of it. Let's get rid of it. So what are a few ways that decks are going to actually mitigate this? There are actually some kinds of decks and some other cards and some actually approaches to playing a deck that can actually help mitigate this complicated token creature variants decision-making that you need to manage. So first off I mentioned this offhand earlier, but any token bouncing is going to increase your, your ability to control the variance with what gets made. Into tokens and then bouncing it back to hand, especially if that effect is immediately available. Now, of course, if you've [00:07:00] taken any amount of looking into strategy and what's strong in Wednesday of exchange, you're going to know that bouncing whatever token you want to is quite good. We have sand hopper and Ekwidon that has action return, a friendly. A friendly creature to hand. If you do, you may pay, play a non-equity on creature from your hand. You have transport or platform? Doing something very similar. Over in Star Alliance,

there is a funny little rare over in Ekwidon that lets you just bounce a single token creature, right? So any bounce that is immediately available or you just get to make a token, see what it is, and then bounce it back, especially with those artifacts is highly, highly valuable for managing that variance because you can just go ahead and make that token creature. And if it's the thing you need, boom. You take it up into your hand, you take it up into your hand. Now a deck strategy. And this isn't as much of a strategy. As much as you, you have a consistency of creature. Token creature making effects. Is a token flood strategy. A [00:08:00] handful of decks that just want to make as many tokens as possible. Grunt is really popular for this one as a token creature. A handful of these strategies. You just have so many token creature makers that you just start with, whatever hand you do and make as many token creatures and possible. And you're just calling the same house and reaping out over and over again. And what happens here is perhaps there's a few payoff cards like membership drive, or maybe there's the mark two generator that you really want.

So you can consistently make more tokens. But really the strategy is just as long as you see your token makers to make them at a pretty high rate, you make as many as you want to. And what happens is that your consistency, your consistency is just in the fact that you're making a ton of tokens that you can use to reap out, to get that Amber, to win the game, moving towards that third key.

And the other stuff does not matter. The other stuff does not matter. All this deck is about is flooding the board. Overcoming your opponent's ability to blow up the creatures to any [00:09:00] degree. And then using that to reap out. So that is, that is one way that this starts to not matter if you're just going all out on token flood. Now, sometimes you will have a deck that just wants to token flood, and you can recognize that from the list or playing it a few times. Sometimes you'll be in a situation where you've got a good draw.

You're in a good situation. Your opponent is at finding you off the board. And, you know, you can just keep pushing and making tokens because you know that your way to win this particular game is that you've got control of the board and you can just keep reaping out. You don't need to dig for your tricks.

You don't. I need to try anything tricky. You just need to brute force your way to victory by reaping out, turn after turn and making more token creatures. Making more token creatures.

Another kind of mitigation. Another way to mitigate the token creature, variants and winds of exchange, either in a selecting a deck that does things like what I'm about to mention or building for our Alliance, with our sealed. Or standard. Is the consistency of effects across many [00:10:00] different cards. So what I'm talking about here is if you have a deck where you want to make token creatures, And you have plenty of Amber control. Let's say you have a couple of rogue operation over in Star Alliance and you have multiple generous offer over an Ekwidon and you have several Mars needs Amber in. Mars. If you have consistent effects towards these particular goals and needs like that creature control across multiple houses across multiple cards, you're you have a much lesser chance of tokenizing everything. I have one effect, right? You have much lower chance of tokenizing. All of your Amber control of tokenizing, all of your creature control. So you can tokenize with a bit more abandoned. There is still a risk that all of it will end up upside down as a token creature. But you generally, if you start to see a few of those cars and get the uses out of them, you can say, okay, sweet. I've gotten the value out of these. I do want to keep making token creatures reaping out with those fighting with those getting [00:11:00] payoff for those. Via the various cards in your deck that may do that. So if you have consistency of your effects, across many different kinds of things, a whole bunch of creature control hub, bunch of Amber control across a few different sections, then you're going to be able to mitigate that variance. Just mitigate that variance by what your deck is made up of.

You're going a bit more towards consistency of effects. Like you might see in a constructive game, but in this case, you've simply built it with Alliance across a few different pods, or you've said, oh, Hey, this is how I can play this. I can actually make token creatures with abandon because I'm going to see my Amber control pretty much, no matter what. Pretty much, no matter what another note on the token flub strategy is sometimes you're making tokens so fast that you're going to loop through your deck multiple times. And that's where, what you start to do is you fight off or blow up in some way. The tokens that have the cards you do want to see on the next flip. So keep that in mind as kind of a discard pile tech, you know, that discard pile is going to flip back into your deck real soon, [00:12:00] especially if you're making a ton of them in a ton of those cards into token creatures. So go ahead and blow up those tokens. You know, you want to see on the next loop, especially if they're all in one house. And get those into the discard pile before you flip. So keep that in mind, as you go apply that as a use a winch of exchange to ex in your casual play, hopefully in the 2024. Competitive play season. This has been KeyForge public radio. I am your host seq Armstrong. If you haven't subscribed at this point, I don't know what to tell you. Come on. Just, just hit it. Just hit follow, please. Plays. I have cats to feed. KeyForge public radio.com is where you can find our blog posts and the merchant shop, which is a great place to both support KeyForge public radio and get some pretty good looking shirts. Both the golden resource design. That we've gotten up there as well as KPR branded shirts. I've got all sorts of things there. The Patriot is of course, where you can support most directly. Thank you. Of course, to our AirWave advocate level supporters like Paul Roadrunner.

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