7. Hand Crafting: Mastering A Core KeyForge System

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hello, dear listener. And today we are talking about handcrafting in key forge. We're going to talk about this so that you can use it strategically to win more games and understand some of the core mechanics of key forge that as you master them, you're going to be able to make, use them to make better decisions and take more effective turns.

Choose when to make tactical decisions for your turn strategic decisions that are a bit longer looking right. And handcrafting is a big part of that, especially those strategic choices, small choices that looks sub optimal now, but are actually setting you up for a bigger payoff in the future.

I'm Zach Armstrong and here on key forge public radio, we're helping you become a more informed keyboard player with strategy topics like this one.

[00:01:00] So if you enjoy improving your game and making better decisions, this is for you. I've played key forge since 2018 and it took me a few years to really understand today's topic and in the research for this topic. I learned even more. Believe me. Today, we're talking about handcrafting so that you can make strategic decisions, which increase your chances at winning. Any given game of key forge. Handcrafting means taking small turns that later create big turns. Handcrafting means taking smaller turns that later create big turns. Now, what do I mean by that? I usually.

The main thing we're counting in small turns is actually cards being played from your hand. So handcrafting is taking these smaller turns, where you're only playing a few cards from hand, still, all of whatever house is available in your hand and playing those out and drawing up. Now, the reason you're doing this is because you've calculated how many cards of each house are left in your deck? And there is a house in your hand that you're [00:02:00] likely to draw into and near. So you're taking that chance by playing one or two cards from your hand and hopefully drawing up into more cards of another house.

And you do this a number of times until you can take one big turn, would that house you've been saving up all that gas together, right? So for many decks, there's a lot of value in that. Taking that big turn all at once a whole bunch of cards, maybe they've got draw effects in your drawing into more, a lot of decks.

Get really effective as you find a more two card combos, three card combos. You create more of an advantageous game state for this house to do its thing. And as you understand, key forges, one of key forges core mechanics, right? The house mechanic, and the fact that a deck is made up of three houses of 12 cards. Each the more you understand that the better you're going to be able to know what's in your deck and then manipulate.

Manipulate what you can using that information. To drive yourself towards success. Because you might have at the end of a game of key forge, and this is [00:03:00] normal, perhaps even if you've been handcrafting well to run out of gas, right? You just start to run out of answers or you have a draw up at the end of your turn and all of a sudden, well,

There's just, there's just nothing there. It didn't draw into anything. Now, perhaps that's happening while you've been making all your perfect decisions because you've been bingeing KPR recently. But maybe you weren't really paying attention to what was left in your deck. And several turns earlier, you could have set yourself up for success by drawing fewer cards.

Then, or more cards now. Right. So understanding, understanding the effects of this tempo. And how your deck wants to use that if it does cause some don't, we'll get to that. A counter example later in the episode. But if your deck wants to use this, if this really benefits your deck, then that's great. And you want to set yourself. You want to set yourself in your deck that you're piloting up for success with handcrafting.

So diving into the details here, handcrafting is when you take a small turn now to set up a [00:04:00] big turn later, and here's the thing there's risk in that, right? Because taking a small turn now let's say I have. For Ecuador cards in my hand, and to Brobnar, if I know that there's a lot of Ekwidon left in that deck, and there's only a few Brobnar cards left in the deck.

I might really want to play those too. Cars so that I can perhaps draw into more Ekwidon cards and play five or six Ekwidon cards. All in one turn. And Ekwidon of course, a house from winds of exchange and maybe onward. We'll see. Ekwidon is very good at playing a bunch of cards all in one turn and getting a whole lot of synergistic effects from those cards playing together, especially when you sequence them properly, make the right decisions . Them working together is greater than just the sum of the individual parts. Right? You can generate these greater effects.

That's why you might take a smaller turn key forge for a big one later, only playing one or two cards of house to draw up into stuff that's already in your hand, and then waiting for the right game state to unleash that [00:05:00] monster turn. Right. So let's talk about those small turns. What does a good small turn look like? Cause you don't want to just be playing one useless card per turn while your opponent races ahead. That might just lose you the game based on them. Getting ahead.

You know alone, and you're not going to draw the same way your house you're building up to might be broad. one game or it might be Ekwidon in another game. It all depends on how you're drawing and what your, what your hand looks like, what your draw is looking like. Right.

So what a good small turn looks like is if you're able to play a creature or two to the board, maybe an artifact that you can activate, right. If you play a creature to, to the board and then those creatures are out on board and you've got those creatures in that, out on the board, while you can call that house again. And that's your small, that's your small play from hand right in, in the

Ekwidon an example where we've got four Ekwidon cards in hand and two Brobnar, maybe we've managed to get two or three Brobnar cards or some And our token creatures, if it's winds of exchange. Maybe we've managed to get [00:06:00] some Brobnar to our, out on the board. And so now what we're doing is, ah, we can actually use these creatures out on the board. Maybe our Pelf is going to have our opponent lose one. Amber, keep them off of that first key. Right?

Maybe we've got a shock herder we're dropping down to activate and to ready and fight with a crock, the clumsy, right. And get that splash attack onto some extra creatures. So a good small turn is one that you've set up for a bit. Maybe you opened that game with a four card Brobnar hand, and you've been playing that out. Those creatures have survived, and now you can take advantage of just playing one or two

And our cards from hand using what's on the board and actually advancing your game, keeping your opponent down, working towards your outs while setting up that really big Ekwidon turn later. Okay. So that's what a good small turn looks like. Cause what you don't want to do is just, you know, play a board wipe that kills just one or two unimportant creatures gives you chains.

And then you slowed down your drum and you didn't actually really slow your opponent down. Meaningfully. You just blew up one creature, right? So you've gotta be doing [00:07:00] that math. And sometimes, you know, in many games there's bad draws. KeyForge just have its bad draws too often. The 2, 2, 2. That you might get stuck in. Right? But again, if you know that math about what's left in your deck and what the probabilities are of what you're going to draw, you can do your best to work, to try to make good decisions, to try to get away from that.

Right. So that's what a good small turn looks like as you've got some things out of the board, you opened in some strength with that house, right? Maybe there's some things on the board. Some artifacts you can activate. And you're playing a few cars while building up. Four, maybe five or six cards. I've had another house for a really big turn later. And so that's handcrafting, right? That's a great example.

So what does a good big turn look like if you're building up for this? What does a really good big turn look like? So a good big turn looks like. A few examples, let's say dropping a whole lot of creatures on the board along with some control as well. I have a deck that loves to spit out a whole lot of [00:08:00] logos creatures all at once. It manages to draw into more and more of them. And one of those is Skippy time hog, and it says, play, your opponent can not use cards on their next turn so they can still play, but they can't use.

And I love this because they can't use anything. They can play. They can't use anything. So unless they have a board wipe from hand they're not going to be blowing up my logo's creatures. And so I've just taken a really huge turn. Maybe I'm playing my other house dis a little bit here and there, right.

To try to get more logos. And to hand, I play all those logos at once. I'm drawing up a couple more cards and then I freeze their board. And if they don't respond to all those logos creatures, I'm going ham the next turn. Right. And so our really big term is one in which all the cards working together, present a really huge threat, especially because it's all in one turn in your opponent, can't respond.

Play a board wipe, fight them off the board while it's your turn. You're doing it all at once. Okay. So that's what a good, really good big turn looks like. Certainly some creatures. [00:09:00] Lots of two or three cards, synergies that start to stack and house Ekwidon, of course, you're familiar with this and winds of exchange. There are so many little synergies between all sorts of different cards, especially ones where you get to capture Amber and then swap control of creatures. There's multiple different cards that do this.

All in different ways. And the more of these you get together, the more Amber you can stack onto a creature and then send it over to your opponent side of the board and then maybe kill it off. Right? And so the more cards you have all at once, the more you can pull these combos off where your opponent's not able to respond.

Cause it's key forge. They have to wait until their turn. So the more cards you're playing all at once, you're going to get a bigger effect. That's often bigger than the sum. Of the parts. If you play these cards, you know, you played a couple of these cards, one turn, and then a couple of the next turn. You're probably not getting those combos offer. At the very least, you're giving your opponent a chance to respond, fight off a problematic creature. That's going to be a part of that combo.

Start to play around things, right. Start to play around by, by [00:10:00] messing up their board or messing with their board in a way that turns your combo off. If they're seeing what you might be setting up. Right. So playing it all at once as the biggest way to make sure you're getting the full value out of all of your possible combos and some houses in some decks love to do this. It's, it's pretty common. I'm sure you've got a couple of decks, even decks that are, you know, perhaps not finely tuned for, you know competitive play.

I do actually really want to have these big plays to get you where you need to go. Right. So that's what a good big turn looks like.

And so as you develop this knowledge of tempo, right? Your knowing when to just play one or two cards from hand to save up for a big turn later, right? As you develop this knowledge of key four, just tempo, it means you're gaining mastery over the house mechanic. Something I do regularly in matches, even casual ones that I would , encourage you to do as well.

Is to count up how many cards are left of each house in your deck? Now, of course you can't flip over your deck and look through it. And count that way, but you can't count how many cards are [00:11:00] in the discard pile. Purged your hand in play. Of all the cards you own and then just reverse that math to figure out exactly how many are in the deck. How many are in the deck of each house? And sometimes I'll do this count and I realize, wait, I only have two cards of this particular house left. And then in the deck,

And I've got two or three of those in my hand. I'm going to go ahead and play that cause I'm so much more likely to drop into my other two houses and have highly efficient terms with those two houses later. And I can see based on the game state and the cards that are in my hand, what I would play now, what am I playing next turn.

What's coming up in one of those other houses. Maybe. You know, Then I can play, I can play to that. I can play to that out. I can play to that out. Right. And again, this is also illuminating. It's the risk of taking that smaller turn. Say I have two star Alliance cards left in my deck. I've got two in hand and I say, oh, sweet. Well, let me just play these.

What if I draw, what if I draw with like one star lines card and one card of another house that's perhaps not really [00:12:00] filling my hand up. Now maybe I'm not totally messed up. Maybe that's not going to lose me the game. But that is kind of the worst outcome there. Right? Especially think of a time early game. If you're handcrafting, you're just playing one or two cards from hand saving up a bigger hand.

But the turn in which that bigger hand is useful, never really shows up. And those smaller turns where you're just playing one or two from hand, your creatures kept getting fought off the board and your opponent benefits from that. And, and you just keep taking very small, useless turns that don't really turn into something bigger. So that's the danger of taking that risk with the smaller turn. Right. But what that can turn into.

Playing all those smaller cards is that big turn later when somebody is complaining. Oh, did you shuffle well, you know, is the shuffling algorithm on TCO broken spoiler alert? It's not. Is the shuffling algorithm on TCO broken. You played all those cards at once, but here we're just hand crafting. Right? You were filtering what was in your hand and when.

And [00:13:00] playing the game really well in a way, perhaps the person didn't understand, depending on, you know, how salty they're actually being. So one example of a deck that actually doesn't hand craft, but it's a great illustration of how to use that deck knowledge, right. Is a deck I have called.

Storinholf of oblong cavern. It's a mass mutation deck with this, sorry. And untamed. This thing has 26 creatures. There's only 10 cards in the deck that aren't creatures. It's got just seven actions, three artifacts, no upgrades. You know, how I was talking about the most advantageous smell, turn.

Is, you know, playing a few creatures and then your one or two card turns after that, you're getting to play just one or two cards, but you're using the creatures out on the board. This, this deck loves to just, it will play all of its creatures out on the board. And then after I've pad a turn where I've played kind of each house once.

Any turn I take with cards in my hand means I'm using creatures on the board. [00:14:00] And this thing has two board wipes, a gateway to Dis, which just wipes everything and gives you three chains. And then Amber Lucian. Which ends the turn and puts everybody's creatures into play ready, but under by the act of players' choice, right.

Putting them into play ready. So skipping all the play effects and things like that. And all of these creatures are passive threats that are even just generating a threat. They're being a threat. While I call other houses. And so this deck, while it is very slow in that it doesn't have much draw. It has a few of the mutant creatures that let you reap discard a card from your hand to draw card. And those are very good and very helpful.

But one of the reasons the stick is not nearly as slow as it looks is because I am putting out so many creatures so often. In that I'm never having to decide between, oh, do I, do I pick a house that I have on the board? I always have a house on the board and can play a few more cards of that house from my hand with some exceptions, of course. But that's the general rule is that I just keep putting [00:15:00] stuff out and it just overwhelmed.

And so many of them are, are passive, amazing passive effects. I won't go into every detail here, but Amber spine, man, girl. Pose Pixies. Pay is Myer SEF, linguist. Stuff like this, others three Brabble, which is an amazing defense against board wipes. If the opponent blows up a Brabble on their turn, they lose three Amber. It's a, oh my gosh. It's, it's such a fun deck and I don't have to handcraft as much because I always have a board option. There's not, there's not often tension.

Between I'll do I play board or do I play hand? I always get to play from my hand because there's always a board that matches it, which has an awful lot of fun.

Now I do have a window of exchange deck that does really want me to handcraft. It's called Daggiera Curator of the battlefield. This is Ekwidon Mars and Saurian. It's a lot of fun. It's really janky, but it kind of forces me to handcraft. And here's why it has, it has two cursed Relic. [00:16:00]

It has two cursed Relic. Now cursed Relic is an artifact from winds of exchange. It's Ekwidon. It has the item trait, it enhances six Amber pips into the deck. If you're unfamiliar with enhance any card with this keyword. And we'll always have pips following it. As soon as that card is included in the deck, when the set of algorithms is making the deck, it goes ahead and puts those pips usually very beneficial pips, right? In this case, six Amber pips on a random other cards in the deck.

So this deck has an additional 12 Amber pips because there's two cursed relics in here. However, cursed Relic has pretty inconvenient text. It says you cannot play cursed Relic. Kurt cursed Relic. Cursed Relic can not be discarded from your hand except through card abilities. That's pretty tough and there's only one role, really two but one important card ability in that Ekwidon house where I can actually get rid of this thing. And that's a trade secret, which says play discard. Any number of Ekwidon cards from your hand, [00:17:00] steal one, Amber for each card discarded this way.

This trade secrets happens to have two Amber pips in one capture PIP. On it. And so what this deck wants to do. Is if I've got some Ekwidon in my hand, I would rather not call Ekwidon. I would rather hold off calling Ekwidon. And in fact, if I'm starting to build up a one or two cursed relics in my hands, oh man, I really don't want to call Ekwidon because, well, those are just dead and I want to only call Ekwidon once I can get rid of them.

And so if I'm taking smaller turns and Mars are sorry, and what I'm doing is I'm hoping I draw up other Ekwidon cards, especially trade secrets, because trade secrets, boom, play that. It dumps everything for my hand, I get the curse relics outright and I steal one for every, for every Ekwidon card discarded that way.

And that cursed Relic turns from a liability into a steel one. Right. And the trade secrets, having those two enhanced Amper pips is just icing on the cake where I'm already gaining two and then stealing a bunch. Would that. One slightly inconvenient capture in there. Right. [00:18:00] So that, that one really wants me to, to handcraft because it's actually got this very, you know, almost a designed in intentional, a really difficult situation.

We're actually need to take a big Ekwidon turn if I'm, you know, gonna be threatening in a big way. And if I don't see it, if that trade secrets gets turned into a token creature, perhaps, right. Which has happened most of the games in which I've practiced with this deck. Then cursed Relic. Cursed Relic has just sitting there. And that is, that is a liability and it slows me down and it's a major chain, right? It's a major chain I do, of course get pips on all these other cards that get to play, but it's a major chain and I want to be taking small turns. In fact, I'm almost forced to be taking these smaller turns for a chance at the bigger turn.

At the bigger turn with that house, we're building up. And in this case, it's trade secrets. And just using that to discard the curse, relics and steal, instead of them clogging up my hand.

So apply this thinking to your decks. What next do you enjoy playing? What are really good? What are [00:19:00] some good decks that you, you just, you enjoy? You have a good time with perhaps they're competitive. You're going to really be considering taking this one. To a, to a fault tour or another large event, just really seeing how you can do right.

And how do they hand craft? Because here's the thing. This is, this is the baseline, right? Assuming no car draw, no discarding from hand, no archiving, but as soon as you start to mix in that car, draw that archiving, that discarding. , that going in, searching for cards from your deck, right. Any of those effects really start to, , mess with this math in ways that, of course you're probably controlling, then you're making informed decisions about thinning out your deck and just the right way or archiving, just the right things so that you can control the information that you you have.

Right. And to figure out what you're about to draw from your deck and make decisions about car draw archiving and other things based on all of that information, because this is just the base layer. As soon as you're archiving, as soon as you're drawing. All of a sudden this mass starts to go in a thousand different [00:20:00] directions, but if you've got that base mechanic down, if you're thinking about it's 12 cards,

In each house, there's three houses. Right. You're only calling one per turn. What's left word of my chances of drawing a particular house. Or what houses has the most or least left in my deck and making decisions based off of that. You're going to start pushing yourself towards victory. A little bit more often, and guess what the ceiling is so high, go back to some old decks. Maybe you didn't think were that good or you think they're good, but you can't quite figure out because the ceiling is high. I can't tell you how many decks I've played. I thought, ah they're okay. And then I go back six months, nine months a year later, and I realize.

It wasn't the deck that wasn't good. I wasn't good enough for the deck. And now maybe I've improved as a player a little bit. And I can get a little bit closer to the skill ceiling. Of that particular deck. So apply that thinking. Check it out.

So, thank you so much for joining me, Zach Armstrong here on key forge public radio. If you're not [00:21:00] already, I'd encourage you to check out the Patrion. You get regular updates on the show, behind the scenes stuff. You get to vote on content. What's going to come up. Like we have an upcoming house playbook series where I do overviews of each house in winds of exchange and dive deep into those and our Patrion supporters are voting. On which house is first, which is next and entirely what order we go in there among many other things. We've also got merchant. If you want to support the show that way.

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