Even though I don’t post as often as I probably should, I do read the Second Genesis forums at least twice a day, and do my best to keep abreast of what the community is saying about the game. It has been in the process of this that I have noticed a few things that got me thinking, and spurred me to write this article. A number of the decks posted in the forums are presented with reminders that the owners don’t possess all the cards they feel are necessary for the success of the deck.

There have also been a few comments about people missing a few cards, despite opening up several booster displays. I don’t mean to single these people out for derision, and I can’t really address their missing card woes, but I can do something about the perception that it takes a lot of money and cards to build a quality deck. While it may be true that building the perfect deck takes a lot of time and hunting for singles, you don’t have to have access to unlimited resources to make a competitive deck. In order to illustrate my point, I thought I should provide an example of deck building on a budget. Spending only forty dollars (a reasonable buy-in for a game, I think) I will construct a tournament-legal deck out of a starter kit and six boosters. I’m going to try writing the article as I go, so please bear with me. Here goes.

Okay, I’ve chosen to go with a Great War starter (starter kit cardlists), and after opening both it and the boosters, I have quite a few cards to work with. After removing all the regions, there were only 17 cards in the boosters that were not playable by either Gallente or Caldari, so I think I came out a little ahead in terms of the size of my card pool, but a few of those unusable cards (six to be exact) are uncommon or rare, and all but one of those are Minmatar-only. I already wish I had gone with the other starter kit, but there’s no turning back now; my money is already spent. It’s time to go through the remaining 67 cards and decide whether I should play Caldari or Gallente.

It was a tough choice, but I have decided to go with Caldari. I had originally decided upon the Gallente, and even written most of a paragraph telling you why, but as I constructed the deck, it became clear that while the Gallente would have afforded me a greater range of news cards, and more than a few cruisers I was lucky enough to pull from the boosters, I simply did not have enough frigates playable by them. It came down to a choice between strong ships and strong news, and the ships won out. Without the redundancy a large pool of frigates would afford me, a bad draw with the Gallente deck would have allowed me to deny my opponent plenty of opportunities with my news, but wouldn’t have provided me any of my own. Now, I’m going to finish getting these cards in order, and then I can reveal what I came up with.

The deck is finished, and all in all, I’m pretty happy with it. I still think those Minmatar cards (especially the Stabber and two War Tattoos) would have made for a nice deck, but there’s no use crying over opened boosters. Without further ado, here’s the deck list:

The Shoestring Strikeforce Deck

I’ll just start at the top and work my way down. The deck is designed to deny enemy ships their abilities and mobility as much as possible. The card draw granted by the Venal Towerr would be nice, but I’m worried about the deck’s lack of anti-news cards, so Precognition Tower steps in as a stop gap measure. Heaven's use is pretty straightforward, as is The Khanid Kingdom's, but I included Sansha's Nation for a very specific reason: most of the denial I’m using comes from my ships, so I need to be able to sacrifice them with some degree of confidence. It also allows me to use the Omber with fewer inhibitions, and this deck can use all the income it can get.

I was a little unsure about including those last four ships, given my rather limited location-based income, but they only make for 8 of my 25 ship cards, and only two of them (the Blackbirds) cost more than 5 ISK. The other 17 ship chards cost 3 or less, making for very rapid deployment of my fleet. While there is plenty of muscle distributed throughout, the real strength of this fleet lays in abilities it can bring to bear. There’s plenty of Warp Scramble in the deck, and I think it (along with Target Jam and Sensor Dampen, to lesser degrees) will be the key to victory. By locking down and disabling my enemy’s ships, I can remove a lot of the tactical maneuvering that is EVE combat, and make it all about brute force, which if I hit early enough, I will have on my side.

As you can see, with the exception of the Stubborn Mechanics, my news cards came directly from the Caldari starter deck, but that’s not really a problem for me. While I’d certainly like more of each card to work with (not to mention some Mind Controls) I really can’t complain about the spread of effects I have available. They compliment my fleet’s capabilities nicely, allowing me faster access to my ships and even more ability and mobility denial.

Finally, the starbase structures are simply there because I had the room for them. I was out of useful ships and news (at least the cards I had sufficient copies of), and figured that some home defense would do this deck some good. The more ships I can send out against my opponent, the better, and these two structures go a long way towards making that possible.

That’s it! Like I promised a couple hours ago, this deck may not win every engagement it’s in, but it should make a good showing of itself. And to those of you who may point out my lack of a sideboard, it’s not that I have ceased championing their usefulness, I simply didn’t have enough cards to make a useful one.

Zack