Building your first deck

A deck is 52 cards, and a blank one is the worst place to start. Every good first deck in StupidChess began as a starter deck with a few cards swapped, and that's the method here: pick the starter closest to how you want to play, change one thing at a time, and let the deck editor's charts tell you what you've done before a game does. By the end you'll have a deck that is recognizably yours and still works.

The rules of a deck

Three rules, and they're all the editor will enforce.

A deck needs exactly 52 cards to play. Fewer and it's a draft: you can save it and come back, but you can't start or join a game with it. You can hold at most three copies of any one card. The exception is Braincell, the currency card, which you can include in any number. Every one of the five starter decks runs 32 other cards and 20 Braincells.

That's it. There's no minimum of any role, no banned list, no restriction on cost. A deck of 52 Braincells is legal. It would also lose, which is the point of the rest of this article.

Start from a starter

The five starter decks are already in your deck list when you create an account, and each is built around one idea.

• First Blood removes pieces. Three each of Assassinate and Lightning Strike, freezes to hold a piece still until you can take it, Swap Theirs to pull a defender away, Tripping to hurry the pawns.
• Hold the Line keeps pieces. Shields and armor, Wall, a few face-down traps, Pile On to tuck one piece under another, and three Flash Shield to answer a threat on your opponent's turn.
• Upheaval moves the board. Fault Lines, Tectonic Shifts, rotations, Hall of Mirrors, Break Ground, and teleports to make use of the chaos.
• Second Life trades and recovers. Both resurrections, Revival, Necromancy, Ransom, and cards that dig in the discard pile.
• Mind Games reads and undoes. Reconnaissance, the reverts, Countermand, Pickpocket, and Mill to threaten a deck-out.

Pick the one whose idea you understand best, not the one that sounds strongest. For most people that's First Blood: its cards do one thing each, and killing a piece outright is easy to value. Play it three or four times before you change anything. You need to know what the deck does before you can tell what it lacks.

Swap one idea at a time

Open the deck in the editor. The catalog is on one side, your deck on the other, and the search and filters above let you narrow the catalog by cost, by role, or by trait. Your deck list shows every card and how many copies you hold.

The mistake to avoid is swapping ten cards at once. You won't know which change mattered. Instead, after each few games, ask two questions.

Which card did you never want to see? In First Blood that's often Execution early on: a three-cost card that only hits a rook or queen, dead in your hand until your opponent's heavy pieces come out. Take one of the two copies out.

Which card did you wish you'd had? If you kept losing a knight to a trap you couldn't see, that's Probe or Disarm. If you kept running out of Braincells with a good card in hand, that's a 21st Braincell, or Coupon. Put one copy in. One.

Then play again. A single swap in a 52-card deck shows up in roughly one game in four, so give it several games before you judge it.

The charts tell you what you built

Above your deck list the editor draws three pictures of the deck, and they're the fastest way to see a problem.

The radar has six points, one per card role: attack, defense, trap, modification, vision and regain. A card counts toward each role it carries, and some carry two. First Blood's radar is a spike toward attack with a little modification. Hold the Line leans defense and trap. Neither shape is wrong, but a deck whose radar is a near-perfect hexagon is usually a deck with no plan: a bit of everything, not enough of anything to rely on. The six card roles explains what each point means at the board.

The Braincell curve shows how many of your cards cost one, two, three, four and five Braincells, with the Braincell cards themselves alongside. A healthy curve for a beginner's deck has most of its cards at one and two, a fair number at three, and only a handful at four and five. Every four-cost card is four turns of banking before it's playable, and a hand full of them is a hand you can't use. The Braincell curve goes into why twenty Braincells is the usual answer and when to break from it.

The type bar is one line split in two: how much of the deck is Braincells and how much is everything else. If the Braincell half is shrinking swap by swap, you're building a hand you can't pay for.

Look at all three after every swap. If you took out a one-cost card and put in a four-cost one, the curve will show you the hand you've just made harder to play.

A first deck, worked

Here's a sensible set of changes to First Blood after a few games, to show the method rather than to copy.

You've noticed the deck has nothing to say when your opponent threatens a piece. Take out one Execution and add one Shield, a one-cost card that protects a piece until after your next turn. The curve gets cheaper, the radar grows a small defense point. The deck is still an attacking deck.

Next, you keep walking into face-down traps against Hold the Line and the robots that run them. Take out one Mental Block, which needs an opponent who is spending Braincells to matter, and add one Probe. Another one-cost card, and vision joins the radar.

Finally, you're losing games on the clock. Rather than add a 21st Braincell, which weakens the deck's attack slightly, add one Move Again in place of a Tripping, so that your extra tempo comes from cards you were already happy to play, and spend a Braincell on thirty seconds only when you must.

Three swaps, three games each. The deck is now First Blood with an answer to a threat, an answer to a trap, and no change to its plan.

Build your own when you're ready

Once you've changed a starter deck ten times, you'll find you have an idea of your own. When you do, don't start from empty. Take the starter closest to it and keep changing. The limits that matter most are the ones the editor can't show you: whether your deck has a way to win, a way to not lose, and enough Braincells to afford either. Three deck plans lays out the shapes that work.

Keep a few things fixed as you go. Twenty Braincells until you have a reason to move it. At least two or three cheap defensive cards, whatever the plan, because every deck meets a robot that plays Lightning Strike on your best piece. And at least one card that reads the board: a Probe, a Sneak Peek, a Reconnaissance. The games you lose without one are the games where you never saw what beat you.