The Braincell curve

Every Built Deck has two halves. One half is the cards you want to play. The other half pays for them. The Braincell card does nothing to the board: you play it, it goes onto your Braincells pile, and from then on it's a coin. The number in the corner of every other card is how many of those coins it costs. Get the ratio between the two halves wrong and you'll spend the game either holding cards you can't afford or banking coins with nothing to buy. This article is about that ratio.

What a Braincell really costs you

A Braincell is free to play, but it isn't free. You may play at most one card per turn, and banking a Braincell is a card play. So every Braincell you bank is a turn on which you didn't play anything else. That's the hidden price, and it's why you can't just fill a deck with Braincells and call it solved.

It also means Braincells arrive slowly. Barring the cards that bend the rules (more on those below), you bank one per turn at most. A card that costs four is at least four turns of banking, during which your opponent has been playing cards at you. Costs aren't abstract. A cost of 3 means "three turns of my card plays, saved up."

Spent Braincells don't vanish. When you pay for a card, the Braincell cards you spend go to your discard pile, where Brainstorm can send them back to your Braincells pile and Recollection can pull them back into your hand. That matters for the curve: a deck that runs those cards can get by on fewer Braincells, because it spends the same ones twice.

Why twenty is the usual answer

All five starter decks are built the same way: 32 cards that do something, plus 20 Braincells, for 52. Twenty isn't a rule. The deck editor lets you run as many or as few as you like, and Braincells are the one card with no three-copy limit. But twenty is where the starters landed, and it's worth understanding why before you move off it.

A game opens with seven cards in your hand, and from then on you're dealt one card at the start of each turn while you hold fewer than seven. With 20 Braincells in 52, a little under two of every five cards you see is a Braincell. Over an opening hand of seven, that's two or three Braincells on average, alongside four or five cards that want paying for. That's a hand you can start working with: bank on the first couple of turns while you develop pieces, and you're playing a two-cost card by turn three or four.

Drop to twelve Braincells and your opening hand averages one or two. Your three-cost cards are now stranded until the middle of the game, and the ones that cost four may never be played at all. Push up to twenty-eight and you'll bank comfortably, but you'll draw Braincell after Braincell in the late game with nothing left to spend them on, and every one of those draws is a turn where the opponent's card did something and yours didn't.

The catalog's own curve

Here is how the whole catalog is priced, which tells you what a typical deck will ask for:

• 28 cards cost 1
• 62 cards cost 2
• 52 cards cost 3
• 23 cards cost 4
• 2 cards cost 5 (Purge and Hostile Takeover)

Two is the most common cost, and three is close behind. If you build without thinking about it, you'll end up with a deck whose average card costs somewhere between two and three. Twenty Braincells supports that. The further your average drifts upward, the more Braincells you need, and the more turns you'll spend banking instead of playing.

The deck editor shows your own distribution as a curve, a bar for each cost, with the Braincells alongside. You want to look at two things. First, how tall the bars at three and four are compared with one and two. Second, whether there are enough Braincells to pay for them. A deck whose bars at three and four tower over the rest, with a thin Braincell count, is a deck that will sit on its hand.

Cheap cards, big cards, and what each is for

The one-cost cards are the ones you can play almost immediately. Move Again gives a second move. 1 Turn Freeze pins a piece for a turn. Shield protects one of yours until after your next turn. Tripping lets your pawns step an extra square. None of these wins the game alone, but they cost one turn of banking, and they do something now. A deck with plenty of them is never stuck.

The four- and five-cost cards are the swings. Lightning Strike destroys any enemy piece with no way to save it. Revert Last Turn undoes an entire turn. Grand Reset sends every piece on the board home. These decide games, and they cost you four turns of banking apiece. A deck with too many of them is a deck full of promises it can't keep until it's too late.

The two- and three-cost cards are where most of the game happens: the freezes that last, the teleports, the resurrections, the swaps and shifts. A good curve has its weight here, with enough one-cost cards to act early and only a handful of expensive cards to finish.

The cards that bend the curve

A few cards change how many Braincells a deck needs, and if you run them you can adjust.

Overclock stays in play and makes every Braincell you bank from then on worth two. Once it's out, your effective Braincell count has doubled, which is why a deck built around it can run lighter. Efficiency also stays in play and takes one off the cost of every other card you play, to a minimum of zero. A deck full of two-cost cards with Efficiency out is a deck full of one-cost cards. Coupon does the same for one card, once.

Sugar Rush and Espresso Shot are different. They give you three and five Braincells respectively that must be spent this turn, and playing them doesn't use your card for the turn. That's a burst, not a bank. They let a lean deck play an expensive card out of nowhere, once, but they do nothing for the long game.

Big Brain doubles whatever is in your pile. At cost four it's a late-game card: played onto a pile of two, it's a waste; onto a pile of six, it pays for everything you're holding.

On the other side, your opponent can attack your pile. Brain Drain takes one Braincell from you, Lobotomy takes two, and Brain Freeze makes you lose one for a single Braincell of cost. Mental Block stops you spending at all on your next turn. If the people you play run these, a deck on the lean side of twenty will feel it.

Buying time

There's one more thing a Braincell buys. On your own turn you can spend one to add thirty seconds to your clock, as often as you can afford. Each side has ten minutes for the whole game, and in a long, complicated one that runs out. A spare Braincell in the late game is never wasted while your clock is ticking. It's a reason not to trim your count too hard: the coins you don't spend on cards still have a use.

How to adjust

Start at twenty. Play a few games, and notice which of two things happens more. If you keep ending turns with cards in hand that you can't pay for, add two Braincells and take out your most expensive card. If you keep drawing Braincells late with a pile you can't spend, take two out and add a cheap card that does something. Change by two at a time, play a few more games, and stop when neither problem shows up often. A deck whose hand always has something affordable in it, and whose pile is empty at the end of most games, has its curve about right.