The trap of the Perfect Hand

A thought that is counter-intuitive in this game is that a perfect hand is not perfect; it’s a perfectly stacked deck that is important.

Compared to many other CCG’s (collectible card games) V:tes is not about having a perfect hand, rather it’s about having a perfect flow of cards. While each hand in itself does not need to be perfect you need to be aware of what cards are left in your deck and if reaching those useful cards will be possible given the “flow” currently available in your deck.

Many decks will employ forced flow, such as Freakshow decks (Una with 50 freakdrives for example) to gain the ultimate flow of cards for a strong table presence (resources on the table).

Other decks will rebuild their decks to achieve the best possible flow for the current game using recursion to rebuild their decks to match a particular table.

Both examples above are strong variants using the principle of flow instead of hand, but what other ways can we emulate these effects?

There are different ways, one is to have strong cards that increase card flow such as Dreams of the Sphinx, Fragment of the Book of Nod, The Barrens, Heart of Nizchetus, Scrounging and to a certain extent Visit from the Capuchin and other cards that increase hand size.

Other less obvious ways are to include permanents that lessen the need of specific cards, such as intercept, stealth, bleed, prevent and strength. While these last examples do not increase the flow of the deck, it lessens the need for a specific flow-speed.

A perfect hand is not perfect – having one bad card is better since you can discard it using flow increasing cards and remove it from future draws, the best hand is half-useful but with possibilities of drawing into cards that will prove useful.

A rule when discarding is thinking about the best possible card available that you can draw and comparing it to any of the cards you have in your hand. Do not forget that the Discard Phase Action is a useful resource that needs to be exploited for maximum gain.