Hela Math, Mental Blocks, and Winterverse!
Welcome back to Burning questions, where we take a look at what's on the community's mind. This week we've got Hela math, Mental Blocks, and Winterverse!
1)
You have 12 cards and in a normal game you draw 9 of them. That means you have a 75% chance of drawing any specific card, in this case Hela, from your deck at any point in the game. If you play Magik you'll have an 83% chance to see her before the end of the game. In other words, you have just a 17% chance of Hela staying put in your deck in game when you play Magik. Seems pretty reliable right?
Well, we don't just need Hela. We need to discard stuff too. In a traditional Hela list you'll need Invisible Woman, M.O.D.O.K., and Hela. You have a 38% chance to draw a specific set of three cards (54% if you play Magik!). But, of course, you need to draw the Invisible Woman by turn 4 and M.O.D.O.K. by turn 5, which lowers the odds of getting off a successful Hela play to about 30%. Obviously cards like Magik, Iron Lad, Crystal, Jubilee effect this. You can also play the M.O.D.O.K. on turn 5 without Invisible Woman, just hoping for a Hela top deck.
What were the odds of the play below? By turn 4 we had Mr. Fantastic and Jeff mid and Crossbones right. The opponent had nothing on Mojoworld yet and had played Black Knight, Lady Sif, and Ebony Blade. They had discarded Magneto and Black Cat.
They played Blade to hit Jubilee and Ghost Rider to bring something back. They needed to hit Jubilee off Ghost Rider and Jubilee to pull Hela or would have been able to win Mojoworld. The odds? About 8%.
Next, here is a game where we were drawing very badly. We discarded Black Cat early, played Lockjaw on 4, Dracula on 5, and a Hail Mary Jubilee on 6.
We needed Jubilee to pull Hela, swap with Blade in the deck, have Death go middle, and have Dracula hit anything other than Ghost Rider (not to mention have the opponent cooperate). We hit the 2% chance play.
A hypergeometric calculator is an indispensable tool for any card game, even one like Snap that is singleton and has small decks. You can use it to calculate important Snap odds:
- What are the odds of getting Nebula in your opening hand? 33%
- What are the odds of getting Zabu by turn 2? 42%
- What are the odds of getting either Wave or Electro by turn 3 (in a deck that plays both)? 77% (Before the rework, Chavez would raise that to 82%).
- What are the odds of getting Psylocke by turn 2 and Mr. Negative by turn 3? 21%
- What are the odds of getting either Psylocke or Ravonna by turn 2 and Negative by turn 3? 34%
- If your opponent plays Korg on turn 1 what are the odds you'll draw a rock on turn 2? 12.5%
As for how often will you discard Hela with Swordmaster? Well, that's obviously 100%!
2)
The mental aspect of the game is very important. Learning to focus is very important. Learning to accept mistakes is important. Not being humble and realistic about your skill level often leads to retreating less than you should. The opposite problem leads to not snapping enough.
Lamby and Peaceful recently had a great discussion about not getting tilted. Go here to watch that.
But one small piece of advice that I give is something that has helped me with the mental side of card games, Snap in particular.
Learn to love the crazy losses
Snap is fun because weird, high variance stuff happens all the time. Learn to enjoy (or at least laugh off the games you lose to something wild or totally unexpected. To clarify, I'm not saying not to care about all losses. I'm competitive and I like to win. If my opponent makes an objectively bad play and wins, I'll get a little mad. If I make a mistake, I don't love it. If I lose 8 cubes on a really close call, that hurts. But the crazy ones are fun. If someone plays something that makes me say “they're playing that card?!” that's delightful. If I lose after I play Legion, but my opponent’s Scarlet Witch changed the location to Bar With No Name, that's awesome. If Sakaar pulls my Doc Ock who pulls my opponent’s full combo, that’s hilarious. The out of left field games are the ones that make the game worth playing, regardless of which side you're on.
3)
From December 25th at 11 am PST to the 26th at 11, there will be a Winterverse shop takeover featuring all Winter Vacation variants, including some that haven't been available since last year's Winter variant rush.
But which ones are the best? I've got my top 3 below.
1. Devil Dinosaur
The runaway #1 Winter variant and it's not close. He wasn't exclusive to last year's rush. He's been available year round. Being affordable or a lack of exclusivity isn't enough to dethrone the king though.
2. Rockslide
I'm sure I'll get some disagreement for putting this ahead of Rogue, but the rock, paper, scissors visual joke puts this one in the number two spot.
3. Rogue
Is that an entire bowl of Hot Chocolate? Does she look like Pokimane? It doesn't matter, she's still one of the best variants in the game.
Honorable mention: Coal Rock
Maybe next year we can get a Sweet Christmas Luke Cage or a Hanukkah Kitty Pryde?
Come find me on Twitter if you've got a burning question, and hit the comments below to let me know which Winter variants you're planning to pick up and how you avoid tilt.