Playing Past/Peace/Anarchy, you have established a reasonable board against your opponent’s Mon-Red deck, even though you went second. You have arrived at this position at the start of your turn 6 (if you want to see what happened to lead to this point, you can go here.)
Tech 2 card(s)
Get Paid - ($10)
Flagstone Garrison - ($7)
Overeager Cadet, +2 Runes (+3), Draw 1
Nullcraft, +2 Runes (+5), Draw 1 - ($5)
Calypso Vystari, +2 (+7), Draw 1 - ($4)
Onimaru - ($2)
Boot Camp Steam Tank 1, Draw 1 - ($1) (get a little lucky here and draw either the other vystari or the cadet or the second boot camp, 3/5 chance)
Overeager Cadet, +2 Runes (+9), Draw 1
Move all 9 runes to DS Bilco, kills Steam Tank 2
Move 8 Runes to DS Hartman, Bilco dies before last rune is removed, deal 12 to Base
Move 8 to Nullcraft, deal 10 to base, GG
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Well, these scenarios, just like real games, don’t necessarily have a “this turn win” answer. If you have a possible win, it has to be balanced against what your board will look like if the attempt fails, and your odds of winning in that scenario.
Yeah I think in this situation, you kind of have to fork your “what do I do” based upon best and worst case scenarios on draws, post-reshuffle (assuming you are playing the garrison, Cadet, and Nullcraft that you draw from cadet, which I think is probably purely optimal from everyone’s perspective?)
Side note I’m super interested to see what turns people come up with, as I’m still fairly new to Past Peace Anarchy and (spoiler alert) this was my board position and I took a pretty sub-optimal turn when put in this situation!
The fun thing is that if the last card in your deck was anything other than Nullcraft or Overeager Cadet, you could easily just win here by going:
Nullcraft (3 total runes)
Overeager Cadet (5 total runes)
Play and max Prynn
Prynn banishes both Steam Tanks, dies, and returns them to play, but not to the patrol zone
First Drill Sergeat hits base for 9
Second Drill Sergeant hits base for 9
Move runes to Nullcraft, finish off base.
This line doesn’t quite work without the Nullcraft, as you only get to deal 18 base damage (and then lose on the crack-back).
My plan with bad draws would be to kill the steam tanks with the drill sergeants and have the null craft deal as much as possible to the base and fill the patrol.
Zhavier’s got it, for sure. Abuse the card draw from garrison, poop out small units, sideline stuff, and go for the throat. Dunno why he’s playing Onimaru though.
As to variations, Cadet draws Nullcraft, Nullcraft draws one from seven. $5 left.
If Boot Camp (2 chances): Spend $1 to play, draw a card.
If Calypso Vystari (2 chances): Spend $1 to play, draw a card from Garrison.
If Overeager Cadet: Play for free, draw a card from Garrison.
If Fading Argonaut or Origin Story: Spend $2 to play a unit from hand, draw a card from Garrison.
Worst line of draw here is paying $2 each for two units from hand, and those plus Cadet and Nullcraft bump us to 9 runes on the Drills.
If we draw into a Boot Camp, we follow his line of play for the win (except I think he can toss off all his runes - tower counters armor, tank only puts 3 damage on him).
If we don’t draw Boot Camp, we’ve got $1 left to play Calypso at worst, or Cadet + Calypso at best. At worst we’ve got 11 runes, 10 of which we can funnel onto the Nullcraft after killing both defenders to drop base to 9hp, waiting to kill next turn.
Mono-Red with an empty board and 9hp base vs a 11/10 Nullcraft waiting for the kill next turn is a hard turnaround. Red can’t exhaust it, could maybe take it out with two shoddy gliders + Jaina + Flame Arrow or something, but that needs Blood not Anarchy.
So that makes worst line from the draw Origin Story, Argonaut, Boot Camp that we can’t play without Oni, and we’re back to the “I’ll get you next turn with my uber-Nullcraft” play.
Would it be better to take out the tech 2 to really lock him out? You can do even more garrison shenanigans next turn to one shot him, but perhaps not if he gets your sergeants.
Squad Leader: Steam Tank Alpha 3/6 +a
Technician: Steam Tank Beta 3/6