Hello everyone, I'm back with the first true installment of my series of articles on WoW theory. This particular edition is on one of the most important fundamental theory: Card advantage.
Card advantage boils down to a single idea: the player with more cards in hand has more options, and therefore, more easily wins the game. This simple idea is quite powerful in practice.
Card advantage: He who has more cards has more options. Using one card to get rid of multiple opponent's cards gives you an advantage, as it limits his options while keeping yours open.
Let's examine this idea further with one of my favorite cards:
Cleave.
Assuming that you have a strong enough weapon in play,
Cleave can net us what is called a 'two for one' card advantage. One of our cards gets rid of two of our opponent's cards. As an example of how powerful this is, consider the following situation: Your opponent has two
Ironforge Guards for his hand, and four resources in play. You have a weapon with one ATK in play, with an Ironforge Guard and a
Cleave for your hand. Both of you have four resources in play. You play your Guard, and say go. Your opponent plays both of his, and indicates that he's finished. You then use your turn to play
Cleave, killing both of his Guards. Now you still have an Ally in play, he has none, and you both have one card in hand. You are now in a position of clear advantage with regard to board position.
Most of the time, one small advantage in cards will not make or break a particular game. Generally one player must build up his advantage over several turns and overwhelm his opponent with his extra numbers of cards. A one card advantage helps, but it's when one player has emptied his hand and the other has conserved his cards and still has a few that the advantages truely shine.
As people realized how important card advantage was, they started to modify the idea to fit new situations. Two main branches of card advantage have developed. So far, I've been talking about what is called "Pure" card advantage. The idea is simple: follow the cardboard. Count up the cards that hit your opponent's discard pile to the number that hit yours. The other is termed "Virtual" card advantage, and is a bit more complicated. This allows us to define another term: Dead cards.
Dead card: A card that is useless when the current board position is taken into consideration.
And just to make sure we're all one the same page, let me define board position while we're at it:
Board Position: The current 'situation' of the game. The collection of information about the game, such as Allies in play, life totals of the players, and such.
When you employ Virtual Card Advantage, you create dead cards in your opponent's hands. Elusive creatures such as
Latro Abiectus are a great example of this, as they make cards like Vanquish or
Execute required and other Allies useless when it comes to dealing with them. If you're at a low life total and your opponent plays an Elusive creature, every ally that you draw is a useless card. That's a virtual advantage. A player could have a hand full of cards, but if they can't deal with that one Elusive ally, they'll die all the same.
So there you have it, a brief introduction to Card Advantage. I'm going to write a follow up article discussing other kinds of situations and elaborating further. I look forward to your comments, and have a Merry Christmas everyone!
by Bladewing 
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