Mix-Ins

by Bryant Durrell
November 9, 1998

I. Introduction

Most people tend to design to some variant of the Rule of Five. The classic form of this is simple: dedicate 20% of your deck to feng shui sites, 20% to foundation characters, 20% to characters who require a resource, 20% to cards that cost 0 or 1 power, and 20% to more expensive cards. Generally speaking, if you're playing a multi-faction deck, you apply the Rule of Five separately for each faction -- so you might have a 7/5 deck, with 7 Dragon foundations, 7 Dragon hitters, 5 Hand foundations, 5 Hand hitters, and so on.

I've also seen people say you should be devoting 20% of your deck to "hitter" cards (big characters, force multipliers, damage increasers) and 20% of your deck to other stuff (character removing events, tricks, combos). I tend to go with the basic rule, make sure that 10% of my deck can generate power (not counting FS sites), and do the rest by feel. Obviously, the Rule of Five is very liberal.

But there are times when you want to not just stretch but actively break it, and that's when the mix-in technique is useful.

II. Mix-Ins

A mix-in is a group of about 10-15 cards, plus enough feng shui sites to support the additional cards in the context of the full deck. In general, you want five foundation characters, and either one or two other cards in quantities of four or five. Use four if you have two other cards, and five if you just have one. Don't bother with fewer than four cards; you're doing this because your deck needs a bit of a boost in some area and you don't want to be short on these late in the game. Remember that you may well need to discard a few cards early in the game.

If you use five foundation characters, you'll wind up with more than 20% foundations overall, and much more than 20% in your mix-in faction. This is good, because you really want to get your mix-in foundations before your other mix-in cards. That's why you need to keep the rest of the mix-in slim; it's all about probabilities.

You also want to use cards that are cheap in terms of resources. It would be very foolish to add any cards that require you to play two foundation characters before you can play them; you'd wind up resource starved far too much of the time. For example, Wind on the Mountain is not a good candidate for a support card, more's the pity. On the other hand, Natural Order wouldn't be a problem, since you can get all the needed resources from one Golden Candle Society.

It's good to go a little high on the feng shui sites as well. If your mix-in is 10 cards, add 3 feng shui sites. If your mix-in is 15 cards, add 4 or 5 feng shui sites. When you add these extra cards, your deck will probably be over 60 cards by a fair bit; it's never a bad idea to reduce the risk of a bad draw in this case. Consider: if you have a 30 card deck, you'll never have to dig too deep to get to a feng shui site. If you have a 80 card deck, however, the possible length of a run of bad cards is much longer.

Avoid mix-ins with decks that are larger than 70 cards pre-mix-in. The mix-in just isn't big enough to have a reliable effect in a deck that size. It might be possible to create bigger mix-ins, but I haven't experimented with it and I suspect you'd lose the simplicity and reliability you get when you restrict yourself to one or two cards.

III. Example Deck

Consider this little Ascended deck:

4 Inner Sanctum
4 City Park
2 Rust Garden

5 Pledged
1 Student of the Bear
4 Student of the Shark

3 Might of the Elephant
3 Just a Rat
2 Adrienne Hart
2 Phillipe Benoit

4 Operation Killdeer
4 Covert Operation
2 Lodge Politics

4 Shadowy Mentor
4 Family Estate
2 Paper Trail

(Shut up, you in the back. I know it's pure cheese.)

This is a functional, nasty deck. However, I happen to think it doesn't have enough character removal. I want to have some Nerve Gases and Imprisons.

One approach would be to add 25 more cards, with Test Subjects and CHARs and Nerve Gases and Imprisons and a bunch of feng shui sites. But that gives me a 75 card deck that is likely to have resource problems. I'll keep getting CHARs before I get the resources to play them. No fun.

I, however, have read this posting, so instead I do this:

4 Whirlpool of Blood

5 BuroMil Grunt

4 Imprison
4 Nerve Gas

And voila; I have some decent character removal without having to sacrifice much of my small deck advantage or my reliable Ascended resources. In actual play, this deck works pretty darned well -- and from time to time, you can drop your first Grunt in the middle of an attack, follow up with a Nerve Gas, and look smug.

IV. Example Mix-Ins

In this section, you'll find some of the really obvious mix-ins, and a couple of deck-specific ones as well.

1. Character Removal

You just saw this, so I won't recapitulate it. This can go in just about any deck.

2. Reductio ad Potentiam

3 Feng Shui sites
5 Test Subject
5 Vivisector

Also viable in most decks, although it's not good if you don't play with a fair number of characters. ("I reduce to power," for those of us who didn't study Latin.)

3. Photocopier

3 Feng Shui sites
5 Sinister Priest
5 Evil Twins

Yeah, I know 5 Evil Twins is hard to come by. This is still really good in, say, an Independent Dragon deck.

3a. Photocopier with an Independent Power Supply

4 Feng Shui sites
5 Sinister Priest
4 Evil Twin
4 Pocket Demon

4. Stop! (In the Name of Love)

3 Feng Shui sites
5 Pledged
5 Operation Killdeer

Also obvious.

5. Ichor

5 Sinister Priest
4 Pocket Demon
3 Flying Guillotine

This is part of my Ichordite Dragon gun deck -- the Pocket Demons give me good comeback, and the Guillotines are sort of like free Training Sequences and Back for Seconds all in one.

6. Disciplinary Action

5 Instrument of the Hand
5 Rigorous Discipline

This won't go in every deck, but it's interesting to contemplate the results of adding it to an Architect deck with Johann Bonengle and CHAR, or a Dragon deck with Ting Ting and Jane Q. Public, or a Monarch deck with Thunder Champions, Butterfly Knights, and Pump Action Shotguns.

So there you go; mix-ins, how to build them, why you might want to use them, and what you can get out of them. I hope some of you find this article useful, not just with regard to mix-ins but in contemplating other decks that break the Rule of Five. As always, your comments are avidly solicited.

Last modified: November 9, 1998.
Send server comments to durrell@innocence.com.