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THE CASCADE
An On the Edge© strategy article written by Robert Bracey

Before I explain the mysterious "Cascade" of the title I will first give a good method of laying out your deck and evaluating it, I know that this sort of thing can never be perfect but it is a of tremendous use for beginners to see things that more experienced players see easily in a deck...

Your deck can be divide into components and laid out on a chart like this one...

(Here Defender means a card with high defense or offense value, and caller means a card that can bring other cards into play or produces pull.)

Feel free to add some additional spaces and print this out for your own use. It will at a glace allow you to spot the strength and deficiencies of your deck. Some major deficiencies are listed here...

LOGJAMMED: The deck has more than 50 or 60 % of its cards in the top row, here the no more than one 0 cost card a turn will slow you down considerably and means it will take far too long to empty your hand. To correct this reduce the amount of resources you have replacing it with

PERSONNEL PROBLEMS: If the decks bottom row exceeds 40% then you will find your conspiracy is to small and weak to be effective, replace some of these cards with conspirators who can be cranked for special effects.

TOP HEAVY: If the deck has a large number of 3+ cards it will find itself off balnce from the start of the game, and unable to recover the disadvantage, to correct this, include a large number of 1 point or 2 point characters who can produce pull.

These are general thoughts I hope people will find useful, now onto the title...

This is a simple deck construction strategy, the ideas of which will help any beginner to the game. The name refers to the decks first turn actions which are to produce a cascade effect. In OtE there is no requirement to wait a turn before using a special power so people just brought into play can be used immediatly to produce pull.

If a cascade deck works well, on the first turn it brings a resource into play, follows up by bringing one or two pull producing conspirators to the back row, who then crank to pull more pull producing conspirators, who then crank to put a defender or two in place. The result of a well constructed deck, is that in almost every game played the cascade deck has a workable conspiracy at the end of turn 1.

The pattern to follow is out lined here, first row, the 0 pull cards. This should consist only of resources, no other 0 pull cards should be included. The resources should add up to about one third or thirty percent of a deck, this will tend to mean that you only pull on resource. The resources you do have should also be well matched to your other cards. My deck contains these...

• 1 Glorious Lords secret
• 1 Oppenheimer contacts
• 2 Friends in great man barrio
• 1 Friends in broken wings barrio
• 1 Friends in golden barrio
• 2 Psychic sensitivity
• 2 Contacts in the art scene

I am hoping to weed it down by trading to only have artists and Glorious Lords. In the cascade deck it is very important to go for a very tight focus.

The majority of the cards should then be at the 1 pull level, in order to make them deployable on turn 1. The Callers should from about 30 percent of your deck, this is quite difficult and I am still some way off.

I would like to tighten up the callers so they are all artists and glorious lords and to about double there number, in this sort of deck be prepared to include multiples of the same individual.

You should avoid particularly expensive cards wherever possible, in fact the chart shows how the cascade will suffer later in the game as its defenders become rapidly outclassed. The objective is to produce pull as quickly as possible, to win before others can get their decks into action properly.

This is a fairly simple deck idea, I have more complex ones but I will save them for future articles, I hope the deck idea and the evaluation and recording system will be of use to those who have begun playing only recently.

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