By Alex Brown

Were you ever playing a game with your friends when someone came over and asked: ‘Who’s winning?’ Sometimes the answer to that question is more complicated than you would think and what makes Huntik so much fun is that there are a number of ways of answering.  Card advantage is one of the easiest ways of working out quickly whether you are winning or losing based on the actions you and your opponent are making on the board. At the start of every game of Huntik, both players start with the same number of cards, and have access to the same card pool to build their decks. Breaking that equality is how you go about winning the game.

Card players generally refer to card advantage in terms of +1s and -1s (or plus ones and minus ones). A +1 is when you use less cards than your opponent to achieve the same or more on the board. A -1 is the opposite, when you have to use more cards than your opponent to achieve the same or lesser outcome than your opponent.  So if you add up your +1s and -1s from the start of the game, you can get a fair idea of how well you are doing depending on how high into the positive numbers you go!

Card advantage is based on the notion that every card you and your opponent has in their hand and their deck is useful. Sometimes you will look at your hand and have multiple Major Heroes or actions you can’t play and know that your hand isn’t that great. That’s why your hand is private - it keeps you and your opponent guessing. That’s one of the reasons the card advantage theory isn’t perfect; anytime your opponent has hidden cards or the ability to draw cards from their deck, you don’t know what to expect.

Let’s take a look at some cards that show what I have been talking about…

Our first example is the evil Free Action Darkwave. Darkwave allows you to KO any number of enemy heroes whose combined DEF value is 4 or less. You can use it to KO a single enemy hero that is 4DEF, but the real value comes from being able to KO multiple enemy heroes (either two heroes with 2DEF each, one with 3DEF and one with 1DEF, or other combinations that add up to 4DEF or less). When you use Darkwave to KO two enemy heroes, you have used one of your cards to negate two cards that belong to your opponent. You have achieved a +1 in card advantage!

The other method of achieving card advantage in Huntik is to use a bigger hero to KO a smaller hero without being KO’d itself, and a popular Good Major Hero for that is Caliban. Caliban is enormous with 8ATK and 6DEF, which means that he can safely move and start combats with enemy heroes who can only muster 5ATK or less. When this happens, Caliban survives the attack but his opponents are sent to the discard pile. If you control Caliban in this situation you have kept your hero on the board and your opponent has lost theirs; you have achieved a +1 in card advantage!

Bring in the Big Guns is an interesting Good card, as it allows you to launch surprise attacks from Zone 1 as well as to play more than one Major Hero in that turn. Still, you want to make the most of this card, because playing it is card disadvantage.  This might be hard to see at first, but Bring in the Big Guns costs you two cards: first, the card itself, and secondly, the hero you bring into play. Since getting that extra Major Hero or surprise attack into play comes at a cost, you suffer -1 in card advantage!

Neptunia is an Evil Minor Hero which at first glance has some interesting possibilities, as you can use it to remove the biggest threat on the table for at least a turn. Neptunia is also a minor hero, so it doesn’t hurt to just throw it down and see what happens. However, using the ability is actually card disadvantage, so you really want to make it count. Activating Neptunia means you are putting one of your cards in the discard pile, while your opponent is merely taking their hero back to their hand. If it is a Major Hero they may not have the chance to play again this turn, but it is still in their hand, so it is not an equal trade in card advantage terms. Activating Neptunia means you suffer -1 in card advantage!

Hopefully I have given you a varied enough sample of cards that show you how card advantage works in practice. Learning to appreciate the potential of cards to bring or lose you card advantage will enable you to more quickly understand when a card is good or not. Of course, there is more to the game than simply accumulating card advantage. In some circumstances cards like Bring in the Big Guns and Neptunia have other strengths that might be more important than simply being at a -1.

Winning games of Huntik is about Missions, not about who gets the most +1s or the least -1s. However, knowing how you are doing in terms of card advantage will help you determine how to approach your next action or your overall strategy. Card advantage is all about getting more out of your cards than your opponents and +1s and -1s are the simplest way of measuring that. Next time someone says ‘Who’s winning?’, card advantage theory will give you a better way of answering them.