Harry Potter Card of the Week
with Alex Rockwell

07.31.02  Card of the Week: Lessons!

General strategy, Having enough lessons, Card drawing, Some interesting and potentially problem cards, and two House Rules which I think would help out the game of HP.

Well, I wanted to do something a little different for this card of the week. I wanted to talk about some issues that players face when building decks, and deciding which cards to include, some interesting cards which I see as potential future problems, and a couple of House Rules which I thik help out the game of HP. Therefore, my card of the week this week is a simple card you've all seen and know: Lessons! All 5 of them :)


First of all, Steve Vander Ark wrote an article on deckbuilding for the Pojo featured articles section (7/29/2002) in which he makes some important points. Primarily, he points out that he was losing a lot of games because he had big cost cards in his hand and insufficient lessons, so he changed his strategy. I think that this is a problem which many players of the HP card game have, specifically, that they just don't play enough lessons.
The second part of this problem is that they use too many actions to draw cards.
Lets first look at using actions to draw cards:

The use of an action to draw a card in effect deals 1 damage to you, and prevents you from playing as many cards. Ideally, one would like to use as few actions to draw as possible, and use 2 actions a turn to play spells, creatures, and so on. To avoid running out of cards to play, cards such s Photo Album, Loop-the-loops, and card drawers are very helpful. Once you have played a photo album, you are effectively drawing 2 cards a turn, and can thus play 2 cards a turn. Some of these will be lessons, which will be helpful for awhile, until you reach your lesson maximum, after which you will want more 'real' cards. There are two main ways to get around this problem. One is to use more card drawers. For example, if you play Halloween feasts, you can use an action to get up to 4 creatures back, which will take you 4 actions to play. This should enable you to play 2 real spells/cards per turn for many turns. Another way to avoid the problem (again, our problem is, for example, that we need to make the most out of our draws, and try to use 2 actions to play non-lessons whenever possible, after we reach our required lesson maximum), another way to avoid using too many actions to draw is to make a deck which will always require the play of more lessons. This is the effect of Forbidden Corridor in the decks I have posted the previous two weeks. By causing you to continually discard cards from play, primarily lessons, you will be able to (with a photo album so you draw 2 cards a turn), play 2 cards every single turn without running out. That could be: A lesson to replace the one you sacrificed to the corridor, and a creature or spell. Your opponent will be in more trouble, since they wont be drawing as many cards as you with your photo album, and they will be forced to use actions to draw (probably). Any turn they use an action to draw, they are losing ground on you.

That is generally the case almost any time. Whenever your opponent uses an action to draw a card, they lose ground on you, and you have more time to get out more creatures, deal more damage, or destroy their cards in play. Conversely, any time you use an action to draw, you are losing time on your opponent, giving them the upper hand. (Or allowing the momentum to shift back in their direction, if you had the upper hand).

This is why lesson destroying cards are so good. They make it so your opponent cant play their cards until they can draw and play more lessons. If they don't have enough in their hand (which is likely, especially if you destroy several lessons), then they will be forced to use actions to draw cards. This puts them further behind. Now you can play creatures which will deal damage every turn, and sit back and work on destroying even more of the lessons they play out. If you can stall your opponent for several turnsthrough this method, and get out several creatures, then chances are that your opponent will never be able to recover. This is the basis of many of the popular lesson destruction/creature decks which exist.

Now, what is the best way to avoid this? How do you give yourself a good chance of not having to use many actions to draw cards? You play some card drawing cards, and you play enough lessons. I would include any of the following types of cards in 'card drawing cards': Photo album and other cards which give you a draw every turn (Of which I believe Photo Album to be the best, as it costs only 5, and gives you a card without condition, such as support banner. However, support banner is a good choice for non-charms quiddich decks. Second, you can use spells which give you several cards. Good examples of this are loop-the-loops, which gives 4 cards and deals damage, cards like hufflepuff match, which will give you 5 cards if you win, and so on. Also, the feast cards which give you up to four cards from your discard are in this category, since you can get 4 good, playable, non lesson cards, which will take up 4 more actions to play. That's several turns for which you wont need to use actions to draw. These cards require that you build your deck around them to work however. Finally, you can use cards which give you a free draw. Examples of this are cards like Bewitched Snowballs (3 damage to player or creature and a free draw), Hedwig (a 1/2 creature and a card of your choice from the discard), Switching spell (destory an item and then draw an item of your choice from your deck), and so on. These 'one draw' cards allow you to make full use of 2 actions on your turn, without having to use an action to draw, since you get to use an action to cast a spell, then an action to cast the card you drew from it. (The spell you get should of course do something good, to be worth the action)

Anyway, that's card drawing. Next, the importance of having enough lessons. This is an area I cant stress enough. The number of lessons (including lesson producing items) you use will (or should) depend on how many lessons you need in order to reach your highest cost spells. It is not good to play one card (ore 4 of one type of card) which costs 10, and have no other cards costing more than 7 lessons. This is because most of the time you wont be able to cast your big spell. In order to get enough for it, you will need to play 3 more lessons, and these lessons will only benefir you for playing that one big spell. So if you are going to go up to 10 lessons, then you should make it worth it by playing several spells of that range. This is the problem with very high lesson cost decks. Generally, either the high cost spell is not worth playing several extra lessons for, or you have lots of high costs spells, so you need many lesosns, so you don't have much left in your deck, and get killed quickly before you can get up to your needed lesson total. This is why decks which have high lesson costs require cards such as Wand shop, Dragon Heart wand or Phoenix feather wand, and/or Cauldrons. Without these cards which provide several lessons, you wont make it to 10 in time. Even with these cards, you should still play a number of lessons, I would recommend at least 24 lessons in addition to around 8 multiple lesson producing cards for decks needing 10-12 lessons. Often these decks are vunerable to disruption (disruption meaning: "your opponent using cards which destroy your cards in play, especially your lesson producers"), because if you play a Wand Shop and your opponent destroys it with their location, or you play a wans or cauldron and your opponent destroys it with Lost Notes, Picking on Neville, or Switching Spell (or etc…), then you wont have enough lessons to do anything until you play another.

For this reason I generally find these large lesson cost decks quite difficult to make and vulnerable. However, the can work if done correctly. The moral of the story is however, don't expect to be able to play a Bulgeye potion against an experiecned player using a deck with 20 lessons and 4 cauldrons, it wont happen, you'll be dead long before you can play it.

I generally would think that for a deck with a maximum lesson cost of 5, that you need 20-24 lessons. Also, you would hopefully have some method of discarding extra lessons, such as by using Flitwick's ability. (The ability to discard cards for good effect is something I wish there was more oh in HP) For example, we could have the following deck:


Professor Flitwick

21 Care of Magical Creatures
4 Borrowed Wand

4 Quintaped
4 Marble Gargoyle
4 Cunning Fox
4 Cobra Lily
4 Black Bat
4 Boa Constrictor

4 Bewitched Snowballs
3 Stream of Flames

4 Halloween Feast

Try this deck out for yourself!!!!!
Play it against your friends and see how it does! Most of the cards are easy to get, but if you don't have them, replace them with the most similar cards you can.

This deck simply plays as many creatures as it can as fast as possible, destroys opponent's creatures, and uses Halloween feast to get its creatures back and continue to be able to pump out creatures, without having to draw lots of cards. The lesson count is sufficient to support the required 5 lessons, in most cases.

I had a 13 game win streak online at Pojo's Harry Potter league, using apprentice, and about half of those games were against players ranked in the top 20.

However, this decks is not without its weaknesses, as is the case with pretty much all low lesson cost decks. Cards which are very good against this decks include Fumos, Transfiguration Test and Transfiguration Exam (provided sufficient speed to 10 lessons to play it). Because this deck has no disruption of its own, it cannot do anything if an opponent plays a wand shop, large wand or cauldron, or whatever, or even 2 or 3 of the above, gets to a large number of lessons and starts casting spells such as Transfiguration Exam, Obliviate, Potions Exam, Potions Class Disaster, and other such power spells.

So I often like to play with a more balanced deck, which has answers for various cards my opponent might play, yet also tries to keep me from using too many actions to draw cards. This could be something like the Forbidden Corridor deck I posted last week. I generally find that for a deck with a lesson requirement of 7-8 I like to have 24-26 lessons and 4 borrowed wands (or dragon heart wands if possible and I need 8), in addition to a character which provides a lesson (such as Minerva McGonagall). I have also found that when playing Madam Rolanda Hooch, I can generally play a couple less lessons, since I usually use her to get a Comet 260 or similar brrom, which basically means I am drawing 1 lesson more than I otherwise would at the beginning. (So its easier to draw enough to get to 8, or whatever I need, so I can put a couple less lessons in my deck)


A final way to help us to spend fewer actions drawing cards is to include cards on our deck which are good, but which have a much lower lesson cost that our maximum. For example, in a charms/transfiguration/creature deck requiring 7-8 lessons for various creatures or big spells, we could also play 4-5 lesson cost cards such as Picking on Neville, Lost Notes, Bewitched Snowballs, Photo Album, Quintaped, Marble Gargoyle, or so forth. We play these cards first, when we get to 4-5 lessons, hoping that this will buy us a turn or two during which we will get to draw more cards (from the start of turn draw), which could be lessons. This way, we will have to spend less actions drawing to get to the lesson count we require.


So anyway: I think generally that the following lesson numbers are required to build decks with the following lesson maximums. Keep in mind that decks which have many cards lower that the lesson maximum, or have good ways to draw cards (Photo album, loop-the-loops), or good ways to produce several extra lessons (Wand Shop), could use less lessons than this. I consider Books to be equivalent with lessons for this purpose (provided you can play them).

Also, I assume that the starting character you use is already providing a lesson.

4 lessons required: 20-22 lessons needed in deck
5 lessons required: 24 needed (or 20 + 4 Borrowed Wand or equivalent)
6 lessons required: 22 lessons + 4 multiple lesson producers such as Borrowed Wand, Quiddich Pitch, etc.
7-8 lessons required: 24-26 lessons + 4-6 multiple lesson producers, possibly with some of those lesson producers producing 3, such as Dragon Heart wand.
10 lessons required: 24+ lessons and 8 multiple lesson providers, including cards which produce 3 or more extra lessons such as Wand Shop.
12 lessons required: 24+ lessons and 8+ multiple lesson providers, almost certainly including Wand Shop, Phoenix Feather Wand, etc.


These requirements are based on the typical deck. If you create a deck which has alternate or unusual ways to get out lessons, that may change things. If you use Hermione as your character, that can change things, as can using Draco Malfoy, Slitherin.

Generally, when playing your deck, look at how many times you use actions to draw, especially during the opening 5 turns or so. If you are drawing a fair amount, then put more lessons in your deck and see if you win more.

So that's my card of the week on lessons, and the importance of putting enough of them in your deck. This article has two more parts, so keep reading if you want... :)


Now, on to the second part of this article. I would like to note that I think it is amazing that none of the cards which have been produced for the Harry Potter card game can be considered so good that they required banning. I think that this is very amazing, and that WOTC should be commended for this. I was afraid when Gringott's Vault Key came out that it would be 'broken', but it was not. The reason for this is that there are no combinations of two cards which are so powerful that they can win the game outright. This has been the case in many other collectible card games, including Magic the Gathering, in which there were many cards which would allow you to search your deck and take whatever card you wanted, or draw huge numbers of cards, as well as combinations of two cards which would win the game outright, sometimes immediately! This has caused cards in Magic the Gathering to have had restriction placed on them and to be banned, as well as created situations where you could literally watch your opponent play for over 10 minutes, performing their 'combination', while you sit there and wait to see if they fizzle or if they kill you. These generally go like this: "I use this to draw lots of cards, taking damage in the process. I use this other thing to give myself lots of life again. Now I draw lots more cards. Now I use this thing to give myself more mana (equivalent in HP to giving yourself a bunch of new actions to do more stuff), now I use that to give myself more life, then I use that to draw more cards, and so on, and son on, until your opponent has ammased a mountain of resources and cards such that they can play some huge enourmous spell or spells and win instantly. Needless to say, this is very frustrating to someone playing against them. I remember one prominent magic player as having been quoted: "I don't even want to have to LOOK at my opponent's side of the board!", meaning that they wanted to have a deck with some such combination so powerful and fast that they didn't even have to worry about what their opponent did, they could still do their combination and win no matter what.

Luckily, Harry Potter is not like that, and I hope it will stay that way. One thing that Wizards has done to ensure this is to put qualifiers on many potentailly problem cards, such as the Money cards (you may only play one per turn), the Healing cards, (they cant get other healing cards back), and so forth. If the money cards didn't have the 'play one per turn' rule, then you could do the following: Turn one of combination: Play Galleon. Turn 2 (with 5 actions): Play Christmas Feast, taking all 4 galleons from my discard (some got their due to damage), play all 4. Next turn: I have 14 actions, play christmas feast, play 4 galleons, do 9 other things, including using a healing spell to put christmas feasts back into my deck and drawing them again, and so on.

If Christmas Feast did not say " take 4 NON-HEALING items from your discard, then that would be a huge problem, as you could get back 4 Silver Unicorn Horns, or whatever, and then use them to get back the Christmas Feast.

Similarly, the card Good Night's sleep is a healing card. If this was not the case, you could use it on Snape or Madam Pomfrey, use their ability to put it and other cards back in your deck, and repeat indefinitely.

So as of now, there are no problems. However, there are a few potential problems. First of all, there is Ollivanders. This card from the base set (when they werent thinking that there would ever be a Healing Item), states that you can take any item from your discard to your hand. That means you can take either a Unicorn Horn or a Philosopher's stone from your discard to your hand, use it to get Ollivanders back, and repeat forever. This is not a problem at the time being however, since Philosophers stone is so expensive and costs 3 actions to play and use, (if you get 15 lessons to play it, you deserve to win), and Silver Unicorn Horn is 2 lessons to play and use for 8 points of healing. Including the action from Ollivanders, that 3 actions to heal 8 points which isnt so good that it's a problem. (Yes, that IS a way to get back a healing card and resuse it infinitely, for any of you who didn't know about it. And no, it doesn't cheat, I have tried to break it. Of course, don't let me stop you from trying...)

However, if an item card is ever made which can heal a large number of points much faster, this could be a problem.

Secondly, there is Spiral Dive. This card can make a cute combo deck involving Diagon Alley and Draco's Trick. You play the Alley. You solve it with the Trick, you draw all but 1 card, you cast Spiral Dive for the win. The problem is that you must have not taken much more damge than your opponent, and that it takes awhile to play it all. In addition, if your opponent uses McGonagall, they can destroy the first Diagon Alley you play.

If a card or 2 card combination is ever made which allows us to more easily and quickly draw our whole deck, then there is a huge problem, since Gringott's Vault key can get whatever card we need, we do the combo and draw our deck, and then we will automatically have drawn Spiral Dive, and we cast it for the win.

While there are a couple potential problems, right now everything is great, and WOTC should be commended for not making and broken cards. I hope they will keep in mind the lessons learned from certain magic cards in the past, and not print cards which allow these sort of decks to be made.


Finally, the third part of this article: Two possible 'house rules' to the game of Harry Potter which I think should exist and even be part of the official rules. (If only I had the power to makethem so). These are rules which are adopted from Magic the Gathering, which were not original rules of that game but were added to make the game more fair.

First of all, the player who goes first in Harry Potter has a huge advantage, They basically have a card and 2 action advantage over their opponent. This means that the chance of the second player winning, with evenly matched decks, is well under 50%, I would say its probably 40%, for the average evenly matched decks. For fast decks with creatures and lots of lesson destruction, it is even less.

If anyone has ever faced an opponent who went: Turn 1: Lesson, Lesson. Turn 2: Borrowed Wand, Marble Gargoyle. They know how sever going second can be. Against this play, if you don't have a Borrowed Wand of your own, (or play Vermillious at 4 lessons, as your second action of turn 2), then you cannot kill the Gargoyle on your next turn. Your opponent can then proceed to play Lost Notes, Picking on Neville, and other such cards and kill your lessons, or those plus cards like Stream of Flames or Bewitched Snowballs on any creatures you play. They can continue to do this and put out more creatures, and you will probably be to far behind to do anything about it at that point. I have done this myself, and also suffered from it, and its is very powerful, and very frustrating for the second player. Generally, if the second player get s a below-average hand, such as a hand with a below average number of lessons, and they don't have enough, they will have to use actions to draw cards, and fall even farther behind. From then, its very hard to come back against a good opponent.

So, I believe that in Harry Potter there should be the same rule there is in Magic the Gathering, namely, the player who goesfirst does not draw a card at the start of their initial turn. This would at least make it somewhat more fair for the second player, as the first player will be more likely to need to draw to get enough lessons, slowing them down so they cannot overwhelm the second player as often.


Secondly, everyon knows the agony of drawing a hand with 1 or no lessons. Against a good player, who drew a decnet hand, this is basically death. You will spend a couple turns drawing cards to get lessons, and you wont be able to come back. While this is better than in Magic, where if you don't draw the equivalent of lessons, you just lose since you can draw only 1 card per turn, it is still very bad.
So I would propose that we Harry Potter players adopt the rule which was indroduced in Magic to fix this: namely, the mulligan rule. This rule states that if you do not like your initial hand, you may discard it, shuffle your deck, and draw 1 less card that you did before. (So draw 6). If you don't like that hand you can draw a new 5 card hand, and so on. This adds a significant amount of skill in determining whether to keep your drawn hand, and gives a chance for recovery in cases where you drew a 0 or 1 lesson hand.

With these two rules, a lot of the luck of the initial draw and die roll is eliminated , and the game is more balanced and skill based. The two rules listed above came into practice in magic the gathering primarily due to player popularity. If everyone playing Harry Potter were to adopt them as house rules, they would probably be incorporated into the official rules as well.


Anyway, that's all my thoughts for this week. I decided to write this because I couldn't come up with a card to feature for the week, and there were some other things I wanted to talk about that would be more helpful to many people (like using enough lessons!!!)

Next week I plan to write about: "The wierdest deck you've ever seen". And yes, next week I will focus on a card :)

Until then,

Alex