TCGs a great form of entertainment

Tomorrow the Microjocs World of Warcraft (WoW) Trading Card Game (TCG) league starts!
If you don't know what TCGs are and you work on the entertainment industry I highly recommend you to spend some time looking into this form of entertainment.

The first TCG was Magic: The Gathering. It was designed by Richard Garfield who earned a Ph.D. in combinatorial mathematics from Penn in 1993. As you'll see Maths and combinatorial mathematics have lots to do with TCGs.

TCGs, aside of being a great form of entertainment, are one of the best ways to monetize entertainment that I know: great viral spread combined with micropayments. There are many reasons why I find this form of entertainment specially interesting but rather than describing those I'll summarize a set of game play tricks that may help you at winning some competitons.

1) Average games run from 6 to 9 turns. So a total of 20 cards (7 at the start of the game, 9 at the start of each turn, plus extra 4 via quests/others) will be dealt at turn 10. That means players will only play 33% of their cards on each game and that if you have to plan your game at no more than 9 turns ahead.

2) You can compute the probability of a card being drawed in a game by doing the following basic computation:
numberOfCardsLikeTheDesiredOneInTheDeck*(100/TotalNumberOfCardsInTheDeck)

3) You can compute how likely are you to draw an specific card at any given time by performing what is called hypergeometric distribution analysis. To do this you can use Excel.
Example 1:

=hypergeomdist(2,7,8,60)
This will give you the probability of drawing 2 cards at the start of the game when you draw 7 cards in a row, if you have 8 cards of that same type in a deck of 60.
Example 2:
=hypergeomdist(1,1,4,53)
This gives you the probability of drawing a card which is repeated 4 times in the deck after the you have drawed the first 7 cards and none was of that desired type.

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Comments

Damia vs Manel

Tell me when are you going to play your game, so i will try to spy you both to get advantage from you!!!!