If both players see them and play them, then how's it an advantage to have them upgraded? Why? What is the point?

Is it just for the emotional boost of "yay, I got a slightly nicer card!" that's balanced by the emotional downer of "darn, my work upgrading just got a nicer card for my opponent to exploit!"

Or is there some gameplay advantage to upgrading, that I'm missing?

DewiMorgan wrote: »

If both players see them and play them, then how's it an advantage to have them upgraded? Why? What is the point?

Is it just for the emotional boost of "yay, I got a slightly nicer card!" that's balanced by the emotional downer of "darn, my work upgrading just got a nicer card for my opponent to exploit!"

Or is there some gameplay advantage to upgrading, that I'm missing?

Your opponent may not necessarily know what to look out for with the upgraded cards. That being said, if the card appears and you can buy it, its an advantage to you - it just comes with the risk that your opponent can buy it as well. There is definitely more advantage to it, but it is a risk-reward situation.

On top of that, you want your decks to be as efficient as possible. Over time, you will become more proficient with some colours, understanding what works well with each other, so you want to give yourself the best advantage there by having the most efficient cards available.

So, as long as your opponent focuses their purchases on cards from the decks they selected in the deck-selection phase, and their selected decks aren't upgraded, you'll get an advantage if you focus on your own selected decks, which have been upgraded.

This assumes that the decks people select are the decks you plan to base your strategy around, which tends not to be true for me, at least. That'll change my deck-selection strategy slightly, then.

For example, I'd been avoiding selecting my Duke of Crows, even though I like it, since I know my opponent is pretty much guaranteed to select it too, so I'd considered it a "wasted selection".

And while I will select Rajhin, the Purring Liar, I tend to select it second , since if my opponent has Rajhin, they'll tend to play that first, which tells me something about them.

But if I plan to make Duke of Crows central to my strategy, then selecting my own, fully-upgraded deck will give me very slightly more powerful cards there. If my opponent is focusing on other decks and avoiding this one, that will give me a slight advantage... but perhaps not as large an advantage as controlling which non-Crow packs are selected.

Or perhaps I'm getting a bit too Princess Bride's Vizzini about it all... and I'm sure my opponents will have spent the last few years developing an immunity to upgraded decks, anyway.