
The opponent had two routes – play into Tidal Wave or play single allies that get bounced by a Retreat/Banish or get locked by Jasmine Rosecult.

She had no consistent way of dealing high damage (like a Mage’s Fireball) or instant death (like a Rogue’s Assassinate) to an opposing ally but the constant knowledge of Tidal Wave kept opponents at bay. In Dark Prophecies (DP) and especially in COTC, Zhanna had no autoloss conditions using a standard deck – featuring The King’s Pride (TKP), Retreat, Healing Touch (HT), and Focused Prayer (FP) while mixing in Tainted Oracle (TO), Elizabeth Winterborn (EW), and Wizent’s Staff (WS) for draw. Zhanna has been my favorite hero since I started playing in the early days of Call Of The Crystals (COTC). For this reason, if drawing a Jack of Spades will make me win, I want to minimize the size of my deck. If I increase the deck size to 10, my probability will drop to 1/10. If I have 1 Jack of Spades shuffled in a deck of 4 cards, and I draw one, then I’ll have a probability of 1/4 to draw that Jack of Spades. Smaller Deck = better chance of getting target card The most important thing to know about it is that it is tied to deck size, number of matching cards within the deck, and number of cards drawn.


The math behind figuring out the probability of drawing a single card in a deck is complex (you can read about it here). But it’s not always true, and to understand those exceptions (like 80 card Garth decks) you need to first understand the rule. So, if you want to draw fireball consistently, you should have 4 copies of fireball in a 40 card deck. This is the prevailing wisdom in most trading card games and generally holds true for Shadow Era. In order to have a competitive deck – your deck needs to have the minimum number of cards possible and the maximum number of key cards.
