A Player's Guide to Resource Management

By Zach Shepherd

In the Auto Assault Trading Card Game (AATCG), power is a resource used to hire mercenaries, enhance your vehicle’s gear, and make progress towards victory. So how does one best utilize power?

In AATCG, you receive power at the start of your main phase, and can potentially gain more through the use of cards played for the remainder of that phase. However, once your turn ends, the power is no more. With this in mind, you want to spend those points in the middle of the playmat more often than not – if you don’t use ‘em, you lose ‘em.

However, if there’s one thing that life has taught me, it’s that every rule has an exception. (Ok, maybe not every rule. You still can’t feed the apes at the zoo – it gives them gas.) Power should be used whenever possible, yes, but not at the expense of your other resource – cards. Cards come in limited supply, in that you’ll only be drawing so many every turn, so you can’t afford to be tossing them around if they’ll be immediately removed from play with no effect.

For example, it’s usually not advisable to play a unit on turn one if you’re going first – it will come into play swerved and unable to defend itself. Your opponent could easily drop a unit on his turn as well, wiping yours out before it has a chance to act. Wasting power is never a good thing, and this is especially true in the early turns. With this in mind, a similar mistake to avoid is playing a single unit with one armor at a mission by itself. Should the unit be attacked and lose, you’ll have no choice but to destroy it in most cases.

That’s not to say that a unit should never be played solo, however (once again, exceptions need be made at times). If your opponent is amassing an army at one mission, you can throw a single unit out – any unit at all – and it will keep the opponent’s forces at bay by acting as a roadblock between them and your vehicle (albeit temporarily). Your unit’s destruction may be inevitable, but that’s ok – it’s just a game, and these cards are very rarely linked to their controllers like voodoo dolls (we hope to eliminate the voodoo bug entirely in an upcoming patch – until then, don’t be surprised if you occasionally experience mild itching when your units take damage).

When a lone unit is used to block in this fashion, you’ve experienced a good helping of card advantage – a single one of your cards was able to stall several of your opponent’s. As noted earlier, cards are a resource, and having the resource advantage wins games.

The moral of the story is to ensure that you use as much power (your first resource) as possible, without wasting cards (your second resource) needlessly. After getting a few games under your belt, you’ll find the right balance that allows you to use all of your power on cards that will have a big impact on the current state of the game. Once this sacred harmony has been reached, you have my permission to celebrate in any way you see fit (so long as you’re safe about it – confetti is more dangerous than one would think).