Today we’re going to have a look at a moment from Arlie’s stream, when he had a big “Aha Moment.”
If you watch the video above, Arlie Shaban, our Brand Ambassador has a moment where the way the game clicks in his mind. He’s shown a combination when his opponent uses it against him, and rather than get tilted, he positively celebrates his new knowledge!
Power Up offers opportunities for strategy that are different to the poker strategy we all know and love. We’re all still in the stage of learning, developing our own ideas and thoughts on how this game is meant to be played.
As Arlie discovered, combining your actions and powers can be incredibly effective. What we need to discover is which powers synergise with each other. As Arlie discovered, you can use a power that allows you to either determine the top card on the deck, or just see what it is. Then either upgrading or reloading a card in your hand can be amazingly powerful as you know exactly what you are going to get!
There are other combinations of cards that appear to synergise well together. The video shows us Engineer and Upgrade, but that same situation also works with Engineer and Reload as the reload card works in the same way as Upgrade in this situation.
These two combinations allow you to heavily improve your odds of hitting your draws and tend to work better for hitting flushes than any other potential hand. Hitting one of your nine possible flush cards is always going to be easier than trying to find one of 4 cards for a straight draw, or even the 8 cards for an open ended straight draw.
Other combinations I like to use are playing either Scanner or Intel, finding a card you like on the top of the deck, and then protecting it with an EMP. I find this reduces the chances of your opponent taking away a card that improves your hand. It does suggest to your opponent that you have a strong hand, but that also allows you to bluff at big pots when an obvious draw is on the board. This does assume that your opponent can fold when they think they’re beat, so it’s of limited use right now.
The other major issue with these combos is the relative high energy cost. Playing two cards together of high cost will take at least 9 energy, and this particular combo taking 10 energy. With 15 being the current cap, it’s a massive investment in a single hand, so we’ll have to be careful about when we use it.
As we develop more strategies, more of these combos are going to be discovered, and we will have to work to understand how these powers work together, and when we want to use these rather expensive combos.
I’ll continue to look at these as I play my own game, and I’ll be getting together with Arlie to discuss strategy on a regular basis. We’ll obviously bring you the results of these musings in an easily digestible format! Have you had a moment where something in Power Up clicked for you? Let us know in the comment section below.
