So I finally got around to sitting down to put together my first Black Sails deck.  60 cards … that means a 30-card draw deck.  Figure a 5 card setup; by your first draw phase, you've seen 14 cards = almost half of the draw deck.  Of you draw 3 cards per turn thereafter, you've decked yourself by plot 6.  Sounds like sacrilege, but is anyone putting 70-80 cards in a Black Sails deck?

Vaapad said:

FYP

Ha.  Fine, lets start there

Vaapad said:

I think the math winds up being that for every card you expect to draw, reveal, whatever from your deck beyond the standard two cards drawn means you should have 2 more cards in your deck.

So if you build a deck that draws 1 card a turn, extrapolate that to how many turns you expect a game to last (I usually go with 7 - 9) and you should probably add 14 - 18 cards to your deck.

I plan on trying an 80 card with this agenda.  In addition to the threat of decking yourself, I feel that the cardpool is getting big enough (and therefore containing more good/power cards to stuff in) that there's less risk of drawing junk with a bigger deck.  On the other hand managing the resource curve in a black sails deck seems like it could be quite tricky.  Do I up the proportion of resource locations accordingly with deck size or keep it at a more standard 8-10 and risk most of them ending up in the hold (or conversely most of them ending up in the draw deck and oversaturating it)?

I don't think we'll see many competitive decks going over 60. You trade deck efficiency for the small chance your games will go over sixish plots and that the missed draw will significantly impact the game. The vast majority of games I play are either finished by plot six or one player has it sewn up. We might see more emphasis on recursion effects over draw though.