ESSENCE

The math behind the numbers

This is a model of Essence, not Essence. It replaces the chain reaction with expected values so it can play thousands of games in the time one real game takes to shuffle. That trade is the whole point — and the whole caveat.

1 · A card becomes six numbers

Every printed card is read out of the card set and its abilities are summed into an expected-value row: cost, damage, progress, prevent, heal, progloss, draw. A card that reads “deal 3 damage” contributes 3 damage. A card that reads “roll a die, gain that much Progress” contributes 3.5 Progress — the mean of a d6, not a roll.

Conditional abilities are discounted by how often the condition is actually met in a typical four-to-six card chain:

These six weights are estimates, not measurements. They are the largest source of error in the model. If a deck's whole plan is conditional, treat its numbers as soft.

2 · A turn is spend-to-the-cap

Each seat gets Starting Essence and gains Ramp / turn up to Cap. The seat then commits the best affordable set of EV rows it can pay for, so a cheap high-output card gets played more often than an expensive one — the same pressure real deckbuilding applies. Leftover Essence can be burned into damage at Burn: Essence per Life. Turn variance jitters each turn's output so identical seats do not draw identical hands forever, and Deck asymmetry gives each seat a fixed quality roll at the start of the game — that is what produces blowouts.

3 · Damage and Progress are the two clocks

Damage reduces Life; at 0 the seat is out. Progress fills Loot Cards; fill them all and you win. Progress threshold is how much a single Loot Card needs (Per-card override lets you make them uneven, e.g. 6,8,10,12). Placement decides where Progress goes: Greedy top-off finishes the closest card first, Spread pushes every card evenly. Bundling lets a single turn's Progress overflow from a finished card onto the next. Ability-Progress share is the fraction of a card's damage that also counts as Progress — the rule that makes aggro advance both clocks at once.

4 · Defense is a tax, not an event

Negation and Prevent have no slot in an EV model, so they are folded into two knobs: Prevent frequency (how often an incoming hit is blunted) and Prevent magnitude (how much comes off). This is why a pure control deck reads badly here — the model gives it credit for surviving but nothing for winning. If a deck shows near-zero damage and near-zero Progress, the simulator flags it: it has no clock.

5 · Wall-clock is the softest number on the page

minutes = sec/turn × turns + sec/action × actions. Turn counts come out of the model; the two seconds figures are your assumptions until you stopwatch a real game. Trust the turn distribution, treat the minutes as calibrated guesses.

6 · Every run is reproducible

The simulator uses a seeded PRNG. Same Seed + same Games + same settings = byte-identical results, so when a number moves you know a setting moved it and not luck. Change the seed to check that a finding survives a different stream of randomness.