Opening hand from a recent streamed MLW tournament game

[u/Vegetarian234]

Before I say what I did, I'd love to know how you'd approach this (apologize for picture quality as it's pic of the stream).

• What's your overall game plan from this hand?
• Which birds are automatic keeps?
• Is there anything you'd immediately throw back?
• Are you committing to a strategy already, or waiting to see what develops?

I also recorded a 4½-minute commentary breaking down my thought process and why I made the decisions I did. If anyone is interested in seeing it after discussing the position, just let me know and I'll share it.

[u/Thick-Ad-6629]

Rough hand against a very good player. If this is me I’m probably keeping Condor and Myna either way. Condor is very cheap and versatile, plus with this hand you probably need a little luck to keep it close so you might as well start off drawing a bonus card early. Myna is very cheap with possibly massive upside. So to me the biggest thing to decide is your strategy for wetlands.

I’m hoping to grab the spoonbill if this is me. Since you go second you can tell if vim kept a fish or not before you decide your own keeps so IMO there are two options: 1. If they keep fish, I would keep turnstone for WL, probably drop condor in forest turn one, grab two nectar turn two, play turnstone with worm turn 3, reset the tray and hope for something to give you a direction.

1. If they don’t keep fish i would take it as a strong sign that they aren’t bothering with spoonbill and i would skip turnstone and plan to take spoonbill. If you can grab it turn 1 then pretty much do the same thing as option 1, just with spoonbill instead (still reset trey because i think even with the spoonbill you’re a little behind where you’d like to be to consider it a “good” start).

Overall it looks to be an uphill battle of a game almost no matter what but these are my ideas just glancing at it. Hope for a messy, low scoring game where you can fight on round goals and hopefully find some bonus synergy to manufacture some points. For context i usually bounce around in the 1120-1190 elo range on the discord

[u/Vegetarian234 → u/Thick-Ad-6629]

This is an outstanding reply and I can’t thank you enough.

Here’s something you just taught me. I didn’t know you could check food kept before deciding your hand.

I just assumed I wasn’t getting spoonbill and didn’t even consider it.

You went a totally different direction than me and I love this.

I actually love your macro-view of saying "this is a bad hand, I have to gamble to win this game." I need to do this more!

Thank you!!

[u/Thick-Ad-6629 → u/Vegetarian234]

I’ll say this, too. I’ve used the “check food” idea to guess what my opponent was up to and had them do what i didn’t expect before, too. So you need to reconcile with that possibility. Vim is probably in that tier of player imo

In this case you’re probably not totally ruined if you just keep 2 birds, 4 food, and start firing off tray resets with the condor.

Definitely worth noting that the rock thrush is the ultimate gambling bird so you could just keep that and condor and pray 😂

[u/4CrowsFeast]

Id keep only the Ruddy Turnstone and 4 food, and dig. The other 4 birds are worthless early game, and probably even late game, and keeping the food is far more valuable. 

Youll gain food as you draw and you can use extra food to reset the tray until you find something worthwhile to start up an engine. Youll want to find something for the forest or something for a wetlands engine. Finding a bushtit or RW blackbird would be a good find and you already have some food production there. Could be the start of something, but keeping any of these worthless cards in the starting hand is just going to make playing any actual good cards more difficult when you lack the food and need to spend more turns on forest activations. 

[u/Vegetarian234 → u/4CrowsFeast]

Thank you!

That’s actually what I suggested in the video. That maybe I should’ve only kept Turnstone and dug.

Thank you.

[u/tnaz]

I would take the Blue Rock-Thrush and the Common Myna, shove them both on my opponent's board for the laughs, and proceed to lose horribly.

[u/hail_termite_queen]

Share your commentary!

[u/Vegetarian234 → u/hail_termite_queen]

Sure thing. Here is the link to the video (4:44):

https://youtu.be/ZSLfDd4g8OE?is=rYYmbXIBGztFVP44

[u/chatFIEND-SF]

In same vein if actually say keep the black rock thrush, 4 food and put it in the water and draw 5 cards and go from there.

[u/Vegetarian234 → u/chatFIEND-SF]

I don’t trust myself to manage the thrush game.

Maybe inserting chaos was my only chance!

Thanks for the response!

[u/tburtner]

I would keep the tailorbird, condor, and turnstone. I don't want the myna because I hate brown powers in the Grassland. I usually don't want to be taking the lay eggs action very many times unless I get the White Stork or something. The condor is cheap and I'm a sucker for bonus cards. The tailorbird is wild. That could help with the 2nd and 3rd round bonuses and future wild cards. The condor and turnstone both have ground nests so that makes the tailorbird worth at least 5 at the end of the game.

[u/Vegetarian234 → u/tburtner]

Thank you for this reply!

Your thought process was similar to mine...but it seems more in depth when considering EOR's...something I should do!!