How to make and play with a defensive oriented deck.
Essentials
Defensive build is created around Zone Defense and Full Court Pressure.
The goal is to have a deck stuffed with defense cards. Zone Defense draws new cards when you play them and Full Court Pressure gives you extra stamina as many cards like Deflection and Foul only cost 1 and Steals give you 3 extra stamina and card draw.
You can also upgrade Full Court Pressure with Energy Drink to get even more stamina per played card.
The goal of this build is to get free card draw and stamina from defense cards and then play Shots to score. If you can, you should use Free Agent, Cleanup and Post Up to remove Passes and Rebounds.
Preparation
Also, another problem is that Zone Defense can be removed easily via Full Court Pass, Pump Fake and Up and Under. So you need high stamina to keep stacking it back.
What works in almost every run is getting Mastermind Coach.
In order for Mastermind Coach to work, you need to play it while Zone Defense is in your draw pile. This can be 50% chance per shuffle. To make it certain at the start of the match you can use Show and Go and play it right away to get Mastermind Coach and play it on Zone Defense.
You might want to play additional Mastermind Coach cards on Full Court Pressure and Double Team, so better create copies with Signature Move and/or Old School.
Playing a match
The focus of defensive build is to keep your opponent from scoring as much as you can by stuffing their deck with Deflections and Free Throws and removing their shots with Bricks. Any remaining shots get Blocked.
Having multiple fouls and deflections in your deck is a good thing because it gives you free draw and stamina when you play them and the opponent has to shoot Free Throws instead of playing more effective cards from their deck. A hand with 7 free throws costs 21 stamina to play and gives only 7 points, while a hand with a mix of other cards can easily mean 15-20 points for only 5-6 stamina in mid-to-late game.
If you can get a draw upgrade for Zone Defense in some of the post game events, it becomes OP as drawing 2 or 3 cards for every defense means you can recycle deflections and double teams, throwing multiple Bricks in opponent deck per turn.
You should use Free Agent and Cleanup to remove Passes, Rebounds and Shots which aren’t Unstoppable from your deck. The less non-defense cards you have, the better. Remember, we don’t want to score much, we just want to obstruct the opponent and score only with Unstoppable shots.
Floater is unstoppable and draws a card, allowing you to keep rotating your defenses.
Clog the Paint is another zero cost defense which can create major problems for the opponent, especially if you can stack up 2 or 3 of those at the same time.
Final word
Keep Defenses, unstoppable Shots and cards used for set up (Signature Move, Show and Go, Mastermind Coach, Old School) and eliminate everything else. This is especially important in late game where you have limited cards to play per turn, so playing a bunch of rebounds is useless. Also, draw cards like Substitution, 6th man and Assistant Coach just limit your defensive ability. You already have great card draw via Zone Defense and you want your deck to be thin so you can do Deflections and Double Teams more often.
Stacked Team cards like Clutch, Persistence or Analytics are also alright, but probably not required. I’d say they are net neutral, although on the highest difficulty they might be even net positive is the opponent is aggressive with Hindrances.
Other than those, the only card I would recommend keeping around is Up And Under, as it can eliminate opponent stack quickly. Especially if you have upgraded card draw for Zone Defense to 2+, you can sometimes play it multiple times on your turn.
And that wraps up our share on Clutchtime™: Basketball Deckbuilder: Defensive build. If you have any additional insights or tips to contribute, don’t hesitate to drop a comment below. For a more in-depth read, you can refer to the original article here by Bigosaur, who deserves all the credit. Happy gaming!