Late last year I began exploring a new collectible card game called Sorcery: Contested Realm. There are two primary
resources needed to play cards in the game: mana and threshold. Threshold is a mechanic which counts the
number of elemental attributes of Site cards on your board. Spell cards may require a certain amount of
threshold present to be played. Browse, for example, costs 1 mana but requires 3 Air threshold.
In March of 2025 I wanted to modify the deck I'd been using at weekly Sorcery events by adding a third
element. The more elements to balance in a deck, the less consistent it will perform. My deck wanted to have
a particular threshold amount by turn four. I intuitively made changes to the Site deck, but a question
lingered:
What was the actual probability I would get Air, Earth, Earth, Water threshold on turn four?
The App
The finished product
The culmination of work started by that question came to be a Node app. It prompts the user with the type of
criteria needed, and parses a user-provided text list using a downloaded dump of Sorcery card data. There are
flags for different options: calculation vs simulation, additional card draws, etc.
Oh and that original question? Turns out the probability of my deck getting the perfect threshold on turn four is
~33%. A single mulligan brings that to 62%, tossing two Sites increases it to 78%, and a full mulligan of the
site hand is roughly 87%.
This project was a fun adventure, and my Sorcery decks have a stronger showing because of it. Feel free to check
it out on Github.
