Enthon's BigWin Hockey

Impact Card Check

A look behind the secrets of

Impact Cards and Combos

Big Win Hockey was beside Soccer the most interesting sport to analyse the “real” influence and interaction of big impact cards on game results. I can’t really say why. but from all different sports I conducted this exercise in the past three months Hockey was the most tricky one. During the initial phase some cards provided temporarily stunning outcomes and at other times just consistently terrible results. It took me almost two months and more as 600 game entries into my database to reach a good level of certainty about the impact values later discussed in this article. 

Generally Hockey includes a fair number of good common or so called “blue” impact cards as well as a number of fairly even valuable more pristine “gold” cards. Anyway, I like to start with an overview about all cards and there designated impact on the game play based on card description and match review. I know this might be not so interesting for experienced players, but because of the additional database analysis results consideration in one or the other case, the majority of the gamers out there might be a still surprised. The Hockey game stats delivered at the end of each game do unfortunately not deliver too much valuable information about the match itself and as for Soccer I had to watch a number of matches to confirm database results in last instance.

As for Football and Soccer I grouped the 13 available impact cards in Defense and Offense supporting. Please note at this point that my general rule of playing always two offensive and one defensive oriented cards does not really apply for Hockey as for instance to Basketball, Soccer or Football. I found lots of combinations (combos) with two defensive cards which worked very well especially in difficult Amateur Tournaments. So, stay open for a bit of a strategy change in Big Win Hockey.

OK, let’s have a look on the impact cards in Big Win Hockey:

As you can see from the table above I wasn’t able to identify a counter effect card for “Puck Luck” at all and certainly there is no such card for “Injury Free”. Furthermore “Recovery” seems to have no opposite card but is to a certain level restricted in efficiency by “Sharpshooter”.

Behind the scenes - Big Win Hockey Game Engine

Howdy fellow Big Win Hockey Fans! As you know I am playing the Hockey App for quite a while and made it up to the top ten for All-Time Trophies. I also started, as for all other sports, some months ago my big impact card review using detailed match data of approximately 800+ matches mainly collected after the major update. To date I have not finished this work for good reason – The outcome is just not conclusive because of an 80% random character of the result calculation.

Well, all of us playing Big Win Sports Apps learned to live with upset losses but also tried to figure out which card combos might give us a reasonable advantage. Furthermore we all are thinking that a better team with higher rating will give us surely more wins too. Saying this and going for a bit strategic match play across your daily tournaments will get us to success. This works to a certain extend in Basketball and for now in the newest Soccer update too, but does it work in Hockey? – No, not at all! My analysis and experience on the daily battlefield shows a completely random result calculation by the Hockey engine, ignoring for the majority of the time the cards you have played, the expected higher influence of gold impact cards at all and finally just do not know the difference between a 74 and a 97 rated team.

It is annoying to lose almost half of your matches playing opponents without cards put on at all and 15-30 points lower rated as your own team. Well, this is how Hothead tuned the Hockey engine and everybody who likes to play on have to accept it, but my tips for you: 

1. Do not spend money in improving your team rating – It is waste of your Bucks and increases your overall winning percentage just marginally.
2. Same is for playing any of the nice Gold Impact Cards – Expensive and worthless overall – Three Blues do the job as well and for a decent number of times no cards get you to surprising results as well.
3. Forget strategy or thinking about what might be the right move – just push the “Play” button and you will get easier through the day.
4. Do not watch matches anymore if you do not like hilarious sports comedy.

My final tip is based on a large number of matches which went like this one:

My opponent is 20 points lower rated and just invest an injury free versus my Big Hits, Dangler and Howitzer Combo. Well a caretaking team manager or maybe just clever. After having a 28 to 6 shot score I lost 1 – 5. An upset as in all other Sports and of course not funny to watch. Acceptable if it would not happen all the time. To be accurate in 52 games I played on a day, I had 5 brutal upset losses plus 17 (!) other matches with random results.

I assume that this is Hothead’s understanding about real life experience and fun and I agree that there are for sure many people out there, who like to play pure luck based games. Unfortunately I am not one of those always happy people and I am just ongoing annoyed about the system and not happy to invest my money anymore. I mean why should we invest our money if we do not get some value back?

As usual I will provide a Big Win Fun Rating for the Hockey Game Engine and it is just 1 stars out of 6. Normally I would have given a zero but for some strange reason such games like the above mentioned have certainly an amusement factor. What can I say more – I am going now to play a bit of Big Win Basketball and Soccer!