User blog comment:Smartguyc/Jackknife deck/@comment-1755882-20140330013631/@comment-6881157-20140331091418

It's only a temporary -1. You convert solid card advantage into resources which can be converted into another form of advantage. 2 Gauge can be used to +2 (be it solid advantage or soft advantage) so Dragonic Charge is a combo +1 overall. I'm not saying it's amazing, but it is at least decent. It's not a terrible card like you say it is.

Non-JK cards in a JK deck are an option, so it increases the versatility of the deck. Jackknife decks are all about versatility, so it's a good fit. You're gonna pay 5 gauge to go from Braveheart to a JK evolution? Hammer Mace is a damn good card, just because your deck doesn't focus on it doesn't mean you can't use it. It isn't worth throwing the game just to get your main strategy. You are much better off using a backup strategy.

Those cards you listed are all situational one way or another, so I'm not going to go into that. My point still stands.

You've really got the idea of consistency wrong. Consistency always comes at a cost. Most of the time, that cost is exponential. Once you pass a certain point, the cost to consistency ratio becomes so large that it hurts your deck. Shields work similarly. The more copies you use, the less effective they become. The equilibrium point is roughly 4 copies, as that is how many you can use without hurting the other areas of your deck. Using more than 4 copies will start to affect your deck negatively. Imagine if Perfect Guards didn't have Sentinel. Would people run 14 in a deck? No. You would be forced to run 7 vanilla grade 2s to make up for the loss of 7k boosters. That makes your grade 2 lineup suffer so much that it's not worth the extra Perfect Guards.