Aff Strategy and Evaluating Quality Cards
- Brett Boelkens
- Sep 25
- 12 min read
In an age of extreme spreading—particularly an age in which the spreading is of underhighlighted cards—the quantity and variety of arguments has generally been prioritized over their quality and intrinsic strategic viability. It’s hard to not notice, particularly amongst debate educators who’ve engaged with the activity in the long-term, that argument norms in the debate community change heavily over time in favor of quantity over quality.
For those unfamiliar, theory debates in the context of counterplan conditionality is a good analogy for the situation with spreading and low-quality arguments. If a counterplan is conditional, that means the neg can kick the counterplan irrespective of whether the aff has offense on the counterplan. Some examples of aff offense on the CP would be if the aff has delinked a DA and said the the counterplan links to the net benefit (meaning the neg causes the DA to happen, not the aff), or if the aff has offense on the process of the CP being bad (such as the CP itself crashing the economy or causing war with Russia). Under conditionality theory, NONE of that offense matters after the neg kicks the CP given that conditionality is an “emergency release latch” for counterplans and kritiks
Conditionality under this framing is a moral hazard, meaning that it incentivizes bad, or at least worse quality arguments in the 1NC because of the fact that the neg cannot be as easily punished by the aff for reading those bad arguments. Neg can read a one-line CP within seconds, and that CP does not need to be particularly well thought out or even have a solvency advocate. In the context of policy debate, some debaters will even read the counterplan text in the 1NC and fill-in the rest of the CP in the 2NC depending on what CP was the most badly answered “CP” in the 2AC. Without conditionality, these practices would not be possible, meaning that the moral hazard of conditionality is a structural drag on the quality of 1NC argumentation.
Similarly, speed has similarly become a crutch to support bad card cutting practices. Fundamentally, if you can read 3 mediocre disadvantages in the same time another debater would spend to read 1 high-quality disadvantage, sadly the former almost always outcompetes the latter, especially given the time pressures of the 1AR. Aff debaters are often extremely uncomfortable with straight turning low-quality disadvantages, meaning that in most circumstances, the neg will not be punished. Because of the fact that affs in LD will almost never punish bad neg practices, mostly due to the lack of a 2AC in LD, the ability of speed and low-quality argumentation to “flood the zone” is another moral hazard similar to conditionality, with both contributing to increasingly high breadth and decreasingly low depth of argumentation.
This has resulted in a circuit debate meta where low-quality disadvantages with one-word taglines of “Extinction!” and cards composed of barely ~10 highlighted words have proliferated. More routinely seen now are 1-2 card disadvantages, in which the uniqueness is implicitly assumed as a matter of fact and the internal link chain is wishy washy.
Aff Strategy in Response to Breadth over Depth
Why do I mention all of this? The current debate meta is for the 1NC to time pressure the 1AR via “flooding the zone” with somewhat blippy arguments, and collapse to the least covered position in the 2NR. Sadly, neg blippyness cannot merely be answered by aff blippyness given that the time skew of the 1NC to the 1AC and the 2NR to the 1AR, meaning the neg has comparatively more time to out-blip the aff as well as answer aff blippiness.
This is both a problem and an opportunity for aff debaters in the sense that arguments being much lower-quality allows for many more arguments then otherwise exist, BUT each argument is now extremely vulnerable to the aff straight turns due to the fact that argument was extremely underwarranted. Start with the principle that the aff should NOT allow the neg to get away with murder; punish them for their bad arguments at every opportunity possible to both exploit the under-argumentation in your favor and to deter future blippiness.
There are two practices which substantially aid this aff strategy:
Good 1AC Design: your 1AC should be designed to answer the most threatening and/or most common 1NC. On a tax policy topic, if the main threat is an economy DA, preemptively link turn the DA in the 1AC by saying the plan is key to saving the economy. If you’re worried about a country-specific plan-inclusive counterplan, read a plan aff about a specific country. If you’re bad with topicality debates, read an extremely topical aff (under the assumption you prep out the now more virulent plan-inclusive counterplan). These are all examples of where the aff ought to be strategically designed to answer the arguments you are most likely to lose on, all of whom sets you up in a better position to answer these blippy arguments due to the fact your aff is already a pre-built response to those arguments.
Quality 1AC Cards: This is the focus of this article. The under-highlighting of 1NC cards means the aff is structurally ahead for a 1AR straight turn. This is especially true if the aff preemptively designed to turn those arguments, meaning that the straight turn debate does NOT start in the 1AR, and the aff can leverage the additional 6 minutes of the 1AC to preemptively set yourself up for answering the argument you otherwise would have had only 4 minutes to answer in the 1AR. However, this strategy is highly premised on the aff having good quality cards themselves given the fact (as mentioned above) that aff blippiness is inferior to neg blippiness
This article will focus on the latter practice, giving advice on how to cut quality cards, especially in the context of larger aff and neg strategy.
Focus on “True” Arguments
A good practice for your cards to be high quality is for them to closely approximate the facts of facts; they ought to be the mainstream academic consensus, not cherry-picked studies you selectively chose because you needed to contrive an argument. Think what arguments would broadly be considered to be “true” in the topic literature. Truth is arguably subjective in an event defined by its ability to negate the truth of anything, but objectively, there are some arguments that are more likely to be on-face true and less debatable than others. Even if there is debate amongst experts, there is a (hopefully justified) majority opinion, and there is a minority fringe opinion. That minority opinion could in fact be correct, and that majority opinion could be unfairly biased towards a certain incorrect conclusion, but those are generally exceptions, not the rule.
For instance, on an objective level, climate change impact cards are more true than climate change skepticism/denialism cards. Despite the fact there are in-depth academic debates on how deadly future climate change will be and whether it is existential, it is broadly agreed that climate change is real and bad, meaning climate change good impact turns are much more difficult to win. A position in which it's impeccably hard to find evidence usually requires accepting awful evidence due to the dearth of evidence available for that position, which is often (but not always) indicative of its “truthness.”
Obviously, contrived debate arguments are often barely grounded in topic literature. The further you stray from the topic literature and mainstream arguments, the evidence quality often goes down. A good standard to find good quality cards is to minimize card-cutting for extremely sketchy positions. This is not to say that innovation and creativity is bad; rather, realize that most (but not all) creative affs are not as commonly read due to them being one-off, surprise affs reliant on the arguments’ newness, not its intrinsic quality.
As a general principle, when cutting cards in the context of a certain position, do research first, and then conform your arguments to evidence available. I am not the first person to say this, but follow the following principle: make the position fit the evidence, don't make the evidence fit the position.
Let’s look at some examples of “true” contentions on the current 2025 Sept-Oct topic on plea bargaining
It is irrefutable that plea bargaining causes wrongful convictions; reducing evidentiary standards in order to catch more criminals by minimizing false negatives (criminals getting off at trial) invariably increases the risk of false positives (innocents being punished for crimes they did not commit). At a fundamental level, you cannot design a court system biased against criminals without increasing the risk of wrongful convictions as equally as you cannot design a court system biased in favor of the innocent without increasing the risk of letting criminals not be punished.
Similarly, the premise of the court clog advantage is true; without (A) a massive increase in funding, judicial infrastructure, and legal professionals OR (B) a massive decrease in the amount of cases tried (such as filtering out low-priority cases), the criminal court system would be overwhelmed. Whether it’s a foregone conclusion that the contingency plans of A and B will happen or not is up for debate, BUT on a fundamental level, this is a true argument.
On a purely logistical level, these arguments are almost an ontological part of the anti-plea bargaining side, a “gimme” link that is hard to refute. In both cases, we see experts in the topic literature such as legal scholars and criminal justice reformers repeatedly concerned about those issues, even if they’re biased for or against plea bargaining., which indicates there probably a fire behind the smoke from both sides.
Cut Cards that Match the Author’s Argumentative Intent
A good practice is to think of the author's argumentative intent. Ask yourself whether your tagline captures the core intent of the article (or at least that subsection of the article)? Is the highlighting representative of an argument for or against a specific thing, or is it merely a sentence or two that you’ve highlighted that is only tangentially related to the rest of the author’s argument? Both of these would be indicative of bad cards.
A very excellent example regarding an author's argumentative intent are topicality debates. Definition/interpretation cards with an explicit “intent to define” and/or an explicit “intent to exclude” are vastly superior to cards that merely define a term for context. In the latter case, the author’s purpose is not to do a deep dive into what that term means, how that term is commonly used in topic literature, and/or what that term does not include; usually it is merely to roughly define the term for the purpose of clarity in an article that talks about that term.
For example, the 2018-2019 policy topic was about reducing “restrictions on legal immigration.” The widely used Tasoff card had both an intent to define the term “restrictions on legal immigration,” and explained how this excludes immigrant groups that don’t have a pathway to lawful permanent residence. This gets a little messy given that I believe a high school actually emailed Tasoff (or at least impersonated an email response from Tasoff), and he said the way people were using the card was not his intention. However, in a vacuum, this is a good example of language intending to define a term, include some things, and exclude some other things, which is often crucial in topicality debates.
Ask what is the purpose of the author presenting this information? Is this a “view from nowhere” as it’s referred to in journalism, seeking to present both sides without bias towards either side? If that’s the case, you might want a more biased card in order for them to make a normative argument or claim X thing is true. Both sides journalism is often bad for debate cards given that it doesn’t often present a unifying narrative, rather “he said this, she said that, you decide.” A slight bias is good for cards to make a strong argument, not the neutral presentation of the facts for both sides. Including the arguments from both sides means that ~50% of that card is an indictment for the other ~50%.
Centrist journalism seeks to avoid constructing narratives or making an argument in order for you to make your own opinion based on the facts; however, as a debater, your obligation is not to be unbiased, it’s to win. Presenting the arguments of the other side, especially when the other side will speak immediately after you, is a self-defeating endeavor, so you should minimize using cards that do this.
I cannot find the original article, but during the 2022 Jan-Feb space appropriation topic, there was a common card cited similar to this article that acted as a “choose your own adventure book,” presenting both sides of the argument and wanting you to decide what you thought about large satellite constellations. This was a bad card because despite its academic source and content, the structure of it is like a Pro-Con website given that it did not make a conclusion based on the facts it provided.
Avoid Extreme Author Bias
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” - Upton Sinclair
I understand that I just recommended finding biased evidence; however, do this within limit,
Think about the degree to which the author’s bias potentially implicates the quality of the argument they’re making. An easy example is avoiding articles written by political figures currently active in Congress or the White House. An article written by a member of the House/Senate on the publication the Hill is a self-serving propo-piece, not an accurate representation of the benefits/harms of the bill.
This also applies to people within the defense establishment. Intuitively, a researcher educated at the US Naval War College or someone associated with the Department of Defense (or whatever it is called now) will likely take a realist, antagonist posture towards Chinese actions in the South China Sea and to demean and disparage Chinese efforts as revisionist and hostile. Similarly, their Chinese antagonists will take a similar, but opposite approach, assuming the same theories, but saying the US is the baddie. Using evidence from these sources is not necessarily bad, but do be wary of the potential for indicts related to the fact that these authors are structurally incentivized to securitize China and paint them as an existential threat (in order to get more funding).
I recall one of the first research assignments I had in college on German nuclear proliferation. This is a good example of how meeting some of the other criteria, such as argumentative intent or not powertagging, is not a sufficient standard in itself. One article I found that would otherwise be great for my research assignment was from an apocalypse obsessed Christian website called The Trumpet, which references the seven trumpets in the Book of Revelation. Sadly, their assessment of Germany’s latent nuclear weapon capability could not be used based on the fact that even the freshman version of me had standards.
This is a general warning to avoid bad impact cards, especially on more fringe positions. For instance, the alt-right is currently concerned about the “existential threat” of immigration just as neoconservatives are concerned about Iran. Obviously, neither would be existential, and both arguments exist as propaganda for their political projects. Similarly, the New Age left often has pseudo-science impact cards in the context of factory farming, gene editing, nuclear power, etc., which definitely are not mainstream science.
Avoid Power Tagging, Selective Card Cutting, and Underhighlighting
If you’ve read this far through the article, hopefully this is intuitive enough already. Cards that avoid selectively cutting and are true representations of what the author intended to say are best. Don't power tag, or misrepresent or exaggerate the true strength of the argument the author is making. Sometimes debaters heavily highlight around sections that are inconvenient towards the argument they are trying to make; of course, this makes you vulnerable to a card indict. If you need to power tag or selectively cut a card in order for you to use that card, cut a different card.
Similarly, don’t underhighlight. Given the current meta, it's a worthwhile question of whether you as the aff ought to also underhighlight. However, underhighlighting intrinsically limits the quality of your argumentation and the clarity of your warrants, and that’s assuming you will read all the warrants in an underlighted card as you would otherwise. The strategy of punishing bad neg constructives is contingent on the aff constructive not being similarly bad. The turn requires you outcompeting the warrants of the 1NC card with your own, so if you both underhighlight your cards, a judge is more likely to make it a wash. If a judge needs to check the quality of the aff and neg cards in the speech document for evidence/warrant comparison for their ballot, you likely did NOT sufficiently explain your warrants. If you’re following this strategy, the turn is major aff offense, meaning it is on par with or perhaps even more important than your aff contentions.
The above card is a good example of an underhighlighted card, as this is one sentence that cites another, earlier study from someone else named Farnsworth. We know very little about how strong the judicial activism argument is; rather that someone has made an argument about it. There are no warrants in this card, at least in the highlighting. In this case, it would hypothetically be better to cut from the Farnsworth article itself; if I was to guess, the reason this card cutter did not do that is because of the fact that Farnsworth was written in 2005.
As a general practice, include the warrants in the tagline to ensure the judge doesn’t need to correctly list all the warrants when reading the highlighted text. As an alternative, add them to the tagline, but do NOT bold them or read that section of the tagline. That un-bolded text is a reminder for you of what those specific warrants are in order to extend them into the 1AR/2AR.
Conclusion
Ultimately, the structure of LD has incentivized neg arguments which generally do NOT meet the above criteria to qualify as good cards. The above tips are things to be concerned with regarding your own cards, given your needing to outcompete your opponents, and to watch out for in regards to other people’s cards. To the degree to which your opponent’s contentions do not meet the above standards, especially in regards to truthfulness, the easier the turn will be, and the easier your 2AR will be. A 2NR that now needs to answer a new straight turn throws a wrench in many pre-planned neg strategies, as they sought to kick an argument they must now defend. Bad practices that overburden the 1AR are perpetuated by the fact the neg is not punished for these bad practices, causing those bad practices to be more and more common. When you’re aff, take advantage of that fact, flip the script, and overburden the 2NR with high quality (often preemptive) straight turns, and make the 1AC work for you to answer the 1NC as opposed to merely being independent aff offense.