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Thirteen tricks for a visible prize card, then thirteen for the match. When the prize is poor, losing the trick is the right play.
Both players hold thirteen cards and one card is turned face up; its suit is trump for the whole deal. In the first thirteen tricks nothing scores: the winner of each trick takes the face-up card into hand and the loser draws the next card from the deck blind, then a new card is turned up. You must follow the led suit if you can, and the highest trump wins — or the highest card of the led suit if no trump was played. Because the prize is visible before you play, half of these tricks are ones you should deliberately lose, keeping your high cards for later. When the deck runs out the second half begins, the prize is gone and every trick counts. Take enough tricks and you beat the rival. Each rival you beat remembers more of the cards you hold, and once one remembers them all, the next demands more tricks from you than the last.
In the first half, ask what the prize is worth before you ask whether you can win the trick. An ace or a trump is worth spending a high card on; a low card of a plain suit is worth nothing and taking it costs you the card you spent plus a blind draw you would rather have had. Playing to win every trick you could win is the single most common way to lose this game, and it loses badly — far worse than never trying at all.
The blind draw is not a punishment. Losing a trick still gets you a card, just an unseen one, and an unseen card averages better than the low prize you declined. That is why ducking is cheap: you keep your good card and still fill your hand. What you are really buying in the first half is a hand full of winners for the second, and every high card you burn on a five is one fewer trick later.
Watch the trump suit above everything. Trumps are the cards that decide the second half, so a trump prize is almost always worth taking even at a real cost, and a trump you hold is worth more than a higher card in a plain suit. Late in the first half, count how many trumps have gone; if you hold more than half of what is left, you can afford to be aggressive in the second half, and if you hold none you should be collecting long plain suits instead.
In the second half, lead your certain winners first while the rival still has to follow. Holding an ace back to be clever usually just means it falls to a trump later. And remember what the rival has seen: everything played in the first half was face up for both of you, so a card you took from the top of the pile is a card they know you have — the ones you drew blind are the only cards you truly hold in secret.