the Mantis God deck is still brokenly powerful, Warren + Undying = new pre-nerf Fecundity, and hand control/size still < everything else (and none of these are necessarily bad things alone, but together they're reason for some thought)

[YetiChow]

Big spoilers ahead for Kaycee's Mod, you have been warned! Also this is more of a ramble/lecture; I'm very keen to hear thoughts/responses but there's no actual question in here, so you've also been warned about that!

So, I've just come off a rather interesting run, that has left me feeling... I dunno. It was fun run right up until it wasn't, and that's not because I was smashing through the early-game with broken combos. It actually got really fun right around the time my broken combos stopped being reliable first-turn draws; but still came up within a few turns so I could be confident of a claw-back victory.

I picked Mantis God deck because I'm a little behind the curve in KM currently and didn't feel like relying too much on RNG to grind out new skulls. I'm up to challenge level 6 and I went with both difficulty skulls, tipped scales + no boss rares. Started out the expected way: fed Ringworm to campfire and got a 3/1 MG ASAP, used it to curbstomp the early fights. I got lucky at the first trader with a Warren and Cockroach, reading in the recent patch notes that Warren rabbits now inherit sigils I wanted to confirm that yes it does spawn infinite free rabbits. Cool, I have infinite chump-blockers for 1 blood, a turn-1 victory, and whichever one of those pops up due to "Fair Hand" (HAH! could that name be any more ironic in this case?), I either win on turn 1 or turn 2.

So, I start grabbing other juicy-looking cards, building out my hand so I have multiple win conditions. I got Hand Tentacle which was very satisfying, and I figured that I might eventually build towards "Sac my MG to HT and build the ultimate eldritch abomination that can one-hit each stage of Leshy", and hopefully get to see the new pirate boss for the first time. But in the meantime I had several bone-based cards so that I could take advantage of all the bones I could generate easily, a couple of cards for sigil-fodder, etc. etc.

I got through Trapper boss (second boss in this run) with some clever play -- I actually thought that I would lose due to a lack of cards with attack capability. I was only by cleverly playing MG and putting rabbits opposite the traps that I was able to get pelts, which I traded in the second phase to give MG a clear line to one-hit the Trader phase. I was quite proud of that move! At that point, my deck was starting to get bloated and getting either MG or Warren as part of hand manipulation was no longer guaranteed. That's when things started getting tense (in a fun way!); I had to really think about cause-and-effect and figure out strategies that would let me hold out until one of my win conditions came available.

And then the RNG hit -- not the powered-up enemies, not even poor starting hands... it was the map that ultimately led to my downfall. Or, rather, the combination of the map and my refusal to completely lean into hand manipulation (I wanted to try out multiple combos, not burn the second-best combos that the RNG blessed me with to ensure my utterly broken MG got an early draw.) Like, looking back it's obvious that I could have made different choices and focussed on sac'ing/ditching/failing to acquire cards and intentionally burning good items then taking a Backpack node to avoid getting more cards; but I was pushing for routes that let me use altars and campfires and mycologists instead; and that meant picking up a lot of cards.

And the thing is, they were good cards! I had a deck that had at least 4 win conditions (the MG, an Ants plus Insect:Flying option, simply going hard with high-damage cards, or Hand Tentacle + arbitrary hand size) in it with a few more cooking away, three different ways to indefinitely stall out with chump blockers, my preferred combo of items (bleach, squirrel in bottle and a skinning knife; plus 2 Pack Rats to replenish with)... I really couldn't ask for better resources. Unfortunately, what I had was too much of too many good things -- all these win conditions competing to be the first out the gate, with no reliable way to enforce any of them, meant that all the bounty bestowed by the RNG in map events became poisoned fruit in fights where I needed a powerful combo early.

And this is where I start feeling ambivalent -- because I knew I was losing the second I beat the Angler (third boss) and my map towards Leshy's Cabin came up filled with new cards and few ways to ditch them. I mean, again in hindsight I could have been ruthless and probably trimmed my deck by about 1/3rd, but that would have meant abandoning most of the fun strategies (new KM exclusive units and sigils, uncommon combos, and things that required a bit of clever play to pull off or at least made me feel clever for pulling them off) and going to a 1-trick cheese deck. And that's when I realised that the Mantis God starter deck is so powerful it can actually ruin a run because of it -- you have to choose to lean into the cheese fully, or else that powerful starter basically cripples your ability to build a well-balanced deck in the late-game because by supporting the MG in the early-game you're missing your opportunity to support any other playstyle later.

I guess the solution in my run would have been to sac the MG to HT early and make that my new cheese strat instead (which would have felt slightly less crutch-y since it requires at least a little creativity to pull off.) But that's not really addressing the issue with MG, it's simply papering over it by using the brokenness of the MG as the engine for some other cheesy build. It also means that if I draw HT, a squirrel and 2 other cards (but not the Warren w/ infinite rabbits), I'm doing 6 damage on turn 1; which might easily not be enough to get through the starting blockers in late-game fights. I suppose I could also have chased down Hoarder sigils (I don't have the Magpie's Glass item yet, but that might have helped too), but again that would mean leaning further into the cheese rather than exploring the more interesting combos available in that run.

Is there a point here? Meh... I don't think that Daniel has much interest in addressing MG at this point so close to the end (in his words in the patch notes) of the KM beta. I've already expressed agreement that making MG a 2-blood card would fix two of these problems at a stroke; and taking the MG deck out means that there is no deck to reliably grind through the early levels in mid-difficulty runs when you're still unlocking the skulls. I guess there's a part of me that sardonically quite likes the fact that getting too greedy about having 'all the good things' can backfire and cost you the run; but it feels rather un-fun to lose the run not because of poor play in the early-mid or even in the late game but because of RNG in the layout of the map and unintuitive hidden mechanics like hand bloat/hand manipulation. Not strictly "unfair" mind you -- I know why I lost, I'm not saying the game cheated (if anything it was strongly in my favour the whole run right up until I let it not be); but it's not like I intentionally took big risks and played recklessly either. I was building a little bit of redundancy into my deck just in case RNG screwed over my MG trump-card somehow; trying not to put all my eggs into one "meta" basket.

The only viable fix I can see here is to give the player some more control over map layout -- something like how right before the Leshy fight you get a limited map with specific events (although I find that the trader event can easily be a noob trap -- going into Leshy you want to be refining your hand, not bloating it); perhaps the step before each boss fight should be similar where it converges two steps before the boss and then always splits into multiple events to give one last option for strategic reinforcement (whether that's refining the hand with myco/sacrifice altar/Bone Lord altar, trying to pick up a last-minute card or item, or a chance to swap Totems or use a Campfire) rather than converging on the boss fight? That would create an obvious "last chance to make a change" point. As an added bonus, it would mean that for anyone who wants to use save scumming (no judgement here -- we all play our own way and it's not like it affects anyone else) it creates a logical save-point; and might even lead to the growth of an unofficial mode where people share their saves before a certain boss and see how well others can do with the same resources (counting not just win/lose, but also how many teeth are obtained at the end of the fight.)

So yeah. Too much of a good thing can actually kill the run; infinite card duplication continues to be absurdly powerful but still not as powerful as hand manipulation; and if you're a hardcore Card Gamer who eats cheese for breakfast then continue to Always Take Mantis God.

[Dlanor]

Yeah, the 3 things in the OP are basically the reason I could never rec KCM to a hardcore strategy fan without saying "you're gonna need to get mods to fix the balance". Hand Manipulation is just plain broken but importantly is also dreadfully boring, buffing that while taking the fun OP stuff like Fecundity out of the game makes no sense at all. The players that wanted the fun silly stuff lost a lot of those options, and you can't even claim it was done to balance the game at this point because the balance is worse than it's ever been right now due to Hand Manip + the top broken cards being no less broken than before.

[StayPuftMM]

My random thoughts on these topics since this seems to be random thought thread:

Mantis god starter deck is awkward to use because starting with two dead cards puts an immediate strain on your map node needs. I personally don't like it for that reason. Exploiting with it also seems very unfun.
Cockroach's undying definitely has high potential to break the game. I haven't done enough with it to say what I think the solution to that is, if there is one, but it's dangerous.
I am really not sure about this "created cards inherit their creator's glyphs in most cases" direction. Beaver and Daus definitely needed the help and have given them the niche of "if you have three open spaces and put a good glyph on it you get a huge effect", but warren definitely did not.
My main priority on opening hand is that pelts shouldn't be an option for it. The "Teeth-Trapper-Trader" loop needs lots of help like this. I think that having some sort of "you can always make some sort of play turn 1" mechanic is good considering how important your early game performance is to the game, but it definitely is very easily exploitable in the current iteration.
Game balance for people at the skill ceiling is not incredibly important to me. They've long ago cleared all the challenge levels and just need the game to be balanced enough to make games with whatever challenge settings they want to be fun.

[YetiChow]

Ursprungligen skrivet av Garent:

My random thoughts on these topics since this seems to be random thought thread:

Mantis god starter deck is awkward to use because starting with two dead cards puts an immediate strain on your map node needs. I personally don't like it for that reason. Exploiting with it also seems very unfun.
Cockroach's undying definitely has high potential to break the game. I haven't done enough with it to say what I think the solution to that is, if there is one, but it's dangerous.
I am really not sure about this "created cards inherit their creator's glyphs in most cases" direction. Beaver and Daus definitely needed the help and have given them the niche of "if you have three open spaces and put a good glyph on it you get a huge effect", but warren definitely did not.
My main priority on opening hand is that pelts shouldn't be an option for it. The "Teeth-Trapper-Trader" loop needs lots of help like this. I think that having some sort of "you can always make some sort of play turn 1" mechanic is good considering how important your early game performance is to the game, but it definitely is very easily exploitable in the current iteration.
Game balance for people at the skill ceiling is not incredibly important to me. They've long ago cleared all the challenge levels and just need the game to be balanced enough to make games with whatever challenge settings they want to be fun.

I agree (strongly!) with everything here except for that very first line -- I don't view the ringworms as dead cards; one is going on the campfire and the other is probably going to become the basis of a backup strategy by taking the sigil off a more expensive creature (and eventually buffing it at the campfire once the other one has been eaten)

I very much think that "created cards inherit sigils" is unnecessary; I can see the benefit of buffing Beaver and Daus but those cards were already situationally strong. Making the bell tentacle also get powered up by Daus chimes improved it from "a better beaver" to "a situational win condition" (and with Pack Alpha sigil both beaver and Daus could be that already anyway.) The side-effect on other cards, meanwhile, is that we now have two easy ways to get powerful sigils onto free cards in the hand (one of them which is an attacker with flying!) and a third way to get that powerful sigil onto the board as well as blocking an attack. And ants were already powerful, so being able to share a sigil with the queen makes them even more so.

You're spot on re: pelts and hand manipulation; I guess there's an argument that it makes carrying pelts a risk since it can disrupt your hand but that only really punishes people who don't exploit hand manip (people who do will be avoiding collecting pelts anyway since they don't want new cards from the trader.) I wouldn't have minded seeing pelts be a separate thing the way bones are; although there are already a lot of "currencies" in the game I don't think that another one is a bad thing.

My main issue with this whole situation isn't so much about balance as the fact that in a game all about combos and strategies and so on, the KM challenges force you to throw all that aside if you want any kind of consistency. You either lock yourself into a certain play-style (MG deck, Ants deck; and from what I hear several of the other decks I haven't unlocked yet seem to have similar one-trick-pony builds) or you pick a "balanced" deck and then you're praying for a couple of good RNG moments early to get you past the first difficulty spikes.

[StayPuftMM]

Ursprungligen skrivet av YetiChow:

or you pick a "balanced" deck and then you're praying for a couple of good RNG moments early to get you past the first difficulty spikes.

I wouldn't say it's that severe. In my experience of mainly using the goat-moose deck the first map is pretty smooth sailing unless you're doing the bear challenge.

[Dlanor]

Ursprungligen skrivet av Garent:

I wouldn't say it's that severe. In my experience of mainly using the goat-moose deck the first map is pretty smooth sailing unless you're doing the bear challenge.

The goat deck isn't balanced though, it's one of the 2 decks that are far far above the curve, next to Mantis God. That counts for bear challenge too, especially because both decks are top tier for hand manip.

[YetiChow]

Ursprungligen skrivet av Totopo:

Ursprungligen skrivet av Garent:

I wouldn't say it's that severe. In my experience of mainly using the goat-moose deck the first map is pretty smooth sailing unless you're doing the bear challenge.

The goat deck isn't balanced though, it's one of the 2 decks that are far far above the curve, next to Mantis God. That counts for bear challenge too, especially because both decks are top tier for hand manip.

Yeah, even if it isn't as obviously "ha ha I push the win button" as MG, it's still built around a single trick (play the goat early, follow up with a powerful card to either insta-win or control the whole match); and no matter what other variations of that you evolve into it's always going to come down to some version of "get the goat out first and immediately play a top-tier card using it." It takes a little longer to build the moose into an instant win option, but at 3 damage base it shouldn't be that long (one sacrifice altar to give it bifurcated/trifurcated or double strike; or taking a risk at an attack power campfire.) And even if you don't choose to power up the moose into your beatstick, its 7 health means you can use it to tank a few rounds of damage using the mole strategy you described upthread.

Or you can plan around turning it into a bones deck, sac the goat to Bone Lord at first opportunity and just make the effort to collect bone cost cards at every opportunity. I had a very successful run doing that, and I think that's going to be my new grinding strategy until I unlock a more interesting deck.

[msgameandcake]

Notably, the Daus's chimes do not inherent its sigils, unlike the Baver's dams. I feel like a similar concept could be applied to Warren/Beehive/Ant Queen. When the Warren and Beehive provide you with free cards, and only cost one Blood to play in the first place it becomes extremely effective to just break things in half with the right sigil. Removing the inheritance element from these is pretty reasonable.

That said, since the Ant Queen costs 2 Blood to play, and the Ant she generates costs 1 Blood itself, the number of game-breaking strategies becomes notably more limited. The Ant deck in particular struggles at higher levels of play due to the fact that they can't generally breach the critical 5 and 6 damage thresholds, their base damage is capped at 4 when you have your whole board filled with them. This isn't to say one CAN'T break the game in half with an Ant deck, there are still a number of ways to make it happen, but the number of ways to do so seems to be within a reasonable limit in comparison to most other high-end strategies.

[MarcoPants]

Ursprungligen skrivet av msgameandcake:

That said, since the Ant Queen costs 2 Blood to play, and the Ant she generates costs 1 Blood itself, the number of game-breaking strategies becomes notably more limited. The Ant deck in particular struggles at higher levels of play due to the fact that they can't generally breach the critical 5 and 6 damage thresholds, their base damage is capped at 4 when you have your whole board filled with them. This isn't to say one CAN'T break the game in half with an Ant deck, there are still a number of ways to make it happen, but the number of ways to do so seems to be within a reasonable limit in comparison to most other high-end strategies.

Definitely one of my most broken runs was with the ant deck (my favorite one btw). Got an Insect/Bees Within totem and went ham with grabbing all the insect cards I could while purging any non-insects asap. Wound up swarming the poor pirate ship with an unrelenting onslaught of bees

[StayPuftMM]

Ursprungligen skrivet av Totopo:

The goat deck isn't balanced though

Good thing it's not the only deck I've ever played then.

Ursprungligen skrivet av YetiChow:

and no matter what other variations of that you evolve into it's always going to come down to some version of "get the goat out first and immediately play a top-tier card using it."

This isn't my experience. Having the option to pick 3 cost cards when they're usually a bad pick doesn't make the other options worse.

[YetiChow]

Ursprungligen skrivet av Garent:

Ursprungligen skrivet av Totopo:

The goat deck isn't balanced though

Good thing it's not the only deck I've ever played then.

Ursprungligen skrivet av YetiChow:

and no matter what other variations of that you evolve into it's always going to come down to some version of "get the goat out first and immediately play a top-tier card using it."

This isn't my experience. Having the option to pick 3 cost cards when they're usually a bad pick doesn't make the other options worse.

I'm not sure I'd call any of the 3-cost cards "bad" -- situational, sure, but they all have very obvious strengths. Grizzlies are all-rounders and easily buffed to become win conditions; sharks will chew through a strong opposition while ignoring counter-attacks; Moose Bucks are solid defenders and can often be used to deal with two lanes (they destroy the opposing creature on your turn, then move over to block the other lane.)

When I use the phrase "top-tier" in that quoted bit, it's not so much in a "tier list" sense as a "tech tier" sense -- they're cards that you're supposed to tier up to unlock via multiple turns of placing creatures. Being able to skip those 2 turns of placing creatures (or drawing squirrels to do a drop-3-summon-1) turns those 3 blood creatures into powerhouses in the early game -- until you're starting to face down, say, two wolves per turn the Moose Buck can easily match or out-damage most of the entire enemy fields in the first map on its own. That's before buffs and etc too.

Without the reliability to summon them on the first turn, 3-cost cards are risky. The second you're starting out with a goat in every fight though (and hand manipulation is guaranteeing that you'll get either it, or a mole to cover you while you draw it... assuming you haven't already put the mole's sigil on the moose!), you've got a deck that's always going to revolve around playing that 3-blood card ASAP. You can change the 3-blood card but the strategy remains the same: summon the expensive creature (which is expensive for a reason!) faster than you'd normally be able to so that you can get ahead of the curve in damage.

[StayPuftMM]

I think that if an exploit is a problem then it should be addressed directly rather than other aspects of the game changed to assume the exploit is being used.

[Dlanor]

Ursprungligen skrivet av Garent:

Good thing it's not the only deck I've ever played then.

Sounds like you should learn to say what actually matters then, to avoid the need for people to correct you and for you to backpedal.

[YetiChow]

Ursprungligen skrivet av Garent:

I think that if an exploit is a problem then it should be addressed directly rather than other aspects of the game changed to assume the exploit is being used.

Which basically goes back to "hand manipulation via the 'Get Fair Hand' mechanic is too easy to exploit."

While I agree that it's important to have some form of guarantee that you can actually play a card usefully on your first turn; the current mechanic makes it too easy to guarantee you do really well (or just outright win the fight) on the first turn. And because of that, Kaycee's Mod is balanced against being still able to challenge those first-turn combos -- in other words, the unbalanced mechanic is actually skewing the game towards being unfair against non-broken builds. While I realise that it's a challenge mode and it's meant to require high-level strategies... what it actually requires now is kind of the opposite. Instead of looking for good combos and multiple win conditions, we're faced with an anti-pattern of having to pick a single win condition (one that's built into the starting deck) and then lean into it so hard that we give up the chance to do anything else. Otherwise, there's no way to guarantee being able to deal with Leshy's amalgams in the boss fight -- you have to not only have a "I win!" button at your disposal, you have to guarantee you draw it (or draw something with Hoarder so you can force it into your hand.) The two options there are item farming until you're going in with a Magpie's Glass (tedious) or ruthless hand manipulation (even more tedious)... at that point strategy is no longer a factor. It's just about exploiting a couple of specific interactions to overcome Leshy's own specific nonsense; and unlike the base game you don't have the benefit of "hey at least it's over even if it was BS!" once you learn how to overcome it (plus, the base game tilts things far more in your favour so it's likely you don't have to completely force the kind of very specific situation that you do in KM.) You're not breaking the game to win and feel clever for it, you're breaking the game just to have the chance to grind some more without any strategy or creativity because every fight is predetermined by your couple of broken combos.

The power of Mantis God is what's papering over the fact that Leshy's fight is not, in fact, something that you can beat with any reasonable/balanced deck. You have to be neck-deep in cheese to be able to beat that first amalgam; and without MG we wouldn't see win-rates anywhere near what they are thanks to MG's presence. Totopo raised this point previously in another thread, and my recent runs have convinced me that it's a major issue -- the amalgams in Leshy's fight exist to force players to bring a defensive opener; but that kind of defence is basically incompatible with any of the quick-win strategies required by most of the starter decks.
----------------------------------------------------------------
As an aside: I just had a run where the cave challenge gave me a mealworm with Dam Builder and Rabbits. The Rabbits inherited the Totem (Insect:Hoarder) effect; meaning that by playing the mealworm I got the chance to select six cards (one for mealworm, one for each dam, and then each of the dams + the mealworm gave me a rabbit which also gave me a "pick card".) That just hammers home to me how unnecessary it is for spawned cards to inherit sigils and totem traits -- like, yes that is an absurdly lucky and specific combo, but the cascading effect was just too ridiculous.

[StayPuftMM]

Ursprungligen skrivet av Totopo:

Sounds like you should learn to say what actually matters then, to avoid the need for people to correct you and for you to backpedal.

I didn't realize that I said that it was the only deck I had ever played and me saying otherwise was contrary to that.

[Dlanor]

Ursprungligen skrivet av Garent:

I didn't realize that I said that it was the only deck I had ever played and me saying otherwise was contrary to that.

You're really good at deflecting by saying things that aren't a replacement for just being correct the first time or admitting you understand the issue with what you said.