great game concept, terrible design.

[Malkavian]

Incredibly terrible possibly worst balancing ive ever seen in a game that would dare invite people to play openly.

whoever designed this cant do math, and has never in their life played a game ever in their life before and just random crap that sounded cool on cards with no concept of interaction.

or even worse hey are just the worst people at their job.

[Mivo]

It's designed by MTG professionals and industry veterans like Matt Place (senior designer at Blizzard for the Warcraft TCG and Hearthstone). They do have quite a bit of experience.

It's an early access game, though, with frequent balance changes. This is the best time for experimentation and seeing how changed or new mechanics affect the dynamics, win rates, etc. Much is still in flux. The devs are receptive for constructive feedback that they can work with.

[Malkavian]

MTG professionals explains it all.

[Zlehtnoba]

Are you now done venting, and ready for something constructive?

This game has a lot of hidden depth, and actually rewards skill and knowledge of interactions. Those end-game comps that roll all over you are not a happy accident, they are the result of players recognizing an opportunity and going for it. And they are there by design.

There are two ways a Storybook lobby can go for you: you get an early highroll and build around it, or you decide to aim for something dependable that will get you a win. You should think about why, in this game, a top four placement is called a win.

That said, SB can be quite frustrating if you approach it with the wrong mindset. You need to accept that broken things happen, and try to be the one that gets there.

[Mivo]

If you could make three balance/gameplay changes, what would they be?

[Zlehtnoba]

Probably not asking me, but ...

1. Eliminate Good boy from the game. He has been rebalanced a few times, and it just doesn't matter, he's still a key character in the most broken build.

2. Move Crystal Ball a level or two higher. Probably to four, or Peter becomes unplayable.

3. Increase hand size, so we can 'sideboard' characters against certain builds, and have more space to store doubles.

There are some things we should do with Slay too, currently it looks pretty bad. I understand the logic that ranged characters with lots of toughness are hard to kill, but there should be a middle road between the utterly fragile ones we have now and tha chupa builds we had a while ago. I love what they did with Sad Dracula though.

[Gabriot]

I actually think the balance is the best of any game like this I've ever played, it's one of the most attractive aspects of the game for me. I will say the heroes have some interesting balancing, like I don't see many worlds where Krampus/Mrs. Claus +1/+1 holds up to Fallen Angels +2/+2 to all units (perhaps every now and then you only get one or the other, but realistically Fallen Angle seems nearly always better), but honestly the hero imbalances are pretty minor and they are constantly patching them to fix them, so props to them on that.

The main thing that is killing my soul in this game is the network issues. I'd love to have a better idea of what exactly causes the connection issues so massively for folks like myself compared to others. If it's something like a regional thing I'm more than willing to VPN to a new region that I dont' constantly get last place in games because I randomly can't connect.

[tmaddox]

Originally posted by Malkavian:

Incredibly terrible possibly worst balancing ive ever seen in a game that would dare invite people to play openly.

whoever designed this cant do math, and has never in their life played a game ever in their life before and just random crap that sounded cool on cards with no concept of interaction.

or even worse hey are just the worst people at their job.

So let me get this right....

Someone gives you a game you can play for free and instead of just moving on when it does not meet your needs you instead visit the forum and insult the devs. You provide no constructive criticism. You give no specific examples of poor design. You just toss around insults.

I hope that it was at least therapeutic for you to post that, because it was completely useless for everyone else.

[Malkavian]

the huge gap between thing that work ( 3 -5 200+ stat characters) vs everything else is blatant and distracts from anything considered potentially skill based and turns it into a pure RNG based game (which the MTG crew has been obsessed with maximizing in their game attempts).

it took me about 4 games and 30 minutes looking at the cards to succusfully predict what would and would not work.

so what we have here is another MTG crew game where 90% of the cards are pointless and a hand full dominate everything, and choice is just an illusion someties forced on you by bad RNG.

most matches theres one brief moment rather you want to pick broken thing A or broken thing C, most rounds prior to that moment and most choices after that are predetermined, except when you get RNG screwed , then you get to pick which pointless cards to sell later for the few good ones, assuming someone else hasn't already got their exponential growth going.

i just dont see how some of these cards can be looked at seriously from a properly designed and balanced standpoint when it is blatant and obvious they are way out of proportion to the game,

and this is standard MTG crew shenanigans, create 6-10 incredibly overpowered things then focus all the rest of the design on them, its lazy.

[Gabriot]

I've had plenty of 1st places at Legend rank without a single 200+ stat character. If you're constantly losing out to those hyper end came comps then you probably aren't putting on enough pressure early. Sometimes you can't stop it, that's a card game for you, but a lot of times you can get a good tier 4/5 comp that steamrolls everyone before they can get their tier 6 comps going.

[Zlehtnoba]

Originally posted by Malkavian:

so what we have here is another MTG crew game where 90% of the cards are pointless and a hand full dominate everything, and choice is just an illusion someties forced on you by bad RNG.

Well, this is close to the truth. The skill is how to get into the top four when you don't get the broken thing. If you can do that reliably, and are able to accept that sometimes you can't, then you will be able to use the times when you do get the combos to climb the ladder.

The only real offender left, by the way, is Good Boy. A good Good Boy comp is practically unbeatable. Even if you get lucky with Pigomorph or Medusa in one rally, you will then lose the next two. The other endgames are mostly on par, in my experience, you can win lobbies with many different things. The devs took out a few things that were really broken, and modified some other ones, and now it feels like you really have meaningful choices to make, including the first one. Merlin is not an auto pick anymore.

If you like the concept, and are bothered by inbalance, devs are open to suggestions. Make your case, with concrete examples instead of vague hyperbole, and change may come.

[Xuande]

Good Boy is not in my opinion oppressive currently. Strong, yes, but something has to be, and there are valid tech options against standard Good Boy as well as Copyboy.

Merlin was always a strong pick but autopick is going a bit far. A lot of heroes were slept on during early launch meta, particularly Sir Galahad but others as well. During my best season, I rarely picked Merlin when he was at his strongest. Perhaps that was a -EV mistake on my part, but there was room to believe Merlin wasn't OP.

What's increasingly making me not want to queue is the current Exodia comp. You're not going to see it nearly as often since its specific to Trophy Hunter, but having your board fully wiped including any summons you have on the opponent's first attack, when their investment is limited to Lv3-5 units, is extreme bull****. I've been 20+'d by it multiple times this meta, multiple times when on summon comps, where I get to make 0-1 attacks before being killed.

One of Grim Soul or Trophy Hunter needs to go, and cutting Grim Soul opens future design space.

[Zlehtnoba]

You're correct, always picking Merlin says a lot about my preferences, the kind of game I like to play (though he is one of the stronger heroes IMO). It also helps that I have no ambitions about reaching rank 4000.

Wasn't Grim Soul just reintroduced in the last patch? And Slay nerfed as a result? What are the odds of devs removing it again? I love that they are responsive and react to data showing that some things are too strong, but in this case they would need to look really closely, if the combo is really as rare as you say. Well, maybe there's a discussion about it on Discord, I don't go there.

[Xuande]

The combo is this:

Trophy Hunter + Grim Soul (slot 1) + Wretched Mummy (slot 2 typically) + Baba Yagas

Grim Soul attacks, may or may not get a Slay but almost certainly dies, and then Mummy's effect procs enough times to fully wipe most enemy boards. It has only been possible as of this patch, because Mummy was reworked after Grim Soul's initial removal from the game. With Grim Soul back, this is possible for the first time.

Typically when I see it, they've managed one Upgraded of each unit, often with an additional Baba Yaga. Assuming a Slay+Last Breath off of Grim Soul, that's 8x4 activations of Mummy, and each activation waits for summons on the enemy field to resolve before picking a new target. In the "worst case" where Grim Soul cannot manage a Slay, that's still 2x4 activations and if Mummy gets to swing against what's left of your board...

What makes this so stupid beyond the difficulty in interacting with the combo is that no Lv6 units are needed and no treasures are needed either, though you can certainly make it stronger with the right treasures. You even get 3-4 spare team slots to put whatever!

I don't go to their Discord either unless its to check for news, such as with this last patch's networking outages. There seems to be only a small amount of discussion about it currently. I've ran into it several times this patch and its always been fatal for me, even from 20+ HP which has happened twice.

Here's an example from yesterday where I was at 21 HP with a decent comp around the time of natural Lv6, and then promptly died to the TH in the room taking 4th without making a single attack: https://i.imgur.com/HdlnRGW.png

[Zlehtnoba]

Thanks, in between your replies I met the combo, and it really is overpowered and fast. More and more it looks like Grim Soul and Copycat should not be a part of this game. They are combo enablers, and such cards are dangerous and limit design space.

[tmaddox]

I think I ran into this the other day and could not figure out how they wer getting so many spell attacks on my units. It just seemed non-stop.