Too many bad cards/events

[Mivlya]

So I understand from some other posts I've seen that it used to be the case that a lot of cards were value 0 and that meant that people were taking strong cards too often, so they applied mass nerfs. That said...there's way, way too much junk in the card pool.

We really didn't need a negative version of every Ace-11 for the collection book. Cards that require you to get hit don't have enough payoff. Too many cards have awkward values and there's almost no payoff to running anything that isn't running values as low as possible. Most of the cards feel like they were designed for the enemies to use, and then are in the player card pool out of obligation. I'm sure the balancing makes it tricky since both sides use the same cards, but as it stands right now I'm rarely ever going to take more than half the cards in the game, and if I want to complete the collection I need to hope I get a bunch of random-value negatives and take awkward tarot cards.

Since there's no taking the toothpaste out of the tube for some of this, I'd really like to see more events that make taking bad stuff more enticing or that give more payoffs (in addition to buffing a bunch of cards), especially since right now it feels like half the events are bad shops that I don't want to interact with because I'll rarely see a card I want and often be forced to take cards I don't want. Do we really need 4-shop, 8-shop, Slot machine, Go fish, 3-card-monte? It feels excessive. Maybe if you could use more services in those shops?

Things like, a counterfeiter that can paint a card negative, or the act 1 counterfeiter appearing again later for more deck manipulation. Defensive cards not having a cost, since they require being hit to be good. More payoffs for playing things other than 2 10-values or spamming low cards.

And I wanna say, I don't mind the game being hard. I've 100%'d several roguelikes (Balatro and StS notably). But right now everything feels very samey because the pool is full of redundancies (the full-suite of negatives), and chaff (randomly costed situational cards with little payoff).

[TwilightSky]

Yeah...I've been struggling to win runs since the last re-balance update when they nerfed everything. It's been rough.

[Dietikon]

Most cards do not bust your opponent or consistently provide 21. Instead they have awkward values or even introduce more randomness. At this moment the game encourages players to have thin decks to reuse overpower cards. This is a design-level issue. If you take 20 damage to renew your deck may solve the problem.