Well Laid Plans - is it as good as I think it is?

[moleo]

I think Well Laid Plans is an excellent card. One of the best cards to have as the Silent regardless of build.

* It is similar to drawing a card (or 2) every turn. Keeping a card in your hand is roughly on par with drawing a new one (usually slightly worse).
Of course, sometimes you empty your hand so you don't get the benefit, but it is still good a lot of the time.

* It is nearly strictly better than exhaust.
Worst case scenario, you can just keep retaining a Wound (or whatever) to effectively exhaust it (merely reducing your handisze to 9).
It is usually a better than this though.

* It evens out the RNG of draws.
Drawing 5 Strikes or 5 Defends is less of a problem when you can look at what is left in your deck and keep cards in hand accordingly.
Drawing Out Manouver and your high cost cards in the same hand is less of a problem when you can retain the high cost cards for next turn.

* Because it evens out the RNG of draws, it makes combos a lot easier to use.

* Synergy with Relics that trigger from powers

As an example of how much I like them, once I used Pandora's box and of the 8 cards it gave me, 4 of them were Well Laid Plans.
At first I was worried, but after playing with the deck I was quite impressed.

What do you think of the card?

[twpe]

It's strong. Unless your deck is designed around infinite cycles and you don't actually play many turns to begin with.

[jirow]

It's good, but 4? Ehhh...

[Pixel Peeper]

Yeah, it's really good.

Having to manually choose a card every turn and constantly look at your draw pile to try to guess which card is best to keep gets very tedious, though. I've found myself passing on this good card just because I didn't want to deal with the hassle.

[Capernaum]

Well Laid Plans is great, but I don't think I'd ever intentionally have more than two (would maybe spend an upgrade on one) unless I had an incredibly specific deck that benefited from the card retention more than the average deck. AKA: Lots of discard synergy cards + Concentrates + tons of cycle. Otherwise adding more than two is just diluting your draw too much IMO.

[moleo]

Originally posted by twpe:

It's strong. Unless your deck is designed around infinite cycles and you don't actually play many turns to begin with.

I find it actually helps set up your infinite combos, by holding the key cards (whether that be Burst+ or Madness or Calculated Gamble+ or whatever) in your hand until you can actually go off.

Originally posted by jirow:

It's good, but 4? Ehhh...

Originally posted by Capernaum:

Well Laid Plans is great, but I don't think I'd ever intentionally have more than two ... adding more than two is just diluting your draw too much IMO.

I'll admit I prefer to stick to only 2 copies, but the great thing about the Pandora's box result of 4 copies was that I can play it for 0 and it effectively exhausts itself.

So it was like the first 2 (maybe 3) copies were useful, and the 4th one I drew was at worst a Clumsy Curse, and at best would occasionally come in handy.

Therefore it was a very mild dilution of my draw, since you only draw it once, and crucially the *first* copy (or 2 or 3) is good, so even if you consider the 4th copy you *draw* to be a 'Clumsy', it is still better than 3 copies + a Clumsy because you'll never draw the Clumsy first.

[twpe]

Oh yes it does help. I just meant that the less turns you use in a fight, the less value it has. Still strong regardless.