Difficulty of Card Hunter as viewed by a Magic deckbuilder

I used to play Magic the Gathering casually for a decade. That mostly consisted of me buying tons of cards, so as to build up to a dozen different new decks every week, and then playing those against other Magic players for fun. The reason I stopped was that less and less people were willing to play casually, and everybody was running around with some version of the latest and greatest tournament deck. As much fun a "squirrel deck" might be in the right environment, as little fun is it if your opponent is dead serious about winning and crushes you in every game with a deck he copied from the internet. Certain cards in Magic the Gathering simply had no place in a winning deck.

In Card Hunter my highest party is level 17, and I have two mid-level parties in addition to that. And while I am far from being "stuck" in the campaign, I am in a situation where I know that I can't use certain items and cards because they might be fun, but would cause me to lose battles. In fact even if I have the perfect "deck", I still need some luck of the draw to win a battle of the level of my characters.

I find this inability to include sub-optimal cards into my deck regrettable. I can't even use them for a fun game against much lower level enemies, as my character's level gets temporarily reduced if I want to play those, and thus I still need to play with the good cards to win.

I very much agree with the basic principle of rewarding people for playing well and building good decks. But I would much prefer a system in which somebody playing either deliberately or because he doesn't know better advances extremely slowly, while somebody playing the best cards masterfully advances much quicker. I am not so much a fan of the system that Card Hunter has, where if you don't play good enough cards or not play them well enough, you just don't advance at all. Sometimes I would like to have the option to just play with goofy cards for fun without being punished for it by the game.

 

I'm exactly the same as you - The Deck of Little Wizards entertained me for years in MtG. My solution so far in Cardhunter has been to build multiple parties so I can mess about with different cards in the lower level adventures. Additionally I dont think you get levelled down for all adventures, only ones that are a sizable chunk below you - so you should be able to build whacky decks and take on adventures 3 or 4 levels below you for fun?

Gray

 

Could you elaborate? I don't know what these "fun but bad" cards are, and I certainly enjoy playing with a variety. From all the playing and strategizing and debating, I know there are tons of different builds that MAKE different cards valuable. So, I find it hard to respond helpfully as I can't think of any "cards that cause me to lose."

 

I learned to stay away from items with certain disadvantage cards, like Superstitious. I also found unholy builds to be hard to pull off, and certainly to be less good than holy builds for clerics.

 

I guess it's a matter of opinion. I found unholy cards so much more useful that pretty much the only holy cards I still use are Inspiration and Mass Frenzy...

 

Oh, you meant items. See, now I'm more on your side. Some items are really awesome, like Rat Boots, which are way more adorable than Mouse Boots. Unfortunately, Squeamish is a little too nasty for me to accept two Cautious Sneaks.

Which is why those "drawbacks-only" quests are really handy: you have an explicit reason to equip such items. And funny thing . . . you can win all those quests, with zero retries, equipping only items that have drawbacks. If this is possible (and expected!) then it calls into question the idea that bringing a single one of these causes you to lose. Yes, I know you were just exaggerating to make your point: but seriously, a lot of gamers adore the "drawbacks-only" quests for this very reason.

Not to mention how Trait drawbacks let you cycle to the next card in line automatically, leading a lot of gamers to put as many of those into their deck as they can. I'm serious: you'll see posts about this from time to time. If you can get yourself used to drawbacks (like through doing quests as an advanced player, or just being stuck using them early on as a new player), you can find good strategies that make use of them. Personally, yes, I'll even use non-Trait drawbacks if I feel I can accommodate them in my strategy.

Having said that, you brought up the example of Unholy Priests. There was a point where I was concerned they were the only viable build, so there's that.

So, let me be sure here: your first concern was that drawbacks got in your way, correct? And your second concern was the specific case of Unholy Priests? Do you have other points to address?

For specific builds, it occurs to me: if you're concerned about drawbacks, you might have questioned Bash Warriors more than Unholy Priests. Priests may suffer Demonic Revenge, yes, but I recently discovered that Bashes are almost exclusively on items with drawbacks at low levels. This should render them "instant losers," but as I mentioned recently, I'm working on a bash-and-stab party and having great fun.