[Feedback] Lava Terrain too powerful

Hello again
I've played quite a few games in a couple of days and I've noticed that, in my opinion, there's a game breaker: the lava terrain. I lost most of my games against hotspot/volcano/wall of fire because the the meta game seems to be "get a full set of lava terrain cards, wait for the enemy to move, win".
What do you think?

 

Lava is a huge part of the meta because of victory points in MP... Priests with cleanse are your friend.

 

Yes but I can't win with most of the players (novices like me excluded) unless I'm full of cleansing card, and I'm not.

 

I wouldn't call them game breaking, just game warping if anything. MP games against wizards essentially involve playing around lava/encumber cards. It's not impossible by any mean, but yes it will dictate most of your deck choices and in-game decisions.

 

I have to disagree. 10 damage is quite small when you hold it beside a warriors attacks, and it comes with a multitude of drawbacks; You need to prevent an enemy from moving off it it, by either making them waste move cards or using other status effects in combination; If they are on a victory tile, they will earn a victory point before the tile will damage them; If they have a movement trait like Slippery or Dimensional Traveller, they will get to move off the tile before it damages them (Unless that order of operations bug hasn't been fixed yet, anyways). It takes a lot of planning and control effects to pull off lava tiles against experienced opponents, and I personally think 10 damage isn't enough to justify it during PvP but that's just me.

 

I would say dealing 10 damage from 6+ range isn't particularly small. Especially when you have a character pinned on top of lava by encumber/halt cards and moving it off will require drawing specific cards. Sure you can't always put someone in that situation, but as long as you have lava cards and the opponent isn't in a position to just eat the damage, you have some degree of control over how your opponent will move.

 

Exactly, it takes encumber/halt cards to make it work, and it can be ruined by opponents drawing specific cards like Team movement cards or friendly pushes. They can't always be put in that situation, whether it's the required combination not being drawn or the opponent having an opposing effect, and sometimes they might very well just be in a position to just eat the damage. These are all statements you just tried to counter my points with. And another drawback I forgot to mention, lava is also completely useless effect on the final turn of the game; If a warrior had 1 HP left and was alone on the victory squares, and that player had 5/6 points, would you bother with casting lava? If the same 1 HP Warrior was in a position to smash the wizard and a single good card draw would save him, do you think that card draw would be Hot Spot?

I'm not sure you can make a valid counter point while using so many "if's" and "as long as".

And let me tell you, Obliterating Bludgeon's damage won't just casually disappear when somebody plays Walk.

 

I don't know how you can complain about me outlining specific situations after writing that first paragraph.

Playing encumber cards is rarely a "if" when you're fielding multiple wizards. Not much reason not to play a few WoF as well in that case. It's not like most players have access to anything better, given how top heavy multiplayer is.

 

Alright, I did use a few of my own "ifs" in my second post, but that doesn't make my first post any less valid (or your counter post any more valid). My second post was simply saying, for every "ideal" situation you metnioned there are just as many (if not more) unideal situations where the lava tiles just don't work. They are the most easily disrupted and hard to set up form of attack, and the payoff is low compared to other more flexible attacks.

 

Also, Lavas are excellent to force your opponent to move, and to block off terrains. Lava isn't all about damage. The fact that too many players build lava around just slow is a bit lacking.j

Lava can be played with cards like path of knives to force them to move. Lava can be used in combination with stone or other terrains to block off paths that you think your opponent to take. Winds of war + improved telekinesis are also great for improving effectiveness of lava, and separate priests from the unit you want to damage. The fact that a lava spot forces an opponent to use a move card is great in my opinion, especially if I attached path of knives to the player as well.

It is not overpowering, and has ways to work around it, but at the same time, also very strategic, I enjoy lava plays a lot.

 

Well then you need to buy more pizza like everyone else

 

Obtaining the top legendaries is mostly luck based. I suppose you could buy epic chests until you get them but that's just not realistic.

 

You drastically improve odds with card club

 

I think lava terrain is too powerful, not because of MP, but in the campaign. A level 1 wizard can already get Hot Spot, which will do more damage than the warrior. And once he gets Volcano, the wizard can win some battles single-handedly. Lava is so prevalent in higher-level campaign decks that when the rules were changed that large creatures wouldn't be affected by more than one of them, that was considered to be a huge nerf making the game much harder.

 

Well, one big reason why lava cards are so common in campaign is that they're the only real damage option available on current arcane items.

All the other good fire attacks (Fireball, Sizzling Bolt...) and all the spark type spells are only available on staffs and skills and it's hard to find a staff with more than a few good attacks.

On arcane items your other options are usually discards (Dissolve Armor, Perplexing Ray...), movement spells (Winds Of War, Telekinesis...) and non-damaging terrain spells (Smoke Bomb, Illusion Wall...). All of these are useful and sometimes necessary but it's still rare anyone would fill all four arcane item slots with them.
If you want damage on arcane items, you can either pick Hot Spot/Wall Of Fire or go for much weaker attacks such as Acid Spray, Arcane Spray, Glob Of Flame, Big Zap...
There's also a couple of high level arcane items with Cone Of Cold and a few with Stone Spikes but both are a lot more rare than lava.

 

Honestly? I would if I had the power tokens for it. That's just my playstyle though.

 

I think the terrain cards are fine. Yes they are high damage, but they require timing, and have the drawback of not being able to finish an opponent before they club you to death as well as being avoidable by team shift or hidden move cards.

I tend to use terrain cards for my arcane items at the moment, but as zalminen says, thats more due to a lack of ranged damaging effects on these card types.

 

If you're talking about Volcano, you're no longer talking about level 1 wizards. Only 5 items have that card, the most common is Epic and the lowest level is 9.