I've been playing a volcano team for quite a long time (in constructed leagues), and with the items from the new expansion I'm quite disappointed by what my team got of new available cards. There are 4 new arcane items with Volcano on them, 3 that require a yellow token and 1 that require a blue. Now the thing is that if you have 2 Mordecai's Staff Of Magma, you are using up your yellow tokens on these. So i can't use the 3 yellow token items, but that's just a minor annoyance.ยด The really annoying thing, and the subject of this thread, is the awful design of the blue token card (Overheated Mesmerizer). The Hypnotic beacon is interesting and pretty nice, but the Brain Burn makes it completely useless, as a poorly timed Brain Burn will reveal your Volcanoes to your opponent. Why oh why couldn't it have been another drawback that doesn't ruin any Volcano tactics. /rant off
Because it upholds the Cardhunter tradition of maintaining an ample assortment of "bad choice" high rarity items.
The drawback is what's making the item cost 1 only to begin with. Ofc, you could have had some other drawback (say Defensiveness or what have you), but then the item would have probably been way better than it currently is. I think Blue Manchu purposefully assumed a stance with EttSC's item design that handicap cards should be meaningful when they do appear on items, given how they lower an item's calculated level (and hence potentially its tokens cost). I do get yours was just a rant, but I guess good item design doesn't equate to making every item as broken as it possibly could. In all seriousness though, it's not like Brain Burn is completely unworkable. There's an astonishing number of builds which stock up on seemingly very bad traits (Ouch!, Traveling Curse, Demonic Revenge, ecc, ecc) which happen to be quite effective. Remember most handicaps also double as deck cyclers, and while drawbacks do sometime lose you game randomly, a well balanced deck can minimize that (i.e. don't just equip 4x Overheated Mesmerizers and expect to never draw Brain Burn). It's also a matter of play-styles ofc. I personally favor decks which don't often lose me games randomly due to drawbacks being drawn at exactly the worst possible time, so I tend to minimize the number of handicaps I put in my builds. But that doesn't seem to prevent people from putting both Traveling Curse and Raging Strike on the same guys, which does make for potentially very effective builds if the drws line up perfectly, but also make for spectacular disasters every once in a while.
As you might know from various sources (like the feed back dev gave in AA contest #1) that dev likes the drawback to be consequential. Also, Overheated Mesmerizer is pretty decent. I uses it in my leadership-volcano deck. Just don't mass it if you can't handle the drawback. How do I handle the brain burn? It hardly matter for my deck if my opponent see my hand once, as I got plenty of leadership and will draw a lot more cards anyway.
I think the rant addressed the surprise aspect of a volcano deck, but I could be wrong. If you are a high ranked player and run volcano builds regularly, you're unlikely to sneak up on anyone. If you have a very strong build, it probably doesn't matter much.
I think the only way you're surprising someone with Volcano is if you have a lot of team moves, or if it's not a Volcano deck. And once I see one Volcano, I'm hoarding the crap out of my move cards. Although that's less viable with Accelerate Time. . .
No reason to print a strictly better Xipil Ring. Still, Overheated Mesmerizer is probably way better on average. Not sure what the problem is. Revealing Volcanos can play mind games with your opponent, and it always cycles. If I'd wanted the drawback to really matter, I would have put Trip or Fumble.
