New human build that is unfun to play against

The root problem of these 'infinite draw' decks is that you never 'deck out'. Churning your deck constantly by wound/heal/draw/repeat has no penalty to the player. Perhaps only allowing you run through your deck once a turn might slow things down.

Decks built on the basic principle would still be hideous to play against, of course, unless the damage is only triggered by your opponent as discussed.

 

Infinite Draw capacity can be limited in one of two ways really. Only allowing a person to cycle through their deck one per character per round. Or Limiting the number of draws possible on spoken card. Or only allowing damage that activates said card come from a specific source.

One of the problems with this combo however is the versatility of a mage in so far as mobility, and accessible powerful cards are a bit high, I use the draw two card quite regularly myself and it has led me to some outright obliterating rounds on warriors and mages.

However the focus should more be on not letting a card combo last for 5 minutes because it creates for unfun scenarios, and not to mention likely unwinnable games. It is the only combo in the game that can guarantee a win essentially first turn it seems, with no other deck setup similar.

 

Any opinions on this? Reposted from upthread:

Whenever a character has to shuffle their deck, every character on the other team gets to draw a card.

It gives you some crucial counterplay against a heavy cycling/card drawing strategy without completely shutting them down.

 

I am personally against adding any kind of extra rules to the basic function of the game and all for changing cards so that their interactions are not broken in the first place. That said I'm not against changing the basic rules if it's a better solution, but i think adding more should generally be avoided. There are already a few suggestions about how to address the issues with Martyr Blessing and the previously fixed healing talents. So far these have been the only abusable ways of drawing cards.

The remaining potentially abusable ways of drawing cards are Unholy Power and Demonic Feedback since they more than replace themselves instantly. One of these is rare (gold banner) and has a small cost and the other has a large cost, 5hp. If these cards do prove to be imbalanced it is already obvious that tweaking the costs is the simplest way to balance them, either by increasing the damage or making the damage unpreventable.

While many other cards allow replacement there are only a couple of other that a capable of doing more than just replacing themselves, Accelerated Thought, Unholy Energy, Consecrate Ground and Bless. While these cards can generate up to 3 cards, they come slowly, once each turn. In addition they have counterplay, opponents can use this time to kill, purge or cleanse the target or their square. They also have downsides, the first two involve taking some damage (telling us how best to tweak them if necessary) and the second two can be stolen by clever opponents.

All in all I think that drawing cards is a very powerful tool in Card hunter and it will need to be monitored for abuse constantly, but since we are already aware of the major issues and have ideas for how to address any minor ones that may occur I don't see it ever becoming a long term problem.

PS- Well these are the cards I know of. If there are any I've overlooked please let me know.

 

Card Draw has always been a very powerful aspect of CCG's, that and tutor effects.

The best place I have ever seen this dealt with is the A Game of Thrones LCG. In this game, each player draws two cards per turn. However, the game puts a hard cap on the number of cards that can be drawn in any one turn to 4. So the most you can draw is 4. There are a few effects that live outside of this such as "Place 1 card in your hand" but these effects are very powerful and limited in availability.

So if this were applied to CardHunter, it could work something like this.
* Start of turn, each character draws 2 cards.
* Each character may draw a maximum of 2 additional cards per turn. All other card draw effects would fail to draw (You cant abuse "cycle to discard")

I could live with that effect.

The game play wouldn't change that much either. Drawing cards up to 2 per character would still be very powerful (2x the number of options/turn) but you would remove some of the crazy combo effects that you can get in CCG's.

 

Just to add another suggestion, Martyr's blessing could also be balanced by limiting it's availability. Right now you can get it on a single talent divine artifact, so you can put a lot of them into a deck. Contrast with something like Talented Healer, which is also very powerful, but is only available as a divine skill, so there is a fixed limit (3), and also an opportunity cost (you can have Talented Healer *or* Altruism, but not both).

I don't think moving Martyr's blessing into the divine skill slot would be enough, but I think it would seriously soften the incoming nerf for a card that is really very interesting.

 

Yippee!

 

Nice, should still create lots of interesting play options.

 

Great! Now hopefully can get over Blessing churn and see if they can still churn using leadership etc.

That said, I really liked the casual interplay with blessing and things like misguided healing during the campaign. It was certainly a fun mechanic to play with.