These card-drawing cards seem grossly over-valued.

Considering the following hypothetical card:

Breath: Cantrip. Draw a card.

I submit this card is neutral. There are some interactions with other cards where it would matter, but under typical circumstances, you play this card, and you're left in exactly the same position you would have been in if you didn't have this card in your deck (i.e. your hand is the same size and you have the same number of actions as you would've had if this were simply deleted from your deck before you drew it). In most cases, if you had the option to add this card to your deck (without removing or altering any other cards), you probably wouldn't care one way or the other.


So consider this hypothetical card:

Slow-Witted: Draw a card.

I've just removed the word "cantrip". I argue that makes it worse--it still only gives you the card you would've had anyway, but now it uses up an action (and it means you have one fewer options for other cards to play until you use up that action). I realize I just complained that moving first is a disadvantage, but I still don't think removing "Cantrip" from a card makes it better.

With me so far?

Now take a look at Inspiration--it's exactly the same as Slow-Witted above, except you have the option to let an ally draw a card instead of drawing one yourself. Now, yes, that does make it better than Slow-Witted...a little. If an ally consistently has better cards than the character with Inspiration, then you should just replace your Inspiring character with a copy of whoever you're targeting, but this is an improvement in that it lets you choose the character who will situationally gain the most benefit from an extra card draw. (At the cost of an action.)

I'd say that's pretty close to net-neutral; there are situations where it will help, but also definitely situations where it will hurt. That suggests to me maybe parchment quality. It's actually rated at silver quality, and the designers apparently expect me to use a power token for the privilege of equipping an Alabaster Charm (2x Inspiration + Wavering Faith). Huh?


Now let's add another disadvantage:

Forgetful: Discard a card, then draw a card.

Yes, occasionally you'll use it to discard a Slowed or something and it will be slightly better than Slow-Witted, but you don't have negative cards in most hands, and most negative cards are Traits anyway, so you couldn't discard them with this. And you could try to use up all your other cards before playing this, so you aren't forced to discard, but then it's merely as good as Slow-Witted. Most of the time you'll discard a weak-but-positive card, so I'd say this is, overall, clearly worse than Slow-Witted.

How would you rate this card? It's better than Fumble in that you choose which card to lose, but it's also worse in that it uses up an action. Seems like a black card to me, though I could see an argument that it's parchment level (Squeamish is parchment despite being strictly negative, and Forgetful might be close to neutral if you played it well).

Surprise! This exact card actually exists in the game, except it's called Lateral Thinking, and it's also silver. Trained Tactics is a freaking Legendary human skill that requires a power token for 2x Lateral Thinking + Weak Parry.

WTF? Am I missing something here?

 

You're undervaluing the cycling effect that those cards have on your deck. The more cards that cycle the better the odds of you drawing the cards that you want are. In most CCGs you want your deck to contain as few cards as possible. In card hunter MP decks do not contain varying amounts of cards. However, they do posses these cards that cycle. So, while it may seem "neutral" one effect is that these cards allow you to effectively pass your turn without ending the round. Another positive effect these cards have is in beneficial non-essential trait cards. These traits can help to cycle off negative traits by utilizing the three attachment limit. So, you can see there are lots of reasons why they are not as, "neutral" as you may have realized.

 

Not sure I follow, Lance. Small decks are generally good in CCGs because you get to pick and choose your worst cards to remove, leaving only your best ones. Forward Thinking is probably a positive card, for that reason--you keep the better of 2 cards and pass over the worse one.

But in most games--including Card Hunter, as far as I can tell--if you simply doubled the number of copies of every single card in your deck, that wouldn't necessarily make your deck any worse. It would make your draws a bit more random, and maybe you'd be slightly worse off due to stacking rules or something, but barring some specialized strategy the effects are going to be extremely minor (and in some cases it might even be advantageous). So smaller decks are not inherently better, unless there's something major I've overlooked.

 

Inspiration is fantastic because it lets you put cards on whichever of your characters needs them. Theoretically, what deals more damage: three characters with one Bash each, or one character with three Bashes?

 

Smaller decks from what I understand in CCGs are better because of the consistency they provide.

Let us look at the effects of Spin Around which allows you to change your facing direction, and then draws a card to replace itself. While changing your facing direction may not seem glamorous it may be the difference between being able to block or not. The fact that you are able to play a card without passing (potentially ending the round) and without effectively decreasing your hand size is huge. Also, take the fact that you have one less card in your draw deck you now have better odds of drawing the cards you really want.

As far as your example of doubling the number of copies of every single card in your deck... that would make your worse. The reasoning for that is that you are now less likely to draw a balanced hand. If for example you have no boots and normally have as a result three Walk cards (being a Dwarf) then your starting hand could be all Walk cards. However, your following hand would have zero Walk cards. If though, you doubled the number of cards in the deck as you suggest then you could draw only Walk cards for your next three draw cards (2 and 1/2 total turns of only Walk)! Now, this is an extreme example, but I hope you understand what I am getting at.

Bash might not be the best example... what with Slide Back and all... But yes, the option to consolidate your resources is great!

 

OK then, would you rather have
A) a Cleric with one Penetrating Cut, and a Warrior with a Penetrating Cut, an attached Impaler, an attached Righteous Frenzy, and an attached Unholy Frenzy
B) a Cleric with no cards, and a Warrior with 2 Penetrating Cuts, an attached Impaler, an attached Righteous Frenzy, and an attached Unholy Frenzy

 

Let's assume for the sake of discussion that Spin Around is balanced.

Spin Around is silver. Lateral Thinking is just like Spin Around, except instead of being allowed to change your facing, you are forced to discard a card. You don't think that's maybe just a little bit worse?

Given the choice between having a Lateral Thinking or a Spin Around in your deck (all else being constant), would you ever choose the Lateral Thinking, and why?

I don't buy it. If you're unwilling to end the round, then your opponent can just pass, and you'll be forced to keep playing cards until either he wants to take a turn or you give up and end the round anyway; either way, stalling bought you nothing. And if you don't mind ending the round, then ensuring it doesn't end isn't a help.

The fact that moving first is often disadvantageous is a problem, but it's a problem with flow (and an exploitable AI), not mechanical balance. Turning any of these cards into a cantrip would make it better, not worse.

Yes, but the probability of that is negligible, and it also gives you the possibility of drawing a bunch of your best card (or combo) in a row. So, it's very occasionally extremely good, and very occasionally extremely bad, and totally indistinguishable from the smaller deck the vast majority of the time. It's not obvious whether it's better or worse overall, but either way it's very unlikely to matter compared to all the factors that the "shrinking your deck" analogy glosses over.

You're cherry-picking examples. I could just as easily say, would you rather have:
A) a Warrior with Penetrating Cut, Stab, Chop, and Simple Strike, or
B) a Warrior with Penetrating Cut, Stab, Chop, and an attached Righteous Frenzy that the Cleric took instead of Inspiration?

(Note: the game acts as if Inspiration were vastly better than Righteous Frenzy.)

You seem to be trying to make the point that the game includes combos that make it potentially better to have a lot of cards in one hand rather than the same number of cards spread out over multiple hands. That's a fair point, though your bringing up Righteous Frenzy and the like actually work directly against that point, because it's a cross-character combo, and Inspire doesn't give you more total cards in a single turn, it just shifts them from one character to another.

I remain skeptical that these combos are strong enough and (crucially) reliable enough to make Inspiration a better-than-mediocre card (if the Warrior's next card isn't a Penetrating Cut, you haven't improved your Impaler combo). But I suppose I can't rule it out. Perhaps those combos become more prevalent at higher levels than I've reached?

But even if this argument justifies Inspiration, it does nothing to help Lateral Thinking.

 

I don't think it counts as cherrypicking if it's an example that happens in almost every match I play. I am constantly in the position where I have a character with two or more buffs active, and I'd much rather load that guy up with additional cards than have more cards spread around. Even if I don't have buffs active, I'd rather have more cards on whichever one of my characters is in the thick of the fighting than spread out among characters who might be out of range for whatever reason. And also there's the fact that the faster you're drawing cards, the more frequently you're seeing the really exceptional cards.

Lateral Thinking does seem questionable, since you're trading away two cards to get one card in most circumstances.

 

In my opinion it's not about ending the round, it's much more about positioning yourself for next round.

Anyway, the filter cards are about opportunity costs. If you didn't have them in the deck, what else could you have in their place (on a very similar item)? Would you have wanted to draw that other card instead, or this card giving you a chance to draw another card from your deck?

But as Lance mentioned, it's about a balanced draw. Drawing all of your good cards at the beginning of the game but not enough moves to use them is pointless. Smaller decks with a focus are simply more consistent at being able to draw usable combinations of cards because there are less chances for large strings of detrimental 'clumping'. The probability of drawing given sets of cards only stays the same when you double the number of the cards in the deck if you also double the number of draws you are getting.

 

It's worth pointing out that because specific cards are limited to certain item slots, it's often not a case of prefering to include an alternative to a cycling card. For example, using Spin Around to cycle to your buff cards is viable because you can't have those buff cards on your boots (at least not that i've seen) so you would be choosing in that case to focus on drawing the buffs you wanted.

In each case it might be good to consider if the cards you could have instead of the cycling cards are worth more to your setup and playstyle than whatever alternatives could be gained from that item slot. Personally I find it better to cycle into the best cards rather than padding out the deck with more average cards, but it may depend on what gear each individual player has available.

 

The cards that allow you to discard and redraw should also be seen as soothing balm to those "I never draw X when I need it" players. Especially those that allow you to churn your deck to find an Armour / Attack card.

 

Could you explain this? I don't think I follow.

So, you're basically arguing that cards like Lateral Thinking only show up on items that go in a slot where all possible items are systematically underpowered, when comparing them to cards in other slots that are nominally of equal quality? That still sounds like a problem to me, because even if that's intentional, it's confusing; if they want to make a "weak slot", it would be more understandable for players if they put in weak cards that are colored as weak cards, rather than weak cards masquerading as good cards.

My point isn't that these cards are too weak to exist at all--it's not like they're the weakest cards in the game; I'd definitely take Inspiration over, say, Superstitious. My point is that the game seems to present them as if they were not merely tolerable or OK cards, but good cards, and I don't think that's the case.

 

Yeah, I get that. I just think you're massively overemphasizing it. There are far bigger issues at stake here.

Here's a thought experiment. You and I play a game of Card Hunter. I double everything in my deck, thereby increasing my odds of "detrimental clumping". But in exchange, each of your characters must discard one card of their choice at the start of every single turn (after drawing). Which of us has the advantage?

This loosely corresponds to you starting with a deck the same size as me and replacing half the cards with Lateral Thinking to "shrink" the deck. Maybe your half-size deck is helping you. But does it compensate for one forced discard per turn? I'd take the larger deck any day.

 

Sure. Cycling through my deck at the end of the turn, while my opponent is out of moves and just passing, allows me to take as many turns as needed while I discard cards I don't foresee being useful on the next round. This doesn't require cantrips although ending with one would be nice to be able to start the round.

It's not a weak slot, but it only appears on human skills. Other options in human skills present team moves, card trading and other card filtering. Lateral is the lowest tier of the card filtering cards. There are also times where

It's silver because it is a mechanic that the developers deemed more useful and/or rare than normal skills. Could it be a lower colored card? Sure, and if that's the only thing you are complaining about then I'd be with you on that if we are scrutinizing card colors. I do think on the design side there could be a lot more going on because cards simply aren't interchangeable. Compared to Spin Around for instance, Lateral is less 'powerful' but they don't compete since spin around is only on boots and a dwarf skill. You will never choose between them.

And I'd disagree with you. Certainly anything above Lateral are quite good. Lateral is decent. A lot of deck building is making your deck more efficient. Filter/Cycle cards do that, as do traits, many drawbacks, and other card drawing. The more of them you have in your deck the more consistent your deck becomes.

You may be underestimating the times where your best card isn't useful. Even having to discard your best (though currently useless) card for a chance at a usable card is a benefit. I don't use a lot of humans so Lateral Thinking hasn't really been on my radar, but Demonic Pain has saved me quite a few times for the exact same reasons.

 

Don't think I am. As an example I made a Wizard with 9 Reactive Teleports in the deck. Being able to consistently have 3 of them in hand made it very difficult for my opponents to hit me while I was able to continue to do damage. When you build around a strategy, consistency of that strategy is a primary concern.

But there's a few problems with that. Firstly, Lateral Thinking doesn't force you to discard in every case. Secondly, forcing a discard doesn't correspond to me using a ton of Lateral Thinking cards at all. The focused discard will be forcing me to discard usable cards where with Lateral Thinking I have the option of if and when to discard.

Rather than trying to roughly simulate half of my deck being Lateral Thinking in a thought experiment, why not actually do it in the experiment? If you were to actually replace half my deck with Lateral Thinking I could build toward that. I think you'd find it a tough build to defeat. Sure with that many multiples I may lose some card advantage, but I'd be able to get to useful cards more often as well.

 

Let's stretch this example to an extreme so it's easier to see the point.

Let's say a warriors deck contains 3 Obliterating Bludgeon, 3 Weak Strike, and 30 Slow-Witted. Even though it costs actions to play Slow-Witted, they are basically cycling themselves when they are drawn. Your effective deck comes down to just being 3 Obliterating Bludgeon, and 3 Weak Strikes, meaning when you draw a card that won't cycle itself you have about a 50/50 chance to draw either of those attacks. But what if you could replace those Weak Strikes with more Slow-Witted? Your deck becomes 3 Obliterating Bludgeon and 33 Slow-Witted; which means when you draw, if it's not one that will cycle itself then it's a 100% chance of it being Obliterating Bludgeon.

This is in essence the point of self card draw; You increase the odds of drawing what you want. In the above example, even if you could only replace one Weak Strike with a Slow-Witted, you still upped your chances of drawing Obliterating Bludgeon for every Weak Strike you can take out. Now, this example is flawed in two ways; The first way is that, ideally, a deck containing nothing but Obliterating Bludgeon is more effective because the character won't be using turns playing Slow-Witted. However the second way that example is flawed is also the reason you can't achieve the fix for the first way it is flawed; A characters equipment slots simply don't support packing a deck with that many of one type of card. You can't have 36 Obliterating Bludgeons, and you can't have 3 Obliterating Blugeon and 33 Slow-Witted; But what you can do is have 3 Obliterating Bludgeon, 5-10 Slow-Witted (In various forms, whether they are Traits or Inspiration or Forward Thinking, etc), and a number of other miscellaneous cards. Every Slow-Witted or similar card is increasing the chance of drawing your Obliterating Bludgeon, even though in a deck that size the increase in chance is somewhat small. But it's still there, and it's not negligable.

 

OK, so you are agreeing with my point that these cards would be better if they were cantrips; the fact that they take up an action is a disadvantage, not a plus, and most definitely not a "huge" plus as Lance argued.

That is a part of what I'm complaining about, though also the item design suggests to me that the designers think it's on par with other silver cards. If "human skill" isn't intentionally a weak equipment slot, then Trained Tactics ought to be roughly on par with, say, Xemu's Crown (for a level 13 human wizard). And that strikes me as fairly laughable.

I could be wrong, but it looks to me like the designers somehow concluded that Lateral Thinking was a silver-level card, and then designed all their items on the assumption that all silver-level cards are roughly equal. If that's true, and if Lateral Thinking is actually on a par with parchment or black cards, then its color should change and all items that use it should be rebalanced. (Or they should replace Lateral Thinking with something that is similar but much better.)

Incorrect. If you have Lateral Thinking in your hand and haven't played it, then you're still short a card (compared to ideal deck shrinkage)--you're short the card you would've drawn in place of Lateral Thinking. Which is worse, because it's a random card, rather than "least useful out of several".

Lateral Thinking shrinks your hand by one card either way--before you play it, it's taking up a slot that could have held another card, and after you play it, it forces you to discard something. My thought experiment is actually more favorable than the actual card in that respect, because it reverses the order of the draw and the discard (giving you more options for what to discard) and it doesn't charge you an action to do it.

Now, OK, you don't have to discard if your hand is empty. About what percentage of the time do you end a turn with an empty hand? For me it's less than 5%. You can't tell me both that a marginal decrease in clumping is awesome and also that you routinely and usefully use up every single card in your hand. Plus, even when you manage to do this, you still played out the entire turn up to that point short one random card, which means you had fewer tactical options and less ability to plan.

Also, if we actually packed your deck with Lateral Thinking, you'd have more than one in your hand a lot of the time, which means that no more than one of those is going to be played when your hand is empty, no matter what you do. If it were me, I'd probably discard the Lateral Thinkings with other Lateral Thinkings whenever possible (which, in the language of our thought-experiment, is like losing 1 card every 2 turns instead of every turn, but the card you lose is random instead of your choice).

Because the point of a thought-experiment is to be illustrative and make you think about things from a different angle. If I just said "imagine half your deck was Lateral Thinking", that will probably not cause you to re-evaluate how good Lateral Thinking is, it will just make you extrapolate your existing estimate, which defeats the purpose.

Or, if you meant why don't we run an actual real-world experiment...if you know of a way to do that, sure. I'm assuming that playing with a double-size deck which is 50% Lateral Thinking is not currently a supported feature in the beta.

 

Which, since lateral thinking is a human race ability, would be something like team shuffle.

Lets imagine some scenarios:

1. You draw your best attack and team shuffle.
2. You draw your best attack and lateral thinking, and you need your movement card to close the gap.
2a. you don't need your movement card this round.

3. You draw unreliable block and team shuffle.
4. You draw unreliable block and lateral thinking and you may or may not need your movement card.

Maybe you have saved some cards from the previous round, maybe you didn't. Clearly sometimes one card is better than the other in different situations. Is team shuffle going to be useful that round or would you just end up discarding it? Do you draw a useful card with lateral thinking or not? Personally I use team shuffle, but I would not go so far as to say lateral thinking is not useful.

 

Oh, absolutely not. This card is amazing. An item that had three of these attached to it would effectively result in a deck size of 33 instead of 36. I think everyone else has pointed this out adequately by now, though.

Inarguably a worse card than Breath, and definitely a worse card than Inspiration. Nevertheless, if you're going for a combo deck or you're playing lots of those items that have 2 amazing attacks and 4 crappy ones, you want this card on that character in addition to Inspiration on your Cleric(s). It's not ideal, but tactically, you could fully work around it to make good things happen.

This is an interesting thought. You get to spend a teammate's cards to 'shorten' your own deck. That means that if you can pack in more excellent attack cards, you can get the advantages of 'Slow-Witted' without the disadvantages of having to have 'Slow-Witted' in your deck. (Of course, Inspiration does leave your Cleric a little weaker for having taken it, but if you have a buffer-Cleric setup in the first place, you don't want your Cleric near the front line anyway. On the other hand, how much better is a buffer-Cleric than a combat cleric? I don't know -- but I am inclined to agree that Inspiration is profoundly over-valued in this game. It shouldn't be silver, and the plethora of items that have 2x Inspiration and 1x 'something else' I inevitably end up avoiding.

Exactly. Items like that are way overvalued and pretty much suck.

Actually, I have to disagree with you here. Lateral Thinking is an amazing card for one simple reason: there are a ton of items out there that have 2 middling-to-awesome cards and one horrible card. And while many of those horrible cards are, in fact, traits, you can easily engineer a character that suffers from Slow, Raging Strike, Backbiting Strike, Demonic Pain, and similar effects as 'payment' for Obliterating Hack and Unholy Wellspring -- and on characters like that, Lateral Thinking is the key to making the character go from coin-flip to awesome. Forward Thinking, naturally, is better, but they're both good.

The real problem is that it's almost impossible to get multiples of these two cards, since they only come from (as far as I've seen) human skills where they seem to always be one-ofs.

 

Good general point, but I think you're making a subtle but important error here.

Cards like Backbiting Strike and Demonic Pain have a low value, but they're still better than drawing nothing. Worst-case scenario, you don't play them, and discard them at the end of your turn to get down to your hand limit. On the other hand, there's at least some chance that you'll decide they're worth playing, and meanwhile it's a card in your hand that your opponent hasn't seen, so it acts as a bluff, and maybe you'll luck out and they'll waste a Memory Loss making you discard it or something.

So even if you draw Lateral Thinking at the same time as one of these cards, Lateral Thinking is still worse than Slow-Witted: the card you're discarding isn't worth much, but having it was strictly better than discarding it.

Now, Slow and Raging Strike could theoretically make Lateral Thinking better than Slow-Witted, in certain specific situations. But Raging Strike also has a nontrivial positive you'd be giving up, and I'm currently playing with Slowed (from a human skill, ironically) and it seems pretty minor to me. I remain exceedingly skeptical that you could build a good deck using these cards that would make Lateral Thinking on average better than Slow-Witted--the benefit when you draw them together seems much less significant than the downside when you draw them separately, and you'd need a ton of bad cards to have even a 50% chance of having one in your hand when you happen to draw Lateral Thinking.