Card: Arcane Wisdom Reflects enemy magic spell. "Maybe allow this card to not count as card space in your hand." "Maybe make it reflect 3/6 chance, but be a trait." I have pondered many hours on how to fix elves and thought of all the aspects of the game. 1. Winds of War. This would cause winds of war to bounce back and allow the elf to move the enemy. 2. Whirl Wind Enemies. This would make it a bit more dangerous by putting the enemy caster in a random spot. 3. 4. P. Short ray. Imagine casting that and losing 2 of your cards plus wasting a spell. 4. 3 dwarf mages now have a difficult time against 2+ elf teams. They have major risk of freezing themselves or the elf reflecting the winds of war. Their p. short rays would be less effective. 5. Elf warriors may still be weak to the warriors, but loading up with parries, dodges, and Arcane Wisdom; they would become formidable opponents. They would be enemy mage nightmares. 6. Elf Mages and Elf Priests; they tend to hang out in the back, but with enemy mages you tend to be quickly targeted with freezes and bolts. The enemy will be more cautious to taking you out, thus allowing elves to linger in the background a bit more safe. 7. Firestorm decks. I stopped playing my 3 elf team BECAUSE of this. It's an almost instant lose. At least with Arcane Wisdom the elves would be able to avoid the 4 damage and give it back to the enemy. 8. Dwarves get a toughness. Instant immunity to damage from magic or melee. This is better than a parry, dodge, block, or any non keep armor. You also get to draw a card. I do not think think this would be any stronger. All in all, I think that this would help weaken some spells that are out there. Also this would boost elves in general and be a great counter to some over powered control decks. In the very least you might see more elven priests.
It's a cool idea, the only problem is that it would probably immediately outclass all other elf racials. Unless of course its on 4+, in which case it's a duck where you have to use the card immediately, but you lose no tempo. I like it, but I think it may take some fine tuning to make it competitive/balanced, and I think I'd also like to see the elf racials in general modified for better balance. For this particular card though, maybe make it 3+ and immune to block reduction, more like an on target ability like dodge rather than a block. Plus if you did it that way, you could steal the card effect before it did anything else, like in the case of whirlwind. Kinda like lusus' counterspell suggestion. That would make it more situational than duck, but also potentially more powerful. The other thing I like about it, is rather than having to activate it like duck, it kind of embodies elven alacrity through immediate response. Edit: I forgot about the hand thing, I'd say no special rule for that. As officer's harness is the only card in the game with that particular exception, and it's a really bad card otherwise, I'd say no.
I prefer a dodge-like racial, simply because that's more generally useful. Elves aren't just weak against 3DC, they're weak against everything. And if elves get stuck as the "counter-3DC", they'll become useless again as soon as the meta-game moves on to another dominant build. Simply, no. I'm one of the few players who's run melee elves at 1300+, and they're too squishy even when carrying inordinate numbers of parries and accompanied by an effective counter-mage. Flaxative has the only effective melee elf (just one of them) at high levels, which he achieved via Nimbus and vampire combo.
You don't need to reinvent the wheel, Reflect Missile already exists. Currently, it's a monster only card, but it could be made available on a new elf skill. It's an emerald card, and it should be, so this alone would bump the item level to 12. For example, an elf skill with Reflect Missile + Walk + Walk would be a lvl 14 blue token common or uncommon. I don't think this skill would be the item to end all imbalances, but it definitely would open a new counter to a few popular cards. I think this should be added to the game, but I don't expect too much from it. We might see a few successful mage hunters with it, but the main reasons why some control decks are unbalanced are still there, like excessive trait cycling.
Problem is that if it was just that by itself it would be too weak. It's just basically a decent block that reflects damage. This would be more on the lines of toughness. You could just say toughness is reinventing the wheel too; it's just an uber block.
Anything stronger than Reflect Missile would be a sapphire quality card. Do you really want to balance the game by giving everyone overpowered abilities? Well, some games employ that strategy, but you'll end up with a mess that blows up in spectacular but entirely unexpected ways every time you add a new card. It's better to polish the game until all cards are balanced in a way that decks work no matter which cards are in there, as long as the total card quality is the same. It's probably impossible to achieve perfectly, but the better the existing cards are balanced to each other the less surprises will spring at you when you change things. If giving elves a card that is on par with Toughness is not enough to balance them, you have a deeper game balance problem and any promise of an "easy" fix is an illusion.
Well obviously nerfing nimble strike and toughness won't make elves much better than they are. What about if elves were not able to be pinned against walls? It doesn't make them any better against magic, but when facing a warrior they could escape easier. The problem is that elves are not good at much. Human's I'd say have better movement control. The ability to push the allies easily negates if not over powers the elf trait abilities. I think allowing elves' movement to not be blocked by opponents would help make up for their weak hp.
[quote="Martin K, post: 49019, member: 4957" Do you really want to balance the game by giving everyone overpowered abilities? Well, some games employ that strategy, but you'll end up with a mess that blows up in spectacular but entirely unexpected ways every time you add a new card.[/quote] It's an interesting point on game balance. mk 1 warmachine really went down this route, nothing is broken because everything is broken. Though there were more than a few cases of op combos back then. The real point is that everything has the same power level, it doesn't matter how powerful something is in a vacuum, but how it relates to everything else.
A nerf to Toughness would make dwarves weaker, which in turn makes humans and elves relatively better... For Nimble Strike, it's more an issue of balancing Nimble Strike against the other warrior attack cards. Funny, that, apparently elves used to have Scamper as their standard move card at first. I wasn't around back then, though, so I don't know the reasons for changing it to Dash. There may be an old developer blog post about it.
