Also, is there anything that says you have to use all of your slots? If you are interested in limiting your deck to up the chances you will draw a particular combo, couldn't you just leave slots empty. It would also free up gems in order to equip higher value equipment in those slots you do choose to fill, taking the quality over quantity approach. My last question would be can you run out of cards to play?
I don't know if you can. The example with the dwarven warrior starts with all his slots empty, but he still has a full deck. In that diary post the empty slot appears to just be the lowest possible item for that space, so you still get 3 or 6 cards added to that characters deck.
With regard to fewer slots at low levels, I'm guessing that is a feature of introducing new players to one game mechanic at a time. Several "missing" slots are those which you would expect to have Armor cards, a somewhat more advanced mechanic because they return to your hand and get you to think about discard strategy as well as play strategy. Probably once you play through the tutorial mission for armor you have the level that unlocks those slots. We had a discussion about minimum deck sizes in this thread, not so much about maximum size. As noted then, filling the slots with low-level items is important to keep people from drawing a few "knockout" cards over and over again: I would be more worried about that than decks getting too big. Borgo has a full bar of Talents, so it looks like the deck maxes out at 36 cards. Drawing two per round you have a decent chance of getting your good cards into play, and that should be further multiplied by drawing for three characters. If the other classes are similar with half the deck being a weapon/attack focus, then chances are you will always have something useful to do.
You're right, the number of cards seems tied to the number of slots you have available. Both pictures of Borgo the Brave show the same number of cards (37 unless I counted wrong). However the picture of Sir Tristram earlier in this thread shows 19, due to him having fewer slots available. That encourages you to equip items in every slot, so that rules out a quality over quantity build. Also, possibly they want to discourage small combo-based decks?
The quality aspect appears to be further balanced in turn by the talent orbs you have available for equipping items. So not only do you need to level up to open up equipment slots, higher levels allow you access to better talents so you can equip more/better items. Level 30 must not be near max either, since Borgo still lacks any gold talents (and he only has 2 silver talents). Is 36 cards the max? I've been looking around for that, not sure if it could grow larger at higher levels or if it caps. Borgo shows 37, but the first card is a walk, or his basic movement, so I assume that's the one you always have each turn. You get 3 cards on your first turn (1 extra), and then 2 cards every subsequent turn. not counting the standard move cards. The examples they've given seem like battles are around 5+ rounds. So that seems like 11+ cards you'll see from a deck, before you add any card drawing effects. I'm not really concerned, just thinking like an old Magic player in regards to deck building options. A simple tutor effect would go a long ways to digging out specific cards when you needed them. They've mentioned that Humans have a card filtering ability as well, which would probably help. Since you actually manage 3 seperate decks, I'm sure we'll want to build synergies between them. I can see limiting the hand size for each character prevents a player from getting overwhelmed by choices and options for all 3 characters, plus it makes everything fit better in the UI.
This may have been answered earlier, but I'll tackle it here again just in case... Empty equipment/skill slots are automatically equipped with weak "default" gear. This forces a minimum deck size, but because the default cards are pretty bad, you're encouraged to try out gear you've found in battle. If memory serves, removing my Dwarven Priest's shield resulted in him being equipped with Bare Arms, which unsurprisingly had a terrible suite of three cards. I fought against Farbs, and I think the battle went about a half-dozen rounds. The decks in the demo had a lot of card draw associated with them, in a bunch of different ways. There were good shields that let you draw a card when you Blocked. The Priest had at least one Inspiration, which lets him or an ally draw two cards. The Priest also had a Boost whose name I've forgotten that let you set up a neat little "action chain". Basically, it was a recurring effect that allowed you to draw a card anytime you played a white card ("Holy" abilities, I believe). I started the turn with just that and an Inspiration in hand, but managed to draw two extra copies of Heal and another wacky white card from the synergy. Combos! Yay! So, there's a lot of stuff you can do to plow through your deck, don't worry.
I'd wager that it indeed works something like this. And it goes without saying, but I also bet that they magically make all multiplayer characters a high enough level that all of their slots are unlocked.
The PAX gameplay video mentions that some items may actually include a smaller amount of cards (would be curious to see this in action) in order for you to control the size of your deck.
Really? Well, I hadn't seen that when I posted before. Sadly, I still haven't: I've got so much lag it's unwatchable.
That is actually incorrect (I think Ben might have had too much coffee that morning or something). Each slot takes a particular type of item (e.g. weapon, staff, armor, etc) and each item type has a FIXED number of cards. These can be three or six depending on the slot type (weapons and staves have six, all others have three) but for a given slot type, the number of cards never varies. As those of you who are regular CCG players know, smaller decks are generally better, so we don't allow you to alter your deck size. Most of the ways we control this are discussed above by knowledgeable folks like Roshirai and Sir Knight. Low level characters do have limited numbers of slots, but that is just to introduce you to the game. By the time you get into the proper campaign (and in multiplayer) your characters will all have a number of slots that ensures that their deck sizes are all the same.
