Card drawing completely broken in PvP

Proof!



http://imgur.com/OExcWzQ

 

Yeh, it's getting to ludicrous levels.

While it's true if you build your whole deck around drawing cards you'll then have very little tools to actually win the match, it's still a mechanic which can be abused. Also, not that fun staring at your monitor for 2 minutes while your opponent draws half his deck

Most TCGs put approach this problem by setting a cap to the amount of cards you can have in your hand at once. I think Blue Manchu should look into this more carefully and react accordingly. Actually I'm pretty sure they're assessing the situation already.

 

The real question is how he plans to kill you before dying to unholy damage from his own negative traits.

 

lol so true

 

Given that two of the three party members have Impenetrable Nimbus attached, I don't think that's an issue. I think in beta they just charged until they won, though I never went up against the build myself.

 

Hmm, can someone explain to me how card draw can get that effective since the Altruism nerf? I guess the dwarven cry is the main engine?

 

Dwarven cry, the AoE inspiration/heal, unholy +2 draw cards, and a lot of traits.

 

A lot of trait push your nimbus away, the more nimbus you have in your deck, the less potential for it to go infinite. There is always a trade off. You can reliably draw an entire deck, but it will kill you. You can have some nimbus, but it wont reliably draw for you. If you used all your card to draw the entire deck, the rest are sub-par card that won't be able to kill your opponent. If you include some strong card, you might not be able to draw the entire deck. If you use a lot of inspiring presence, the enemy will try to close in on you. If you don't, draw potential is lower etc...

It's a strategy, it works well when it works. It's not unbeatable. Whether or not it is too strong and requires nerf I will not personally comment until I saw the build.

 

I'm counting upwards of 24-30 cards on 2 of the priests. Dwarven Battle cry and around a maximum of 8 draw spells per priest. (2 per divine item, 1 from each weapon). He's still showing 6 or 7 draw cards in hand, so what happened to draw 50+ cards in one turn? I only see Altuism on one dwarf, and since the draw spells are unholy you wouldn't get triggers anyway. Plus if all your items are devoted to card draw spells you won't have many divine spells to trigger altruism.

My best guess is he emptied two dwarfs deck to the point they could reliably redraw Dwarven Battle Cry. But I can't figure out how he drew so many cards to get there.

What drew so many cards? Without a decklist I'm not biting.

 

There are some unholy items that have 2 different draw 2 cards on them (at the cost of damage), and I think a 3rd card as a negative trait. It's unlikely he cycled the deck at all. 25/28 non-movement cards on the two priests matches up nicely with how many cards are left in their decks (considering you have 36 cards total).

 

Demon Charm 2nd, without token cost even. It's a pretty decent card for drawing at a severe cost of self harm.

 

Any item that can potentially draw more cards than it has on it is a problem.
Examples;
Demon Charm Of The 2nd Circle
Unholy Power: Draw 2
Demonic Feedback: Draw 2
Demonic Revenge: Draw 1
Total: 5 draws over 3 cards

Advanced Flexibility
Leadership: Draw 4
Leadership: Draw 4
Slowed: Draw 0
Total: 8 draws over 3 cards

Potential Fixes;
When a card is discarded it can't be drawn for a certain number of turns.
Limit the hand size.
Cap the number of cards a character can draw in a turn.

 

Total: 0 net draws, because you have to discard 8 cards to get those 8 cards. Yes, it's a great card, and yes it can help with cycling through decks, but it's not the same issue.

 

It kind of is. When you have that many cards in your hand it is pretty easy to discard 2 useless ones for the chance at better ones.

 

An extra problem with "infinite draw" decks is that time apparently ticks for the opponent after the spell has been cast, if there's no further resolving necessary. So you can cast 100 things, and still be winning on time.

 

I know the item list, which is why I'm confused. The item you're referring to is the Demon Charm Of The Second Circle , but it still doesn't draw that many cards and priests are still limited to 3 divine items. That's why I'm questioning this build. I don't understand how you can fit enough card draw into a single deck to achieve this type of result (resulting in drawing upwards of 45+ cards in a single turn).

I helped show how broken Martyr's blessing was, as well as the old Altruism and Talented Healer. But all of those required a dedicated draw engine outside of the lowly "draw 2" cards which are good but simply aren't that crazy. The only card (I can think of) that potentially remains is the new Altruism, but it requires much more luck (and a lot fewer unholy cards) to achieve these kinds of results. This strategy doesn't appear to be using Altruism, so I don't understand the method it uses to draw so many cards.

You simply can't fit that many dwarven battle cry's, inspiring presences, or (demonic feedbacks and unholy powers) into a single deck to make this occur reliably. Dwarven Battle Cry is a singleton on items, Inspiring Presence can only be found in multiples on a legendary divine weapon. These cards are seemingly too limited to fuel this amount of card draw. I need to see a decklist before I really can understand how this is possible much less how reliable it its.

I could be wrong, and my hats off to the guy who figured this out, but I don't' understand the issue currently.

 

And he's using non-optimal cards - I'm sure I could put together a better set than he has.

 

Hmm, less Inspiring Presence than I expected, I know Demon Charm 2nd was too strong though. Haven't really tried that many on 3 priest. Still, there's too many wild cards to reliably execute this. And too few Nimbus to reliabily protect self dmg. For example, I counted 15/30 cards are non-drawing, non-trait in 1 priest. That's 50% of the card being sitting ducks.

Definitely not good enough, it is strong though, just not reliably.

 

I've seen many different flavors of this. Actually, dwarven drawers aren't the most common (or the most effective) either, imho. I feel like this strategy is much, much more effective on a human party.

Dwarven Battle Cry, while a nice card, you can only have 1 in your deck per dwarven character, and also comes with the slight inconvenience it will benefit any dwarven enemy on the board. Humans, on the other hand, can rely on many more items benefiting the build: listing only the best cards for the build, you can chose Perfect Tactics for a drawer + cycler combo, or among Advanced Tactics, Advanced Flexibility, Trained Tactics and Novice Flexibility for enhanced recycling capabilities.

The pic posted in the OP shows somewhat of an extreme case. In my experience, the card drawing doesn't usually stretch that far, although such a build can easily assure the user to hold, on average, 10-12 cards per priest.

I find the build is far more more effective when coupling 2 priests with another class for some serious damage dealing. Also sorry for my bad nomenclature. For the sake of this discussion:

• drawer - a card meant to end up with a net result of holding more cards in your hand then before the drawer was played.
• cycler - a card used to draw more cards, but which results in a net result of 0 (or less) additional cards in your hand. These can be used to draw more drawers to keep the loop going.

Summing up the general mechanics of a drawing build for those who might not be familiar with it:
- Altruism on priests.
- Accelerated Thought on priests and/or other character you want to pump with cards. Unholy Energy preferibly cast on the damage-dealer if that's part of your build. Martyr Blessing obviously works well too.
- Main drawers in the form of Unholy Power and Inspirational Thinking. Demonic Feedback is something you want to use as a last-resort drawer only cause of the built-in damage. Inspiring Presence is rarely seen too.
- Inspiration is very flexible, as it can be used either as a cycler for your priests or to pump your damage-dealer with more cards.
- Other cyclers in the form of Spin Around, Forward Thinking, Lateral Thinking and Leadership.
- Bless and Consecrate Ground go along nicely with this build.
- Cleansing Ray although technically a cycler is too situational to heavily count on it. Maybe if you have a wiz loaded with hot spots or similar cards in your party?

For those wondering how can you draw that many cards (it does seem unreasonable at first), you need to remember Altruism (even after the nerf) and Accelerated Thought/Unholy Energy will net you a lot of cards in the long run. Cyclers will help you draw more drawers and the loop feeds into itself. Altruism effectively turns a cycler into a potential drawer (or makes your drawers potentially net you even more cards), as the trait is guaranteed to make you draw 2 cards (one when altruism comes into play, another if you roll an unlucky 4), but can easily grant you 3-4 or more cards if luck is on your side. With such a build, you're assured to cast lots of spells, so altruism gets proc-ed a lot.

Interestingly, since your warrior/wizard can contribute to the process via human skills, your priests can afford to swap a few drawers/cyclers for either more damage/defense or, much likely, heals/buffs/debuffs.

This way, you can have more healing (which also helps you mitigate dmg from Demonic Feedback), Unholy Energy, Hunoly Wellspring, Impenetrable Nimbus or whatever flavor of (un)holy priest-ness you like.

In fact, I believe people still needs to tap into the true potential of the build. Atm (at least in my experience) most people will overstress the card-drawing aspect, meaning the vast majority of your deck can't do much more than drawing more cards and leaving you with little else to actually win a match. This makes for some annoying matches, which usually go on for very long, even if you end up finally beating it (the compulsory card-drawer will likely go turtle in a remote corner of the map, the average turn easily stretching for 3+ minutes of little more than oh-so-exciting card-drawing action).

This build surely has some authentic potential, if you ask me. It needs a lot of rare+ cards for it to truly shine, and a smart player who knows how to build a deck like this "the right way".

More than anything else, I'm not really worried about this build potentially being OP. I'm rather annoyed by the fact it makes for long matches involving me watching my opponent drawing card, after card, after card, after card for the 80% of it.

 

My experience exactly so far. Also worth keeping in mind that if you use 2 characters to boost one character, that character will have to go into 3 vs 1 situation. So 15 cards essentially, 12 if you don't count basic moves. And there's few cards/effects that can shut it down completely.

But well, I'm not actually certain how deck reshuffle works, but infinite draw would obviously be a problem. Almost infinite oth might not be, if you have to sacrifice too much for it.

BTW how did the match at the picture turn out? Seems dwarfs might be in for a surprise