I'm kind of curious what kind of decks this format would produce? As an alternative to Peasant, if we allowed Rare Items, what would happen?
Cult of the Bejewelled Cult of the Bejewelled Cult of the Bejewelled Cult of the Bejewelled Cult of the Bejewelled and maybe something with Runestone
"Less League" Neat idea, but i would go beyond peasant and restrict the item pool for that league very explicitely, to force it into new directions. Maybe offer a casual map as a mask to prepare a build according to the leagues special item pool, to avoid a build-in delay like the drafting phase of QD. Then you enter and can start matches once your party is certified according to the leagues restrictions. I know this seems demanding for the average, easily frustrated newbie, but i think a lot of people might find a change of pace rewarding. Possible restrictions could go from item rarity to level, exclude a blacklist of items, races, or even demand lower character levels, if that is somehow possible. Low-Level PVP was demanded here and there, why not implement it as league (first).
It would be interesting if, say, novelty were encouraged in a particular league which would each month prohibit a certain number of most-frequently-used items from the previous month (how to normalize would be interesting, as we don't want it to bias towards, say, legendary divine armor because most people aren't running multiple priests and each can have at most one divine armor at a time; say, number of players who used it at least once, divided by number of players who own a copy and therefore could have used it). That might mean a league where one month Bejeweled Shortswords, Aegis of the Defender, Shielding Tokens, Electroporter Novice, whatever, are completely prohibited, for instance. Even wackier, one could derive the pool from a small number of the *least-preferred* items... just need to allow enough to still have a variety of seemingly plausible builds when up against builds under the same restriction and not hyper-optimized full-range-of-items variants.
There are actually two games that have done this kind of play-oriented restrictions before and have done it well. Urban-Rivals´s ELO tournaments have a permanent ban-list of characters that gets changed slightly every 3-4 months. Each week, depending on your ELO ranking, you also get to look at the most used characters from the previous tournament and vote which to ban or keep for the next. Alteil, on the other hand, had an Underdog System that kept track of the least used cards in the game both as play cards and soul cards (Alteil has a system where cards can be used in two different ways), with an exception of permanently allowed utility cards. If you won with decks following this underdog list enough times in a two-week interval, you got a massive prize. The problem of implementing this into Card Hunter is the scale. There are, if the Wiki is accurate, 1934 items in Card Hunter. Banning those high profile items seems like it would do not that much good. Bejewelers would move on to Double-Edged, Defenders would move to Buckler of Protection, Aggressive Stabb-...I´m sorry, Cautious Mobility would be replaced by one of many of the good elven tokenless racials, there are like 4-5 different legendary staffs for AoE wizards. While there is a lot of super-focused redundancy in high-scale play, there is also a ton of back up in case the top dogs get restricted/banned I second the motion of Toaster, the one i´m comparing to the underdog system mentioned earlier. There are a bunch of very cool-looking epics and legendaries that are overshadowed by commons and could see play in this kind of format. I honestly don´t think this will give birth to new constructed-worthy archetypes, but it would be a more unpredictable experience as you might see some archetypes that are no longer seen, such as Frost wizards, Bash oriented Warriors or priests that actually heal
How cool would it be to have a format like a MTG draft cube in CH? Take a while to play, and it would probably be a pain to implement. But it would be cool.
