I have thought a lot about the discussion we had recently on how to make Card Hunter more fair. I appreciate and love the thinking of BM. Having to make the best of your item pool is cool and avoids net decking. But unfortunatly it is not, what Card Hunter has been for me. My feeling in the moment is, that Card Hunter degenerates into a show-of-your-items. In Death March I am able to make an incredible good run, because ... Yes why? Just because I have an Ilusion. Ok, it is of course not the only thing which is good about my build, but every time I play against someone without Ilussion it is just a slaugther. Ranked games are not as bad, because you can win with less good stuff. But having certain items definitly increases you chance in winning. And having a lot of them will increase your chance even more. My last suggestions were about how to increase the chances to get the legendaries. But as I said, I love the idea of BM. It reminds me of Shandalar, which is in my opinion still one of the best games ever. It is cool to improve your deck more and more. No panic, I wont suggest something like ante for Card Hunter. But lets face it, Card Hunter is not that kind of experience anymore. I think I lost enough words for motivation purposes. My point is, that there has to be a way to invalidate the items for MP in order to keep the idea of BM alive. The most radical way woul be a time stamp on items. As soon as an item is older than three month, you are not allowed to use it in MP anymore. A way I would love much more, would be something like the Standard format in Magic the Gathering. In MP you are only allowed to use the items of the last three sets. There could be a league, where you are allowed to use all your stuff, like Legacy in Magic. But this would need many resources for designing new sets often. Basicly this are my ideas how to improve the Card Hunter experience. May be some of you have a better idea how to balance the item pools?
I think all that's really needed to drastically improve multiplayer is making legendaries more accessible and balancing a few existing cards; both of which have been discussed plenty of times in various places, but to summarize: Players need a way to work towards earning specific items, rather than relying completely on the random-number-generator for all of their loot. A few select cards are in desperate need of balancing, namely Elven Maneuvers shouldn't be able to draw a step-attack every time you take damage for more than 1 turn, Defender's Block shouldn't have an enormous range, and burst attacks shouldn't be buffable by things like Unholy Wellspring and Savage Curse. Of course there are other things that could also help, but I think those are the largest impediments to an enjoyable competitive multiplayer experience.
That would be the other way to improve it. I think there is no right or false, it is a thing of preference. Do you want to have a game which is about looting, getting items and improve their decks while doing so? Or do you want a game, where anybody has the possibility to search for and play the 'best' deck? As you already mentioned, the second way has been discussed a lot. As far as I know, the other way has not been discussed.
Ideally, there shouldn't be a 'best' deck. The ultimate goal of balancing is to ensure there are a wide variety of competitive decks at the highest level of play. But yes, I think everyone should be able to work towards their dream deck at a reasonable pace and then play with it as much as they want. Players should be able to continuously improve their decks as they play, but that should be because they have many decks worth playing, not because they constantly need to replace invalid items.
