Seriously? Worst decision ever.

The only possible reason I could see for this banning was to attract new players, of course as usual with game developers, it's okay to attract new players at the expense of old ones.

Without Olcadan's about half the symbols in the game become completely unplayable, and Order, which is the most overpowered symbol in the game right now becomes even stronger, because they're one of the ONLY symbols that now has any way to deal with problem foundations. So now everyone else has to deal with 2/3rds of their staging area being constantly Chinese Boxed and PM'd all game long. Awesome.

Chester's, yes, it's overpowered, but at worst it needed an Eratta, the life gain was unnecessary, but a lot of those symbols (mostly ALL) need some form of negation, or they become terrible. I understand you don't like foundation wars, but without negation the game becomes all about who gets their condition first without any semblance of strategy. And it removes a huge amount of interaction between players from the game. Negation is a good thing, overpowered cards aren't.

Lord of the Makai is an enabler, sure, but the real problem with it was Defender. Defender was the problem. I have three, they were MUCH harder to get ahold of than my LotM's and I would not have even felt annoyed if they got banned. Also if you want to ban enablers why did you leave Shinobi Tradition around for so long? It was twice as bad and a common.

Basically what you've accomplished instead of better balancing the game is turning the game into a fight between Order and Water to see who can pull off their spike or ira spinta recursion first. Fun.

DrUnK3n_PaNdA said:

There is a little symbol with a pitch fork called evil and another symbol with a weird triangle called chaos, they both tend to run over order unless the order player is able to connect with a juni's spiral arrow as they can both run playsets of red lotus of the sun and oral dead so have fun hitting them with your program malfunctions and china boxes.. Oh yeah? ever hear of a symbol called water, it has this card called dormant for millions of years, it kind of beats the pants of program malfunction and chinese boxing.

Um, with out olcadan's order pretty much only has 2 answers against destiny have fun getting your brt's and forethoughts statically turned off. Go play your order deck against good and you'll see what happens when they lay down thier torn heros and you have 0 olcadan's to get rid of em with. Without olcadan's fire can run any foundations they want and not have to worry about getting their good foundations like savage fighter and fight or flight turned into thier weaker foundations for the cost of committing an asset.

I see what you mean but olcadan's was a meta warping card where every deck ran 3-4 copies and ran 4-8 copies of cards that stopped olcadans, yeah that really sounds healthy to me. Personally I'm tired of running garbage foundations just so my real foundaitons don't get swapped out for a bs card. And I would like to play some water and not have to worry about olcadan's ripping my foundation to shreds.

Well it's a start at least. For NOW I will refrain from calling James and Steve Gary and Bill. None the less they missed a lot of things that are problems. Spinta and BRT still around? Smooth guys.

THANK YOU though for getting rid of Lord of the Makai and Olcadan's. It definatly frees up more slots in decks, and makes it's so you can run more utility foundations/attacks and not run at least 6-10 assets.

There was a reason this game wasn't doing so hot. It wasn't inviting to new players. I will give em credit, they're slowly starting to make the game more new player friendly with this kit. I like it a lot. But in order for new players to even stand a snowball's chance in hell in major tournies... They're seriously gonna have to do something about more of the power cards that are absolutly impossible to get now.

B-Rad said:

I feel what your saying unfortunately I think it will be that way till next years rotation I just hope the game can stablizie some what in the mean time.

trane said:

Or the fact that it's a 6 check foundation with an amazing block, built in life gain, and 3 symbols that made absolutely no sense with its primary ability?

Air/All/Water didn't need that broad of negation. The only symbol that actually made sense on the card was Evil.

First off im very cool with all the banning that have been brought about and i would like to break them down a little:

Olcadan's Mentoring forced every player to set aside anywhere from 3 to 8 cards to defend against it. Although every symbol could play it not every symbol had answer to it. BYE BYE Owlface

Lord of the Makai was a card i loved to play and for a while i thought it was a good edition to the game. Then i slowly realized that it was a card that was so badly undercosted that im now glad to see it gone. BYE BYE LOTM

Chester's Backing was a card the mixed to elements of game play that just dont belong together; negation and life gain. IF this card had only been a negation card or if it had only had life gain it would have been ok in my book but with both those abilities pushed into one effect this card just had to go. My only regret is that i have eight copies of it...BYE BYE Chester the M*lester.

The only thing that comes to mind when the mini-format was announced is "Current". It's also not that great of a descriptive term, but it's a lot better than "mini". It's either that or "Constructed Limited". Personally, I like "Brand Spankin' New".

Owlface has been overdue for months, sadly it couldn't of been done before US Nats. Lord of the Makai marginalized momentum cost too far, Order and All will hate to see it go, but maybe people might play other attacks other than Kuzuyu Reppa... Chester's was a bit of a surprise, but I won't be sad to see it go. It's just too good for it's own sake.

I'm not sure where all the talk about "OMG my favorite symbol isn't playable anymore!" is coming from, folks. If anything, now you've got a choice whether you want to put in foundation destruction prevention in one form or another in your deck if you want to. Before, it was a necessity just due to how many decks ran Owlface. Look at Water, it had literally no answers to Owlface. Now, you can build a mono symbol water deck without worrying about Owlface ruining your combo. So, Water is more playable, Chaos is more playable, Earth is more playable, Void is more playable, Life is more playable How is this a bad thing?

Sajir:

Right, so what you're agreeing with is that the game should be rock paper scissors, and that it should play like magic on a competitive level where all decks autopilot and win or lose on the merit of what cards are in them rather than player skill.

You're giving me answers that are confined to several symbols. What do the rest of the symbols do? They lose. End of story. All is garbage now except for Bitter Rivals, which trashes everyone but a few. Rock paper scissors is a BAD way to balance a game. If Rock can never beat Paper, then where does skill figure into the game? They had everything very close to right. They just needed an answer to olcadan's on the rest of the symbols, then things were fine. Instead they robbed All and Air of any form of Negation, made momentum-based decks almost impossible to run unless you play one of a few characters and made anything fun and gimmicky completely unplayable, because you can't pack olcadan's in decks running low-tier symbols to stop the foundations that squish your deck. If anything removing olcadan's ENCOURAGES foundation wars.

And Nyobari

It's called Clean Freak and it's amazing.

sir_shajir said:

Remember that Red Lotus Commits itself after one use unless you're playing Kyo (which nobody does) so if you get two boxings, or a boxing and a shooting cap if you're playing water, or a boxing and PM, or a PM and shooting cap, etc, you can overload red lotus easily.

DrUnK3n_PaNdA said:

That's exactly the point I was making earlier that many people seemed to miss the point. If Defender is the problem, ban Defender. Don't be like Magic and ban every card that supported the broken card in hopes to balance the broken card, just ban the broken card.

As for your comment on Order and Water I agree. It basically comes down to the decks that can run the shooting cap/program malfunction/chinese boxing combos and the ones that can run red lotus being the only decks that can probably win anymore. It becomes a game of not being able to use your staging area and failing half your attacks until you get spiked to death.

As for the promo cards being harder to get let me say this. I have 4 Olcadan's, 5 LotM, and 5 chesters compared to 1 spike, 3 spintas (I was lucky to get those in packs), and 1 Defender. You tell me which is harder to get.

Due to the quote system being sucky and unreliable, the SotG will be in Bold, and my comments in standard text. I know nobody wants to hear what I've got to say (mostly because it generally involves pictures that are funny to about two people,but lemme put on my serious face and do this.

There we go.

* * *

First off we are not raising prices but we are making some changes. The most frequent feedback we received from retailers who participated in the anniversary event was that having two sets come out at the same time was too much product for them to bring in during hard economic times, we have been hearing this for a while now from stores and distributors.

So starting with the release of set 13 we are going to only release one set at a time, meaning that The Tekken set will release by itself and the SoulCalibur set that was scheduled to release with it will now be released 3 months later as set 14. This will also allow us to get back to releasing sets on time.

The price raise did enough damage to make sales drop over here. Had you hiked it again it would have pretty much killed my ability to purchase. Good plan on that, and sets releasing on time is good news for everyone. I don't see the bad news. Granted, people who are franchise nuts are the biggest losers of this phenomenon but you do what you have to do.

I do, however, have a question - Will the sets be bigger to mildly compensate? While a 99 card set every three months is decent enough, maybe beefing it up by 18 more cards would be better. Again, you probably already thought this through (and probably won't be reading this either), but it'd help in alleviating the fact that we're getting far less new cards than before per release. It diminishes the cost of playing and the cost of producing, but at the same time with less cards to get, it means I have to purchase less. Beefing up the one set you're releasing may be something to consider once your kidneys are solid enough.

Plus, product being released on time makes it so that you have product to sell, which makes it so that you can get dat cash.

The other big change taking effect with this set is that we are dropping foil cards, even though sales are currently steady they are not where they used to be and the current print runs just do not justify the cost. I know that this will really piss some people off but it beats raising the price of the packs, like I said difficult decisions had to be made.

Foiling on cards is... eh. Modern CCGs seems to have placed too much emphasis on it. If the art is good, the foiling can ruin it, but if the art is bad, the foiling can help it. It was really used as a way to quickly identify a rare. Can't say I'm for this change, can't say I'm against it... It really doesn't affect me either way.

With the set rotation we have there is never a good time for a player to start playing

Glad we agree.

Thats right standard and legacy will stay the same but on top of that we will also now offer a new player format, that I believe a lot of veteran players will also like. Currently we are calling it the mini block format ( I know the name needs work, give me suggestions).

This format will consist of the the current base set and the following three expansions. So new players can get into the game and be competitive without chasing the past years cards, then after playing for a year they will have all the cards they need for the standard format. Will this appeal to all veteran players? No but I have already talked to several who are excited about it. It went over really well at the POTM and has been a lot of fun in the current in house league. This will give us a very good entry point every year while not disrupting the standard environment.

I know a guy who's gonna salivate when he realizes he skimmed over this paragraph. Idea for a name : (year). Since the base set is the first set of the year generally, why not call it (in general) the yearly format? That way, we can refer to Set 12-15 as 2009, 16-20 as 2010, etc.Less confusing this way.

The second initiative is an offer that is to good to refuse and should generate new players as well as excite the current player base. We have put together a new player recruit kit that is out of this world. It is called the Fight Night recruitment kit. It contains the following:

(snip)

Nearly $200 retail value for only $49.95. As you can see this is a great way for a new player to get into the game and I know that a lot of current players will want these too, just remember to use them to to help recruit new players. These kits are perfect for sealed deck events.

I'm liking that idea. Problem is there's some banned cards in Cutting Edge. It's also a way to get rid of old stock that seasoned players aren't buying because Legacy isn't really supported. Again, I'm liking that idea - new exclusive promos are characters, so no need to buy 4 of said pack to be competitive, and newer players get a whole lot of cards. I'll definitely talk to our store owner about it.

Next bans, yes it is sadly time for me to bring out the ban hammer and smash the hell out of some problems with it. The following cards are banned starting July 1st, so yes they will be legal for Nationals:

Olcadan's Mentoring (The effect might have not been too strong, but it's ability, combined with the stats, the +0 low block and the Infinity just made this too good not to be used - Glad it's gone. VERY glad it's gone. I finally don't have to feel bad about not putting it in my decks anymore!)

Lord of the Makai (Free momentum, my favorite? Not anymore. The first time in UFS that the enabler is banned before the piece of the combo.)

Chester's Backing (The effect was great. The Vit gain? Not so much. Most puzzling out of the lot, but with Olcadan's gone, it makes sense to get rid of it's chief target.)

I know that no matter what we do when it comes to this people will be upset, meaning that any card we ban will make some players mad and others will be up in arms because we did not ban the card they hate the most but that is to be expected, so we have to do what we believe is the best for the game overall.

I'd like to correct that statement : "I know that no matter what we do people will be upset."

Now OP. Starting in October the Fight Life Championship series will start up with store championships. Every store that runs OP can run one of these a year. These events will have an exclusive promo card participation prize along with other cool stuff. This will lead into City Championship events which will begin early next year, which will also come with an exclusive promo card. The monthly tournament and league kits will get a complete overhaul starting in October resulting in one very robust kit that can be used for both tournaments and leagues.

I still don't like that name.

Store championships leading into City Championships? I await more information to be trickled down before getting excited. If it makes it so that the tournament season remains relevant after Gen Con, I'm ALL for it. It's too bad we can't do it for September because we have an outside visitor.

* * *

In conclusion... there's stuff I don't understand why you are doing, there's stuff I don't like where you're going, but at least you were honest and also looked for another solution to a price hike. Honestly, I dare say that was the most influential SotG that was ever written.

Nyobari said:

It was called The Gorgeous Team and unless you could kill it before Shooting Cap came out you'll soon find that water could recur foundations to the point of absurdity.

If it wasn't for the picture I was going to ask "Who are you and what have you done with Hatman?"

I think I'm just gonna convince my playgroup to switch over to miniblock. Tonight I played a Death Hata deck with a real lot of set 12 vs a Ivy deck with like 90% Ivy support, was the most fun i've had with this game in a real long time. There was actual attacking and blocking, it was insane. Once Tekken comes out I think i'd just like to be rid of Feline spike, BRT, Bitter Rivals, Chun-Li, China Box, Pmalfunction, shooting cap, rejection.... you get the point. Not that I think all of these should be banned but I'm tired of having to deal with them and would this game become an orange war.

I know set 12 only is a blast and if sets 13 and 14 are as good, this game is gonna be back to where I want it.

Archimedes said:

Archimedes said:

I gotta be me. Also, I was planning on using that picture in a rant against FFG at the end of May but decided against it due to lack of energy and the "zomg we have no prize support owait yes we do" having been explained on the forums and various other things. I know I fly off the handle way too fast sometimes. I'd like to say I've tried to cure myself of this but not only would that be a blatant lie I doubt people would be reading what I post if I wasn't perpetually angry, sardonic and insulting a massive portion of the time.

I was discussing this with Target X earlier tonight and went : "I could go with righteous anger with ZOMG WHY DIDN'T YOU DO THIS FOR THE GODDAMNED CANADIAN NATIONALS RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH! but what would be the point as US Nats will be played under the same rules?" So yeah, a calm response to the SotG.

Honestly, I doubt my questions will ever be answered until the October SotG unless I take it up with Steve Horvath himself, but honestly he doesn't have the time and most of it is just crap anyway.

trane said:

No. It's because Chester's is THE card that leads to nothing more than irritating gray wars, and has universal control over the game's most played type of card (foundations).

Anyways...

Shinji Speaks:

So, after seeing the FFG page had posted something about a “Fight Night”, I figured, if they have the time to post that, then they MUST have found the time to post the SOTG. When I got to the GD forum, I saw the thread, and held my breathe as deeply as I possibly could, to the point at which my heart hurt. I said to myself, “If I don’t see any bans, I will explode in a profanity-laden tirade” (although honestly, I would just do what I always do, and exhume a giant sigh of hatred and disdain). Naturally, as soon as I clicked on the link, I ignored everything and just scrolled through until I found what I was looking for.

…and alas, THERE ARE BANS! =DDDD

Olcadan’s
Makai
Chester’s

Is Shinji satisfied? Yes. As I’d said previously, I’d be happy to see just about anything go, as I get a hard-on for the banhammer. No more Chester’s wars. No more ludicrous Olcadan’s. And mostly, no more Makai idiocy. Although yes, I’d love to see something done about Feline and Spinta, those three NEEDED to go. Thank God!

Anyways, onto more productive critiquing.

Reduction of 2 sets to 1: Can only save us money. It isn’t fan-friendly, but really, screw the fans. I’m really indifferent here, but hey, they understand their budgets. Don’t worry guys, Super Obama is on his way to save ya.

Tekken: They said they were going to spoil some of the new cards. They didn’t. Fail.

16 Exclusive promo cards: Holy crap. 16? Wow…guess I’m gonna be havin a prerelease…

No more foils: Eh…shine is nothing more than that: shine. Although it’s a traditional part of CCGs, it isn’t integral. Oh well, maybe one day they’ll reshine things much like they do with league promos?

New metagame: Don’t care. I play in standard.

Fight Night: Fare enough, those are some good chase promos. Also, Dariya? Dude, viable 6 handermuch?

Fight Life and City Championship: Wish they had given more details, as they sound awesome.

bloodocean said:

Honestly this is sounding better and better. Get rid of all the issues once and for all so we can start fresh. Screw all those cards and have fun with the stuff that's actually balanced.

Pardon my french but: Why the **** does anyone still consider BRT broken, LOL

Seriously, LOL

LOLOLOLOL

If you guys are dissatisfied with the cards picked for banning, keep in mind they just proved that they ARE receptive to banning problem cards, including box toppers and promos now. More bans MAY happen if cards continue to be problematic.

Ira-Spinta: Gimme a break, Red Lotus still stops it cold, and now Air decks can't Chester/Mentoring them away, Order decks can't Mentoring them away, and Fire decks can't Mentoring them away either. Chester's and Makai gone = Spinta loses a LOT of power.

Feline Spike: Air decks now cannot gain extremely easy and free momentum with a 2/6 foundation - they have to switch to a 3/5 with a hand cost or a very slow 1/5. Chester's no longer protects Spike from Enhance negation, relegating that duty entirely to Inhuman, which ALSO has a hand cost. Chester's and Makai gone = Feline Spike loses a LOT of speed.

Chun-Li: She now only has ONE direct control card off Air (Inhuman), and see above for Spike. On top of that, the larger hand costs mean Chun-Li now has to keep THREE cards in her hand to Spike you with her Response, and if the Spike fails to KO she's totally defenseless - effectively, she is reduced to a 3-4 card per turn cycle, much like a 6 hand size character would be. Hoyoku-Sen is in exactly the same boat, just rolls better and is easier to block.

Blood Runs True: Seriously, people still see this as broken? what

Bitter Rivals: Two of its resources just lost a way to prevent answers to this card with the removal of Chester's Backing. Fire never really had any anyway.

Defender: Lord of the Makai being gone means you will always have a finite amount of momentum to use with this card. It is no longer a WIN CONDITION but a clever enabler and combo-oriented card, as intended. Water decks can no longer protect it from answers with Mentoring or Chester's. All three bans hurt this card.

Chinabox/Experienced/Malfunction: Have you guys even played with anything from set 12 yet? Good decks basically just flat-out laugh at these cards. Life and Earth stop caring once they have a single momentum. Even Air and Death have a solid way to punish these. Order lost its only way to deal with commit punishers like Torn Hero with the removal of Mentoring, and lost its premier win condition outright with the removal of LOTM. Water lost Chester's and LOTM, also losing the ability to deal with commit negation or commit punishment.

Basically all of the cards people ***** about just got kicked in the teeth, indirectly. It's like the errata on One-Armed Manuevers, kicking the enabler instead of the combos individually (e.g. Soul Power). One card gets banned so several can stay in the format.

I'm sorry if this post sounds harsh but people need to try to look at the bigger picture. It seems like some of you just have no other CCG experience at all to know how to identify enablers and understand how the removal of certain combos and enablers can neuter threats quickly.

Wrong

Tagrineth said:

First off, as I stated before, Chase ultras are much harder to come by than promos. LotM you got one per box of Realm, guaranteed. How many of us were guaranteed an Ira-Spinta or Feline Spike? I sure missed out on that one then. As for Chesters we still get almost one a week in our prize support and the card's been out for months. Everyone in our playgroups has at least 4. Olcadan's was hard to get I'll give you that. But if you're banning cards based on their availability don't look to things like booster toppers and cards that are in prize support every week for a year, look at the cards that are present in a third of the boxes at best.

Ira-Spinta - I'll say what I said in an earlier post:

Remember that Red Lotus Commits itself after one use unless you're playing Kyo (which nobody does) so if you get two boxings, or a boxing and a shooting cap if you're playing water, or a boxing and PM, or a PM and shooting cap, etc, you can overload red lotus easily.

It basically comes down to whoever gets more copies of either lotus or Boxing out first and my money's on boxing any day. With access to gorgeous team off of water and the fact that you have 2 other cards you mentioned that can commit it easily. Plus, shooting cap lets you ready your boxings, any way to ready red lotus? Not really. Lotus can't stop em all.

MarcoPulleaux said:

You claim to like well thought out arguments. Tag posts some nice blocks of text explaining his point of view and you give a one word answer. I recommending writing more than one word if you feel he's wrong.

DaiAndOh said:

This is about the SOTG; he can take his BS derailing diatribes elsewhere.

griffinman01 said:

@Tag: I largely agree with you. However, Order does have one answer to Torn Hero, and it's sitting dead in front of you; Ira-Spinta. But, at least this means that Order will have to sit on its Spintas to shut down your Heros instead of just dumping them on you to try and set up a Forethought lock.

I love this SoTG {why is it so natural to write STate Of the Game?}; piece of great news after piece of great news after piece of okay-but-could-be-worse news. The promotions sound awesome, especially that Flash of Blades will be included in the prerelease kits. In my area, I remember several of our new players building decks and asking for advice and time and time again we would tell them "Oh, there's this one common from Flash of Blades that would be perfect... no, I only have my set, none for trade." I guess no one else bought them in quantity either, so now we get 'em free? Sweet

My, quotes are quite messed up 8). Thanks for the "new replies" warning, board...

Wafflecopter said:

It's not the single problem card that gets locked down, try half your staging area. Remember that the combo could be used on either turn.

Here's a situation where you try to attack someone with 2 boxings, 2 shooting caps, and a hybrid style:

You attack, they box twice, shooting twice, rejection, take 1 and ready the boxings again. Repeat with Hybrid style to pull the rejection back. If you have red lotus it happens like this: You attack, they box, you cancel with lotus, they box again, you look at your committed lotus and shed a tear, they use shooting twice, rejection, take 1 and ready the boxings again. Repeat with Hybrid style to pull the rejection back. This can commit half your staging area pretty easily. Then when your turn rolls around you just play an attack and box your opponent's foundations again. If it deals damage (which it could do without it being a throw) shooting lets you have another round of boxing.

Another variation is: Play Ira-Spinta, use Boxing, your opponent gets one of two options for his red lotus. Option 1) He cancels the boxing. Then Spinta shoves lotus into the momentum. Option 2) He doesn't cancel the boxing. Boxing commits lotus. Then Spinta shoves lotus into the momentum.

Red lotus is really just an annoyance to Ira-Spinta, not a cure-all by any stretch (unless they're playing Spinta in a fire deck).

Anyways I'm tired of trying to argue this point. Stuff like this is why I'm VERY tempted to just switch to the mini format so none of this crap exists anymore. Too many stupid cards have been made at this point and rather than try to fix the problems by banning a bunch of cards that people have complained about for over a year now they ban cards that really aren't the problem. FFG can do whatever they want with the game but FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DON'T MAKE CARDS LIKE THESE AGAIN. It'll only bring a year of pain and complaints.

Half my board? Either you got a great draw (in which case, you can get much nastier than tapping half a staging area), or I got a bad one, or one of these two decks plays very few foundations.

When you're staring Cap+China Box, the answer is not to attack; if you drew a hand with 4 attacks in that kind of situation, you know you a) drew terribly or b) need to change your deck. You play some foundations to try and counter-control (lock the Cap down, then it's only 1 card; better yet, use Alluring Beauty to copy Chinese Boxing, and then lock Shooting Capoera down for their next turn ), and make sure you can defend yourself on your opponent's next turn.

griffinman01 said:

Please refer to this part of my post as it's obvious that no agreement can be reached here and I've stopped trying to argue the point.