Don't get me wrong, I'm fine with a fair amount of variance in card power level. I do not think every card needs to be equally powerful. And some cards will appeal differently to the Spike/Johnny/Timmy demographics, of course.

I'm not so excited about cards that tend to decide the game based on your opening hand rather than play choices, since if that gets too out of hand you may as well just be flipping coins. I'm also not so excited about cards that are in every single deck (or every single deck based on whether you are Order or Destruction) or cards that are essentially unplayable since that limits deck build variance - and that variance IMHO is one of the main strengths of deck building games.

There is a counter-argument, of course, that you need a certain amount of draw-dependence because otherwise the game is too skill-based (yeah, it's possible) - if I sit down and play Chess with Kasparov there's not a lot of point to it because the outcome is essentially foreordained. If I play Magic against one of the top Pro Tour players then they have a big edge but they won't always win. I think most people actually prefer the Magic part of the spectrum - but typically the better players at a given game want it to be more skill-based since then they win more.

I actually don't really care from a game design or deck design perspective about the CCG/LCG aspect - when I played Magic competitively I'd just proxy the cards and then get them by hook or crook for actual tournaments. From a player point of view, I'm happy that this is a LCG since otherwise I wouldn't be playing - if Magic was cheap to play I would never have found this game and would probably still be playing Magic.

I got out of Magic because of the types of players I was running across as much as people able to essentially buy wins based on the over abundance of rare power cards.

I like that there are extremely powerful cards in the game, but because everyone has equal access to them they are not extremely overpowered.

To me a card becomes a problem if there are not suitable cards that are of equal power or capable of shutting the card down available to each faction. When I am forced to play specific races just to stand a chance there is a problem... when I am forced to use a race in a specific build to counter other races strong builds... well I accept that as part of the metagame.

dormouse said:

I fundamentally disagree here. Neutral cards can certainly be overpowered. Once again, the parallel in Magic is the Black Lotus. The cost of actually acquiring the card in real-world $ is actually irrelevant - the mechanic the card has is a problem for the game because drawing 1 or more in your opening hand is such a huge advantage.

dormouse said:

I agree here. But I think the game is really close to having this problem right now. Right now I think that the strong builds (tier 1) probably boil down to:

1. Chaos/Skaven rush

2. Near-mono Orc rush

3. Chaos/Dark Elf anti-rush control

and then there are a bunch of tier 2 decks that typically have good matchups against the control deck but bad to terrible matchups against the rush decks. I must admit I'm not certain that this is the current metagame because I don't have enough opponents to find out for sure. I haven't found a tier 1 Order deck.

We aren't seeing anything that is even remotely close to the Lotus. The lotus is a huge design flaw because of what it does in the context of that game. The closest equivelent would be a tactic that gave you three resources for free. An extremely strong unit that everyone has access to or a support like Warpstone excavation still comes no where close because this games mechanics.

I think the reality of this game producing something as fundamentally unbalancing as BL is just very unlikely and have a hard time taking anyone serious who brings it up as an honest comparison to an existing card. Even something as ridiculous as the Baneslayer Angel is unlikely to see print in this game. When we see Shrine to Nurgle getting nerfed before any major tournaments I suspect this game is going to stay on the proper side of balance with a wide spectrum of usability, efficiency, and strength in its card design... and this is a good thing to me.

Apart from Warpstone Excavation which allows you to have a boosted start build, based on luck, cards are ok design wise.

Though rush decks are getting better and better and i fear major tournaments to come this summer will see a majority of these decks.

dormouse said:

To make myself clear, right now I do not think there are any cards that outright need to be banned. But I can't say I'm happy about Warpstone Excavation, Contested Village or Innovation simply because they are 3x in so many decks before you start to think about the rest of the deck.