I've been musing over a moderately complicated alternative to the standard Treachery implementation. I don't like the standard Treachery rules at all, basically because of poor balance.

None of the decks of cards in Descent are particularly well-balanced (i.e., at a similar power level to each other), but in most cases it doesn't really matter much, since the cards are drawn randomly and you have to make do with what you get. The only exception, other than Treachery cards, is Shop Items. The Shop Item deck is quite small, and with a slight blip in the Ranged Weapons, is mostly one of the best balanced decks in the game. It's also only really used in the initial stages of the game, before the heroes get more powerful weapons.

Treachery cards (and indeed Overlord cards in general) are horribly balanced, however. They range from completely useless (a surprising number- I reckon somewhere of the order of one third of all Overlord cards in existence are so bad you'd play them less than 5% of the time you drew them) to ludicrously powerful (absolute must-plays if drawn). Treachery cost has next-to-no correlation with power level, either: compare Lone Golem with Lone Troll for a particularly stupid example. Consequently, the Treachery mechanic is extremely dull, as the same small number of cards get used over and over again (Crushing Blow, Danger, Ambush, Elite Beastman War Party, Lone Troll, Drinkers of Blood, Poison Pit to name some of the cards I consider the most powerful: I don't think anyone else's list would be radically different).

Proposed variant, therefore:

Separate all Overlord cards (with and without Treachery costs) into three piles: Traps, Spawns and Events. Power cards go in the pile corresponding to their Treachery cost; Evil Genius goes into Events, Brilliant Commander and Hordes of the Things into Spawns). Shuffle all three piles separately.

Go through each pile in turn. From each pile, randomly draw, and then turn face up to inspect, cards equal to your Treachery value for that type of card times 4. So with 3 Spawn Treachery, draw 12 Spawn cards. Sort these cards into two piles: cards you want to keep, and cards you want to discard. You may not keep more than 16 cards, even if your Treachery is 5 or higher, but you may discard all cards if you wish. Having done this, increase the size of the "keep" pile to 16 by dealing further cards randomly from the top of the corresponding shuffled deck. Remove all discarded cards and the remainder of the shuffled deck from the game.

You now have three piles of 16 cards each, each pile partially chosen and partially random. Shuffle the three piles together to form your Overlord deck.

Note that the actual Treachery cost of each card is completely ignored: this is intentional.

You will, of course, end up with a deck containing far more cards with Treachery costs than normal (probably the majority). I actually consider this a bonus, for the following reasons:

The average power level of Treachery cards is not, I believe, much greater than that of non-Treachery Overlord cards (witness, for a start, that the best Power in the game has no Treachery cost)- there are of course a small number of exceptions, but it's exploitation of these exceptions that I'm trying to avoid.

You get a *much* more varied Overlord deck each game.

Thoughts? "4" may not be the correct multiplier, I admit: I'm wondering whether 3 or even 2 would work better. I'm also consider whether some sort of limit to the number of Power cards selected would be useful, not because I consider Power cards particularly powerful in play, but because they do generate a lot of Threat when discarded.

Do you get to look at the additional "random" cards you deal out in the final step before shuffling, so that you know what's in your deck, or are you just surprised when you draw them?

My first observation is that the number of treachery cards you get changes dramatically based on how many expansions you have. With all expansions, it looks like this could easily result in over half your deck being treachery cards, even if you have a treachery score of zero and therefore no choice at all. I think that's really only workable if we believe that the average power of treachery cards is very close to the average power of non-treachery cards...which, to your credit, is an explicitly stated assumption.

I don't think I really buy that, though. A lot of treachery cards are probably weaker than the best normal cards, and certainly very few of them are as good as the best treachery cards, but well over half of them are either extra copies of the better normal cards (e.g. Dark Charm, or Danger, though Danger was a treachery card before it was a normal card) or improved versions of normal cards. Compare:

• The majority of spawn treachery cards are obviously improved versions of normal spawn cards; everything that can be spawned without treachery can be spawned better with treachery
• Dark Power or Critical Strike probably beat Aim on anything but a troll
• Weakness and Sneak Up On The Prey are probably usually better than Dodge, or at least on par
• Enrage gives the effects of both Charge and Rage on a single card, and for a lower total threat cost
• Poison Spikes and Scything Blades do a lot more damage than Spiked Pits
• Cloud of Gas improves Paralyzing Gas
• Killer Chest improves Mimic
• Dance of the Monkey God improves Curse of the Monkey God
• Animate Weapons improves Dark Charm
• Greed can probably generate similar resources to Evil Genius, at a lower threat cost

Dark Power is still probably not the equal of a good normal card, but I think there's a clear systematic bias in favor of treachery cards. And quite a lot of treachery cards with no non-treachery analogues are really quite good. Even if you leave off the obvious and/or commonly-used ones like Crushing Blow, Poltergeist, Ambush, Dark Relic, Rolling Boulder, etc., there's still a lot of cards that maybe aren't worth their treachery cost, but are still awfully strong to just get for free:

• Spell of Binding/Burning/Frost/Thunder hits all heroes in an area with a web/burn/frost/stun token for a fairly reasonable threat cost; that's an impactful play
• Frozen Path gives a 1/3 chance of instantly ending a hero's turn, and can waste a lot of the heroes movement points or force a lot more risks of losing turns, for a tiny threat cost.
• Alarm opens up an unrevealed area early and immediately makes it your turn; if the first hero into a room runs for the chest, BAM, they lose their initiative, and you've got two entire areas' worth of monsters on the board to attack them with.
• Sloth costs the heroes a conquest every time one of them wants to go shopping or use the glyphs as a shortcut.
• Other power cards increase monsters' armor or speed, or increase heroes' conquest value...those are worth caring about...

Now sure, I'm cherry-picking the better ones, but how many "bad" ones can you name? There's one Dark Balm that you'll probably never use, Smash and Empower are highly situational, and there's a few others I'd say have a good chance of being used for threat, but most treachery cards go unused because they're not worth the treachery cost, not because they're not worth the threat cost. Even some cards that people single out as being incredibly bad, like Lone Golem or Drugged Darts, actually look pretty decent when you take away the treachery cost. Under this system, you'll undoubtedly discard a lot of them simply because you must discard a sizable fraction of the cards you draw as an overlord in order to get threat, even if you could choose exactly what you draw, but the average card power still looks like it goes up considerably.

Mixing in a lot of random treachery does sound like it could make the game more interesting , but unfortunately I'm pretty sure it's also a sizable boost in power to the overlord.

...I also feel I should plug Enduring Evil , in which I've redesigned most of the card decks (including overlord cards & treachery) to try to make the cards more consistent in power, as an alternative solution to your problem (unless you have your heart set on an extended campaign).

Hm. Ok.

I do think Treachery cards have a greater average power level than non-Treachery cards, but I'm just not convinced it's *much* greater. I haven't pulled this completely out-of-the-air, either: I've played games with the entire collection of Overlords cards shuffled together in one deck, and not noticed much increase in Overlord power. In any case, my variant method itself weakens the Overlord somewhat by preventing them from cherry-picking all the best Treachery cards, which may (and indeed almost-certainly *will* if the choice is restricted enough: an overlord who gets to play Treachery as written is, I'm convinced, definitely stronger than one who simply uses all Overlord cards shuffled together, even if you compensate for Conquest from deck-exhaustion by counting cards drawn from the deck).

To answer some of your specific points:

* Yes, the best Treachery spawns are certainly better than the best base spawns, but it isn't true that all Treachery spawns are better than all base ones (note: I know you didn't claim that). I'd certainly rather have Beastman War Party than Dogs of War, for example. Spawns, however, are easily the biggest power-difference of the three, I admit.

* Dark Power and Critical Strike are only better than Aim on relatively weak monsters. On bosses and tier 4s, I think Aim is generally better, and it's those monsters that you generally want to increase the attack power of in the first place.

* Weakness is worse than Dodge most of the time, as well as being more expensive. Sneak Up on the Prey would be better, except you can't play it on the monsters you really care about. Also Dodge is pretty weak in the first place.

* Scything Blades do more damage than Pits, but don't impede movement at all (which is mostly what you want traps for anyway), and cost far more to play. They also have a greater chance of missing. Poison Pits are admittedly better in every respect, but Spiked Pits are among the weaker base Trap cards anyway.

* I disagree with many of your comparisons following. In each case the Treachery card has a more powerful effect that the base one, but it also costs more, and in many cases the upgrade isn't worth the cost. Cloud of Gas, for example, will rarely hit more than the hero opening the door if the heroes are playing sensibly, and costs 50% more than Paralysing Gas, Animate Weapons costs more than double, and comes with an additional restriction, Curse of the Monkey God also costs more than double. Killer Chest *is* usually better than Mimic, I agree.

* Greed is *far* weaker than Evil Genius, mostly because it gives the heroes a choice and they whichever is worse for you. For the same reason I don't like Sloth much (though it isn't terrible: it's better than most Power cards).

* Alarm and Frozen Path are both very good and somewhat undercosted. But you are, as you say, cherry-picking.

* Dark Armour, and Unholy Swiftness are complete garbage, in my opinion. I'd rate both of them worse than Doom!, which is saying something. Wrath *may* occasionally be playable, but the cost is extremely high for the effect.

* Of the "spells", only Binding is in any way good. Burning does mabye 7-8 damage if you're lucky, spread out among all heroes (basically useless), Frost probably does nothing, Thunder costs the heroes half a turn, which is OK but about twice as expensive as it ought to be for that effect.

YellowPebble said:

You forgot to finish that sentence (the rest of that paragraph is a parenthetical remark).

In any case, your rules that prevent the overlord from cherry-picking all the best treachery cards clearly do not weaken him at all in the particular case where he has zero treachery; in that case, if treachery cards are better than normal cards on average , you've made the overlord strictly better.

If the advantages and disadvantages balance out for any amount of treachery, that means that you've reduced the utility to the overlord per point of treachery and created some magical amount of treachery at which the rule is roughly balanced against the normal rules, while making the overlord more powerful with less than that amount of treachery and less powerful with more than that amount of treachery.

The magical point at which this occurs will, of course, be different depending on which expansions you have.

So if your goal is just to make this rule balanced with some specific amount of treachery and combination of expansions that you have in mind, you might be OK.

If your goal is to make a new rule that's equally powerful compared to the old rule under a range of conditions, then my estimation is that you have probably not succeeded (depending on your tolerance for error and the size of the range you care about). Because analyzing one simple special case means I can predict that either your rule is systematically better (for the OL) than normal, OR your rule scales differently, making it better in some games and worse in others.

Errr, yes, I did. I tend to carried away with parenthesis sometimes. As the old saying goes "always read what you written, to see you any words out".

Ahem.

I think I meant to say something along the lines of "compensate for the increased average power level of cards in an un-Treachery-ed deck".

I agree with your conclusion, for the most part, although I would point out that an overlord with infinite (or even just a large number, say 200) Treachery is also clearly strictly better under my rule, since they get to their entire deck. So I suspect that in fact the relationship is rather more complicated. I'm pretty certain that if you revise the number-of-cards-you-get-to-see-per-point-of-Treachery to 1 (I'm less sure about it if you use 4, but I think it's probably still true), my rule makes the overlord weaker with moderate Treachery (perhaps 4 of each type), but it is clear that with 0 or 200, they're better. So there may in fact be no magic number where the power level is equivalent, or there may be two such numbers, quite distant from each other.

My feeling is simply that this rule doesn't grossly distort the game balance- I'm not trying to claim it doesn't affect it. It's not as if Descent Quests are themselves well-balanced against each other in the first place (nor would you necessarily want them to be, come to that).

On a bit of a tangent, I have looked at EE (some time ago), but my urge to tinker with anything has prevented me from using it as written. I have borrowed a number of your ideas for some new decks of my own devising, such as spawns that scale with treasure chest colour opened, Disruption, Penetrate and Deflection (I renamed the latter Defence), many of your skill cards and Freeze replacing Frost. I've also tried several of your quests. Count me very impressed in general.

I haven't looked at your Overlord cards in detail, but I'm willing to take on trust that they're better balanced. My problem is that, while you could (can) certainly create a set that were better balanced than the published ones, I actually don't think it's possible to balance them well enough to make the published Treachery mechanic really work well.

YellowPebble said:

An overlord playing with ~200 treachery under the standard rules also gets to [choose] his entire deck, because that's enough to replace every normal card with a treachery card at normal cost. In fact, an overlord playing under your rules doesn't get to choose a completely arbitrary deck, even with infinite treachery, because he's constrained to having 1/3 of the deck be monster cards, 1/3 be traps, and 1/3 be events; under normal rules, you could have, say, nothing but spawn cards, if you wanted.

But sure, it's more complicated than a fixed utility per point of treachery, especially at very high values. I'm not so concerned about what either system does with 200 treachery, though I am concerned about, say, 20 (one Enduring Evil quest uses 18, another uses 3).

Incidentally, I'm assuming you're throwing out dark glyphs entirely with this rule?

Bother. Quite right.

Yes, of course. Dark Glyphs just don't work at all as written. And I don't think they're really interesting enough to be worth trying to fix.

YellowPebble said:

It seems like the reason for the proposed variant is not to fix any balance issues but to see more variety in cards used from one game to the next. Here's a slightly different suggestion with more random results (including a variable ratio of Events:Traps:Spawns) in the final OL deck:

Separate the cards into Events / Traps / Spawns, as above. Shuffle each pile separately. From each pile, draw 2 cards per corresponding treachery. You may discard up to half of the cards, drawing replacements. Then draw 2 more cards per relevant treachery, keeping all of them. The final deck will have 4 cards per relevant treachery from each of the piles.

Example: JitD Quest 3 (Treachery: 3 Green, 3 Purple, 4 Red)

1. Draw 6 Event cards, discarding up to 3 of them. Draw replacements for any discarded cards.
2. Draw 6 additional Event cards.
3. Draw 6 Trap cards, discarding and replacing up to 3.
4. Draw 6 additional Trap cards.
5. Draw 8 Spawn cards, discarding and replacing up to 4.
6. Draw 8 additional Spawn cards.

The final deck has 40 cards - 12 Event, 12 Trap, 16 Spawn.

You are suggesting that the overlord should be forced to have a larger deck the more treachery he has? I don't think you've thought this through.

In fact, your rules cause an overlord with no treachery to have a deck of zero cards, which means he cycles it infinity times during set-up (drawing his initial hand) and wins the game before it actually starts. Well done.

Antistone said:

I have thought it through, based on the treachery for all of the JitD quests. You'd end up with a deck of 36 to 48 cards. This is the "normal" range for the OL deck size - the base game has 36 OL cards; adding the expansions makes 48. I know more treachery would give a larger deck, but does that variable number of cards really make a huge difference?

Obviously if you're playing homebrew quests, this may not make sense. And if you're considering a complete overhaul like EE it's just plain stupid to expect things considered for the vanilla game to work.

Also, though I probably shouldn't even acknowledge your absurd example of an overlord deck containing zero cards, the OL would not automatically win. If there are no cards, the OL can never draw the last one.

"When the overlord player draws the last card in the overlord deck, the heroes immediately lose three conquest tokens"

EDIT:

If you're concerned about quests with drastically different treachery values, you could easily alter the number of cards per treachery in steps 2-4-6 of my example. Just choose a multiple that brings the final deck close to 40 cards. (This wouldn't work if you made a homebrew quest with 200 treachery, but that doesn't matter. Treachery, just like everything else in the game, needs to have a "reasonable" value for the game to work.)

The treachery range in WoD quests (the expansion that introduced treachery) is 6 to 18 (2-2-2 in quest #8 to 6-6-6 in quest #9). OK, it doesn't go down to 3 treachery like Enduring Evil, but that still means your deck size is varying by a factor of 3 (24 to 72 cards). I'm prepared to call that a "huge difference." And that's assuming that you aren't even pretending this would work in RtL. Your accepted range of "reasonable values" is apparently a LOT smaller than the actual game publisher wants to use.

The bigger issue, though, is that that is pretty much all your rules do. More treachery = more cards, with the same proportional amount of choice...so if having a larger deck is bad, all else being equal (which I'm pretty sure is the case), under your rules, giving the overlord more treachery is strictly bad for him. Considering that increasing treachery is a strict and significant boon under the normal rules, I'd be inclined to reject your suggestion without considering it further.

But what I'd really like to know is WTF your proposal is actually intended to accomplish? The OP already proposed rules that give you a consistent deck size with randomized cards with increasing amounts of choice the more treachery you have. If we modify your proposal so that treachery actually helps you and your deck is a constant size...we basically just get the proposal from the original post back again. I am unable to identify any change you made that could even be argued to be a good idea.

Having a larger deck is bad in the sense that it takes longer to cycle through it, but a larger deck is also more likely to include good cards.

The essential part of the idea was to have the ratio of Event:Trap:Spawn cards in the deck reflect the ratio of treachery points. All of the JitD quests 'work' with 4 cards per treachery; that can easily be changed to another value for other quests if necessary. As for what this accomplishes, it creates a much more varied play experience. Cards that are typically never used will sometimes be in the OL deck. Quests with lots of trap treachery will actually have lots of traps played, because the OL will have more trap cards than other types. Quests with lots of spawn treachery will have more spawns, etc.

Constructive criticism would be a lot more helpful than just discarding an idea because you are too stupid to see the concept behind it.

Explaining the concept behind an idea would be a lot more helpful than assuming everyone can read your mind and making ad hominem attacks when they don't.

A larger deck is "more likely" to include good cards in the sense that it contains more cards total and is therefore more likely to include any kind of card you care to name, good or bad. It doesn't provide greater odds of drawing good cards on any given turn, and it means that any particular good card in the deck will be drawn fewer times per game on average.

The more interesting question is the average value of cards in the deck...which, under your rules, appears to be exactly the same for any size deck. Making bigger decks strictly worse, as I originally said.

As for changing the ratio of cards in the deck to match the treachery, congratulations, your proposal does actually do that. Your reasoning for why that's desirable is rather suspect, though. More cards of your highest treachery type are already played, under either the original rules or the OP's rules, because you'll have (proportionally) more good cards of that type ( unlike in your proposal), which will tend to cause you to discard more cards of other types for threat. Under the original rules, the overlord also has the option to swap out any kind of card he wants with any kind of treachery, which means that either the deck composition will already vary by mood/play style or that the different card types are inherently unequal and you're modifying the difficulty of quests largely at random by enforcing a particular selection.

And I don't see any reason why the ratio of treachery should be used for this; it doesn't vary much, it goes in large, discrete steps, and that's not what the quest designer expected the treachery numbers to be used for. Skewing the proportion of card types in different quests is an entirely orthogonal design goal that has little to do with treachery and doesn't have any particular reason to be in this thread.

But even if we accept "making the ratio of cards match the ratio of treachery" as a sane goal, that still doesn't make this a sane plan. That could have been accomplished by modifying the OP's house rule as follows:

"Instead of keeping 16 cards of each type, keep a number proportional to the corresponding treachery type, scaled to keep the overall number the same (see table below for quick reference)."

That accomplishes your stated goal without making treachery bad for the overlord, distorting the deck size, or making treachery unplayable outside of a narrow and arbitrary range.

I apologize, I did speak harshly. I simply found it incredible that you could reach the conclusion that my idea was entirely without merit while at the same time admitting you did not actually understand what my idea even was.

A larger deck is "more likely" to include good cards in the sense that it contains more cards total and is therefore more likely to include any kind of card you care to name, good or bad. It doesn't provide greater odds of drawing good cards on any given turn, and it means that any particular good card in the deck will be drawn fewer times per game on average.

The more interesting question is the average value of cards in the deck...which, under your rules, appears to be exactly the same for any size deck. Making bigger decks strictly worse, as I originally said.

There are a lot of interesting ideas here, but I don't think either of us have done a thorough enough analysis of the available card pool to substantiate (or refute) any of these claims. It seems relatively easy to at least approximate the marginal cost of an additional card for any given deck size, but it's far from trivial to determine the marginal utility of that additional (random) OL card for any given deck size. We need to know how "good" an average card is, but even that is hardly a start. We also need to know the distribution of all cards. If, for example, there were 50 useless cards and 1 awesome card, a large deck would be (on average) much better. The odds of drawing that one awesome card on any given turn are much higher if it is actually in your deck than if it is not.

As for changing the ratio of cards in the deck to match the treachery, congratulations, your proposal does actually do that. Your reasoning for why that's desirable is rather suspect, though.

Desirability is a purely subjective concept. Some people like things that other people do not. I'm not going to try to prove to you that you should be interested in something.

More cards of your highest treachery type are already played, under either the original rules or the OP's rules, because you'll have (proportionally) more good cards of that type (unlike in your proposal), which will tend to cause you to discard more cards of other types for threat. Under the original rules, the overlord also has the option to swap out any kind of card he wants with any kind of treachery, which means that either the deck composition will already vary by mood/play style or that the different card types are inherently unequal and you're modifying the difficulty of quests largely at random by enforcing a particular selection.

Is modifying the difficulty of a quest at random a bad thing? If you think so, you might want to get rid of skills, make all the heroes exactly the same, stack the OL deck instead of shuffling, etc. You really think this one extra bit of randomness is going to ruin the game?

that's not what the quest designer expected the treachery numbers to be used for

Yes, I know. That's why this is posted in the "Home Brews" section.

Skewing the proportion of card types in different quests is an entirely orthogonal design goal that has little to do with treachery and doesn't have any particular reason to be in this thread.

Why? Isn't this thread about different ideas of how to use treachery in constructing the OL deck? This is completely on topic; this is exactly the thread it belongs in.

"Instead of keeping 16 cards of each type, keep a number proportional to the corresponding treachery type, scaled to keep the overall number the same (see table below for quick reference)."

I considered something like this, but I tweaked the idea slightly to allow fewer discards than in the OP's original idea, which will lead to more variation between decks from one game to the next.

mahkra said:

No, I said I didn't understand what the goal of your idea was. I'm fairly confident I understand the idea itself perfectly (meaning, I could play a game using that rule if I desired).

mahkra said:

No, that's wrong. The large deck is more likely to contain the awesome card, but the smaller deck containing the awesome card will allow you to use it more often. The average number of times during the game that you draw that card (averaged over all possible decks of a given size) is independent of the size of your deck, modulo special cases like if you already have it in your hand when you reshuffle.

Pretty much the only way that the larger deck could be better is if having a wider variety of cards in your deck is intrinsically better, regardless of the quality of the individual cards. For example, if you get diminishing returns when repeatedly playing the same card, or if combinations of cards are important. Effects like that might exist in Descent, but I think they're small enough to ignore for purposes of this discussion unless you're prepared to consider decks with around 12 cards or less, in which instance I think we're already agreed that your rules break down.

mahkra said:

So you're saying that my "conclusion that [your] idea was entirely without merit" is something entirely subjective and that you're not going to argue with me?

Things like balance, tactical depth, ease of use, etc. are generally regarded as desirable for games and people argue that rules are good or bad by relating them to those concepts all the time. Things like "making sure that two ratios of variables I decided to look at are exactly the same"... aren't . That's like if I said yoru idea sucks because it means the overlord will end up playing more cards whose names contain the letter "Q". Unless I explain how that's related to some commonly accepted goal of game design, it's a non-sequitor and you'd be justified in dismissing it.

You did try to relate your thing to a commonly-accepted good (variety), but if you're going to abandon that connection as soon as I challenge it, we're back to a non-sequitor.

mahkra said:

You misunderstand. I meant that you are producing a systematic change in the difficulty of a single quest, but that the amount of systematic change is being chosen at random.

That's not like adding more skills to the deck so they might be selected at random, it's like taking a pen to your quest guide, crossing out the heroes' starting conquest in each quest, and writing in the output of a random number generator. Each of the quests is still the same every time you play it, but some of the quests are harder and others are easier and there's no rhyme or reason to any of it.

If you don't agree that's a bad idea, I don't know how to help you.

mahkra said:

Actually, this is supposedly a thread about one specific variant. But more generally, it's a thread about addressing the issues YellowPebble raised in the original post, specifically:

• Treachery cards are not balanced
• The same treachery cards tend to be used every game

Your stated goal is something entirely separate: to skew the composition of the overlord deck in favor of certain card types under certain conditions. That's got nothing to do with the issues YellowPebble is trying to solve. The fact that it involves treachery is incidental; it's like coming into a thread discussing adjusting the conquest value of specific heroes and talking about the negative conquest variant; the merits of the negative conquest variant do not impact the appropriate conquest values for heroes to have, and therefore are irrelevant, even though it involves "conquest."

Thank you for putting me in my place, oh God of the Forums.

Hey, I don't object to the addition to the thread (I don't think anyone ever objects to having their thread bumped). It's relevant to the thread title, anyway.

I agree with Antistone's general point, though, that that variant actually makes a lot of treachery *worse*.

Rather than worrying about specific mechanics for now, what about this concept?

1. Non-variable OL deck size
2. More treachery allows more control over deck contents (probably via more opportunities to discard randomly selected cards)
3. Ratio of cards in OL deck matches ratio of treachery types
4. Not all cards in the OL deck are known to the OL

The first two points work together to ensure that it's always better to have more treachery. The third point is just for flavor.

Antistone asserts that RaW treachery rules already make certain maps much more trap-heavy, etc.

More cards of your highest treachery type are already played, under either the original rules or the OP's rules, because you'll have (proportionally) more good cards of that type ( unlike in your proposal), which will tend to cause you to discard more cards of other types for threat. Under the original rules, the overlord also has the option to swap out any kind of card he wants with any kind of treachery, which means that either the deck composition will already vary by mood/play style

However, there a few reasons I like my proposal for flavor:

• Most quests have at least some treachery of all types. This means that an OL can usually pick his favorite card (or two) of each type, which he will then use whenever possible. This does not encourage a variable play experience from one quest to the next.
• If we accept that treachery cards are better than regular cards, then the OL will have more good cards of the highest treachery type, as Antistone states above. However, the OL has no reason to play cards of that type in general; he is only encouraged to play the good (treachery) cards. If there are more good trap cards in the deck than good spawn/event cards, then traps will be more commonly played, but not traps in general. It's just that the couple good cards are played at every opportunity, driving up the statistics for that category. A couple cards played over and over (especially when it's the same couple cards each game, because those are the ones the OL likes) is repetitive and conflicts with my goal (variety).
• Per Antistone's own reasoning, the OL deck with RaW treachery varies by mood/play style. I'm suggesting an alternative that would make the OL deck vary by quest instead.

The fourth point in my treachery concept is also to encourage variety. If the OL knows exactly what is in his deck, he has more incentive to 'farm the deck' for specific cards, discarding lots of middling cards for threat. If he doesn't know exactly what good cards will be available to him, he's more likely to use some of those middling cards instead of discarding them all.

I agree with most of this.

I don't actually think there is a major problem regarding the frequency of play of cards once the Overlord's deck is created. Some cards are obviously played more than others, but there are very few Overlord cards that I would like to categorically state I would *never* play. Not only are you strongly encouraged to play the cards you've drawn (in many quests, you won't even see all the cards in your deck once each), but situations make cards better or worse than normal. While the cards could certainly be better balanced, the variety of Overlord cards *played* is reasonable- it's the variety of cards added to the deck using Treachery I dislike.