I am having trouble understanding why you would ever discard cards. You can only discard from the house you activated, and so why not just play those cards instead of discard? Can anyone help me out with this? Thanks!

You can only play cards and use cards from one house per turn and so cards from a house you don't chose don't have any value on this turn.

Right, but you can only discard cards for the house that you chose to play for that turn. So, why not just play those cards instead of discarding them? Like, say I don't like any of my Mars cards in my hand and I want to get rid of them, so I choose to activate Mars so I can discard them. But, wouldn't it be better to just play them since I can't play any other cards that turn anyway?

It may be possible that one of those cards has an effect you don't want, but you still want to clear your hand for a card you do want.

21 minutes ago, Moes1980 said:

Right, but you can only discard cards for the house that you chose to play for that turn. So, why not just play those cards instead of discarding  them? Like, say I don't like any of my Mars cards in my hand and I want to get rid of them, so I choose to activate Mars so I can discard them. But, wouldn't it be better to just play them since I can't play any other cards that turn anyway?

There are effects that can harm you more than your oponent: Dis has a spell that destroys every creature and gives you 3 chains, Brobnar has the same one that only affects non damaged units. Dis has a spell that kills a creature, which is useless if your oponent doesn't have a creature and there is a Card that deals 2 damage to all creatures.

Oh, I see. So you could have cards that you literally don't want to play because they will be counteractive against your strategy. That is interesting...

1 minute ago, Moes1980 said:

Oh, I see. So you could have cards that you literally don't want to play because they will be counteractive against your strategy. That is interesting...

Sort of. It looks like that in most cases, they're not a good move right now . That card that kills all creatures, for instance... it's a wonderful card if you have two creatures and your opponent has seven. It's lousy when you have the seven creatures and your opponent has two.

And with your deck recycling you may eventually get those cards back anyway.

I think the optimal strategy is to discard any house cards you don't play. This will increase the likelihood that you get more cards of the house you want to activate next turn.

Activating the same house twice in a row will probably be the suboptimal play in most situations. That's why it's probably best to purge your hand of the house you just played so you increase the likelihood of getting cards from the house your playing next turn.

55 minutes ago, dirtmuncher said:

I think the optimal strategy is to discard any house cards you don't play. This will increase the likelihood that you get more cards of the house you want to activate next turn.

Activating the same house twice in a row will probably be the suboptimal play in most situations. That's why it's probably best to purge your hand of the house you just played so you increase the likelihood of getting cards from the house your playing next turn.

Possibly.

I think it’s not that clear cut though. The goal is to maximize your turn while still keeping an eye on the end game. Since you can only use the cards in play that match your choice of house that turn it may be more advantageous some turns to choose a house based on board state. That may make keeping some cards and choosing the same house twice in a row appropriate sometimes. In any case it does seem that hand management is going to be an important part of the game.

At this stage, with zero games under belt, it’s all just speculation for me. Can’t wait to give it a try and see if it’s for me.

4 minutes ago, Starbane said:

Possibly.

I think it’s not that clear cut though. The goal is to maximize your turn while still keeping an eye on the end game. Since you can only use the cards in play that match your choice of house that turn it may be more advantageous some turns to choose a house based on board state. That may make keeping some cards and choosing the same house twice in a row appropriate sometimes. In any case it does seem that hand management is going to be an important part of the game.

At this stage, with zero games under belt, it’s all just speculation for me. Can’t wait to give it a try and see if it’s for me.

Same here just theorycrafting. The proof of the pudding is in the eating or something

1 hour ago, dirtmuncher said:

A ctivating the same house twice in a row will probably be the suboptimal play in most situations.

I suspect that in most cases, the optimum play will be the house with the most combined cards in hand plus cards on the table. Possibly weighted a bit in favor of cards on the table, since they come into play tapped.

10 hours ago, Moes1980 said:

I am having trouble understanding why you would ever discard cards. You can only discard from the house you activated, and so why not just play those cards instead of discard? Can anyone help me out with this? Thanks!

Since you draw up to your max hand size, you could discard a bunch of cards to burn trough your deck faster looking for a specififc card.

10 hours ago, Xelto said:

Sort of. It looks like that in most cases, they're not a good move right now . That card that kills all creatures, for instance... it's a wonderful card if you have two creatures and your opponent has seven. It's lousy when you have the seven creatures and your opponent has two.

Exactly this. Also, if you've got a few such cards in a house, it might be worthwhile taking an otherwise sub-optimal turn to clear 3-4 cards out of your hand than to play slightly less suboptimal 2-card turns that are actually being "productive".

Hand management is important in this game, and quite handily lost me my demo yesterday.

8 hours ago, dirtmuncher said:

I think the optimal strategy is to discard any house cards you don't play. This will increase the likelihood that you get more cards of the house you want to activate next turn.

Activating the same house twice in a row will probably be the suboptimal play in most situations. That's why it's probably best to purge your hand of the house you just played so you increase the likelihood of getting cards from the house your playing next turn.

Activating twice in a row lets you use the creatures and artifacts you played last turn, though. Fighting and reaping with things on the board is often, but not always, more productive than the play effects of the stuff in your hand. It's what makes it an interesting game with strategic choices to make.

12 hours ago, Moes1980 said:

Oh, I see. So you could have cards that you literally don't want to play because they will be counteractive against your strategy. That is interesting...

I think the main reason this rule was included is so they have the option of printing conditional cards. Like the healing card for example. This seems like one of those rules that got included after gametesting to resolve some fringe cases which could impact the enjoyment of the game. Will you do it in most of your turns, probably not but it's good to have the option.

I've seen at least one card that might not actually be playable until a later stage in the game. If the card has a play condition to it, then you either need to hang on to it until later in the game, or decide to discard it to make room for more cards now.

There are numerous situations where you may find discarding those cards the best choice. The main reason is that you not only play the cards of the chosen house from your hand, you can use the cards already on the table ONLY from the chosen house (as per the current rulebook).

Therefore, if you have 3 creatures and an artifact in play from the same house and only 1 or 2 cards of that house in hand, you might want to ditch them both. This means that half of that house is now out of your deck and when you fill your hand to 6, you have a very good chance to draw a lot of cards (4+) of another house, for an explosive next turn. Meanwhile, you have 3-4 actions with the cards already in play. I would call that a good tempo play.

The other reason is you might be cycling your deck for a specific house that will beat the current board state of your opponent. The list can go on and on.

The common decision standpoint in all of those scenarios, including but not limited to discarding, is risk versus reward and I think this will be the strongest feature of the game. We will see.