I think that healing and +counter quests resonate with players for flavour reasons - and players try to squeeze them into decks more than their power level would indicate. I was talking to ddm about this the other day and we were discussing just how ridiculous quests that need counters have to be to be competitive.

For example, Smash 'Em All! has a very powerful effect - destroying each and every one of your opponent's supports is nothing to sniff at - but it still never makes the cut even in slower Orc decks. The reason is that the card simply does nothing most of the time. If your opponent has any disruption at all then it's trivial to negate them.

Sadly, most quests are more on the power level of Repair the Waystones - take Extending the Wastes from the Burning of Derricksburg. "Action: Spend X resource tokens from this card to corrupt target unit with printed cost X or less. Forced: Place 1 resource token on this card at the beginning of your turn if a unit is questing here."

That is a terrible, terrible card. Even if it read "Action: Spend 1 resource token from this card to corrupt a target unit. Forced: Place 1 resource token on this card at the beginning of your turn if a unit is questing here." it wouldn't be very good.

Even if quests did not lose their counters when the unit left, they would most likely not be good. Smash 'Em All! may be playable at that point, however.

I wonder if there is a possible rules tweak for healing (e.g. you can use it to prevent damage too) or +counter quests that would bring them more in line with player's hopes/expectations. Thoughts?

My thoughts were maybe a card that lets me spend resources to add counters to my quests. Perhaps a two for one trade or a three for one. I think another reason that most quests are unusable is that they take a moderately balanced quest zone and blow it out of proportion, making you draw way too many cards in a turn. Perhaps a card that lets me draw one less than my quest zone gives me? Also, the need to place a unit on the quest by playing it into the quest zone. If I could move someone to the quest (either by rules change or, sigh, another card effect) then the feasibility of playing a unit first and then playing the quest when I get it in my hand would be much awesomer.

Right now I'm playing a High Elf defense deck that uses Protect the Empire and Defend Tor Aendris to block anywhere with the high elves dragonmage and Steel's bane. Works pretty well once it gets going but the biggest weakness is knowing that if I go ahead and play that dragonmage to draw cards, I won't be able to play him on the quest once I draw it into hand.

I think healing could be great if it could be played as a response to damage dealt or prevent damage assigned. I doubt we will see that, but I also expect to see some feasible healing with the lizardmen as there will be opportunities to damage my own guys to do more damage to you. I will want to heal that up of course, before my opponent kills my lizards.

Let's say you made the following rules changes:

1) You can move any unit in the quest zone on or off a quest during your capital phase, at the same speed as playing a unit / support / development (so you can't do it in response to things).

2) Quests do not lose counters when the unit on the quest leaves it.

Would counter quests be too powerful?

Don't have much of an opinion on healing really. Like lifegain in MTG I think its good to have a mechanic that simultaenously appeals to new players and is bad - its part of the journey of becoming good to learn why it is bad and then, on the flipside, to learn when it actually can have some value.

RE: counter quests... @ Clamatius, I think if you don't take away the tokens when the units die, the quests themselves need to be removable, probably by allowing them to be counted as supports for Demolition, Pillage, etc. Otherwise yes they are too powerful, or really, Smash em All is too powerful.

One thing they could do is allow any unit in your quest zone to satisfy the 'if a unit is questing here' requirement, meaning you don't have to associate a particular unit to a given quest. So long as you have something in your quest zone, you are good, but if all your quest units die the quest gets reset. This probably doesn't fix the problem but it helps.

I think by changing the rule that you have to play a unit into the zone into being able to move units onto the quests that would be a good start. Then produce neutral cards that can add resources to nonunique quests on the turn after they come in but are not tactics so that they can be countered with a variety of effects. That way someone can't just drop a bomb onto the infiltrate quest to make an opponent discard twenty cards in a turn. Resources should still leave the card when the questing unit leaves or perhaps halfing the resources (rounding down) when a unit leaves would be better. This would put a lot of thouse quest cards back on the menu. As it is I only ever see Infiltrate!, Wolves of the North, and the two defend anywhere quests being played at the moment. Those are easy ones to start with a noticable benefit to the deck types that need that sort of specific support like mill decks or skaven multiattack decks or late game winners in need of a stall.

For healing I agree that healing at the moment is fairly lack luster. To fix it I would release cards that added effects to healing like card draw & resource support along with new cards that allow the defender to choose how damage is divided during combat. And maybe adapt the rules to allow healing to be played as a fast effect to units so that the unit doesn't leave play until the end of the phase and until that time may be healed.

How about getting to put your resources that you have not used during your opponents turn ( in other words you had some held back but didn't need to use a tactic etc) onto your quest during your 0 phase of your turn instead of turning those resources back into the pool. (seems I could have worded this better but hope you know what I mean).

That would be way too good. Spending 3 resources to fully power up Smash Em All would be really strong.

I think this would work:

1) You can move any unit in the quest zone on or off a quest during your capital phase, at the same speed as playing a unit / support / development (so you can't do it in response to things).

2) Quests do not lose counters when the unit on the quest leaves it.

3) Quests count as a support card.

Yep, seems fine. Smash em All would be played for sure w/ those changes.

Not sure I like the flavor of " 'Pillage' destroys 'Sack Tor Aendris' " but whatever.

Yeah, flavour wise it's not that great. Pillaging a sword isn't that great either, so, eh.

What quests would become decent? Smash 'Em All for sure, but what else? A Glorious Death? Night Raids? Wake the Dragons? Infiltrate? Everything else seems bad even with those changes.

Clamatius said, "That is a terrible, terrible card. Even if it read "Action: Spend 1 resource token from this card to corrupt a target unit. Forced: Place 1 resource token on this card at the beginning of your turn if a unit is questing here." it wouldn't be very good."

I disagree - if it had THAT text, it'd be quite solid since you'd likely get it to work a bit more and every bit more Corruption available makes Chaos that much more viable as a solo race.

ddm5182 said:

In what may be a first (LOL), I totally agree with both the good suggestions made here by DDM and by his opinions on this. Well said, sir.

The problem with Healing is that most of the time, things don't really get damaged - they're either killed or have hit-points reduced (by DE decks). So any effects that you could tie to Healing (such as the current ones that deal damage when you heal stuff) are fairly unreliable.

Wytefang said:

This, and to a further extent, just about anything the High Elves do. A lot of HE effects and abilities come into play when they are already at a disadvantage.(healing, searching the discard pile) Also, they cost too much. Lower printed cost and higher loyalty cost probably would help them in the future...and maintain flavor.

As far as quests go, allowing units to move freely onto quests should make them a lot more playable. Some quests are just terrible no matter how you slice them. And some are good. Smash 'Em All is a scary thing to see in single set. Infiltrate is just good. Journey to the Gate is all right, but is better if Infiltrate is also on the board. Quest tokens need to reset when a unit is removed or else some of the abilities become too strong.

Allowing multiple units to play on the same quest might be interesting.

qwertyuiop said:

They do. I can't recall the exact quote from the rulebook as I'm away from my cards atm, but I'm sure this is correct.

Subtle changes are much better than a hoard of changes at the same time. We're all used to deciding not to play quests for some reason or another. Mine is that I don't like drawing the unit I need and then having to wait on my quest. Many more quests would become a good option if I knew I could move a unit in the quest zone onto the card. That alone really determines the speed at which I can get a quest going. If I can get it rolling on turn two instead of turn four or five, that makes all the difference as to whether or not it will have an effect.

Another card idea. A tactic that places a token on the quest for each unit not already assigned to a quest in your quest zone.

LordMalinari said:

Ah. Didn't finish my thought, there. Insert "I've played a few games where my opponent and I decided to try leaving them on and it was ridiculous"

Clamatius said:

Sniff... My pure-Chaos deck must be even worse than I thought, cause I added that quest to the deck and my deck got a lot better! :-(

I will say that I do not have any decks that I regard as good right now that use a Chaos board. Chaos has not got a lot of love recently, although Effulgent Boils is pretty solid.

Anyway. So, qwertyuiop: what quests did you think seemed too good with the not-removing-the-counters change?

Clamatius said:

Well, (and i only play single set now) a quest with tokens is always going to be perceived as a greater threat than one without. If it's a decent quest, even more so. In the case of Smash 'Em All, an orc player can effectively neutralize support in the quest and kingdom zones for the game if all it costs him is a couple of resources every time he wants to reset the board. This forces the opponent to play more units to these zones to be able to generate the resources and draw the cards needed to win, units which could be used to attack are now forced to defend. The same goes for other quests which are decent in single set. Night Raids becomes a lot cheaper. Infiltrate! becomes ruthless. A Glorious Death creates a one sided battle of attrition. It can really change the whole dynamic of a game. In my limited experience, that is.

qwertyuiop said:

I also play only single-set, and also only mono-faction (I keep one deck for each faction and try to keep them all balanced to play with friends) and I found Chaos was really hurting for sufficient corruption effects. That's what made the quest so useful to my deck. It was an easy way to corrupt cheap units and then clear them out with direct damage. Maybe now that I have Effulgent Boils it won't be as necessary. Other than that, the only quests in the game that see use, even in my limited format, are the attack from QZ, defend from QZ, and Smash Em All. So I agree that in general they seem like they need a buff somehow.

I think not clearing the quest off after a unit dies would be too powerful. Maybe just add a resource to a quest whenever a unit is placed on the quest, to speed them all up a little bit?

Interesting idea, although really you're effectively reducing the counter requirement to 2 instead of 3.

One more idea: instead of the unit leaving the quest clearing off all the counters, it clears 1 counter (so it's set back but not totally reset).

Clamatius said:

Yeah, I thought about that, but its not exactly the same, as some quests do not count up to 3, but just accumulate resources for other purposes (Sack Tor Andris), so it just seemed cleaner to just add one right away for all quests than change some to 2 and tweak the others in some other way.

I think freely being able to move a unit onto a quest would be just enough. The resources still reset, but you save a turn or three over the course of the game. Anything more than that, and things might become too strong.

Not sure about that. Most quest effects are pretty weak, with a couple of exceptions.

For example: Extend the Wastes, Dat's Mine, Repair the Waystones, Reclaim the Hold, Slaver Raid. If any of those just got counters and never needed a unit to be on them they would still not be that fantastic.

Then I guess some better quests need to be released. I think if testing were done using the ok, or good quests, we could come up with something. Horrible quests are just going to stay horrible. Making them playable might turn the good quests into deck staples.