Uh, nice game FFG? Ban this ****, immediately There's no point even trying to build anything but thrower now.

They don't have to ban that card. I would normally say they'll fix it in the next cycle (remember, this set was designed while Skaven were running wild and Order stunk), but that's at least 3 months away. I don't usually believe in banning cards, and I don't want them to here, but I will submit and say they should at least errata thrower to once per turn (once on yours and once on your opponent's). People were saying it would make it too weak, but now I think HE might be fine with this fix.

And to whoever I had that bet with about the next battlepack...yeah...that was before this card................

The Tiranoc Outpost is not the problem, just look at all the other meh cards from March that deal indirect damage. They need this one to properly function. The problem is the RBT that brings it over the top.

That one should be fixed, dont know how, though. (Errata to make it 1/round?)

MKP

Maybe specting for a "Limited" addition to BT? Or maybe the guy who wrote the spoiler (thanks Raistlin_TN) forgot something or did it wrong.

Frankly, I think they're trying to address it by adding more ways to kill supports.

They have ways to kill supports. The problem is that you HAVE to include ALOT of them in EVERY deck to play around this one particular card. I don't know if I REALLY see it as a huge deal, cause you'll always have to play around SOME deck, but it also renders any unit removal worthless cause it's so against the flow of every other deck and the game as a whole. But yeah, I feel like there's enough Dwarf stuff pushing Developments and Enough HEs actually doing stuff now, that the card can be changed to once a turn and HE are still in the game.

The meta now, without Outpost, is actually something close to fine. You can pack your deck full of support destruction and make your deck suck, or you can just play Grimgor with a reliable plan that handles the rest of the field. I'm very proud of how our Orc/Undead reanimator deck has been performing vs. thrower & dwarves, we finally have it in a state where it is favored vs. both, not overwhelmingly so, but nice, skill-intensive matchups that reward tight technical play.

... and this card sends all of that work to the trash bin. Utterly pointless to play anything but thrower now. One thing I know for sure: we're going to start seeing some really, really stupid cards in non-thrower decks. 3x Mob Up! is standard now, and still probably not good enough. Your deck clearly needs more Steel's Bane, and 3x High Elf's Disdain in every order deck. This is retarded.

swingjunkie said:

The other trouble is that aside from Burn It Down (which would normally be a weak card), only Dwarf, Empire and Orc have access to support removal. HE, DE and Chaos don't.

Now think about what factions are actually playable right now.

This is what I mean by the Thrower archetype constricting the metagame - I think with the Thrower banned there would be a lot more viable decks out there.

The sad thing about the outpost is that while there's some otherwise powerful cards in this pack (Recovering the Fallen is insane and the dragon is very strong), to a large extent they don't matter. I guess the counterspell is probably better than Disdain, since you can counter the fogs and flames. Recovering the Fallen should also make Dwarves resilient to unit hate and make the Grudge Thrower / Ranger combo much more powerful.

ddm - i know exactly what you mean - we've been playing with a what sounds like similar type of deck, and excited that it's giving some competition, and not the one-sided kind.

It does make me wonder though - if they're apparently selectively making certain deck types better by basically increasing their speed, when Chaos finally gets their boost to be #1, they're gonna have to have some pretty **** fast cards

The new Empire Knights are nice, a perfect fit in my defending disabling deck.
But against thrower?

Yeah... tbh that perfectly sums up my feelings about this game right now.

"Whoa, bunch of cool, fun cards that would be really neat to build around. Too bad there's no chance they are competitive against thrower."

It makes me sad to think how many cool archetypes are waiting to be discovered and being choked out by having to either 1) ramp to grimgor, or 2) play a million terrible support destruction cards no matter what the rest of the deck is trying to do.

Whatever. If they don't want to ban thrower, fine. Just means the game sucks a lot more than it needs to, and that's a shame because this is a pretty good game.

One of my friends explained to me how he views meta.

We are both into sports so he explains a deck in meta as basically being the Lakers/Celtics/Heat/Magic. You the player are the coach. Your team has the talent the resolve and the determination to get to the playoffs and win the finals. IF you are a good coach then SHOULD YOU NOT WIN?

He described the luck in the card games as being the lucky or missed calls by refs.

I never looked at it in this light but it makes sense. You are playing a game. When you take it to competitive level it becomes a sport, like Poker.

Certain teams will have the right amount of talent to remain on top for quite awhile. But as time rolls on new rookies enter the picture and veterans start to get rusty and replaced.

It doesn't mean no one enjoys watching the lower bracket teams or that the players of those teams don't enjoy the sport. It is called "having the love for the game" and knowing that not every team can be a winner is part of the package.

Thankfully card games can be monitored for balance unlike in professional sports. I still say give it time. Play the game for fun. Post observations for James and crew to read, when you feel like the meta is fine then take to tourneys. If meta gets to rigged, then go back to playing for fun but still posting thoughts and observations like the one above.

Great points, Curator. I think that the players who come into this game expecting or wanting it to be like Magic - particularly in the tournament balancing aspect of things - are going to consistently find themselves disappointed. The way that new cards arrive in tiny batches adds to the weirdness of this game's developing "meta" (ugh) and I suspect that's the biggest issue for old-school, experienced CCGers.

The other thing that we could be missing is that perhaps the nature of how they develop and get new cards out to address potential problems with over-powered decks may be an issue, too. It may just take from 6 months to a year to get cards out that fix older problems.

I'm disappointed that there exists such an overwhelmingly powerful deck archetype but I'm sure it'll get addressed eventually. It mainly really only affects competitive play anyway, so at least it's not ruining fun matches.

As an older CCG player, I really enjoy getting the battlepacks once a month(ish) and the ever changing environment. If you don't like the current environment, you can usually wait a month and see something new. It keeps the game changing where as the Star Wars CCG only got a game change roughly six months apart (sometimes worse if production got messed up). It's amazing how the small amount of cards released each month can have a change on the gameplay. It also has my local Chaos player screaming for more diseases so he can use grandfather's call to a reasonable effect.

I'd like to see an english spoiler just to make sure there aren't any technical differences in the wording of those cards.

I like the Temple to Verena. I think it would help out a lot in the early game if you get a big card. I play a very cheap deck (nothing over 3 resources) and I still run into issues where I wish I just had one more point. Plus, you might catch an opponent off-guard when they think you have no resources. "I don't have any on my capital board." "Oh hey! there's two on this temple here that I can spend!"

Also, those become "hate" immune resources as well.

I agree that often it works out to be "wait a couple of BPs and it will get fixed" except that the Thrower archetype has been good and getting significantly better for the last 3+ months. It's just that noone really seemed to believe me for quite a while. I'd already found the deck by the time f7eleven posted it.

The pre-outpost version is tough but beatable but in any event I think it's bad for the game. Our playerbase is so small that having really non-fun tier 1 archetypes is a disaster. On top of that, because it's all supports, only half the factions have meaningful ways of interacting with the **** thing so the metagame is extremely constricted.

The things with sport is that you a player cant play in two clubs.
Think about the fun of a first league where all players in all clubs are 80% the same extracted from two towns and the remaining country is not even considered.

Clamatius said:

jogo said:

USC dominates the college football scene. They have for years. Most come from same state, CA. Other states have their colleges too. It hasn't killed the interest in supporting fans of the college or franchise, even if the team they root for has never and will never make it to a bowl game, much less a playoff.

When I am able to make an all Slaanesh deck that will be the only thing I play. Even at the competitive level. I support the theme and part of the fun will be playing it the way the theme is supposed to be played (whatever that will be). Wining the tourney scene doesn't matter to me, but that is not to say I am not a competitor. Part of the fun will be beating good decks with my theme deck and the other fun comes from playing other players.

Since there is no prize support I don't even understand this whole need to play thrower decks. If everyone just played what they found interesting or fun, instead of needing to win, then this game would have a more supportive atmosphere. I have played heroclix for years (for some reason we have a huge 16 player turn out average every weekend). Yes there are broken pieces in it, but that is going to happen. However, that doesn't stop me from playing the Xmen or Teen Titans.

One of the reasons I hate anything besides Core Magic (as in only playing with the core sets released once a year) is because there really aren't any themes like Xmen or Slaanesh. This switch over to a game of factions, races, gods, and tactics seems to be where the competitive players coming from Magic are struggling. It is their nature to build a deck based on a color rather than a race, faction, god etc. I believe in theory that if Magic was goblins, elves, humans, undead, and merfolk. The scene for it would be different and the transition over to W:I would be easier. I can't fault the Magic players struggling with this type of a game. A game meant for fun play and not so much "OMGZ this deck is PWNZORS".

I don't plan to play thrower deck because I don't find it fun. Yes my local scene has door entry fees that are divided to the winners, but the way I see the fee it pays for the space, the ability to see new faces, and the experience of facing new decks...at least that is how it is down here. We don't look up the top decklist and mirror decks. To us that is an insult on our ingenuity and originality.

Curator said:

You and I view the game from a very different angle though. For me, the fun of these kinds of games is largely as a deck designer - to solve the puzzle (or at least think I might have solved it) and then to find out whether my analysis was right. Telling me that that isn't fun and I should just throw together a pile of cards because they all have unicorns on them or something is pointless. If flavour-based design is the way you like to play, more power to you, but that isn't what I do - function over form every time for me.

And as for the playerbase size, well, for a normal hobby game I am sure it is doing just fine for FFG, although I would be surprised if WH:I is doing better than a successful board game of recent years (e.g. Dominion, Agricola). Coming from Magic where a single tournament may have hit 500-1000+ players, yeah, it seems small.

Well I think that's Curator's point though - that we all view it differently. Some like solving the puzzle as a deck-designer and some really like theme-decks and then others love competition in general. Doesn't mean anyone's wrong though, in what they like.

I don't think I'd say that "no one believed you," Clamatius, about the BT decks. I just think that we all saw them as not terribly over-powered until the more recent arrivals of specific key-cards for that deck and I think that was a fair assessment (no matter how much DDM will rage about that remark, it's what most of the people I spoke to at GenCon said as well).

I agree that at this point, it's just a really tough deck but like everyone's saying, hopefully its power fades as they tweak stuff and add even more cards to the gameplay environment.

Just my 2 cents, though, of course. YMMV

Wytefang said:

Seriously guy? Obvious troll is obvious...

ddm5182 said:

I kidney punched my friend when he used lingo like that around me. It is very immature. I would have thought he learned that the first time he said "lawlz". I am older now and I have grown out of the physical force ways of teaching and admit that was immature for me to do.
I don't know where these redundant statement themes came from...probably 4chan...but they really tick me off. Just when I thought I had seen the many ways to down grade human society...

Don't bring that 4chan lingo into these forums. People that play board games over video games are supposed to be intelligent. So please if you must use that talk, take it to the first person shooter or MMO forums, not here.

For the record Fang' is a veteran on these forums. He has temper flaws, but he makes up for them with his intelligent input.

ddm5182 said:

Sigh. LOL

Curator said:

Hey, thanks for the kind words, Curator. I don't mind DDM's response since I (somewhat) provoked it (although it was in the fair process of proving a reasonable point, imho). I prefer to keep a lot of slang and such away from this forum but it's not my forum to make the rules so I have to play along as best as possible with any issues that arise between us. I do value DDM's intelligent input though his tone and attitude almost always drives me nuts. Still, at least he loves the game and I can appreciate that much, at least.