What is the consensus on the removal of Bolt Thrower in tournaments?

Would this level the playing field?

Edit: The title should read - barring.

Lordpappanqui said:

The general consensus is that in order to create a level playing field the following cards would need to be removed or changed:

Repeater Bolt Thrower

Mining Tunnels

Warpstone Excavation

Reclaiming the Fallen

The "Destruction Post March of the Damned" thread discusses this further, but basically Mining Tunnels and Warpstone Excavation are far, far stronger than any other resource and Reclaiming the Fallen singlehandedly shuts down all Destruction decks.

Connor

why do people hate bolt thrower so much, its not a very good deck. any deck can just hate it out very easy.

please don't make us have this discussion again, just go look around. You can't miss it

CAlexander said:

Clamatius said:

How do Aggro-Dwarves like WE? I can totally see RBT loving it, no units means it's a freebie, the negative effect never comes into play. Or do Dwarves fortify KZ or QZ with just Supports for money, in which case WE again doesn't kick in much at all.

All competitive decks play 3x Warpstone Excavation - it's too good not to run. Same goes for Innovation and Contested Village.

The normal Dwarf decks (like the GenCon winner) typically don't have any units in Kingdom and just Dwarf Rangers in Quest.

Corruption essentially doesn't matter because there are so few aggressive decks in the competitive metagame at the moment that blocking doesn't really happen much.

Wholly in favor of banning all of these, as long as it comes with a promise from design to stop making more of them.

I know it helps sell sets when the new cards are way better than the old cards, but it sort of ruins the game.

CAlexander said:

Actually that's the consensus of a few vocal people here in these forums - no way to really know what the vast majority of W:I players think about those cards. While many of us may see them for how powerful they are, other players may not feel the same way.

I agree with Wytefang.

I suspect that a majority of competitive players agree that something had to be done about the Thrower, one way or the other. The other stuff, eh, it's only been a BP or two and Reclaiming the Fallen was the latest one, so I think there is no time for a real consensus there.

I do think that it's obvious that these are super incredibly potent cards though. Hopefully they continue to tweak things so we don't lose players like the ones that left Overseer Lazarus's group or players like Clamatius.

Wytefang said:

Hi,

We already had these discussions on this forum. I think while Mining Tunnels and Reclaiming the Fallen are powerfull cards but not game breakingly so. A "simple" core set Waagh! has also the possibility of an instant winning attack as RtF... which needs many units in the discard pile before get any worthly uses. And WE still only OP if drawn early in multiples... but since the metagame will be much more unit-heavy maybe that's also change.

And also there is a deck in the "Worlds Top 8" without WE and with only 2 Innovations ;-) Maybe Contested Village even more owerpoered than these ?

A 40-person tournament is not enough data to judge a metagame. Flukes happen in cardgames, you cannot assume all of those are optimal lists. For some comparison, MTG (with a MUCH larger cardpool, admittedly), frequently has some terrible decks finish even 1st at 300+ person PTQ tournaments. "The sun shines on even a dog's ass" as the saying goes.

Would be better to discuss theory & playtesting as a group, rather than rely on the results of one small tournament to dictate optimal card choices. Collectively, we can put together a lot more data than that.

Anyway, if it were my decision to make I would have never printed Warpstone or Mining Tunnels. Now that the cat is out of the bag, I probably wouldn't choose to ban them. I'd be really happy if they were banned but its probably not the right call for the game. Unfortunately though, that means destruction needs supports comprable to Mining Tunnels in order to be competitive. I'm sure we will get them, since all signs point to power creep as the MO of the designers.

RTF on the other hand is just straight up broken. It completely invalidates the entire design philosophy of the destruction factions. Lets examine the core themes invalidated by RTF in more detail:

• Dark elves: Hand disruption, unit kill via -hp, milling (putting cards in the opp discard pile from the top of the deck)
• Orcs: "smother" effects (kill that cares about printed cost), "edict" effects (opp sacrifices a creature), or just straght-up unit kill (Troll Vomit)
• Chaos: unit kill via direct damage

Decks built around these themes *CANNOT BEAT* Reclaiming the Fallen. I'd go so far as to say that destruction decks built around these themes should not even be played so long as RTF is in the metagame.

In general: the meta is actually worse now without thrower, since we at least had two viable archetypes to choose from. Now there is dwarves or...? This is an honest question: can someone post a list that can beat dwarves reliably? I know we haven't found one yet, though to be fair we were building to take thrower into account as well.

Initial reaction to the current meta: even worse than when Skaven was dominant, because at least then we had 2 flavors of Skaven (orc and DE), and dwarves had some serious game against them toward the end of the cycle.

I could be wrong though. Interested to see what others are brewing.

I think you're wrong. I reckon Dwarves are tough but beatable. Now that you don't have to beat Thrower too, you can realistically run decks that previously would have been a bye for Thrower (like aggro Empire).

I'll believe it when I see it man... Slayers says "nice volley gun". A *lot*. Do you really think Verena is enough? It never has been before.

Remember too that *Dwarves* dont have to beat thrower, which apart from maybe the mirror in some metagames was the primary thing they tuned for. So all that support hate becomes even more unit hate...

I'm just depressed because I really liked the Orc/Undead deck. RTF is so stupid.

I think each order faction has good answers for RTF. It is tougher for destruction at the moment though, they dont have any counters, damage cancel or attack redirection effects. Also their mass removal frequently is not playable during the opponents turn. If destruction gets some more stuff that can accelerate their resource base and some better ways to counter a tactic that causes a large attack in a single turn I think there will be lots of viable decks. If only shrine to nurgle/nurgles pestilence still worked, lol

i know. lets just ban every card we have a problem with.... or you could just pack any of the cards that destroy supports

deviant-dj said:

This.100% approval, RTF has to go.

given the faq update, bolt thrower decks are now a thing of the past. Now enter the continued rant about warpstone excavation

deviant-dj said:

Fixed for ya.