There is one trend that has bothered me when the game was released, but I shrugged and thought it will go away. But it didn't. In fact, it got worse:

Most decks don't try to build on interesting synergy, or clever tricks. Instead, they pick cards that are obviously incredibly powerful and play that. As a perfect example, take a list at the World Champion: http://deckbox.org/sets/21306?v=v

Out of 18 different cards,

3 are purely metagame choices (Burn it down, Demolition, Zealot Hunter),

1 more is abused for combo-purposes (Grudge Thrower was designed to give +P for your units during attack, but it would be played even if it just said "Action: Sacrifice a Unit to do nothing")

3, namely Great Book of Grudes, Cannon Crew and Ancestral Tomb, are in there because they synergize well with each other and are very good to begin with.

And all others (11 cards) are staple. As in: It is impossible to imagine any competitive Dwarf deck to not have these cards. Rangers have plagued us since they were printed, in every Dwarf deck we ever built, as has Stand your Ground or Slayers of Karak Kadrin. It is hard to only imagine a card that would give us reason to not play Rangers (and Stand your Ground) anymore, or rather, I believe it to be impossible, since they are so ridiculously good in absolutely any case as long as you play some Dwarf Units.

Note that this does not hold true for all powerful cards: Judgement of Verena is ridiculously good, but not all Empire decks want to play it, just most. Another such card would be Deathmaster or Rock Lobba, with the former highly dependant on a single deck type (and the deck is either about it, or he's not in, which is fine), and the latter being played in every and all Destruction deck, but at least they do not dominate the game completely, like Rangers do.

But there are worse offenders than Rangers, and I am really bothered by them: Innovation, Contested Village, Warpstone Excavation.

If 100 out of 100 competitive decks contain all these cards, something is amiss. And to be honest, it sucks: Instead of 50 card decks, we build 41 card decks (or in the case of dwarves, 35 card decks). And even worse: They totally dominate the game: If you opponent starts out with a hand with 3+ of these (in pretty much any combination, except tripple Village is kinda mediocre), you need to have about 2+ or you might as well concede right there and then. Chances of ever catching up to "Village in Kindom, Warpstone in quest, development in kingdom, random 2-drop in kingdom" followed by Innovation for 2 in turn2 to get 7 resources are slim at best. To sum up: These three cards give you a huge jump start, and if your enemy has that boon, you must have it too, or else you're going to lose one in every few games to it. If you have it too, at least the random wins due to great starting hand are equally distributed.

Why is that? A few reasons: All three cards give resources, all three cards are too cheap, and all three cards come without meaningful disadvantages. Imagine there to be more Warpstone like cards: 0 cost, 1P, 1HP units, which have no real drawback, especially when stacked. Imagine them to have "Your units may not have toughness in this zone", or "you cannot prevent damage", or "These units may be killed as if they were supports" or similar very small limitations. We'd play 50 of them.

What do I think would be the best course of action? Either errata them, which is annoying, such as Innovation with a cost of 1, Contested Village with another drawback (such as making it unique), and Warpstone with a huge disadvantage ("All your units come into play corrupted"). Or even simpler: Plain ban them. The game would not be worse if they didn't exist.

So then, I'll go print some proxies for these three, because I want to make more than three decks.

I know what you mean, before I moved to an island and lost all my oppenents, I played a lot with a lot of different people.

Among my close friends we built decks with the cards I have, and the decks ended up being fairly balanced as the good cards kind of get spread arround. But when I played at the mini-events at the game store I went too, I wished I had like 12 inovations, warpstone excavations, contested villages, so that I could have multiple "competive" decks with out having to pull my decks apart finding those cards.

Now I only play with my brother, and frankly I enjoy the game more as we play arround trying to build themed decks. (And I mean themed for themes sake, not power themes.

Thats not to say there is a right or wrong way to play the game. I understand play at the competive levels and also enjoy the puzzle of making the most effient decks, but with the basic core awsome cards in every deck that matters, that side of the game has been all figured out and I am not overly entertained by that exercise anymore.

The psotings of the top decks were very dissappointing for me. I concrat the guy who won, he did the best job of figuring out the mega and muct have played it well to win, but really all the decks look somewhat the same. I think the lack or variety in the top decks is bad for the hobbey, the only thing that stops this game from complete stagnation is the rate of boosters that keep things kind of interesting. But unless some of the other factions start playing at the same level I feel this will not be enough.

I am not playing 8th eddition warhammer, but I rember warhammer the table top game suffering from this at times too.

At casual events in my area, you see nice army variety, but lots of stores put on what we called "monney events" where top prizes were store credits. I went to one event where I played vs vampire counts EVERY GAME. 2/3 of the armies were undead. Then Dark Elves got a new book and went from sucky to awsome, then you could go to a 30 player event and there would be 10-12 dark elve armies!

I have little interest in going to an event where I get to play vs dwarves all day, and feel like I have to briong dwarves to win. Some big cards might chance that meta, but I do not feel it would get any better. Say chaos got soem awsome cards and synergy so that all you saw where chaos decks with warpstone.. innovation... contested village and whatever broken card they can come up with.

I still like this game, but feel its most interesting when you build a bunch of balanced decks out of the mix of cards.

I totally agree with you.
And I think most of the player base thinks so, the warhammer forums are stagnating if I am not missing some hidden activity.

Everyone seems to think either Errata or Bans are the way to deal with such cards, but there is another way. One that provides players with a deckbuilding choice. Print 'magic bullet' cards.

Eg.

Essence of Destruction.

Neutral Tactic

0 cost

Destroy all your opponents support cards with a cost of 1 or less.

Ok, now that seems rather harsh, but it now provides both players with a choice in their decks. Do you pack this card as it has no use if your opponent doesnt use the very cheap support cards and does your opponent keep playing with the cheap support cards in his deck knowing they can be destroyed so easy.

I actually like Magic Bullets as they add an extra layer of strategy to a game, and help to shape deckbuilding away from Auto-choices of very powerful cards.

MartinSmudge said:

While this works in theory, it leads to a degenerate meta-game: If you have the magic bullet and your opponent has the power card, you win by a lot and he has a useless card. But if you don't have the bullet, he still wants to play his power card, and if he doesn't have the power card, your bullet is pointless.

Which means playing against each other has a hidden Rock-Paper-Scissors element where zero skill is involved: It's purely random, and your deck or his deck will be at a significant disadvantage. It is possible to write cards, such as "Support, Building, 2 Cost, 1P, Action: Discard X cards from your hand to destroy a Support of printed cost X or less", which is devastating against warpstones, and still useful for many factions (chaos and high elves do not have anything except Burn it Down right now). But still, it drops back to having such a random factor of having or not having a card in your deck. You cannot play all answers to the staple cards, or else your deck will suffer.

And lastly: Do I really want a game where we all play Anti-Warpstone in our decks instead of Warpstones? That is exactly as degenerate as before, except now our bread-and-butter card is not even good on top of being required.

This is not a good solution at all. And if I wanted house-rules ("play without them with your friends") I wouldn't post here.

Really, what were you expecting in the world championships? People go there to win.

You need to take the whole of the community into account. If you enjoy the creative aspects of the game the most, that's great, but some people just play to win. It's what they do, and those people go to world championships.

The thing is, if you don't want to play this environment, you don't have to. Put a soft ban on the problem cards in your playgroup. There's no reason to handicap the competitive players because that one person in your group bringing dwarf nonsense doesn't mesh in with your ideal. Kick him out of your group and continue as normal.

I'm personally pretty satisfied with the power cards present in W:I, because they don't cement you to a certain deckstyle. WE,CV, and Innovation (in most cases) are just resource grabbers. They aren't going to prevent you from trying new things with your favorite faction.

You misunderstand me. I do play to win, (Sirlin: Playing To Win) but I don't want to play a degenerate game, and I don't think it is necessary to do so. It is not a given that the decks at the world championship have to be boring, but they were. And if we look at which cards all of them played, we can deduce that those are probably (also) at fault for getting only boring decks.

The three cards I mention don't break the game, they "only" make it less interesting. If FFG decides to print a few carbon copies with different names, we would play more copies per deck, up to some to be determined amount (possibly about 5-10 each). When you next play a game, think "Would I want to draw a WE, CV or Innovation right now?" before every draw. You'll see that the answer is Yes on pretty much every turn from start until the end, because more resources are just good.

It just bothers me that all decks are so similar, because some cards are so good that they are good in every single deck, no matter what it tries to do. And having many identical decks (and rarely more than one deck per faction, though this is improving lately) doesn't improve play experience.

Kicking someone from the group because he plays the game as it's supposed to be played (with winning in mind) is a scrub move. Should we not play with the other guy who just plain plays better too? Or that guy who likes dwarves? Or anyone playing a Reclaiming the Fallen or a RBT?

Out of all 3 cards, I think only WE is fairly overpowered. Probably needs something like 'limited' in its traits to balance it.

Sining said:

1. Is it overpowered? It doesn't win games, and people don't play anti-WE cards (of course, everyone plays support destruction, which they can burn on WEs if nothing else turns up). I doubt it. It is just very, very solid, and increases tempo so much that everyone must play it. It's not a non-skaven ("Kill anything with less HP than you have units") Deathmaster though.

2. Limited doesn't solve the issue, it just pretty much removes all other Limited cards from the game, because you'd rather have a WE instead most of the time.

If we'd want to add a keyword, make it "Unique" instead. That way, multiple stones are useless. But everyone would still play three of them, because playing one and developing two for Innovation doesn't hurt much. No, the only way to remove it from the game is to either nerf it hard (eg. "All your units come into play corrupted in all zones", or "Forced: Corrupt one of your units or sacrifice WE", or "WE loses its Power if there is any other card or development in this zone") or ban it. And the same holds true for Innovation. Contested Village is at least as staple, but at least many factions got other 1-drops to play if they prefer, and those are sometimes better. Contested Village is better lategame too, since you always have 1 resource spare at some point, and it has no drawback.

Compared to the other 2 cards, it's probably the most overpowered one. Although by your definition, none of them are overpowered either.

I don't think there's any real way to nerf WE without changing the way it works dramatically other than making it limited. Could always ban it but I'm not sure it's worth banning.

Wow, this is so new for a CCG-esqe game...a game where you only build about a 41 card deck even though it says you can build more? I feel like I've heard of this before......OH YEAH! Magic: the Gathering! You have a 60-card deck, BUT around 17-20 of them are LANDS, which are even less interesting then WE or CV cause you don't have to decide where to put them. It's such a novel concept.

Surely there aren't any other games that waste space on such trivialities. Netrunner? Broker or various Loan cards. Pokemon? (I don't remember what they're called it's been so long, but I know they have them). Heck, even Shadowfist has a few Fung Shui sites that are almost auto-include.

Resources are part of gaming. There will ALWAYS be things you NEED in a deck, and the proportion these 3 cards take up in your deck seems about right. (as a side note, let it be stated that I have 2 competitve decks that Innovation is NOT part of, so that one's not even neccessarily auto-include.)

Kdansky said:

Yeah, sorry I wasn't being serious about kickiing someone. But I don't think he should be faulted for playing with the power cards to the point where you feel the cards need to be errata'ed.

Seeing as you're familiar with David Sirlin, what do you think about the Street Fighter competitive scene? Do you think that because Ryu is such a popular character due to his relative simplicity it makes the championship matches any less interesting? If so, may I direct you to this?

On another note Vitamin T's deck was pretty loaded with power cards, you're right. But I think it was an interesting choice, given that Bolt Throwers were going to be played. I think his deck is cool because it does well against the character-lite decks and the normal decks alike. Not boring and thoughtless in the context of the tournament.

Why is warpstone such an issue when it's available to everyone?.....

>> HURR DURR MTG DOES IT TOO!!!!

Yes, Magic has the same issue, only worse so. This is one of the reasons why it is less of a joy to play and build decks for. MTG decks are basically 8-10 cards, each 4 times, plus 20 boring lands. And if you look at MTG decks, the vast majority of the competitive ones are incredibly bland, especially when you have the broken cards to choose from. Imagine if these three cards didn't exist: The game still works absolutely fine (if not better), and there is not a single replacement card that every deck would play. We would still see some cards played more often than others (such as Demolition!), but overall, we'd have 9 more interesting cards to put into our decks.

I also want to note that you claim to have a competitive deck without Innovation, yet don't care to show us. And it probably contains Villages and Warpstones anyway, making it a moot point. I'll be impressed when someone shows me a top deck that does not contain any of the three.

-Quote-------------------------------------------
Seeing as you're familiar with David Sirlin, what do you think about the Street Fighter competitive scene? Do you think that because Ryu is such a popular character due to his relative simplicity it makes the championship matches any less interesting? If so, may I direct you to this?
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While I have only passing knowledge of SF4, I like fighting games in general, and I enjoyed this match a ton. But it is really the wrong comparison for our problem here: It shows that mirror matches of relatively "simple" characters can be awesome too (though they frequently are not, this game is absolutely incredible and hardly a fair case for the average game).

But to continue with your metaphor: Imagine if all SF4 characters had Ryu's Fireball, Sweep and Uppercut. And I don't mean any projectile (Dhalsim has one too, but it's different), I mean: The completely identical move. Now we know that all three of these moves are very good and very character-defining. What would happen? All matches would feel like mirror matches, and the difference between characters might completely disappear in many cases. The game would lose a lot of variance, and I doubt it would be the hit it is.

-Quote-------------------------------------------
On another note Vitamin T's deck was pretty loaded with power cards, you're right. But I think it was an interesting choice, given that Bolt Throwers were going to be played. I think his deck is cool because it does well against the character-lite decks and the normal decks alike. Not boring and thoughtless in the context of the tournament.
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It was certainly not boring, and it isn't a bad deck. But if those 9 cards had been something that not everyone had played, it would be better still, or if it had some cards that were not obvious choices I would appreciate it a lot more. The deck is something we all came up with at one point or another, and he is "only" a great player during the games, that is why he won. There is nothing in the deck that makes me go "Now that's something clever!". The deck is about brute force. Is that a bad thing? Not necessarily, but other choices should at least be competitive too, and not completely pointless.

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Why is warpstone such an issue when it's available to everyone?.....
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That is precisely the reason why it's an issue. If it was available to one faction, that faction would dominate, and get banned or nerfed. But as it is, everyone must play it all the time, or at least two out of three of them; Empire Movement decks are not too fond of Warpstone (though they still play them from time to time), Rush decks cannot afford to develop a ton for Innovation (yet some do), and if you play a lot of Limited cards you don't want Villages on top of that (such decks are currently hypothetical). But all of these decks will still play the other two cards three times each.

I am not complaining that the card is too good, or that I lose to it. I am complaining that I am forced to play it in every single deck I build if I want it to be competitive.

I cannot get quotes to work, and copy/paste is problematic too. Bleh.

Kdansky said:

This is very true. I think Street Fighter succeeds because the basic model works so well, while many fighters crash and burn because of their new "innovative" ideas and fluff game mechanics. But to be fair, I also feel the same about W:I, the general design is so well done that I think it's very difficult for the game to fail. You have manual control over your resources, it's simple and works well. You don't have to pack a ton of "lands" or fish around for your card draw cards to make your deck work.

As for everyone playing mirror matches. This isn't fair, because not everyone plays Dwarf. 70% of the players gravitate to Dwarf because it is a safe, versatile choice, which is why 70% of Street Fighter players pick Ryu.

Some decks are up and coming, look at Empire now with it's new Rodrik's Raiders nonsense, or Dark Elf with Slave Pens and Undead. The metagame will change and shift, and WE/CV/INNO isn't going to impact that much.

Kdansky said:

I really like his use of Burn it Down. I think Burn it Down is a horrible card because it's slow to start, and creates conflict with Innovation, however this is why I am not the world champion. It requires some finesse to juggle innovation and burn it down, and I think it was a bold choice for his deck. Maybe not clever, but I found that to be cool.

Have you gotten the expansions yet? What do you think of some of the new options available to the different factions?

swingjunkie said:

Well I am not worrying much about nerfing of banning cards, i allways have fun when i play casual games with friends. I have played competitively with other card games before and there will allways be some auto-include cards. Though here my vision about the 3 "best" cards at the moment.

Innovation: really strong card, big boost at first phase of the game. I don't mind this card much right now, but i am wondering what will happen to it next cycle, where developments become more important/ played more. I don't know how we can nerf this card without making really anti-innovation counter cards or errata the whole card... maybe development removal will become cheaper in the next cycle??

Contested village: nice card for its cost, dont mind this card either. If you want to ban this card, why not huntsmen or envoy from averlorn as well? I dont want to nerf his card much or ban it, but I think that there should come more good limited cards available to the cardbase that work really specifically to certain strategies (and not to any deck like this one). That way people need to make choices what limited cards they want to take in their decks and we would see more differences in decks (in theory). Right now we have 9 different limited cards available, i like FFG gave the new alliances cards limited keyword as well, though don't know how many people will use it.

Warpstone excavation: I guess the best of the 3 cards at the moment, only empire movement-heavy decks should keep it out of the deck (but empire has huntsman as well, so does not matter that much) I don't like banning any card, rather look for some little errata to fix balancing or create some answers to it through new cards (altough as explained above by others not allways ideal or a solution at all, rather moving the problem). I think the best way is to somehow nerf WE at its trait "warpstone" or at being a neutral card. Right now we have 3 cards with this trait. Some ideas that pop up now, feel free to comment or add ideas;)

(neutral?) Tactic: 0 cost Each opponent must give you 1 resource for every "warpstone" card he owns.

(neutral?) Unit: 3 cost 1p 2hp , forced: after this unit enters play, destroy a target support card that does not share the racial affiliation of its controllers capital. Support version of the zealot hunter, should be a great card overall as well, also eating contested villages for breakfast. playable from turn 1 as well.

Might I suggest a change in the format for gameplay?

Try playing with the draft format. You can use the one I have posted before or try making your own, I am honestly anxious to see what other can come up with. I am not going to insult non-draft players because I have had a ton of fun with both tourney formats, so I expect the same respect in return.

Draft format seems to be the way to go with this game. I just wished more official support was made for it. I loved the idea of imagining the draft format cards tell the story. The draft itself reminds me of lord of the rings. In war you are not given an infinite selection of troops to build an army with. Aliies don't always send the aid requested. To me draft feels more tactical. The luck is there, yes, but if you come up with your own methods to form draft pools then it honestly feels like tactical warfare. Sure you may have this awesome unit of troops to hire, but what if they are not available due to unforeseen events.

I was going to say more, but I forgot my train of thought, thanks to UPS delivery distracting me.

Anyways I'll be back after I assemble what is in this box.

One thing to consider is that overall, all things being considered, the card pool for Warhammer right now is fairly small in comparison with a traditional CCG/TCG over an equivalent time frame. The battle pack format works great in my opinion, but it takes about 6-7 months or more for the cycle to finish and have a new number of cards in the environment equal to what you generally see with quarterly releases from the others (Magic, L5R, etc). What you end up seeing as a result is that while you get a few changes maybe every month with the next pack, the core of the various decks remain unchanged for a long period of time.

Here is a question to any that have played GoT or Cuthulu for a long time. When the games were in their early set of cycles, how many really strong/broken/etc cards were used in "every" deck, and now that they have been out for a while how many are now still used?

First off, Kdansky reminds me of someone who hasn't posted here in a few weeks...hmmm..

Secondly, I find myself readily agreeing with him. In fact, I was just bemoaning this fact to my regular opponents about a week ago. Having these 3 must-use cards leads to less slots in a new deck design for other cards.

WE is probably broken - though it wouldn't be if they would simply tweak Corruption so that instead of just denying a Unit the ability to be declared as an Attacker or Defender, it also made their text box blank. Then Chaos would see the jump in power that many have been hopeful for AND Warpstone Excavation would suddenly be far less appealing than it currently is.

I find myself liking Innovation, though, simply due to the fact that it seems to be one of the few cards that can lead to a dramatic comeback. Other than that, it's clearly super useful, maybe even too useful.

Like most, I agree that Contested Village is probably the least offensive in this trio but still almost NEVER useless.

It's a tough problem to sort out, I'll say that much. Also, I find myself agreeing with Kdansky (and meaning no offense to Vitamin T at all) in that the top 8 decks were all, save for the Empire Jumping Jack deck, pretty boring and predictable. I'm not seeing anything really magical in the card choices of most of the decks. I guess I could toot my own horn a bit as the 9th place finisher a tiny bit (my apologies as doing this is kind of tacky, I realize that) by espousing the fact that I actually included a very unexpected card in Dragon Mage Awakenings x3 to slot into my Dwarf deck which did NOT run GrudgeThrower either. It always caught opponents off-guard and invariably led to their request to "read that card, please?" It also saved my bacon time and again vs. Rune of Spite. But it's that very kind of deck-design decision that I think Kdansky is afraid that we're seeing less of when "must-have" cards arrive on the scene.

I'll be the first to admit, I can see the problems or issues being discussed but I honestly don't have many answers myself, other than the Corruption tweak I mentioned above and even that is fairly drastic.

Zeruul said:

When I played thrones early on, there was a really good 0 cost unlimited cycle of 'commit to reduce the cost by 1' type cards. You usually saw at least one set of these in a deck (there were three sets, one for each of thrones 'challenges' which is what the game is based around. They also had a demolition-esque card 'put to the torch' which burned 2 locations, which were pretty much support cards. In the middle of the road, thrones had a card called Massing at Twilight which was a really cheap and effective card draw that you saw in most decks. I don't know about now, since I haven't played thrones for like 2 years. I feel it jumped the shark some time ago. If Rings hops in here, he'll give you more of a breakdown.

TBH, I don't think having many decks play the same few cards is particular only to WH:I. It just happens in every single card game where there are usually a few good cards that most people will include. So it's more a question of 'is there something wrong with the cards' or 'is there something wrong with the players?'

Although my most enjoyable deck right now is an empire/lizardmen deck and not the dwarves. And I'm still trying to come out with a new HE deck that works well against dwarves

The problems with anti-cards are manifold:

1. If they are not strong enough, we'll still all play WEs. Demolition kills WE, but that does not stop anyone, since it's still a net gain to play it.
2. If they are so punishing that you don't want to play WE anymore, we have three deck-types: Those that play WEs, those that play the Anti-WE, and those that play both. This leads to more randomized Rock-Paper-Scissors, and even less deck choices (since we now play 12 instead of 9 cards in some decks, and 9 cards in all others).

I agree that WE is the worst offender, as its early-game boost is so incredibly strong. If your opponent opens up with (any 1-drop) + (any 2-drop) + double warpstone, you pretty much have to play Verena's Judgement turn 2, or play double warpstone too, or you just die a few turns later. At least villages take a moment to get going due to limited, and Innovation is a one-time econ boost, instead of a permanent hammer.

That said, I think Warpstones can be nerfed easily: Instead of corrupting everything in one zone, they could corrupt in all zones, or corrupt in all other zones, or force you to corrupt something each turn. The last one is my preferred errata, since that makes multiple WEs very suicidal, which is exactly why they are so strong right now: Only the first has a (minor) drawback, the second and third are just free hammers.

@Wytefang: I am not that person, whoever that is.

And I would also appreciate more cards that allow for dramatic combacks. Reclaiming the Fallen seems to want to be that, but it ended up being ludicrously good all the time.

@Sining

It happens in many games, that is true. But it doesn't need to. Warhammer 40k by Sabertooth did not have that problem. Some cards were played in many decks, yes. But those cards were considered broken days after spoilers arrived, and got banned before they ever entered tournaments. Imagine a card such as "Deathmaster Sknotch: 1 Power, 5 HP, cost 3 / Corrupt: Destroy any unit with 4 or less HP". Magic and Pokemon force you to play boring cards (lands and energy) and they are worse for it. The old Starwars game had no such cards, and neither did the really old LotR CCG.

Corruption every turn sounds like the best way to fix WE that I've read so far.

I haven't played the WH40K card game but isn't that no longer in print? I also didn't hear many good things about it, mostly lots of grumbling about eldars being broken I think.

It's gone out of print years ago. It was an incredibly fun game, except for the fact that they (also) didn't dare to ban clearly broken cards, and therefore the meta just died, with only Chaos and Eldar being remotely competitive at all, with Orks a distant third. It probably was a difficult sell due to the number of factions it had, and many people only wanted to play one or two of them. That works badly in a CCG.

It also was difficult to play well (and needed a solid amount of cards to build good decks), so beginners and average players were crushed really badly, which does not help when you get told about it.