Confiscating functionality of Almalexia in most cases useless

AnduinTryggva · June 2023

Due to the cycling mechanics of Almalexia the pile from which to confiscate cards of one's opponent is in most cases empty so that this functionality just goes to waste.

It rather should be confiscating from the draw pile.

rbfrgsp · June 2023

The Almalexia deck wants you to think about the order of your actions each turn.

In the vast majority of turns almost everyone plays their cards, and then uses up unspent resources to activate a patron. I am guilty of this myself.

Force yourself to be more flexible in your play style with Almalexia. It's true what you say - the cooldown piles are much emptier in games with the new deck.

BUT - the new patron gives you the power to place one card from the draw stack into the cooldown. So why not activate the patron earlier in your turn, and THEN play the confine cards? This lets you choose exactly which card you want to confine from the top of the draw deck.

Personofsecrets · June 2023

In agreement. The mechanic isn't fleshed out that well. The vast majority of the games where I have confined cards, the mechanic isn't that important. The times when I've gotten a good amount of value from the mechanic are times when I was already beating the opponent handidly.

Most of the time I haven't had confine be that relevant when it's used against me. It's honestly sort of a noob trap since people try to confine your power card, then skip development, and fall in a hole. A couple of games I had to play out of being confined, but it wasn't that game changing. More of a nuisance and these games where also sort of opportunistic where everything didn't align for me, everything aligned for the opponent, they get multiple confines on the same turn, and they still can't really impact the game in such a meaningful way.

I'll never say that maybe things can't change as we learn more about how to play the class, but confine seems like a low in game priority.

Largomets · June 2023

It sounds like you simply haven't played the deck enough. I would argue that, if anything, it's a bit over tuned. You can literally use it every turn the agent stays up. If you manage to get lucky early and hide one behind a taunt-agent before your opponent gets any power or means to remove agents, you can indefinitely sandbag them by simply taking all their good cards every turn and snowball a win they can't come back from. It might be nice if there is a "cap" on how many each one can hold, because as of now, a lucky player on turn 2 or 3 can set themselves up to stop their opponent from getting any good cards.

Further, the game literally gives you a patron ability to move cards to their discard pile now. You can use the patron itself to create a cooldown pile. There are many, many other great ways to play and pair this deck, and it's so nice to finally have a meaningful counter to the crow spammers. It's a shame they didn't nerf druid so the "I hate having fun and want to ruin fun for others" crowd still have druid they can use to turn the game into an RNG farm, but amalexia is a breath of fresh air prioritizing skill/thinking over brute for RNG.

Personofsecrets · June 2023

Largomets wrote: »

It sounds like you simply haven't played the deck enough.

In my case, I've gotten thousands of points worth of games in this season and a few more games in casual. I'm choosing Almalexia almost every time.

The cards aren't that impressive most of the time and the cards which work the best are Donate mechanic.

Rouz · June 2023

Honestly the whole reason they introduced almalexia is what is holding back. Its supposed to be this deck that helps counter snowballs. Where one person gets a deck advantage and just turtles. And the game is filled to the brim with RNG, so its hard to counter that strategy. And this deck was supposed to help alleviate that issue. But guess what, it is still held back by the same issue! There's a rare chance that when you can actually use confinement its useful. You can roll the dice with the patron ability, throw something into the CD pile, the confine that card. But if you're going up against purple, red, or any of the meta decks; aint gonna change much if the other person has an advantage in one of those already.

The times I've played almalexia against players, it seems like I'm constantly in situations where its like "Man, sure would be nice to have an Almalexia card to use here to slow my opponents roll. But because of RNG, very few of the cards that are actually useful got played!".

The other side of it is that Almalexia can then be used to further increased the steamroll of a deck with an advantage.

Like say you go red. You get a volley and an armory. And then you get quite a few donation cards. This lets you cycle through your deck by a HUGE amount. Meaning you play the volley and armory more often. Meaning that advantage you had? Yeah its even more of an advantage.

I like the synergies of the deck. Synergies with Druid and also the other Green deck. Those make for a lot of fun strategies. But I can't play any of these strategies if RNG taverns are still holding it back.

Personofsecrets · June 2023

Rouz wrote: »

Honestly the whole reason they introduced almalexia is what is holding back. Its supposed to be this deck that helps counter snowballs. Where one person gets a deck advantage and just turtles. And the game is filled to the brim with RNG, so its hard to counter that strategy. And this deck was supposed to help alleviate that issue. But guess what, it is still held back by the same issue! There's a rare chance that when you can actually use confinement its useful.

And that is the problem with the design philosphy of the developers. I won't pick on them because it is an industry wide issue.

It's wrong headed, misguided, fallacious, contradictory, erroneous, discordant, misconceived, and a little bit silly to think that when a game has a problem, the best way to solve said problem is to design counters to the problem as to let players "adapt" on their own.

If someone such as myself with no formal education in game design can figure out this problem, then I would expect for those who are in gainful positions in the industry to already know the trappings, pitfalls, and poison pills of just creating counterplay to issues that players don't like.

Except such expectation regarding others thinking is my own mistake. See, I'm projecting my beliefs and understanding onto others because I mistakenly believe my ideas to be so obvious, self-evident, and axiomatic.

One problem in the game industry is that designers and players alike are sort of like lemmings. There are memes within the industry, or maybe we should call these ideas sacred cows or idols or commandments, and the vast majority of people are in worship or devotion or reverence of these ideas.

I can't point to just one single idea in such space that causes designer behavior, but it's several or many ill-conceived ideas wound up together in their knotted gyri.

And the result is that developers will absolutely do anything to not solve a problem. They don't believe in solving problems and especially not when they don't believe in the problems to begin with.

When someone doesn't like an issue of a game, it's not that the game had a poorly designed aspect, it's that the someone in question needs to adapt. Designers will leave no stone unturned when coming up with ways to not solve the problem. They simultaneously mistakenly believe that they are giving players the tools that they need to overcome that which frustrated them.

It's all so tiresome. But I strongly believe there will one day be game design without the conceit of the fetish to not solve problems there to hold us back. Until then, we rely on data driven analysis by developers to very seldomly give the happy chance of guiding their hand against game problems. They won't listen to players, but sometimes they will listen to points that form a line within Excel because so-called data is one of said idols and sometimes can show them the error of their ways.

rbfrgsp · June 2023

Rouz wrote: »

Honestly the whole reason they introduced almalexia is what is holding back. Its supposed to be this deck that helps counter snowballs. Where one person gets a deck advantage and just turtles.

That's interesting. I'd never really looked at the Almalexia deck that way, and I don't think it's all that great at achieving that as its intended goal.

I've been playing Lexi a lot and I'm actually quite enjoying it now.

To me, Almalexia is there to enable you to build combos between decks where usually no combo would exist, and it forces you to evaluate the usefulness of each card in your deck within the context of the present situation.

Example. Hlaalu Coin Exchange. One of the best cards in the game. But I drew it at a point where I didn't need to purchase anything, and I had no way of activating its combo to hit a second patron. It was essentially unnecessary in that turn, but I didn't want to burn it at the Hlaalu patron.

So I donated it, drew hunding warrior wave and banked three power for a much more optimal outcome that turn.

That's just one time, but it illustrates the play style which I think this deck is actually trying to encourage.

If you build a strong base of Lexi cards, then that opens up the potential to flesh out the remainder of your deck almost as a "greatest hits" of all the other decks. Usually, this would be suboptimal as it would lean too heavily on RNG luck to get the right cards out together at the right time.

But with Almalexia, and a bit of careful planning in your move sequences, you can now make this type of play work.

I'm not sure this was a deliberate objective they set out to create when designing the new deck, but that's what seems to have come out of it. I appreciate the extra complexity and dynamic that it has added to the game.

Largomets · June 2023

Personofsecrets wrote: »

Largomets wrote: »

It sounds like you simply haven't played the deck enough.

In my case, I've gotten thousands of points worth of games in this season and a few more games in casual. I'm choosing Almalexia almost every time.

The cards aren't that impressive most of the time and the cards which work the best are Donate mechanic.

I was quoting the OP and not you specifically to be clear. With that said, you're one of the top people in this game. I promise you that if you haven't found a few absolutely-broken ways to use this deck, then keep playing because there are some absolutely-broken ways to use this deck lol.

I was specifically addressing OPs complaint that the deck is cycling too often to confiscate cards. Not only is that not my observation IN THE SLIGHTEST after maybe rounds 1 or 2, but you can fix that problem by simply donating 1 gold to "create" a cooldown pile of your choosing at that and then confiscate the card that you just moved to cooldown.

Also yes, cycling is strong especially since you can synergize cards to generate absurd amounts of power and prestige in one turn, but the fact that I can actually trap my opponents cards, sandbag them for going first by removing whatever card they bought on turn 1 from play, and buy a card that lets me re-draw from my cooldown and play it in the same turn is buck wild.

Rouz · June 2023

rbfrgsp wrote: »

Rouz wrote: »

Honestly the whole reason they introduced almalexia is what is holding back. Its supposed to be this deck that helps counter snowballs. Where one person gets a deck advantage and just turtles.

That's interesting....

Yeah there's a lot of combos. I've played the deck a A LOT. Here's some situations where you can see it being great.

Pelin + Almalexia - Use discard function to cycle through your deck and pull those "high impact" red cards. Rally, Volley, etc. Showcasing the ability for the deck to allow a player to play a "S-Tier card" more repeatedly. And then the revive card from your discard deck is another example of this. Allowing you to play say rally, then 1 turns later you may be able to play it again.

Almalexia + Agent Cards - Sorta in line with the above. Say you have an agent on the field. Said agent dies. You can then use mothers mercy card or whatever to "revive" it. If you get both of the mercy cards + have a decent fielding of say blocker agents (the chimera, the red cards, rajjin, even the one from the almalexia deck itself), combining them with mothers mercy lets you have a very good uptime for them.

Hunding + Almalexia - There's a lot of interactions with the discard functionality with alm and hunding. So hunding has cards that will move something from the discard pile to the top of your draw deck. Then you can use alms discard card to discard something and pull that card you just move to the top of your deck. You can combine this with other patrons to have a high play rate for those cards.

Druid + Almalexia - The card that gives you power when you put something in the discarded pile for druid king? That card that people used with the psijic deck to make it so moving cards from the draw pile to the discarded gives you power? Yeah it works with Almalexia's discard cards too. So when you discard something after playing that druid king card, it gives you power. Not only that, but Almalexia has a card that is similar to the druid king one. Meaning you can combine both of them to generate 2-8 power per discard (depending on your luck).

Crow + Almalexia - Just helps increase your chances of pulling a crow combo. Oh didn't get that crow card to continue your combo? instead just got a treasurey card? If you've got a discard/pull card from Almalexia, you can discard it and try to get another crow card.

For counters

Confinement - Helps counter almost every deck if you time it right. Someone get a rally? Confine it. Someone got a crow deck advantage? Confine as many as you can. Lets you take those OP cards that someone got early out of the game.

Patron Ability - Same as above. Someone get a round 1 armory? Roll the dice as much as you can and use that patron ability to keep that card in the discarded pile while you try to play catch up.

Rajjin/Bewilderment Cards - Someone spawn you with bewilderment? Use the discard/draw cards from Almalexia to discard the bewilderment cards and draw something new. Better yet if you have druid king or the equivalent from the Alma deck, you can get power for discarding them.

But again, all these strategies face the same issues as the rest of the decks. As the rest of the god damn game. The tavern RNG/luck. I can't employ any of these strategies if the game doesn't *** give me the cards to do so. When I play a game and only 1 or 2 almalexia card drops the entire game. I'm pretty pissed since it can be such a useful card when early game opponent advantage developers.

They brought this patron in to try to address these complaints of early advantages and turtles. And all it did is get hamstringed by the same exact issues that were causing it. Not sure if its incompetence, stubborness, or they just needed a ToT deck to "sell" necrom with. But god damn is it annoying. Still.