I'd like to use this space to document my initial thoughts about the Gold Road chapter and maybe it will be interesting to see how my impressions change over time.

First and foremost are the gameplay patches.

There were some random seeming fixes for Eidetic Memory. These don't really have to do with gameplay, but are "might as well" goods.

The Almalexia Patron ability is declared to be fixed. Previously, we couldn't discard Agent cards to her effect for seemingly no good reason. This is a great change.

KO ALL abilities have some standardization and I think that this is perfectly fine. It makes sense and prepared the game for some new abilities.

There was one balance update to buff a Mora card, Ink and Blood, and I'm sure that everyone can guess that I find that change to be abhorrent. Not just because of its effect, but in small part because anyone found it necessary to begin with.

How is there data that Ink and Blood should be changed to help play patterns, but not, let's say, you know what I'm going to say..... yes..... Pounce and Grand. That makes no sense, but moving on.

The biggest change to the game is that there is a new Patron to draw from. We finally get Saint Alessia, and all her army has to offer. I will take the time to analyze stand out cards and how some design principles across the actual designer’s game pieces and my game pieces are similar.

For posterity, the game pieces that I theorized on are linked to below. The comparison after that link.

https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/659665/now-that-saint-alessia-is-released-id-like-to-provide-my-take-on-the-saint-alessia-patron#latest

Right off the bat, it's interesting that the starter card for Alessia is an Agent. I would have never thought to have done something like this. My version of Alessia can generate guys who are sort of similar to the starter card, but a bigger point is made in that when this starter card is played, the reshuffled deck will have less cards. It may even have 9 cards. When the deck is being reshuffled every turn, some lines of play involving deterministically drawing a certain number of Writ of Coins, even if it's just 1 of them to get to 6 gold, become possible. This is quite a significant development to what is possible.

One commonality that I will point out is that the true Alessia cards also have low health. During my time designing my fantasy cards, it seemed sort of essential for the cards to have low Health in order to prevent swarming the board from being too likely at too early of a stage of the game or from being too strong. One interesting factor about the Agents having low health, and I did think of this purposeful line of play during my time with my fantasy cards, is that a setup with numerous 1 health agents would hypothetically make the power generating starter cards have a purpose and not be so awful. So that is hypothetically one massive game problem that sees some slight relief when opting to play with Alessia. Obviously, that shouldn't be a game wide problem ever, but more options of dealing with problems is always better.

Another commonality is that the designers too chose to use some of the legendary characters from Alessia's story. It's nice to see guys finally in card form. Even The Elder Scrolls Legends only ever depicted Umaril in its card pool, so there are many characters who are important to lore, but not really represented well as game pieces. One critique that I have of the these Legendary characters is the glaring fact that they have the same amount of Health as normal old Agents. It doesn't really make thematic since that two Shield Bearer cards could be so powerful as to take out Pelinal Whitstrake. A Banneret could supplant both Whitestrake and Morihaus in a single blow. That's crazy!

One thing that I wonder is if these legendary characters pose an issue for the other TOT decks. Shouldn't they all feel just as epic to play with? Legendary characters should have probably been a thing from the very start. I'm sort of surprised that such characters along with a tiny special animation fitting of TOT and maybe a special audio clip were not implemented. A big part of digital card game design is that publishers want their game to feel flashy like Hearthstone. I don't have a problem with not having such things and especially with not imitating Hearthstone, but there is this tiny, weird thing now nonetheless.

One last similarity between our different designs is that we both came up with Knock Out All effects. Although I could sort of tell that this thing was coming because of early patch notes and I even wrote as much before Alessia was announced, it is cool to see the differences that we have. I must hand credit to the designers that they so aggressively costed Saint's Wrath and even added 3 copies of it to the Alessia deck. That helps make sure that players are able to get that card and have fun with such a powerful effect. To the designer’s credit, in doing so they also made another card without Combo. This is very rare for TOT as I think that there have only been a few cards without Combo to date such as Luxury Exports, Warrior Wave, and Mother's Mercy. By bringing back the Choice mechanic, they found a way to make a powerful card, but also keep it relevant when it's first ability. One thing that I will note is that this card does seem to go against their design principles when looking at Jarring Lullaby and Shadows Slumber. Those cards, if I remember correctly, only gave a single gold and Knocked out multiple agents when played. That is to say that there are times, such as when the opponent didn't have agents, that those cards may have only been generating one single gold. The first abilities, again if I remember well, were changed to give two gold and that is a much better value proposition when using a card that may have otherwise been doing nothing. Another example of this type of thing is that Customs Seizure was buffed to do something rather than nothing more of the time. I think that it's clear enough that the designers don't want their cards doing nothing, and this isn't really a complaint about Saints Wrath, but that card does seem to go against this hypothetical design principle because sometimes it will do next to nothing. I suppose that it sort of matches up with Mother's Mercy in this regard, so maybe the designers aren't as allergic to cards doing nothing as I think they are. Who knows?

Another thing that designers got right, in my opinion, is by not being afraid of having Saint Alessias ability cost a lot and have interesting implications via the permanence of the cards that she adds to the deck. I don't believe my design is wrong in these regards, but both the design team and I chose to balance our vision of what Agent based momentum looks like in different ways. I designed more in fear. I think that it can be good to design from that type of place in order to prevent busted effects from being made. That said, I think that the design team struck a good balance with what they landed on for the Patron effect.

I do have a few things on the more critical side to write. It's nothing scathing and should be read with level-headed calmness. The things that I see that are sort of odd or more like "meh" things rather than "this hurts the game" things.

Firstly, is the flavor of Ayleids getting a card slot. I guess that the Ayleid traitors did play a role in Alessia's success, but I don't really think that a deck showcasing her strengths really needed them. There wasn't something else to go with? To the ideas credit, I guess that their depiction does show the alliance building central to her story. I don't know, it feels sort of funny, but not as funny as Pelinal Whitestrake being a 7-cost card with 2 health.

I also don't really care for how the Ayleid Defector card wipes out itself. Thematically, I suppose that this portion does make sense, especially as a contract, but it is sort of bad from the design perspective. That's because someone drafting Agents CANNOT take this card because it will kill of their stuff. And if they don't take it, then their opponent will just completely shut down what they are doing and without a huge cost to themselves. I don't know, maybe this is necessary to prevent Agent stacks that are too strong from happening too much, but a card that is so one-sided and such a blowout in certain situations is too swingy for my tastes. It also doesn't really work to build the theme of Alessia. Maybe that makes sense since we are, again, dealing with Ayleids who are doing their own thing, but then why even go there to begin with. This card misses the mark.

Another thing that I don't particularly care for is the Prestige generation. One design concept that popped up when I was making my fantasy cards is that it may be the case that it's hard for players who are putting all of their power into destroying Agents to ever win. Bear in mind, that isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it could be frustrating to some players. I feel like the design team just sort of tacked on these Prestige generating effects to avoid the issue, but they feel sort of boring. I suppose that Alessia did gain a ton of prestige thematically speaking, but the prestige generation feels more like a band-aid fix to an issue that will inevitably be caused when dealing with agent stacks. Not only do I think that they should have just let power generation be a thing and have Knock-Out cards be the answer to Agent stacks sucking up too much power, but I also think that my design choice of Multi-Combo fixes this theorized issue in a more thematic and exciting way.

One last dour point that I'll mention is that I don't understand how the designer’s Alessia cards work together as an army. I applaud them for being brave enough to not put a Combo on everything, but I don't really see how her army is working together as a whole. It feels a little disjointed. The heroes are a bit too weak. I don't see how the team is all coming together. The card pool is too flooded by characters just doing their own thing. One thing that I think my fantasy design gets spot on which is a miss from the real Alessia deck is that my design has better flavorful synergies. I don't really see any synergy in the Alessia deck at all and that's a bit sad.

To end on a bright note, I'm looking forward to using the Saint Alessia Patron effect. I think that it's strong and interesting. Again, we will see how the starter card plays out - that is at least interesting. And finally, we will see how Priestess of the Eight works out. Drawing 2 cards is quite strong, but doing so is also not free since it costs the card itself. Very cool risk versus reward on that card and I want to see how it plays out. And with that, I'd like to thank the designers for their work, welcome you to comment here your thoughts, and I'm going to go farm the deck fragments up. Thank you for reading.