The problem in a nutshell.

Bat

Decks that give straight up power are too oppressive, and decks that take prestige away are not nearly oppressive enough. Rajhin, in a redundant majority of cases, can not be strategically played. Saint Pelin, for example with the stupid decks that just spams power into prestige, can not be strategically countered by anything but buying equally stupid power=prestige cards. So at the end of the day, for most part, all this game boils down to is having enough gold at the start rounds to buy extremely oppressive cards and then just spamming them.

Decks that have the potential for making this game more interesting and countering power=prestige spam need a major buff. Rajhin agents have a measly 3 shield, while a stupid Saint Pelin contract agent has 5? This all needs a rework from the bottom up.

Casdha

Someone that plays Rajhin really well can clean your clock if you give them half a chance, I know it has happened to me more than once.

I've had so many Agents on their side that they started stacking on top of each other. I sometimes think that darn cat must be sneaking cards up their sleeve. I've seen so many played in just a few rounds, more than coin can get rid of, that a wily cat can be the only explanation LoL.

Tommy_The_Gun

I see all those threads about the lack of balance in this card game - and I agree. But for me personally, when I look at this card game as a whole - the biggest problem imho is that it is not engaging enough. It lack "just one more game" syndrome, when you play it, over & over and then you wont realize that you spend 3 hours.

Something like this existed in Witcher (game of dice in the earlier games and card games in later games). Similar with old Might & Magic RPG games that had Arcomage card game, that was simple, yet addicting.

Tales of Tribute on the other hand gets boring pretty quickly, and you just want to complete it for the quest or achivement etc, becuse it is not fun & addicitng.

Bat

Casdha wrote: »

Someone that plays Rajhin really well can clean your clock if you give them half a chance, I know it has happened to me more than once.

I've had so many Agents on their side that they started stacking on top of each other. I sometimes think that darn cat must be sneaking cards up their sleeve. I've seen so many played in just a few rounds, more than coin can get rid of, that a wily cat can be the only explanation LoL.

Yeah, but you have to have some extra good RNG luck from the start to even be in a remotely good position to build towards such. That whole deck needs more shielding on its agents, more power=prestige on combos, and probably more prestige loss for the opponent to make it viable as a deck as a whole. As it is, it's too little, and much too often, too late.

Bat

Tommy_The_Gun wrote: »

Tales of Tribute on the other hand gets boring pretty quickly, and you just want to complete it for the quest or achivement etc, becuse it is not fun & addicitng.

That's also a good point, it just feels like a chore in its current iteration, and I think with some better balancing of the decks it could lead to less of a feeling of being run over by RNG time and again, and more as if strategy actually matters. It really isn't fun to have to play game after game and consistently lose to crap hands, just to be able to get a daily reward.

Heartrage

Prestige reduction can’t be too high. If we could reduce prestige as much as we can build up power, we could end up with stalemates where neither can build up prestige and win the game.

Rajhin shields do only have three shield. However, contrary to pelin, rajhin has a lot of combos that can trigger from these agents and rajhin has many effect that can deny the opponent and extend the life of these agents which make them much more dangerous than they seem at first. They are also cheaper than pelin agents and, such, can’t be as strong as them for balance reasons.

Lnin0

It seems like the wanted to design two types of deck - a main and a support. Perhaps why you pick two.

However, it seems part of the problem with this 2 deck system is if RNG opts you into having to stack a support deck. It will always be a struggle against an opponent who RNG has favored with a main deck. If every deck was a main and could be used to reach a win condition then would help go a long way toward the feeling games are a matter of RNG. But likely introduce its own balance issues.

Bat

Heartrage wrote: »

Prestige reduction can’t be too high.

And I didn't say it should be too high, I said it's too low to be effective in an overwhelming majority of plays against power=prestige decks.

Heartrage wrote: »

If we could reduce prestige as much as we can build up power, we could end up with stalemates where neither can build up prestige and win the game.

The problem that I'm describing is that power=prestige decks are too overpowered against counter strategy decks in an overwhelming majority of plays against them.

Heartrage wrote: »

Rajhin shields do only have three shield. However, contrary to pelin, rajhin has a lot of combos that can trigger from these agents and rajhin has many effect that can deny the opponent and extend the life of these agents which make them much more dangerous than they seem at first.

Yeah, but no. Rahjin agents are very weak against all types of power=prestige decks, and even if you have all of them up at the same time your opponent could pull a rally+armory and have them sent to the cooldown deck, while still getting to keep their contract agent up in that same turn as well as still being able to convert a portion of their power to prestige.

Heartrage wrote: »

They are also cheaper than pelin agents and, such, can’t be as strong as them for balance reasons.

The contract agent I mentioned costs as little as the most costly Rajhin agent - yet it has a shield that is close to twice as effective at preventing power to prestige conversion - its least expensive drawable agent costs just 1 coin more than the most costly Rajhin agent, and yet still offers almost double the effectiveness in terms of shielding. There is no balance to counter power=prestige decks with, except for playing equally brain dead power=prestige strats, which is the main point of my OP.

Edited to correct an erroneous claim.

Anne13

The problem is unbalanced, unfair Rng. Far too one sided.
Can play 10 games out of those 9 rng has favoured the opponent.
Cards falling in their lap.
Good cards dropping for them as I'm forced to pick up bad cards..
Players spamming sorcerer king patron over and over each turn
So broke like 99 million other things in this game...

Don't get me wrong I've had the odd game or 2 with okay Rng but against that far too many against me.

Asawasa

rahjin deck is 2nd best for gaining coin, 1st for killing agents, 1st at killing your opponent's hand, tied for 2nd with Psijics for drawing extra cards, only deck to reduce opponent's prestige even when they triggered end game, 3rd at getting rid of tavern cards.

you say it's not oppressive enough? anyone hits you with a full rahjin and your down to playing 1 card, while they draw like the crow deck, get rid of cards from tavern they know you want or can afford, give you a useless card, and knock your prestige for good measure. sure, the agents each are easy to kill but there are many, they all taunt and its damn annoying spending power you could be using to recover what they stole each turn.

Best thing to do once you see this deck is try and out race the opponent to 40 prestige if you can. don't mess around, don't just buy cards because reasons, get to 40 prestige and better make it a few extra just in case. otherwise, this deck will overwhelm you.

IrishOphidia

I understand that this is a deck builder PvP card game and that a bit of RNG is necessary to facilitate that style of game, but the utter lack of counter play is outrageous. There are a lot of appealing aspects about the game, but they fly to the wayside in the wake of power building decks (specific cards) and essentially who gets the luck of the draw WHEN THEY’RE ACTUALLY ABLE TO PURCHASE THEM.

Basically, once one player has a decent amount of good cards the game is already over because there is very little counter play to power building combos. Even the Khajiit deck fails at this. It would be a great counter deck IF it was actually able to keep up with the immense ability to simply stack power. The logical thing to do would be to have a counter card for every builder card. That way if someone heavily stacks into power, the opposing player can at least attempt to stack into counter play to somewhat even out the chances of winning which would then encourage the use of other strategies of win conditions.

merpins

It's a game of RNG. Since you can't actually build your own deck, it becomes a game of did you get the better cards first. It has strategy, but the strategy is RNG reliant so there is no real strategy. You can plan out everything in your head perfectly, but if you don't draw gold or you don't RNG into the cards you need to pull off strategies, you lose. That's why I don't like this card game.

dmnqwk

The Rahjin decks suffers enormously from Jeering/Prowling Shadow being a giant pile of poop.

When designing cards, I don't know why anyone would design a card that costs 4 and does nothing with ONE health... ONE. And making it a taunter it's destroyed if the opponent sneezes harshly.
Prowling Shadow, at a ridiculous 5 cost, adds a single gold coin but is even more poop because it's a more expensive card that, again, does next to nothing.

In a deck where you want combo 4 having an Agent with ONE health is a terrible design. The entire deck has zero power and a Patron power that adds zero power, so offering up utterly useless cards is terrible. I like Rahjin overall, but I would love an explanation from whomever designed this one card (and worse upgrade) as to why they made it taunt. (It would actually be an improvement not being a taunt simply because people would not bother removing it a lot of the time).

I'd like to see Jeering Shadow change the 1 health taunt to 2 health. A simple fix like this could vastly improve the card (even though I still wouldn't take it 95% of the time).

P.S. Regarding the Banneret vs Stubborn Shadow - one costs 9 to get 5 health while the other is a mere 6 for 3. You can also obtain more of the Rahjin ones AND there are more combos to have if they stick around so I don't think there's an imbalance present. Except with Jeering/Prowling Shadow - that card is just poop.

Skvysh

dmnqwk wrote: »

When designing cards, I don't know why anyone would design a card that costs 4 and does nothing with ONE health... ONE. And making it a taunter it's destroyed if the opponent sneezes harshly.

It's because they put an insanely high value on a card being an agent and even more on an agent having taunt. Based on various agents, the "agent" keyword itself adds around 2 gold cost, charging additional ~0.667g for every health point. Taunt costs you another ~1.334g extra. So, it's not surprising to see a 1 health taunt agent costing 5 gold with the added combo bonus of -1 prestige (although, imo, it should either cost 4 gold or the prestige deduction should be moved to a play effect for it to make sense). It's also why Banneret can get away with 5 health taunt with 3 power from play at a cost of 9 and why a contract Shield Bearer costs 6 gold for effects "worth" 7 gold. The numbers, based on other cards, make sense to some extent.

The issue, I'd say, is that the value of keywords is off to begin with. Star Realms sees bases and outposts with cost as low as 2 - and the cards' cost stops at 8. A few of the cheap bases are useless or only situational at best (looking at you, Warning Beacon), but the bases see more play because of it and allow longer games if they aren't completely one-sided.

The other issue is that ToT seems fixed on having both upgraded and non-upgraded versions of cards in play. When you have 2x Ansei's Victory or 2x Hlaalu Councilors in the deck, you're wasting valuable deck space on expensive (and arguably situational) cards that could be better spent on designing and including a few lower cost cards that could help with the whole power creep seen in the aggressive decks.

Well executed and/or lucky aggro decks that focus on closing the game early should still win most of the time, but the opponents should also be given a reasonable shot at a comeback if the other person happens to pick up 2 Armories/SWVs in the first 2 turns.

Heartrage

Anne13 wrote: »

The problem is unbalanced, unfair Rng. Far too one sided.
Can play 10 games out of those 9 rng has favoured the opponent.
Cards falling in their lap.
Good cards dropping for them as I'm forced to pick up bad cards..
Players spamming sorcerer king patron over and over each turn
So broke like 99 million other things in this game...

Don't get me wrong I've had the odd game or 2 with okay Rng but against that far too many against me.

If Rng favor the opponent 90% of the games you play and you rarely get ok Rng, it’s not Rng.

Rng can totally make you lose a game and losing streaks because of Rng happen. However, If Rng is so one sided and Is what makes or break games, you would be closer to 50% win rate because of how probabilities work.

Bat

Heartrage wrote: »

Rng can totally make you lose a game and losing streaks because of Rng happen. However, If Rng is so one sided and Is what makes or break games, you would be closer to 50% win rate because of how probabilities work.

You conclude with something that you, in the sentence prior to your conclusion, contradict.

In this setting, random means that, randomly, a certain number of people will have rather consistent luck, but also that, randomly, a certain number of people will have rather consistent bad luck. That's how RNG works, as is evident with all other setting where RNG has been in play in this game and other settings throughout history.

An analogy to show you just how wrong your conclusion is, would be a person (prior to curated drops) running vMA once and getting exactly the weapon they wanted from there and in the right trait, while another person would run the exact same content hundreds upon hundreds of times and not getting any such luck.

Bat

And that's down to large number variables. We don't even know whether or not certain cards from certain decks have certain RNG values making them less or more likely to be drawn at certain turns throughout a game, so making the claim that RNG would mean everyone wins in at least 50% of the games they play, needs backing up with some actual evidence.

What we can say with certainty is, however, that there are evident RNG mechanics in the game, and thus we can also safely assume that, considering how RNG works, some people will have better luck and some will have worse. That's what we can say with any certainty about it. Dismissing the experience of people who claim to have had bad RNG luck is premature, and claiming they instead should have been able to win in 50% of their cases is baseless.

Casdha

I'd like to know how someone is picked to go first. I've counted the last two days and I consistently start 70% of the games I play.

Heartrage

@Bat
1- No, it’s not a contradiction. A winning/losing streak is possible with Rng on a small sample. A win rate is something you calculate for the totality of your games and such has a larger sample and will be more representative of the average odds. If you flip a coin 4 times, it is much more likely that 4/4 of your throw will be tail than it is to flip 100 times and get 100/100 tail.

2- Rng luck isn’t consistent. You can have a streak of luck, however, the more you play, the more average your luck will get. The odds of someone who has had a lot of bad luck are the same as the one who has had a lot of good luck.

3- This analogy has nothing to do with what I said.

4- Individual cards having different Rng doesn’t change the fact that you have an equal chance to get in the same situation as any other player and so, it doesn’t affect the 50% odds.

5- I never made the claim that everyone win in at least 50% of their game. It is mathematically impossible for everyone to win at least 50% of their games because every time someone win, someone else must lose against them.

6- I will, however, make the claim that exactly 50% of the players of completed games have won. Which would mean that, you have 50% chances of winning any games of tribute if it’s only Rng.

7- In a game where Rng dictates who win, the more you play, the more your win rate will look like the average win rate.

8- the claim was that Rng was unfair and unbalanced and that it was the reason why they lost not that they had bad Rng.