Would you like a Thieves deck?

Bat

A deck with cards that would allow you to look at your opponents next hand and snatch one of the cards in it, with combos giving you the chance to steal additional cards. Costlier cards could allow you to look at their next hand, or their cooldown, and steal cards from those.

This is a yes or no type of poll because it's that type of question, please refrain from discussing the poll format.

Bat

Yes

It's sad that no one who voted has explained their choice. I think a deck like this could be good for the game since the only spite deck we have is Rajhin, and it's pretty situational and weak in most cases.

fall0athboy

No

No. I like the game as it is. This would end up being a deck that, kind of like how some argue Crows or Druid King, you would have to play, otherwise you'll lose all your cards.

It would absolutely lend itself to trolling, where someone just eventually steals all your cards so you can't play anything but then also not end the game, forcing you to concede.

sharquez

You already can (and should) look at the opponents hand and deck and such, it's open with that info.
Stealing cards? As long as its not a patron ability and sufficiently costed, it could be cool, but I wont draft it regularly.

Agenericname

If the game were balanced well I think that a deck like that could be fun. Seeing it paired with a deck like Duke of Crows and sitting there watching your oppenent play for a couple turns in a row wouldnt be much fun.

SeaGtGruff

No

No, I think that would be infuriatingly annoying. It's already galling enough to sit and watch your opponent buy up the card(s) you wanted to buy. Can you imagine the added frustration of watching your opponent steal your best cards from you? Can you imagine the hate whispers? And then there would be the NPCs who used that tactic every single time, even if they had several other better moves they could do instead.

Bat

Yes

If the patron would cost gold (6 gold for favor with benefit, 3 gold to bring back to unfavored) you could steal any of your opponent's cards they have in their gives, current hand, and cooldown. The cost for favor should be higher since the thief should not be at too great an advantage.

Agents could be similar to Hlaalu, get 1 or 2 coins on use, the better agents could have steal a card from your opponent's current hand on a bigger combo than Hlaalu's "get a free card" flavour, say 4. There could be a couple guard agents that could also have upgrades, when you have them up you prevent the opponent from stealing, if you have the upgraded guard card/cards they prevent opponent from stealing and can be bribed with gold (or if you play a "Corruption" card in your current hand) to influence opponent's guard agents to look away when you steal one of their cards. Guard agents could also have small taunts, which would incentivize players to buy e.g. Reach or Pelin cards, or to use Duke patron in new, more interesting ways.

I think this would be a great deck to balance out some of the extremely over-powered gameplay that (in particular Duke, Druid and Loremaster) currently can offer to the person with the most RNG luck.

Bat

Yes

I think a deck like this would be fun, make gameplay less RNG-luck-heavy, would synergize well with most of the current decks, and also have the potential to bring more variation into how the other decks and patrons are played. It would be a great balancing deck in my opinion.

HalfDragoness

I gave it some thought before answering and I think: yes, but not exactly the way you specified.

The biggest gap in the decks at the moment is that once your opponent has built up a really strong deck there is very little you can do about it. Even if you do everything you can, throughout the game to stop your opponent getting the cards they want the rng of which cards appear can still mean your efforts are for nothing. If you've ever played a game against someone with a lot of Crows/ Rajhin/ Druid cards, or a combination of the above you'll know that there comes a point where the opponent just has so many rescources, all the good cards, and they can just hold you down with ease while they strut around doing whatever they want. Or you get to be the person with all the power and watch your opponent struggle even though a fair bit of the power imbalance came from card rng.

Anyway... straight up being able to steal cards would be bad, I think, because if you have the resources to do so then you can potentially steal all your opponents cards creating an even more skewed imbalance. I think what would work would be if you could swap cards with an opponent, where you control the card you're giving to the opponent but the card you recieve from the opponent is random (and from their current hand including active agents). The ability to swap cards should be a patron ability and it should cost 2 gold + 2 power (bearing in mind that the Psijic Patraon costs 4 gold to activate). The other final thing is that I think the Patron ability should cost 2 gold + 3 power, if you have higher prestige than your opponent rather than the cost of the skill changing based on who has favour or not.

This would make the Patron and the theme of the deck less about theivery and more about adressing power imbalances, giving power to the underdogs and toppling powerful systems. It would really allow the player who has less to be able to distrupt the opponents deck composition. e.g. foisting off treasury cards or any card you don't want to stop your opponent from having a whiole hand of Crows.

Sheezabeast

Yes

I think a less annoying version of this idea would be a card or Agent that allows you to clone one card in your opponents hand at random, and upgraded version would allow you to see the cards to pick.