I'm just giving a play by play to bring to light how incredibly problematic War Song is from a gameplay perspective. As we get to that, I should also bring up my assumptions. My assumption with any games that test skill is that dumb luck should be minimized. A meme coming out of Hearthstone was that dealing with chances is a form of skill too and it may be. There are many forms of skill and we could have competitions to judge them. Who can open a letter the fastest without ripping an envelope with just their bare hands? Who can pull start the old lawn mower with bad oil and questionable spark plugs in the fewest number of tries? Who can win the most games of Rock Paper Scisors? Hopefully you get the picture by now. It's that testing skill with minimal chance is a superior form of testing skill compared to testing skill with relatively more chance. Adding more chances causes one to descend into the gritty world of all of that other "skill" testing that I just mentioned. Okay, maybe you can run to the mailbox faster than everyone else in the neighborhood, but who cares? And who cares if you lose when you get unlucky or win when you get lucky?

So onto War Song. I've had these games alot where, for starters, war song diminishes the value of the extra gold gain by second player. Because of War song, the waters are mudied with regards to starting the game with a small advantage as second player to help cancel out the advantage that first player has via their first pick. Maybe first player has the first pick, but second player should get the first chance at a more expensive play if it is available. War song prevents that.

War song also screws up crucial turns for the rest of the game when one is struggling to get a small advantage. In my recent game, I purchased Scratch to match my opponents Scratch. We both started with War Song in our opening hand. For them, it didn't end up mattering, but I was prevented from also making a writ of coin and turning that extra gold as second player into something real.

This is where things get interesting. My opponent, who I believe I beat around 80% of the time, then made what I consider to be a mistake by purchasing a power generating card in the form of Deepwoods Ritual. I consider this move to be a mistake because Blackfeather Knight is also in the tavern and by purchasing an additional card, they lower their chances of being able to purchase Blackfeather Knight by alot.

Neither one of us is able to capitalize on our 3rd turn because neither one of us combos our scratch. And when I do draw the writ of coin that I made on my second turn, it is unfortunately in a hand with, you guessed it, War Song. So I'm still unable to develop my cards in the way that I would like on my fourth turn. On their fifth turn, the opponent finally combos their scratch and that is essentially where they won the game.

If it hadn't been for War Song's power generation messing up several of my turns, then I probably would go on to win the game. And while I'm not entitled to win a game, I think that the person making better decisions, like not picking up power generators in a gold race, shouldn't be able to lose a game because of such dumb luck like this. While card games will always have an aspect of dumb luck, it should be minimized and there are few better places to start than with a loathsome single power generating card that ends up in way more games than is enjoyable because of Red Eagle being a compulsive pick for many players.