simple answer is don't let them reduce their deck down.....

NoSoup wrote: »

simple answer is don't let them reduce their deck down.....

I suppose, but either strategy is going to be pretty hard without Hlaalu (for the whittler) and Rajhin (to counter the whittler). Kind of with OP here, I don't think this is what Almalexia was intended as. Then again, its not a fun deck to play with no matter what, as RNG can truly victimize you with those agents

I will sometimes impliment this type of strategy.

Yes, Almalexia can help you find your powerful cards, but the designers likely made Philanthropy and Mournhold Clergy because of games where someone could be cycling through cards pointlessly and basically doing nothing.

So it is important to see this game closing aspect of Almalexja to be just as valid as the card filtering aspect of the archetype.

You can also make some other comparisons. For example, you can still play Toll of Silver, which in part draws a card, even if no cards remain in the deck.

In Almalexia's case, you can too play a card with a draw effect even if no cards remain in the deck. It just so happens that the Donate effect puts a card back in the deck before the draw part of donate happens.

One of my first observations or maybe questions was regarding the order of operations for Donating that the designers chose. I think that they got things right from a balance perspective to have the discard happen first before the draw. That said, if it didn't happen first, then it sure wouldn't work as well in conjunction with an "emptying the deck" strategy.

A last thing that I will point out is that some games make actions not possible if there are not proper targets for the card effect before the card is played. So, the heuristic that my friends and I used.for these kinds of things is to talk about what "the game knows" or what "the game doesn't know."

For example, one cannot activate a Mystical Space Typhoon from the Yu-Gi-Oh! card game to target and destroy itself. "The game knows" that MST must target a different card. This doesn't really make sense, but it's just how it is and what the designers of that game want.

Likewise, from The Elder Scrolls Legends card game, Ice Storm was changed so that it could not be used when there are no units in play. Ice Storm only says that it deals 3 damage to each in play unit, so you would think that no units could be a valid number, but the game was changed to "know" when using Ice Storm is appropriate. Surely, the designers had their reasons, but they ended up making the card much more confusing and also worse in certain situations.

And that is where I will drive this last point home. It's often much more confusing when one cannot play a card even if part of its effect will seem not to work before the cards activation. That is a really complicated process for most people and involves creating an entire layer of rules that people must learn through sheer experience alone rather than from an understanding that comes from a rule book. So it isn't really player friendly to make some cards have arbitrary restrictions on their use.

For that reason and all of the others written above, we should all find the usage of Almalexia that was questioned to be perfectly fine.