Alternate Reality

[Bloodshadow]

I agree with Jmizzle. Cards in game are already perfectly balanced; you don't need uber cards with astronomical costs. This card is just too much programming for too little return.

And I think card effects should be limited INSIDE the game. So permanently changing a card in your deck or permanently delete a card is, in my opinion, wrong.

[Spamalot]

I have 6 of every card in the game upgraded, and I see no reason to change any of them, because there are no underpowered creatures worth improving at the cost of quantum requirements. As this spell would only be used on buffed creatures or to replicate permanents, this card's utility is very limited.

There are lots of places where it would be useful...it would just have to be balanced properly.  Maybe something like +3 summoning cost for every extra effect that was put on the card.

So if you had a 3/8 otyugh from a single blessing, it would cost 7 to summon.
Or you could have a 0/11 otyugh from a single heavy armor, also 7 to summon.
Or you could have a 6/11 otyugh with a poison counter that costs 9 to summon, but functionally can't increase its eating ability because of the poison counter.

Places where it would be useful:
Putting momentum on your damage cards that are already somewhat cheap.  For example, it wouldn't be a terrible burden to have a momentumed Forest Spectre summoned for 6 life quanta.

Upgrading your x/x creatures to x/x+6 creatures to avoid Paradox.

Getting your wimpies past the first-round fire storm or lightning barrier.  For example, a Fallen Druid with a single blessing would be able to survive that single round you need to let your Anubis immortalize him.

If you got exceptionally lucky and got something like a +5/+0 Pegasus or Wyrm from a Chaos Seed, you'd in effect be doubling your upgrade for an additional 3 summoning cost.  7 Light quanta isn't a whole lot for something that is effectively 16/4.

Since phase shields are so common with Rainbow decks, a dragon with permanent momentum would be useful, since you wouldn't have to waste a deflag/steal.

Upgraded expensive cards would be very useful for mono decks, especially Fire and Darkness, since they can generate Quanta so easily.  A Ruby Dragon with blessing would cost 15 to summon, as opposed to 12, which is a trifling difference for a mono-fire deck.  Your Vampires in your Darkness deck could go from 4/3 to 9/7 with Blessing and Nightfall, and would only cost 8 to summon, which is still less than Dragons with similar damage without an ability.

But to reiterate:  the main idea is to slowly generate a few cards with increased powers at the expense of money and increased summoning cost.  If you think the increased summoning cost would make the power useless, the problem isn't the idea in general, it's the particular increased summoning cost.

That is:  don't throw the baby out with the bath water.

[jmizzle7]

Well, having a 0/11 Otyugh for 7 quanta would be pretty nice, but this would be a new hard-to-program way to grind for improved cards, and it would only make the rich richer, as you have to have excess in order to gamble for those improved cards. The increase in card cost would of course need to be balanced, but the net result would be an even larger gap between veteran players and new players. We don't want new players to feel like they are starting an uphill climb they will never finish.

[Spamalot]

Well, having a 0/11 Otyugh for 7 quanta would be pretty nice, but this would be a new hard-to-program way to grind for improved cards, and it would only make the rich richer, as you have to have excess in order to gamble for those improved cards. The increase in card cost would of course need to be balanced, but the net result would be an even larger gap between veteran players and new players. We don't want new players to feel like they are starting an uphill climb they will never finish.

It doesn't seem that bad, to me.

I only started playing a couple of weeks ago, and I've already got all my Rainbow deck cards upgraded, and I'm about 90% finished buying 6 of every card so I don't have to switch to the trainer to try new deck combos out.  Also in about two weeks, I've gotten like 2 Eagle's eyes, 3 Owl's Eyes, 4 Pulverizers, Lobotomizer, 4 Eternities, 3 Tridents, 2 Vampire Daggers, 5 Miracles, 1 Improved Miracle, and 5 Shards of Divinity.

A couple of weeks isn't really a whole lot to basically get to what is essentially the "highest level" of the game.  The only thing left is to upgrade 6 of every card, I suppose...but that's more of a "just for s***s and giggles" kind of thing.

Furthermore, it doesn't create that huge of a gap between total newbs and vets, because you could only have 6 of these special cards in your deck, anyway.  (Although...to be honest, my deck only has 5 creatures in it to begin with, heh.  I bet it gets totally owned if it ever pops up in the Top50.) 

In balancing terms, it a) removes the need to put a single additional card in your deck, and b) guarantees that this card will be drawn when you need it, at the expense of a) making it slightly more expensive to play said "phantom card," and b) forcing you to play this "phantom card" on the same creature, every time.

You gain a little flexibility by not having to stack Improved Blessings or Chaos Seeds in your deck, but you lose a little flexibility because it only works for that single creature.  You gain a little power because you don't have to draw both the creature and the card, but you lose a little power because you might have to wait an extra round anyway to cover the additional cost of summoning.

[jmizzle7]

I'm talking about having excess of upgraded cards on which you would use this card. Of course it's easy to get 6 of every card, but why would you use this card on a non-upgraded card? Then again, if you were to use blessing on a basic Oty and make a permed copy, that would be better than a standard Elite Oty, so why would you want to farm gods in the first place if you can manufacture your own stuff that is better than the super-expensive upgraded cards?

[Spamalot]

I'm talking about having excess of upgraded cards on which you would use this card. Of course it's easy to get 6 of every card, but why would you use this card on a non-upgraded card? Then again, if you were to use blessing on a basic Oty and make a permed copy, that would be better than a standard Elite Oty, so why would you want to farm gods in the first place if you can manufacture your own stuff that is better than the super-expensive upgraded cards?

This would only be usable on upgraded cards, as originally presented.  This was intended to make it more difficult to acquire these sorts of double-upgraded cards, because generally speaking, they will be somewhat more powerful than the average upgraded card.

That being said, it seems like with any multiplayer game these days, the most powerful doodad becomes the de facto standard, and everything else is considered to be useless...I'm sure you'd eventually find decks built entirely around 6 7/5 momentumed Pegasuses or something like that.  Personally, I don't really have a problem with it.  That's about 180,000 electrum worth of upgraded Pegasuses you'd have to sacrifice to get your 6 upgraded ones that would cost you 10 apiece to summon...with dive, that's a 14/5 card for about 10 quanta, which is only slightly better than your average dragon, but with momentum.  It's exactly twice as much damage as a Sapphire Charger, for exactly twice as much quanta, and you have to spend air quanta to get the extra damage...so that seems pretty balanced, to me.

It should be noted, of course, that PU/TU would work on these cards, so carrying these cards in your deck could be somewhat of a double-edged sword...since all newbs would have to do is stack 6 PU/TU in their deck and voila, they have a 7/5 Pegasus for 7 Aether quanta, when you just spent 10 to summon it.

Other possible game-breakers at +3 summoning quanta per powerup?  A 0/17 (2 heavy armors) otyugh for 10 quanta would be pretty tough.  An 8/2 lava destroyer with momentum for 8 quanta would be pretty tough...add a heavy armor and you have an 8/8 lava destroyer (can't be paradoxed) for 11 quanta. That's about the same as some dragons, but you get the growth ability.  Vampires with a nice attack increase from a lucky Chaos Seed would be pretty tough.  5/5 or 2/8 Physalias for 4 quanta would be pretty hard to get rid of.

So yeah, in balance terms, I doubt a single rule to cover all creatures would be sufficient.  Fortunately, there is a limited number of creature/powerup combinations, and I doubt it would be too difficult to go through each of them to determine how much the increased summoning cost should be on a creature-to-creature basis.  You might be able to get things like a 8/8 Cockatrice for only +2 quanta, but a 10/4 lava destroyer might be +3 or +4.

[jmizzle7]

Well, I personally would like to see new content and new cards before I see a convoluted, random card creating algorithm introduced to the game. Sure, it would be nice for people to customize stuff, but the game should be about deck building and using the available cards to generate strategies and counter-strategies.

You speak of "180,000 electrum worth" of pegasus cards to make super pegs, yet you have only played this game for two weeks. While I believe that it should take some measure of time to acquire lots of upgraded cards and decks and such, what you are talking about is weeks of grinding just to generate six super-upgrades. That is not, and should not be, what this game is about.

[Spamalot]

In a couple of weeks or so, I've gotten well over 60 upgraded cards, which at 1,500 electrum apiece is about 90,000 worth of cards.  How? I don't care about my win %, so I quit fights vs. any False God except Fire Queen, Miracle, Incarnate, and Chaos Lord, who seem to be the easiest to defeat regularly.  Doing that, I win an upgraded card about once every 5 fights...usually one I didn't need, so I sold it for about 2/3 the cost...so doing some math here, I needed about 450-500 wins against those False Gods to get an entirely upgraded 60-card rainbow deck.  If you play quickly, you can get 5 wins in an hour...about 90-100 hours of nothing but grinding....

So it might take 1-3 months to get one of these cards.

As I've said before, though: I didn't invent the grinding paradigm, I'm just working with it as an assumption.

Beyond that...the nature of the random shuffle/draw doesn't really lend itself to "fun" deck-building in PvP, because the most effective decks seem to be the simplest and therefore most consistent.  E.g. poison decks and rapid mono-fire.  Once you move beyond those two simple strategies, everything seems to revolve around two or three extremely powerful cards.  Namely: Sundials and Hourglasses, so you can dig with reckless abandon through your deck and then out-spam your opponent.  I haven't seen a decent PvP deck that wasn't either poison, monofire, or built around otyughs and sundials.

Personally, I like my permanent mutant alternative idea better.  That would really increase the ability to build oddball (but effective) decks, because the monsters would be easy/easier to acquire.  Unfortunately, I think it probably has an even greater potential to be game-breaking, because some of the mutants you can generate with Fallen Druids are exceptionally powerful.

[jmizzle7]

In a couple of weeks or so, I've gotten well over 60 upgraded cards, which at 1,500 electrum apiece is about 90,000 worth of cards.  How? I don't care about my win %, so I quit fights vs. any False God except Fire Queen, Miracle, Incarnate, and Chaos Lord, who seem to be the easiest to defeat regularly.  Doing that, I win an upgraded card about once every 5 fights...usually one I didn't need, so I sold it for about 2/3 the cost...so doing some math here, I needed about 450-500 wins against those False Gods to get an entirely upgraded 60-card rainbow deck.  If you play quickly, you can get 5 wins in an hour...about 90-100 hours of nothing but grinding....

I don't care how you grind, and you are pretty much preaching to the choir, as I have logged thousands of games against the false gods. So what if you have well over 60 upgraded cards? Lots of people do.

So it might take 1-3 months to get one of these cards.

I couldn't have said it better myself. Why would I want to spend 1-3 months on one card? That's really obsessive. I say just make do with what cards are already available, which leads me to my final point...

I haven't seen a decent PvP deck that wasn't either poison, monofire, or built around otyughs and sundials.

That's because you have only played the game for a couple of weeks. I have dozens of decks that are completely viable in PvP, most of which are not poison, mono fire, or oty/dial decks. The game is already quite balanced, and there are not very many cards in each element. The beauty of Elements is the fact that there are 12 elements, each completely distinct from the others. If you can permanently change your fire creatures to the point where their drawback (low hp) doesn't even exist anymore, or give earth creatures momentum permanently, you are effectively killing the uniqueness of the elements. I admire your willingness to share your ideas, but I really don't think this is a good one.

[The conartist]

Just a terible idea.period.

[Pilchard123]

conartist, do you ever say anything nice?

'Just a terrible idea. Period'

'Read a book sometime.'

Nice, useful, constructive comments, don't you think?

[Spamalot]

It's a good idea, in the context of the grind paradigm, I think.

It seems like the vast majority of negative opinions about it revolve around the grinding aspect.