Is it just me, or do the upped and unupped versions have everything on the card (except for shiny art and name) in common? Shouldn't the upgrade get something better? Or maybe I'm just missing something.
Upped image need fixing, table is correct, need to make some time for fixing it
Some quick hypothetical calculations time. A deck with 4 wands/4 PA/6 sosac/6 dials/4 life pend/6 novae or any other stall mechanism you seem fit. It is clearly a deck that has only deckout as win condition. Opponent has a 30 card deck
Turn 1 PA/wand out (best case senario using upped life pend/nova split), from this point on you have 12 turns to deal with sosac/dials. Seems something upped decks will achieve easily, unnuped decks will be around there more or less.
More realistically using the same deck: turn 2-3 PA/wand (2 novae or pend and mark) from this point on you will have 11-12 turns to deal with sosac/dials, which is about the same as above if not a turn or 2 slower.
List of counters: basicaly whatever counters the stall mechanism (PC, purify, SoP for the above example), the wand itself PC protected is unstoppable
Take out wand and put arsenic in its place: you need 11 rounds to go through 100 HP.
List of counter: heal, stall mechanism counters (PC,purify, SoP), dim shield, diss shield, wing, tit shield (unnuped wand)
In that comparison it seems to me that wand is borderline powerful/OP in the unnuped setting, while powerfull in the upped. Some balancing issues come to mind though.
1.the wand cannot be used in a deck that is not designed to work around it, how that is weighted in balancing?
2.the bypass dmg is what makes it usefull, so an "on hit" clause seems too crippling, maybe a % chance as Rutarete suggested?
3.a point that odideph brought up, how does the destroyed cards weight in the balancing? In the example above maybe the opponent has 2 purifies not drawn, what if first 2 hits both are gone? How do you take that into the balancing account?