Dog Pit - Suggestions and Feedback

[ak65ala]

Grabbow is easily countered. If you don't like it, use a counter.

I'm not whining about Grabbow being OP, I know it is balanced in PvP.  I am stating that in the confines of this event, it seems that rainbows are the optimal deck, leading to a homogenization in dogs, leading to less strategy, less depth. 

To bring cards the counter every possible dog, you basically need cards from every element, leading to a rainbow.  Graboid is one of the strongest un-upped creatures, so it is your damage in your rainbow....  Now, we are seeing different type of graboid decks, and different types of rainbows, so I might be simplifying this all too much.  Maybe this event style just isn't for me. 

[Chromatophore]

The problem with this is what happens if you ban a card that puts a player below a 30 card deck?  Most of the event, for example, Chromatopup ran with 31-35 cards so if you banned Nova for example he wouldn't be able to field a legal deck.

One possibility is replacing the banned cards with relics (for the duration of that round).

Personally i don't like the idea of offering the advantage to the player with fewer dummy points.  There is already a strong motivation to turtle with a high defense and intelligence.  If more people adopt this strategy this event could last quite a while.

I'd prefer to see the banning of cards associated with a high strength stat (the opponent dog is intimidated and forgets some of its skills) than with low dummy points.

I do think rainbow decks have an advantage in this event, not because grabbow is inherently all that strong, but because having a rainbow allows you to salvage a useful card in most every matchup which allows you to morph your deck more readily than a mono deck could.

[Kakerlake]

The problem with this is what happens if you ban a card that puts a player below a 30 card deck?  Most of the event, for example, Chromatopup ran with 31-35 cards so if you banned Nova for example he wouldn't be able to field a legal deck.

The idea was that the banned cards convert in this round only into Quantum Pillars, which then can be converted into any pillars / pends.
Also, I think it might be a good idea to have the banning as well when two dogs have the same ammount of dummy points, so folks will have to have a versatlie vault from the beginning.

Personally i don't like the idea of offering the advantage to the player with fewer dummy points.  There is already a strong motivation to turtle with a high defense and intelligence.  If more people adopt this strategy this event could last quite a while.

I'd prefer to see the banning of cards associated with a high strength stat (the opponent dog is intimidated and forgets some of its skills) than with low dummy points.

If the advantage was given to the better dogs, it wouldn't solve the problem in the slightest. Winnerdogs would only recieve an additional advantage to the INT bonus.
The weaker dogs have already the disadvantage of losing health and not gaining Exp, so a ban advantage helps to counter that problem.

See it this way: The fight organizer gives the stronger dog a handicap, so the fight will still be interesting.

[Chromatophore]

I'm not convinced that banning cards is the way to get rid of so many rainbow decks.  Switching out novas for quantum pillars is going to make a full-spectrum deck a bit slower, but its not nearly as debilitating as a mono deck losing all its damage producing cards, for example.  In other words, mono decks are often more dependent on a single card than are rainbows.

As far as better vs. worse dogs, in this event the best dog for most of the time was (arguably) ****head and for much of the event he was near the bottom of the standings in terms of dummy points.  Maybe there could be a different measure of a dog's power -- something like hp + 5*(str + def + int + luck) and that could be used to determine which dog receives a bonus (if there is one).

On an unrelated note, strength and especially luck are underpowered compared to defense and intelligence.  The rule that a losing dog can only deal up to half the damage it receives really hurts the strength stat, since a winning dog can guarantee taking very little damage if it has a low strength.  Plus the fact that there is basically no advantage to dealing damage except maybe in the later rounds or just for the sake of speeding things up.  I suppose Chromatopup has gotten away with relying predominantly on strength throughout the event so far but he has been walking a tightwire to say the least.

It was suggested earlier that strength allow you to use some upgraded cards and damage would be dependent on which round it was.  I could get behind this idea.

As for luck, maybe something like the dog with the highest luck (or a randomly chosen one if there is a tie) receives a free card of their choice each round.