Guest posts by RoKetha

13

Trio & Quartet / Gravity/Time/Earth Lockdown Deck

« on: December 15, 2009, 10:10:08 pm »

Why would he need an Anubis?

Worst case scenario, the weapon gets destroyed by the other player instead of being destroyed when you play something over it. It's not like you animate a weapon as soon as you play it unless you expect it to last longer that way.

Just a thought, Eternity is really, really good as anti-creature control; you can heal your creatures of damage and status and remove any buffs theirs get. They have to kill them in one hit to get around it, and they can't rely on Heavy Armor to do it.

Why the Deja Vu though? I'd think you'd be very short on time quanta as is and it doesn't really add anything to your deck. Unstoppable might be a good card to consider adding because it lets your Oty pierce shields and eat 5 HP dragons right away.

14

Issue Archive / Hacks/bugs

« on: December 15, 2009, 10:10:04 pm »

Just wanted to mention that Elements is unique in that quanta is cumulative. You don't need 5 bone pillars to play a card that costs 5 death; just one (or a quantum pillar) will eventually produce enough quanta. This is the reason for the higher card costs, but it's also the reason that no matter what, every card will always be viable for a rainbow deck (Miracle, the most expensive one-shot card in the game works okay even with sundials using light quanta) as long as you don't go completely overboard.

15

Game Suggestions and Feedback / We need a 12th False God!

« on: December 15, 2009, 10:10:03 pm »

Miracle and Fire Queen kind of share the Life element really.

Air: Fire Queen
Earth: Seism
Fire: Hermes
Water: Scorpio
Entropy: Chaos Lord
Gravity: Graviton
Light: Miracle
Darkness: Incarnate
Aether: Gemini
Time: Rainbow (sort of... he definitely embodies the multi-draw aspect of Time)
Life: Fire Queen/Miracle, more Fire Queen though
Death: Morte

The thing with Fire Queen is that Air is absolutely terrible without another element unless you do nothing but float Eagle's Eyes and pray they don't have any of a large list of cards. So they gave her Life since Air's signature creature is FFQ.

I do agree that there should be a 12th god though, because 12 is a significant number: there are 12 months of the year and 12 symbols in both the Western and Chinese Zodiacs, for starters. It's also a pretty significant number in religion, both modern and ancient.

16

Issue Archive / Synchronization bug or cheat

« on: December 15, 2009, 10:10:02 pm »

All are common desynch bugs, especially the Steal desynch. The Oty one as you described it I haven't heard exactly like that before, but if the creatures had 0 displayed HP then it's common too.

17

Issue Archive / Farenheit (creature) attacks during Sundial

« on: December 15, 2009, 10:10:01 pm »

Pretty simple bug here: Animated Farenheits will attack during stasis from Sundial provided you have at least 5 fire quanta. Stasis cancels the 4/5 base damage of the attack, but not the bonus from your fire quanta count.

Also, because of the order of end-of-turn actions: each creature attacks, pillar sets and mark add quanta, then your weapon attacks--animated Farenheits will usually do less damage than a wielded one... not a bug exactly but it might not be the desired effect, thought I'd note it. It gets even weirder with Elite Fireflies and Brimstone Eaters, because depending on creature attack order, two animated Farenheits can do different damage amounts.

18

Gemini / Gemini's Massive Dragon spamming

« on: December 15, 2009, 10:10:01 pm »

The AI likes to have extra quanta before it uses abilities for some reason. Like Scorpio/poison AI3 tend to save one death quantum rather than go all out poisoning you, and I've never seen Scorpio use Psionic Wave with his last aether quantum. Maybe that was it.

Sometimes he'll just play dragon, momentum, PU 4-5 times (yes, I have seen FIVE FREAKING TIMES before) and you might as well just leave unless you have like 3 sundials already in your hand. You can lobotomize them all before dying maybe but then he'll just break your bone wall.

19

General Discussion / luckiest 2 hours ever :)

« on: December 15, 2009, 10:10:00 pm »

Eternity's good for a lot more than just stopping you from decking.

--Immunity to flying weapons other than morning star/glory
--Immunity to PU on your creatures (most of the time)
--Opponent cannot buff creatures
--Removes poison and damage from your creatures
--Blocks one creature ability for one turn
--Card advantage from making your opponent play the same creatures again
--Quantum advantage for the same reason

Definitely one of the stronger weapons if you can fund it. Pulverizer is just stupidly overpowered though because if you enchant it, using an element it already uses, there's only one card in the entire game that can counter it, which you need to draw one of for every single permanent you get, and it requires a specific element to play this card in the first place.

20

General Discussion / Slot wheel mysteries revealed (finally!)

« on: December 15, 2009, 10:09:56 pm »

Eh, maybe I'm really, really unlucky, but... I've won emerald and wind pillars off AI3, which has enough deck variety in every deck that the odds of not finding 5 non-pillar cards in 50 attempts is incredibly low. Maybe there's a bug no one knows about yet.

21

Duo-Decks / Unstoppable Puffer Fishes deck

« on: December 15, 2009, 10:09:51 pm »

I was waiting for Puffer Fishes to show up in a deck. Smart use of Unstoppable, more decks need that nowadays.

As Scaredgirl says, having Congeals usually works out better than Ice Lance, as Congeal holds more early-game power. By the time Ice Lance starts killing tougher creatures like FFQ, you've entered the phase of the game where you need to already be ahead in damage through poison. Although, Ice Lance does have the advantage of killing Mind Flayers outright, one of this deck's bigger worries.

One concern is that your creatures are pretty fragile and few in number... not sure if there's a real way to get around that though. Early Lobotomizer will ruin you as well; again, not much you can really do without having to pull in another element.

I'd actually say that while you indeed should not play the Ice Shield early game, this is a momentum deck so once you get going with several Unstoppables you might as well play it, as poison decks need to slow the opponent as much as they can while they build up poison counters, and even if it's stolen, no real harm is done.

I do have to question whether this will be fast enough at getting poison counters out early-game, the time where poison has to gain an advantage, because unlike Chysaoras, Puffer Fish are stopped cold by Sundial, giving your opponent time to get his own creatures and spells out. Again, not really sure if there's really any way around that with the current element balance...

22

Fire / Chicken Fries

« on: December 15, 2009, 10:09:51 pm »

I always love to mentally pit mono-fire decks against themselves. Nothing slows down a fire deck like a fire deck. XD

Cool deck though. If I was gonna slim it, two Brimstone Eaters would be gone before the Fire Storms. Especially if you're still unupgraded.

Edit: Actually scratch that, you're using the Eaters in place of pillars instead of just extras. I honestly dunno what to replace then.

23

Issue Archive / Mutants keeping natural abilities.

« on: December 15, 2009, 10:09:51 pm »

Actually, it looks like I was wrong about Nightfall/Eclipse to begin with: they give +1 and +2 attack respectively that remains the same even when a creature burrows or unburrows. So you don't get an attack bonus by unburrowing after playing the card, or a penalty from burrowing after playing Eclipse (Devourers stay 2/3).

However, if you Bless a Shrieker so it has an odd attack value like 11, burrowing it drops the attack to 5, and unburrowing brings it back up to 10... this shows that the game doesn't actually store the original attack value, but instead just halves and doubles.

24

Card Ideas and Art / HERO CARDS by Scaredgirl

« on: December 15, 2009, 10:09:50 pm »

You know you don't have to kill them, right? These are just characters. All you need to do is kill your opponent and you will win.

You do indeed have to kill them if you don't want your opponent to completely paralyze you, which most of these cards do.

Are you sure your opponent has a Hero in his deck? Maybe he's playing some fast rainbow and doesn't even have a Hero. Can you directly even target a Hero or not? I don't know, maybe you can't?

If you can't target a hero why even bother playing after the opponent gets out a card that automatically kills all your creatures and hits harder than dragons that you can do absolutely nothing about? And it wouldn't matter if you only saw a hero in 1/4 of all decks, because that's still 1/4 of all your matches being losses the instant your opponent plays a hero and you aren't prepared to stop it in two turns or so.

So after that highlighted part you STILL went and explained to me why they aren't balanced?

The point is not that these aren't balanced, the point is that I doubt anyone could go back and balance heroes on this scale. How do you balance a creature that automatically kills everything the opponent plays just by existing? Are you going to make it easily killable? Would it still be worth 20 quanta them? And after you make both those changes, is it still good enough to compare with all the others? Sticking unkillable super-duper-ubers with ****-you-up-totally spells into a young and already imbalanced card game with an already heavy amount of draw luck involved is just not going to benefit the gameplay. Adding more things that need to be countered when the game is already too specific with many of its counters isn't going to help the game's polish.

If there are going to be heroes, they should be slightly stronger than a normal card, not something that wins by itself. I actually thought the current set of upgrades are mostly good hero cards, a little weak if only one is allowed per deck, but those are considered standard now.

I think you are missing the big picture here. You are saying that having powerful cards would somehow be impossible to balance. That's not true. What if they cost 100 quantum to play, would they still be overpowered? I don't think so. What if they cost 25 quantum? Who knows. What if kept the cost where it is but made Hero's less powerful? What I'm trying to say is that there is always a balance. You just have to find it.

I just have to find it? No, you're the one who wants heroes, you go balance them. But I will say that putting a super-high cost on a super-powerful creature is just so much more likely to end in disaster and a favoring of luck, one way or the other, then putting a medium-high cost on a creature with slightly stronger than average abilities.

I laughed my ass off at the Chosen One's portrait but if these aren't really serious card suggestions (which you seem to suggest with your comment about spending lots of time designing the cards and no time considering their stats) you need to make that clear, and if they are the burden is yours to balance them.