I think Nab would be fine if it was simply underpowered and something you only see occasionally as a meme deck. Playing 1 game out of a hundred where your opponent Nabs something important and wins with it can be an interesting and fun moment, like when you get killed by an Elnuk deck that drops a 3/3 and 3 4/5s on turn 5. But when it’s 1 out of every 4 games that you lose due to Nabbed cards, it starts to feel unfair and unfun. I think if Pilfered Goods were simply moved to 3 Mana the Nab package would be a fun meme deck, like Elnuks, instead of an auto include package in every Bilgewater deck.
I think that the Medarda change is good, since he needs to be low cost to get any kind of value from him. My one gripe with him is that he still costs too much to really be used in an Aggro discard deck with Draven, so I think he'd be better as a 5 Mana 3/4 or something.
More Feedback (I'm skipping those I think already submitted)
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@Demonxyz95
I like the Crystal Phoenix, it synergizes with random effects and the hand mage deck. The only change I would make would be to change the Temporal Loops to add something like 5 seconds to the timer, so that the player who plays it isn't pressed for time as much.
@Linkblade91
I think Hoptallus is an interesting design, but I fail to see what options it opens up in terms of deckbuilding. The most obvious one I can see is some kind of Mill Rogue or Battlecry Shaman deck using Hoptallus, but I feel like those strategies would be kind of annoying if they were playable. Maybe you could change the carrots to cost more and reduce their cost at the end of each round that they're in your hand?
I like Primal Fury, it seems like it'd synergize well with attack druid and big hand druid. If you want to make it a bit more proactive, you could make it add 1 copy of Claw, Bite, and Pounce to your hand, so that you could use Pounce that turn if you don't have extra Mana.
@MrRaphsody
I feel like Volcano might not be a good idea, since it can affect your own board. Other than that, you card seems really cool!
@Bigcums
If you want the requirement to be harsher, maybe it could be "If you've restored Health 8 times this game" so that it can't be easily fulfilled with a single Lay on Hands.
@Bannenparty
I'm not sure about Antonidas. Basically you'd want to run him in a Warlock deck with few spells to get a slightly overstated 5 drop, which seems really weak. However, if he were 4 Mana he'd be ridiculously strong. Maybe it'd be better if he was something like a 5 Mana 5/7 with "Battlecry: Shuffle a 'Pyroblast' spell into your opponent's deck for each spell in your hand" so that he has a real downside that could be leveraged as an upside in certain cases.
Based on feedback I changed my "Mistress of Fate" card to this:
Now she also serves the purpose of potentially disrupting your opponent's combos by reshuffling their hand. I made it a Deathrattle so it would synergize better with cards like Fel Lord Betrug and Dollmaster Dorian, and also so that her effect would be disruptable with Silence.
Mistress of Fate would be intended to be used in a Plot Twist deck to provide more consistency and to fulfill the Supreme Archeology quest faster.
My other potential card would be "Cause of the Light" which would support Pure Paladin. I think it is balanced, because it requires you to give up a card in your opening hand to make your deck better one turn 4 at the earliest (without Paladin card draw). It also naturally balances itself, since the more Neutral cards you include in your deck the more turns it will take on average for the card to go off. This would also allow for experimentation on a Pure Paladin deck with 10+ Neutral cards that just uses this quest to activate the Pure cards in the late-game.
I feel like Yriel's Token Spell leads to somewhat unfun games, since it essentially provides infinite damage for the rest of the game. I think if the token Spell were something more interesting that can close out games quickly it would be more interesting. Alternatively, you could do something like make Yriel something like "Start of Game: Shuffle 5 copies of 'Libram of XYZ' into your deck" and make "Libram of XYZ" a Libram that is on a powerlevel equal to most other Librams.
@R
I don't like White King. It will almost always be a 5 Mana 4/4 since the opponent will just trade with it, but when not dealt with it becomes a 5 Mana 4/4 with divine shield that deals 3 damage. A version of this design that I think would work would be to make him a 5 Mana 3/4 with Divine Shield and "When I lose Divine Shield, summon a 3/1 Pawn with Rush". That way he would always summon the Pawn.
@BasilAnguis
Nice card! The only problem I see is that the new "Dagger" isn't very impactful. It is essentially a worse "Give a minion Divine Shield and +1 Attack." I'd recommend maybe reverting Dagger to the old effect of "Give a minion +3 Attack and Immune this turn" to make it more impactful and unique.
@Bigcums
Dark Archivist seems really weak since there doesn't seem to be a way to really get his effect off. I'd recommend doing something to make him revive himself, such as "Deathrattle: Return this to your hand. If this has died 7 times, add 'Bhuzu the Blind God' to your hand instead." Aternatively, you could make him something like a 2 Mana 2/2 with Echo so that you don't have to copy him as many times.
@Cg8889
I think it may be a bit too good, since it's essentially a 4 Mana Assassinate with an upside. I think you could up her cost to 5 and maybe change her effect to "After this is returned to your hand, put 'Poisonous Cloud' on top of your deck".
I decided to make "The Scarecrow" from the Monster Hunt solo content. The idea behind him would be to sacrifice some of your weaker minions to get rid of enemy minions, and then cast "Scythe" to destroy your opponent's remaining high health minions. You can also drop him on turn 6 and sacrifice your board for a board clear on the next round.
It works somewhat similarly to "Plague of Flames" but due to the whole combo being 9 Mana and not requiring you to destroy all of your minions, I think it has significant differences.
I think it'd be far more interesting if Spells were just added to your hand, and then you could decide when to cast them and they'd cast at the start of the next combat. Alternatively, you could do something like make cards generate a 1 Coin Spell that reads "Discover a Spell. Cast it at the start of the next combat." That way you could have "When you cast a Spell" cards and still have how spellls work make intuitive sense. That way players could control the randomness and even save up Spells for hard matchups. Right now, there are simply not enough cards that generate Spells and not enough cards that get a payoff from it. If you had cards like 'After you cast a Spell, deal 1 damage to all enemies" then I could see a reason to go for a Spell based strategy. Also, you printed far too many spell-hate cards. I think something simple like "After your opponent casts a Spell, give this +2/+2" could be a lot more balanced and not immediately shut down an already underpowered mechanic.
LoR is actually free to play, so budget shouldn't be an issue. You're guaranteed to get a free Champion wildcard every week (along with a lot more cards) so you don't have to spend money to get cards. I actually have a full collection from just playing around 3-5 games every day and not spending money (and also being a bit stingy about crafting cards, to avoid duplicates). You can buy wildcards (but not packs) but Riot intended LoR to make money off of cosmetics instead of buying cards. The only reason that you don't start with all of the cards is because building up a collection over time is fun.
Hmm. If yoink is so powerful that players are purposefully running high-synergy decks to counter it, then it might be a problem. I do think that having to play around all the cards in your deck as well isn't very fun, so I think it does need to be changed (to either reveal the cards drawn or draw the lowest-cost card)
Well yeah but not every card in your deck is “The Ruination”, and you can apply that same logic to drawing from your own deck. If you mean that yoink has a higher variance in outcomes than drawing from your own deck, then I would agree with you. To fix that, maybe it could be changed to draw the lowest-cost card from the enemy deck? That way it wouldn’t be able to give players late game bombs that they didn’t include in their deck.
On average, a card from your opponent's deck will be worse than a card from your deck, so I think that it doesn't make sense to claim that yoinked cards are better than drawn cards. For every game in which your opponent yoinks a better than average card, in another game a player will yoink as worse than average card. The value of a card from the opponent's deck equals the average value of a card from their deck. In my opinion, the main issue is that drawing cards from the opponent's deck costs so much less than drawing cards from your deck. Since Pilfered Goods draws 2 cards for 2 Mana instead of 2 Cards for 4 Mana, Riot seems to evaluate cards drawn from the enemy deck as being worth 1 less Mana on average than cards from your deck, which I think is a little unrealistic. Honestly, the best solution is to make it so that the cards drawn are revealed, in order to reduce the value of the card drawn while keeping Bilgewater's ability to draw for cheap.
Maybe instead of Side Boards it'd be something like you can make 3 Versions of a deck (with a Core 30 cards that is the same between all 3) and you choose one of the 3 to play. That way it wouldn't increase the time it takes to play by that much but still allow for players to make different versions of their deck for different matchups.
Currently, LoR does have random mulligans, since they would definitely have informed players if it wasn't random.
However, why doesn't LoR make opening hands less random? What if LoR implemented a rule change that when you mulligan a card away you will always draw a card that costs less than it if possible? Given that LoR is online, I see no reason why they would keep Mulligans random when they have the ability to bias them to help the player. They could also do something like make it so that you never get a 7+ cost card in your opening hand, since it doesn't feel particularly fun to get a bricked out hand and be unable to play.
Thanks for the feedback! I think you’re right, I didn’t consider how much the different Hero Powers effect how you play the game. I think some of these would probably work as Hero Powers though, something like “Passive Hero Power. Your minions always attack the lowest health enemy minion if possible
I guess it would cause balance issues because the anomaly might make a certain tribe too good, and Blizzard wouldn't be able to correct for it by nerfing cards or changing Tavern Tiers. However, I think that the attack-changing Anomalies wouldn't cause this because most strategies have at least one minion that they want to protect, so it would still allow for a wide range of viable strategies. Time of Plenty and The Meek Shall Inherit might cause issues though, so if Anomalies was introduced maybe they wouldn't be one of the options. I think with balanced Anomalies it could still work though
I had the idea that Battlegrounds could have Anomalies that would change up gameplay, similar to the Dalaran Heist adventure. Each game, 1 random Anomaly would be selected and shown to players before they pick their hero that changes up gameplay and requires players to adjust their strategy. With Anomalies and rotating minion pools, each Battlegrounds game could feel like a unique puzzle! Here are some of my ideas of what the Anomalies could be:
Clarification: The anomalies that change how minions attack still respect Taunt.
So what do you all think about the idea of Anomalies? Would they help make Battlegrounds more fresh and fun, or would they just cause confusion?
I really like the +2 Spell Damage Mana Droplet, it seems like a really interesting card because the opponent can always know whether or not you can get the effect off.
Ekkeh
I like your card, I think it’s mostly balanced despite the potential for Spell Damage +7 with Frost Nova. If you wanted to prevent that, you could make it something like a 4 Mana 4/5 with “Battlecry: Gain Spell Damage +2 if an enemy is Frozen”.
Hordaki
I like your card, but I fear that it becomes mostly useless when the opponent has any minions on board, since they can just trade into it. To fix that, it could become something like a 3 Mana 3/3 with “Stealth for 1 turn. Your opponent has Spell Damage -1” or “Battlecry: The next damage spell your opponent plays has Spell Damage -1”. Also, I’m not sure if it qualifies as a Spell Damage card, since it doesn’t give a player positive Spell Damage or improve with Spell Damage.
I think Nab would be fine if it was simply underpowered and something you only see occasionally as a meme deck. Playing 1 game out of a hundred where your opponent Nabs something important and wins with it can be an interesting and fun moment, like when you get killed by an Elnuk deck that drops a 3/3 and 3 4/5s on turn 5. But when it’s 1 out of every 4 games that you lose due to Nabbed cards, it starts to feel unfair and unfun. I think if Pilfered Goods were simply moved to 3 Mana the Nab package would be a fun meme deck, like Elnuks, instead of an auto include package in every Bilgewater deck.
I think that the Medarda change is good, since he needs to be low cost to get any kind of value from him. My one gripe with him is that he still costs too much to really be used in an Aggro discard deck with Draven, so I think he'd be better as a 5 Mana 3/4 or something.
More Feedback (I'm skipping those I think already submitted)
@Demonxyz95
I like the Crystal Phoenix, it synergizes with random effects and the hand mage deck. The only change I would make would be to change the Temporal Loops to add something like 5 seconds to the timer, so that the player who plays it isn't pressed for time as much.
@Linkblade91
I think Hoptallus is an interesting design, but I fail to see what options it opens up in terms of deckbuilding. The most obvious one I can see is some kind of Mill Rogue or Battlecry Shaman deck using Hoptallus, but I feel like those strategies would be kind of annoying if they were playable. Maybe you could change the carrots to cost more and reduce their cost at the end of each round that they're in your hand?
Feedback for Page 3:
@Linkblade91
I like Primal Fury, it seems like it'd synergize well with attack druid and big hand druid. If you want to make it a bit more proactive, you could make it add 1 copy of Claw, Bite, and Pounce to your hand, so that you could use Pounce that turn if you don't have extra Mana.
@MrRaphsody
I feel like Volcano might not be a good idea, since it can affect your own board. Other than that, you card seems really cool!
@Bigcums
If you want the requirement to be harsher, maybe it could be "If you've restored Health 8 times this game" so that it can't be easily fulfilled with a single Lay on Hands.
@Bannenparty
I'm not sure about Antonidas. Basically you'd want to run him in a Warlock deck with few spells to get a slightly overstated 5 drop, which seems really weak. However, if he were 4 Mana he'd be ridiculously strong. Maybe it'd be better if he was something like a 5 Mana 5/7 with "Battlecry: Shuffle a 'Pyroblast' spell into your opponent's deck for each spell in your hand" so that he has a real downside that could be leveraged as an upside in certain cases.
Based on feedback I changed my "Mistress of Fate" card to this:
Now she also serves the purpose of potentially disrupting your opponent's combos by reshuffling their hand. I made it a Deathrattle so it would synergize better with cards like Fel Lord Betrug and Dollmaster Dorian, and also so that her effect would be disruptable with Silence.
Mistress of Fate would be intended to be used in a Plot Twist deck to provide more consistency and to fulfill the Supreme Archeology quest faster.
My other potential card would be "Cause of the Light" which would support Pure Paladin. I think it is balanced, because it requires you to give up a card in your opening hand to make your deck better one turn 4 at the earliest (without Paladin card draw). It also naturally balances itself, since the more Neutral cards you include in your deck the more turns it will take on average for the card to go off. This would also allow for experimentation on a Pure Paladin deck with 10+ Neutral cards that just uses this quest to activate the Pure cards in the late-game.
Feedback for 1st page:
@Linkblade91
I feel like Yriel's Token Spell leads to somewhat unfun games, since it essentially provides infinite damage for the rest of the game. I think if the token Spell were something more interesting that can close out games quickly it would be more interesting. Alternatively, you could do something like make Yriel something like "Start of Game: Shuffle 5 copies of 'Libram of XYZ' into your deck" and make "Libram of XYZ" a Libram that is on a powerlevel equal to most other Librams.
@R
I don't like White King. It will almost always be a 5 Mana 4/4 since the opponent will just trade with it, but when not dealt with it becomes a 5 Mana 4/4 with divine shield that deals 3 damage. A version of this design that I think would work would be to make him a 5 Mana 3/4 with Divine Shield and "When I lose Divine Shield, summon a 3/1 Pawn with Rush". That way he would always summon the Pawn.
@BasilAnguis
Nice card! The only problem I see is that the new "Dagger" isn't very impactful. It is essentially a worse "Give a minion Divine Shield and +1 Attack." I'd recommend maybe reverting Dagger to the old effect of "Give a minion +3 Attack and Immune this turn" to make it more impactful and unique.
@Bigcums
Dark Archivist seems really weak since there doesn't seem to be a way to really get his effect off. I'd recommend doing something to make him revive himself, such as "Deathrattle: Return this to your hand. If this has died 7 times, add 'Bhuzu the Blind God' to your hand instead." Aternatively, you could make him something like a 2 Mana 2/2 with Echo so that you don't have to copy him as many times.
@Cg8889
I think it may be a bit too good, since it's essentially a 4 Mana Assassinate with an upside. I think you could up her cost to 5 and maybe change her effect to "After this is returned to your hand, put 'Poisonous Cloud' on top of your deck".
I decided to make "The Scarecrow" from the Monster Hunt solo content. The idea behind him would be to sacrifice some of your weaker minions to get rid of enemy minions, and then cast "Scythe" to destroy your opponent's remaining high health minions. You can also drop him on turn 6 and sacrifice your board for a board clear on the next round.
It works somewhat similarly to "Plague of Flames" but due to the whole combo being 9 Mana and not requiring you to destroy all of your minions, I think it has significant differences.
I think it'd be far more interesting if Spells were just added to your hand, and then you could decide when to cast them and they'd cast at the start of the next combat. Alternatively, you could do something like make cards generate a 1 Coin Spell that reads "Discover a Spell. Cast it at the start of the next combat." That way you could have "When you cast a Spell" cards and still have how spellls work make intuitive sense. That way players could control the randomness and even save up Spells for hard matchups. Right now, there are simply not enough cards that generate Spells and not enough cards that get a payoff from it. If you had cards like 'After you cast a Spell, deal 1 damage to all enemies" then I could see a reason to go for a Spell based strategy. Also, you printed far too many spell-hate cards. I think something simple like "After your opponent casts a Spell, give this +2/+2" could be a lot more balanced and not immediately shut down an already underpowered mechanic.
LoR is actually free to play, so budget shouldn't be an issue. You're guaranteed to get a free Champion wildcard every week (along with a lot more cards) so you don't have to spend money to get cards. I actually have a full collection from just playing around 3-5 games every day and not spending money (and also being a bit stingy about crafting cards, to avoid duplicates). You can buy wildcards (but not packs) but Riot intended LoR to make money off of cosmetics instead of buying cards. The only reason that you don't start with all of the cards is because building up a collection over time is fun.
Hmm. If yoink is so powerful that players are purposefully running high-synergy decks to counter it, then it might be a problem. I do think that having to play around all the cards in your deck as well isn't very fun, so I think it does need to be changed (to either reveal the cards drawn or draw the lowest-cost card)
Well yeah but not every card in your deck is “The Ruination”, and you can apply that same logic to drawing from your own deck. If you mean that yoink has a higher variance in outcomes than drawing from your own deck, then I would agree with you. To fix that, maybe it could be changed to draw the lowest-cost card from the enemy deck? That way it wouldn’t be able to give players late game bombs that they didn’t include in their deck.
On average, a card from your opponent's deck will be worse than a card from your deck, so I think that it doesn't make sense to claim that yoinked cards are better than drawn cards. For every game in which your opponent yoinks a better than average card, in another game a player will yoink as worse than average card. The value of a card from the opponent's deck equals the average value of a card from their deck. In my opinion, the main issue is that drawing cards from the opponent's deck costs so much less than drawing cards from your deck. Since Pilfered Goods draws 2 cards for 2 Mana instead of 2 Cards for 4 Mana, Riot seems to evaluate cards drawn from the enemy deck as being worth 1 less Mana on average than cards from your deck, which I think is a little unrealistic. Honestly, the best solution is to make it so that the cards drawn are revealed, in order to reduce the value of the card drawn while keeping Bilgewater's ability to draw for cheap.
Maybe instead of Side Boards it'd be something like you can make 3 Versions of a deck (with a Core 30 cards that is the same between all 3) and you choose one of the 3 to play. That way it wouldn't increase the time it takes to play by that much but still allow for players to make different versions of their deck for different matchups.
Currently, LoR does have random mulligans, since they would definitely have informed players if it wasn't random.
However, why doesn't LoR make opening hands less random? What if LoR implemented a rule change that when you mulligan a card away you will always draw a card that costs less than it if possible? Given that LoR is online, I see no reason why they would keep Mulligans random when they have the ability to bias them to help the player. They could also do something like make it so that you never get a 7+ cost card in your opening hand, since it doesn't feel particularly fun to get a bricked out hand and be unable to play.
@KANSAS
Thanks for the feedback! I think you’re right, I didn’t consider how much the different Hero Powers effect how you play the game. I think some of these would probably work as Hero Powers though, something like “Passive Hero Power. Your minions always attack the lowest health enemy minion if possible
Edit: I changed "The Meek Shall Inherit" and "Time of Plenty" to have less of an effect on the game.
I guess it would cause balance issues because the anomaly might make a certain tribe too good, and Blizzard wouldn't be able to correct for it by nerfing cards or changing Tavern Tiers. However, I think that the attack-changing Anomalies wouldn't cause this because most strategies have at least one minion that they want to protect, so it would still allow for a wide range of viable strategies. Time of Plenty and The Meek Shall Inherit might cause issues though, so if Anomalies was introduced maybe they wouldn't be one of the options. I think with balanced Anomalies it could still work though
I had the idea that Battlegrounds could have Anomalies that would change up gameplay, similar to the Dalaran Heist adventure. Each game, 1 random Anomaly would be selected and shown to players before they pick their hero that changes up gameplay and requires players to adjust their strategy. With Anomalies and rotating minion pools, each Battlegrounds game could feel like a unique puzzle! Here are some of my ideas of what the Anomalies could be:
Clarification: The anomalies that change how minions attack still respect Taunt.
So what do you all think about the idea of Anomalies? Would they help make Battlegrounds more fresh and fun, or would they just cause confusion?
Feedback for Xarkkal, Ekkeh, and Hordaki
Xarkkal
I really like the +2 Spell Damage Mana Droplet, it seems like a really interesting card because the opponent can always know whether or not you can get the effect off.
Ekkeh
I like your card, I think it’s mostly balanced despite the potential for Spell Damage +7 with Frost Nova. If you wanted to prevent that, you could make it something like a 4 Mana 4/5 with “Battlecry: Gain Spell Damage +2 if an enemy is Frozen”.
Hordaki
I like your card, but I fear that it becomes mostly useless when the opponent has any minions on board, since they can just trade into it. To fix that, it could become something like a 3 Mana 3/3 with “Stealth for 1 turn. Your opponent has Spell Damage -1” or “Battlecry: The next damage spell your opponent plays has Spell Damage -1”. Also, I’m not sure if it qualifies as a Spell Damage card, since it doesn’t give a player positive Spell Damage or improve with Spell Damage.