Cactus Game Design Message Boards

I like it at first glance. Maybe I'll see about testing it for a few games. Helping solve massive resource swings would go a long way toward evening the playing field for decks that aren't 100% about "get everything out as fast as possible."

I'm in favor of this potential change. Massive resource swings due to large draw abilities are excessive. I think finding that sweet spot of what that max should be is key though. (I think somewhere around 11 or 12 more than likely) I think many potential strategies (particularly in T2) just aren't as viable due to being unable to keep up resource wise with decks like throne variants. Draw/search is so essential that it kind of a limitation for strategies too since you must be able to keep up resource wise or just never have a chance.

I'm more in favor of just limiting the amount one can draw per ability.

@Red - The big deal is a rescue where I can get a D9 before throne triggers right now. With a slight modification it’s a D10 before throne triggers.

The mulligan would just be for increasing consistency since less draw abuse will be in the game.  Not a must, just a potential idea.

This is bigger then a couple draw cards, I simply noted a couple of the most overwhelming draw cards.  The biggest thing a 12 limit does is stop ridiculous pop off turns, unless a deck is built to gain resources that are played down instead of held (Different cards seeing play is usually a good thing).  This limit forces cards into play sooner which creates a larger player interaction aspect.

Set rotation looks like it fixes things but players will find ways to be consistently acquiring resources at an exponential clip.  Endless Treasures, Hannah, Territory Class draw abilities (just naming a few) will continue to be super fast engines that hit hand limit often, especially when combined with defensive card acquisition. Just because I can get a consistent +6-12 with a couple older cards doesn’t mean I can’t get the same with new ones.  It just looks different. It’s an easy and quite frankly relatively lazy build for me with Throne now. The tools are so obvious, that doesn’t mean there aren’t other ways to be banging off crazy speed every turn.

How would you see a hard cap change limiting design in any way?

Instead of changing the hand limit, would it make sense to establish a draw limit?

I'm thinking, "Each player may draw a maximum of 6 cards per turn."  3 cards from draw phase would count towards the maximum so that way the defending player has a chance to draw the same amount as the attacker if they have the cards to do it.  6 may be too high or too low but I figure that's a good starting point and would prevent the 'pop off' turns.

The risky part of changing or punishing drawing with rules is that it stands to slow the game down due to LS drought.  Redemption has a very unique process for achieving the win condition that many other card games do not have.  I'm not familiar with many other games but the ones I am simply have a point system that you either have to get to or decrease your opponent so they can easily play with drawing however they need to.  But with Redemption, LSs have to be drawn (mostly) in order for a player to be able to win and reducing the opportunity for drawing makes that harder.

Set Rotation does help solve many problems but if any legacy format is to exist which likely will those formats will still have the same problem and there is nothing to say that a similar problem won't occur in the newer format.

We already have a legacy format it's called booster draft. But yeah a draw limit seems to just break a lot of things.