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I thought you found out the answer to this question the first evening of Nats

For purposes of discussion, yes you can build a judges offenses and it will win a few games if the opponent can't answer Moses or Gideon but IMO Martyrs is just a straight up stronger offense.

Judges also lack good reserve access. I guess you might make up for that with the defense you pair them with, but that’s definitely a factor in their viability.

Years ago Judges were terrible. Auto (Bacon), among other things changed all of that. It’s time for the Judges to not be top tier anymore. If we’ve done our job with “move over bacon” (RoJ) then Judges are no longer as dominant as they once were.

I don’t think that they will win any 2 player categories, but still potentially can hold there own in a multi-player category.  Friday night at Nats I didn’t have a deck or even a thought of what to play and it was super late when I got back to the hotel.  I decided to go with something “proven and fast,” and built an “old school” judges and Pharisees deck (with new cards included) and took 3rd in T2-MP mostly because it was fast, had enough power and hit on a Hail Mary during the last game.

Yeah clay has successfully power creeped Judges into oblivion

Turns out that having an entire offense that searches deck, discard, or Reserve trumps a few heroes that D2 and a few CBN GEs

Indeed. For me I'd also like to see old and very old cards strenghthened again without reprinting them or create several newer copies of it.

Point is power creep even though it is good leaves the older sets in the dust and they should be rotated out because quite frankly their time has come. And what about the cards that alot of people use from those sets? like FA, three liner, NJ, etc. Well those should be looked at to see if they were too strong in the beginning and if not reprint them or reprint more balanced versions. But don't drag along the rest of the under-powered useless cards just because rotating sets is bad somehow. That's what a "legacy" category can solve let all the outdated cards play around in that sandbox.

And for something to be better than judges with only adding new cards is out of control power creep imo. If the goal is to change the "top tier" offense every year the power creep will never stop and we will end up having sudo-set rotations anyway because the old cards will become useless even if new cards for that theme are printed.

This was kind of my thinking...  What makes Clay more special than Judges?  Either way, one offense is the top dog.  Is it because Judges was a top offense for longer that it was deemed "unhealthy" for the game?

Ironically, CoW's intentional power creep (to weaken the Greek sitelock deck) created a sort of balance in the top offenses, since Throne and BoM decks were similar in power.  And there were a surprisingly large variety of both of those offenses (some players even combined them).  But RoJ erased all of that, and we are back to 1 dominant offense.

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But RoJ erased all of that, and we are back to 1 dominant offense.

I honestly don't think that's the case.

CoL, Martyrs (with several different variants), Revelation Angels and Throne are all dominant offenses IMO.

Revelation Angels and Throne are notably weaker than Martyrs.

I have a Revelation Angel deck that is nearly undefeated in dozens of games played. If that's not considered dominant, I'm not sure what is.

In that case I may very well be wrong. This is the first I've heard of an angel deck that consistently beats Martyrs. What defense are you running in it?

Quote from: The Guardian on January 24, 2018, 11:22:08 AM

I have a Revelation Angel deck that is nearly undefeated in dozens of games played. If that's not considered dominant, I'm not sure what is.

Tell me everything

I'm surprised you commented on this before anything Leviathan related

Quote from: tripleplayNa1 on January 23, 2018, 06:36:42 PM

Point is power creep even though it is good leaves the older sets in the dust and they should be rotated out because quite frankly their time has come. And what about the cards that alot of people use from those sets? like FA, three liner, NJ, etc. Well those should be looked at to see if they were too strong in the beginning and if not reprint them or reprint more balanced versions. But don't drag along the rest of the under-powered useless cards just because rotating sets is bad somehow. That's what a "legacy" category can solve let all the outdated cards play around in that sandbox.

I fully agree that set rotation should happen, in fact I think we are getting close to a point where it not happening will be quite harmful to the game. Once the meta settles after this year's set I'm planning to experiment building decks based on different set cutoffs and see how much of an impact it would actually have and if anyone's fears on the matter are justified.

I don't know how it would be harmful, but the fact is your project has in essence already been done.  Travis has been gathering the deck lists for the top 10 decks for the last 2-3 years.  All you have to do is simply look at that information and you can determine if sets have basically been cycled already.  I would also be interested to know what older cards need to be cycled out due to their power?  If everyone would take a look at their cards that they take to tournaments, you see that we don't have to ban cards because the players do it.

Let us look at my collection.  I am a type 2 player so I carry at least 4 of every card, which takes a lot of room.  So I only carry cards that might truly be played.  I do still admit that I have cards that don't fall into that category for most, as I have some cards that can go in a deck, but often never see play.  So if we examine the cards I have from the sets you will see that we are doing it ourselves.

Set:     Carry:     Total:     % of set

P:         36           88          40.91%
A/B:      0            15            0.00%
OR:       6            155          3.87%
PR:        7            106          6.60%
WO:      13           81          16.05%
WA:      16           171          9.36%
C/D:     1             103          0.97%
AP:       20           207          9.66%
PA:       27           160         16.88%
K:         51           250         20.40%
E/F:      10           100         10.00%
AW:      11           150           7.33%
G/H:     11           100         11.00%
PS:       76           251         30.28%
FF:        91          130          70.00%
RoA:     83           130          63.85%
TeP:      48           60           80.00%
DI:       87           115          75.65%
I/J:       61           100          61.00%
EC:      119          146          81.51%
PC:       87           93            93.55%
CoW:    127         129           98.45%
RoJ:     129         129          100.00%

So if promos show the current state of power in this game, so you can safely say that any set with a percentage below it is under powered compared to the overall game.  So tripleplay isn't wrong saying the foils are the "drop off."  I guess I'm just trying to understand why we need rotations when it is happening without making it a rule.  Plus leaving them in rotation allows to potentially bring them back to the lime light even if it is only for a short time (ex. Gideon).

I don't know how it would be harmful, but the fact is your project has in essence already been done.  Travis has been gathering the deck lists for the top 10 decks for the last 2-3 years.  All you have to do is simply look at that information and you can determine if sets have basically been cycled already.  I would also be interested to know what older cards need to be cycled out due to their power?  If everyone would take a look at their cards that they take to tournaments, you see that we don't have to ban cards because the players do it.

It isn't as easy as looking at raw data for which old cards are most played going from there. The post rotation meta could make certain good cards unplayable and current unplayable cards top tier. This also overlooks the primary points of rotation. It's not about getting most of the olds cards out of the meta, it's about getting the 1% of old cards that will be auto includes in their respective decks for eternity if they aren't forced out via bans or rotation. The meta will never self-correct Throne or The Deceiver away.

The primary three benefits are opening up design space, lowering average deck consistency, and keeping the meta fresh. You can argue that the latter is being accomplished and to a degree it is but with the number of auto include cards increasing every year that will slowly become less true. Rotation also serves to get rid of cards that, while not broken enough for bans to be implemented, are regarded by many people as unfun and generally unhealthy.

Regarding design space, the easiest example is Throne. Throne rotating out would allow them to print solid red and purple cards without the risk of Throne decks dominating everything else. Rotation also prevents decks like CoL from existing because less cards in the card pool means the lower average deck consistency and CoL only works because of near perfect consistency. Losing TexP alone would completely kill the current CoL strategy.

Average consistency has been a slowly creeping problem for a while but RoJ skyrocketed it. As a general rule, the more cards there are in a game's card pool, the faster and more consistent the average deck becomes even if cards that exist for the sole purpose of increasing consistency are avoided.  Cards that do intentionally increase consistency are very dangerous (even more so that in other TCGs because of Redemption's lack of a resource system) and once you reach a critical mass of them the game becomes impossible to balance. Older examples of this kind of card are Consider the Lilies and A Soldier's Prayer. Those two cards are very dangerous and high on the list of cards I would be glad to see removed from the game via rotation and they don't even work in most decks. Cards like The Ends of the Earth and The Deceiver are even scarier because you can play them in literally every deck. Without set rotation, the number of Ends and Deceivers will slowly but inevitably rise, straggling deck diversity.

Every card game eventually has these problems and the reason symptoms haven't been showing much until now is that power creep functions as pseudo set rotation but now that the power creep is slowing down (Which is a good thing), the consistency creep will get exponentially worse until either bans or rotation are implemented.