Cactus Game Design Message Boards

What could be done?

One possibility to change/fix this would be a fundamental change to the latest development our Redemption cards have received - but maybe there are more! This change would need to first define what is "red", "green", "brown", etc. in terms of a brigade resp. what is "evil Egyptian" "Musician", "Animals", "Persian" etc. in terms of themes: What makes each brigade/theme special (could be one thing or maybe more).
So make brigades resp. themes more unique - above all in their possibilities to acquire resources! E.g. (the following examples are taken unchanged from my conversation with that other player mentioned in the beginning, but as said the entire topic arose out of that player's thoughts, insights, ideas etc. but which I fully second!):

Red could get an ability like "Once per turn, if your Red warrior is banded into battle, you may draw 2".  Gray could get an ability like "Whenever you discard a card from an opponent's hand, draw 1."  Green could get an ability like "Whenever a Green ability shuffles 1 or more evil cards, you may draw 1".

For themes this could mean: "Whenever your Egyptian DCs a card from opponent's deck you may draw a card", "Whenever you ressurect a Ruth hero you may xyz ..." - And so on and so forth.
One could even be more divers in rewarding brigades/themes with resource aquisition in order to not "limit" them to one unique activity (like shuffling a card, banding, DC from hand etc. - those are just examples to get the idea.)
Today abilities that provide access are printed on all themes in more or less the same/similar manner, like The Dreaming Pharaoh provides more or less the same as Queen Vashti (in terms of access) - so there is no unique "brown" or "evil gold" part in either one. Same goes for all the "Horses" cards or Faith of Samuel/Words of Ecouragement/Reach of Desperation etc.

To summarise: Making each brigade/theme acquire resources (cards) in a unique way would be one possibility to start to "define" what it is to be Red or Gray or Green /Egyptians or Persians or Musicians etc. For me it feels there should be more possibilities which make brigades or themes more unique.

So I would like to know your feelings, thoughts etc. about it but also would like to read about your ideas, opinions and so on.

Hopefully I did not repeat myself too much in this post! 

Bye

@Sean: Thank you. But as said: It is not my idea. I got this input and the thinking behind from another player during a conversation - but during past months and weeks I was getting a stronger and stronger feeling to make this idea/thinking more public and subject of discussion!

I am fine with power creep and speed. I am not fine with power creep and speed all in the same brigade, i.e. Throne. If more themes, like you mentioned, got more speed/power, there will naturally be more versatility in decks.

Hm, but this is what happened so far to several brigades/themes - providing them similar kind of access and hence making them more and more convergent (they do not distinguish from each other as I tried to point out in the opening posts). Making themes and brigades more unique again IMO would result in much more versatile decks and concepts besides "setting up AFAP and rush each battle with one winning move (while possibly stalling/chumping during defense)".

I also would love to see certain defenses be able to beat certain offenses. This is a common theme in card games that colors/strategies are susceptible to others, but more dominant against others. I would love specific defenses to hinder speed, play first, protection, but be susceptible to low numbers, lone heroes, etc.

Nice idea!

I definitely agree that there are very few deck themes that do speed well and since higher level tournaments are won with speed decks, the diversity of deck styles among the top finishers at these tournaments is virtually nonexistent.  Sadly, the key to winning a higher level tournament 9/10 times involves vomiting your deck onto the table and shoving a bunch of heroes into battle with special abilities that make your opponent defenseless.

With all of that said, it is very important to establish the fact that there is absolutely nothing inherently wrong with speed and decks that use a ton of heroes in battle that would make them a threat to the game.  As has already been stated, the problem is that there are only a couple of deck themes that do speed very well and at a level that is magnitudes better than all other deck themes thus making those other deck themes essentially obsolete for players who actually want to place in the higher level tournaments.

While I definitely agree that all deck themes are being pushed towards speed more, I do not believe that such a push is a bad thing.  In fact, I would say it is necessary.  In any card game such as Redemption the key to victory is making a deck with good resources and consistent and effective ways of accessing those resources.  Get your resources out before your opponent and make sure those resources can actually pack a punch.  The key then to deck diversity is not to be afraid of speed and attempt to outlaw it.  Instead, "speed" needs to be obtained via different methods and with different end objectives.

Broadly speaking, you can achieve victory by either storming the gates with a bunch of heroes that are only strong together but benefit from large numbers or by using a lone ranger that is strong on its own by suffers from the inherent weakness of being alone.  It may be hard to stop an army, but is also hard to assemble one and resurrect it if it falls.  A lone ranger may be easy to "assemble" and then resurrect if it falls, but it may fall once or twice before it meets with success.

With the strategies above in mind, the way to move forward then is to provide "speed" options that can benefit each of these strategies.  "Speed" that enables a player to consistently get a couple of search abilities off early in the game will greatly benefit "lone ranger" decks that only need to setup a couple specific cards but not prove very useful to decks that need to assemble an army.  On the other hand, "speed" that helps a player start a drawing engine will greatly benefit decks that need to assemble an army but not prove very useful to decks that are trying to fish out 2 or 3 specific cards.

Throne decks mostly draw and Musician decks mostly search and recycle, so there is honestly already some level of diversity.  My hope and prayer for Redemption is that each offensive and defensive brigade will soon have a theme that can actually be competitive at Nationals.

I'm no expert but my 2 cents is the speed is a necessity to combat the power creep in the game because if your opponent can draw a card, then that card can do everything and cant be stopped.

It pains me to say this...but i feel a properly planned and implemented set rotation to scale back the game would help with this a lot.

(warning: ranting) and asfor the brigade colors being unique, my biggest gripe are the many characters that are multi brigade. like the heros that have 3 or even 4 brigade colors.
but getting back to powercreep, a reset like set rotation and scaling back the game to what it once was would invite a lot more creativity, for instance if you have a character that is multi brigade then sites loose there power because that same character who uses overpowered blue enhancements(random example) and game breaking white enhancements(random example) can acces that red site and the blue site and the white site and not have a site access ability because his own ability is overpowered and game breaking.

(gonna rant some more) and speaking of multi cards that do everything, I think that's something that seriously needs to be scaled back. cards that are both a good dom and evil dom, cards that are an artifact and enhancement, a site that's a character. basically it creates a situation of whatever you need you have. I feel the game would be a lot more fun if you didn't have the card you needed. I kno that may sound crazy but currently theres something like 4,000 cards in the game and atleast a 1/4 of them are multiple things. it realy kills a game knowing that your apponent may only have 5(random number) cards in there hand but that's 5 evil characters, 5 heros, 5 enhancements, 5 sites, 5 everything else in the game, and all of them cant be negated.

and speaking of cbn cards, the prevalence of cards that cant be stopped needs to be corrected. I played a game on lackey a few weeks back and by my second turn it was clear that every card in my deck was completely useless and it didn't matter what I played or even what I had in my deck, the game was over so I spent the rest of the game politely playing cards and pretending to still play the game knowing it didn't matter and id lost. and please do not suggest we need to implement cards that say "this card can negate a cbn card." id pull my hair out because the obvious solution to that is a card that says "this card cannot be negated, even by a card that negates cbn cards." (rant over, sorry)

I often play oldschool yugioh with a buddy of mine where mystical space typhoon can negate other magic cards when it destroys them and we run 3 per deck. and its a lot of fun because you kno at any given point your magic card can be completely shut down and the only way to stop it is by using your own mystical space typhoon to destroy his.
In redemption this would be using your destroy cards to destroy theres. but you have to make that choice to either stop them from destroying your card or to save it and destroy something else of theres that may actualy mess up there plan. but all the cbn cards throw this out the window and force you to strike first because if you don't then you loose and theres nothing you can do about it, even if you have a handful of cards that say "negate and kill everything."

strategy is involved when you have to carefully plan when and what cards you destroy and if your opponent is going to stop you, and what do you do if your opponent stops you from stopping them. but if your opponents cards cant be destroyed then is it still even a game? at that point u could just limit the deck to 10 cards and simplify the rules to "first player to draw a cbn card wins" cause that's about what u have. (sry last rant I promise)

however scaling back the game is going to anger many ppl that thrive on the current power of the game.
and set rotation is going to anger a lot of people also because everyone fears itll make there expensive cards worthless.

but I'm oldschool and only collects cards before the priests set so take my post with a bit of salt, there may be alot of the newer meta that I don't understand and I apologize if my ranting is way off topic.

I intend on replying to this tomorrow when I can read it on a computer. I do not agree with the bulk of your thesis, although I do think consistency is out of hand, but it is not a problem to let all themes search and draw. I will further expound tomorrow.

So all in all for me it feels the competitive part of the game convergences to similar deck builds where there is no real difference between concepts or themes: Regardless whether Throne, Flood Survivors, Koney etc.: If you are not fast and being able to win a battle in one move you are not very competitive these days in my opinion.

The drawback is that lots of themes and great resp. strong cards are not played at all or at least not very much and on the other hand all successful decks work similar, regardless of theme, concept etc.: Characters or cards that draw and win battles in one move (by either CBx or protection or a combination etc.). So flood survivors feels and play similar to Purple Throne Kings with Red Wariors, and Persians, Egyptians, other nationalities have characters who draw/search/take and enhancements which interrupts + draw + play next.

Throne, Flood Survivors, and Koney have absolutely nothing in common other than set up speed. I disagree with the general thesis that convergence is taking place at the top level.

Throne is a deck that wins by drawing a ton of cards, playing first, and having all of that attached to a band. Typically, Throne does not play a ton of enhancements and what it is plays are not CBN. Throne's selling point is that it is fast, not objectively more powerful than everything else.

Flood Survivors do not draw. The offense has 0 draw abilities and generates a card quality advantage by choosing what cards you need for that respective attack. Furthermore, the offense doesn't do broken things. The closest thing to broken is a single CBN battlewinner in Rainbow, that has condition that must be met to be CBN.

Kony was nothing like the above two decks. It could consistently deck out on Turn 2, as well as win two souls in a single turn through a busted Christ's Triumph interaction that should have NEVER worked. The other two decks are somewhat balanced and have weaknesses, Kony was a broken combo deck that shouldn't have existed.

When you consider other decks like Prophets and Musicians, I don't see how you can argue convergence because decks play battlewinners, draw, and search. I mean, given the constraints of the Redemption game engine, I do not see a way in which you can generate resources outside of those basic mechanics. Furthermore, each of the top decks has a significantly different win condition that makes it not work the same way as the others, which I see as a good thing. Throne wins by overwhelming its opponents, flood wins from behind, and prophets win by taking control of the game through different anti-meta techs such as Jonah or CWD. I see these as fundamentally different, even if some of the behind the scenes engine is the same.

So while I can understand that there seems to be some similarities in that top decks have card advantage engines. I think I overall disagree with that "deck themes" themselves are too convergent. Redemption being resourceless basically ensures that card advantage and set up speed will be the best strategy competitively. I dont think there is any way around that fact outside of set rotation which could control card pools to limit how abusive those strategies can be.

I feel like the core strategy of competitive deck themes (provided there is no tier 0 deck like I believe there currently is) is diverse enough that what they do is different and diverse. Whether that be how they approach card advantage, or how they aim to win.

I do think convergence occurs when you look at staple cards. I do think there is a heavy arguement for staple souls/doms or cards like Book of the Cov. contributing to convergence of ideas but that not a deck theme problem.

This isn't a problem exclusive to Redemption either. Mtg while it is a resource based game uses a ban list and has multiple formats to promote diversity of play. YugiOh has more similarities with Redemption and the competitive scene there mostly consists of either setting up an "unbreakable" board or breaking boards and winning shortly thereafter. Yugioh deals with this by utilizing its ban list to control what the top decks are and to make sure that no one deck spends too much time in the sun for the competitive scene. It also unbans things (there is also a limited and semi limited list but that doesn't really equate much to Redemption outside of maybe T2) to give new life to older decks.

All that said I think it takes a careful approach on how to address it and set rotation (introduction of a new format basically) address this the cleanest but other measures like ban lists should be implemented as necessary for the existing formats for the heath of the game while still trying to create new and exciting deck themes. And that is way easier said than done. Not impossible just difficult and takes a lot of careful planning and time.