Yomi-O's now with 200% more fireballs (v3 wishlist)

Yes certainly! I like your conditional no normal draw version quite a bit. I’d probably have to see them in action to decide which I prefer.

I think making PCP cost two cards nerfs “topdeck hero” DeGrey playstyles without really bothering more conservative playstyles. The smaller a player’s hand, the more it hurts to have to discard and the more likely they are to have to discard something valuable. If 7 cost two cards to discard, topdeck hero DeGrey would be weaker because 7 would be a much less real threat from a small hand, while DeGreys that build hand more are rewarded by being able to realistically threaten 7 flips.

As a real example, I was recently playing a game against Leontes in which I had AA and 1 random card after dumping most of my hand to bring him to ~30 life and powering up. I topdecked a 7, beat his FDB/dodge mixup by spending my 1 low value card to flip 7, and confirmed into AA for lethal. This wouldn’t be possible if PCP cost two cards to flip.

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Quite a lot of discussions here to catch up on so I’ll summarise:

  • I agree with @zqxx that the majority of Arg matchups are fine and he doesn’t need loads of changes for no real reason.

  • Completely agree with @fenixoftheashes that Temporal Distortion could get it’s +1 damage back if we nerf Time Stop. The idea of not needing to do anything weird with Quince would be especially great.

  • On DeGrey, I can finally see why making PCP cost 2 cards would make sense. I could see either PCP nerf working tbh. Best to have them as options for testing. Troublesome Rhetoric definitely needs it’s lifegain reduced. Is 8HP too little to be worth using though?

One question @hobusu, what flavour is broken by having DeGrey on 85HP? Personally I think it would be completely fine to nerf both HP and TR a little (say 5HP and 2HP respectively) to give him a moderate survivability nerf overall.

Also, I know I still owe @mysticjuicer some Jaina feedback, I stupidly left it drafted on my work PC so I’ll put that up today sometime

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Rather than have Geiger’s TD throws become enders, I’d rather make his 0.0 Aces lose their pumps, if he absolutely needs another change besides losing his +1 damage and getting Gold Bursted out of TD.

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If you had one more card the same situation would still have happened. shrugs Sometimes you draw the card you need when you need it.

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The Geiger-Quince matchup is not nearly as bad as suggested, and letting jokers knock off TD will go a long way toward making it even better. Quince player has to know to make sure to threaten AA off of KD, but that’s a matchup knowledge thing. That being said, I would actually prefer the nerf to make him unable to combo off of time stop throws over the one to his damage in TD, with the reasoning that it would increase the mind games when TD happens, and the more mind games the better.

There don’t need to be big changes to Arg’s Hex. The “unable to heal” clause on bubble Shield is probably fine for anti-gloria tech, and as far as vs. Lum and Oni, a nerf to arg’s counter should be fine for Lum and Oni maybe just needs another rank of throw, things that have already been suggested.

As far as Jaina goes, I say take away Knee Bash and make that throw just have normal throw properties, including the speed that goes with a throw on a 6. It would slightly nerf her dodge followups, but give her more consistency on punishing throws and make 6 spin maybe do some actual damage, plus give her more consistency on throws and let her save her blocks a bit. I know people want this mythical “flavor” of shooting arrows and being some different thing, but she is what she is, and this seems like the easiest way to accomplish multiple goals for her regarding her power level.

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Agreed, and I don’t really think he does.

Giving Jaina an actual real 6-throw is a thought.

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Yes, I had thought of that. It seems that you value nerfing “topdeck hero” DeGrey more than buffing high-hand DeGrey—which makes sense, since the nerf is larger than the buff. I’m not entirely opposed to the idea, but I think the smaller change (in terms of effect, not number of words) would be nice to test first. We should probably test both ways, though.

I don’t think so, but that is why I’d said originally that I wasn’t “sold on it being specifically 8, but either that or 10 should be acceptable.” It would definitely make me more likely to use them either early in the game, before the opponent has efficient enough combos to make 8 hp of healing look inconsequential, or more likely save them to play multiple at once.

  • The character who punches villains with his fists of justice currently has the same starting life as characters like Grave, Midori, and Onimaru, indicating a similar body size to them among other things. Reducing his starting life would make him seem like he was more similar to Jaina, Gwen, and Zane.
  • As I said, reducing life by only 5 is mostly inconsequential. It usually means that the opponent has to land one card fewer per game, not counting low normals. A change to Point, Counterpoint is more substantial, partly because it changes both players’ valuation during turns where it’s used (whereas starting life changes never change valuation unless they put lethal in range) and also because he can potentially heal up to 48 life per game if he plays all four and the opponent plays into all of them. This would be reduced to 40 and 36 if PCP was changed to 10 and 8 life, respectively. Yes, that’s unlikely in a real game, but the threat of it is substantial and each time the opponent decided to disrespect PCP they’re essentially setting his starting life that much higher retroactively. Thus, in some games his starting life can secretly be as high as 138(!) in 2nd edition, though “only” 102 is more likely. If we go with 8 life PCP as an example, that means his most likely “effective starting life” from a single successful PCP is 98 and his highest possible is 126, meaning that the effect on a single success is about the same as if we’d reduced his starting life and the maximum effect is much greater.
  • I’ll only allow DeGrey to have less than 90 starting life if Quince goes down by the same amount, since they both have 90 right now. Good luck convincing any Quince mains to do that! :wink:
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I still don’t like messing with PCP. Mess with TR I instead I guess, if he needs it, but hitting Aces feels like enough.

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Yeah, honestly I think removing MHG from AA is enough. After all, adding AA to the list of things affected by his innate was the only change between 1st and 2nd edition, so he’s been “good but not overpowered” for a while now. We don’t want to bring the nerf hammer down too hard on any one character, especially if lower-tier characters are getting buffed, and we also don’t want to balance the fun out. Thus, right now I’d say that changing his innate is consensus and all other DeGrey changes should be “under consideration” at most.

I think the changes that are listed Consensus in the BoB thread as of the time of this post are a lot more elegant than most of the other changes under consideration, generally making the game more consistent and intuitive as well as evening up the tiers. (The only one I’m not in love with is Bag of Tricks not getting 7s back, as opposed to some other fix.)

I think we should start testing those changes, and those changes only, to get some data before we continue our theorycrafting.

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Yeah, I think I agree. Hitting Surprise Gift a tiny bit is probably fine all on its own.

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If we want to make her gameplay less heavy on 50/50s I continue to suggest moving 7* to 8*… but we’ve been over that already.

The important thing right now is to find out whether the current consensus changes will have their desired effects. If they do, that might give us more of an idea what needs changing for more difficult cases like Jaina and Midori.

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Anyone up for some games at 7pm Eastern tonight?

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That’s about 1AM over here, but if I’m still awake by then… sure!

I’ve actually changed my opinion on the Bag of Tricks to 8 change. Before I joked about not wanting it because it would ruin the great Japanese translation (since the number 7 gets used in the Japanese name for Bag of Tricks). Now I think there’s a bigger reason to keep it on 7, which is that having the ability and the fastest throw tied to each other leads to her not functionally having more than the normal number of uses for 7-throw.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Setsuki player grab more than one 7 using Bag of Tricks. Why exactly that is isn’t as important as noting that players already are limiting themselves to only one copy of it per retrieval, which means that they’re trading the 7 in their hand for one in the discard. Because of this, every time a player uses 7 to throw they’re putting it in the discard “permanently,” since the cost to get it back out is another 7 (so the same number of 7s remain in the discard). Basically, it’s already fine because the opportunity cost of using the 7 as a throw is that you lose access to a Bag of Tricks with it unless you take multiple, and no one does. Moving it to 8 wouldn’t actually fix anything imo, since if you want to get your fastest throw and use it over Bag of Tricks you’ll just get the 7 and throw with it either way, and the rest of the game your fastest throw no longer has that opportunity cost of losing Bag of Tricks.

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Good thinking. (This is why I am having second thoughts about being so active in this conversation.)

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While I’m thinking of it, here’s an interesting article about hacking games. It was written with role-playing games like D&D in mind, and I don’t agree with everything he says, but he makes some good points about the dangers of tampering with an existing game and gives a good approach for doing so.

Absolutely! I’ve made a poll in the Bureau of Balance to make it easier to see which characters are being tested by whom so that arranging for specific matchup tests can be done without having to ask “who’s playing as Lum again?” So everyone who has expressed interest in helping to test these ideas, please vote! I would encourage everyone to mostly stick with their mains or other characters that they’re fairly familiar with; it’s fine if you want to do more than that, but having the most experienced players of two characters play against each other will probably be more useful than if one or both aren’t quite as skilled with their character.

also mj if you don’t vote rook the entire community will disown you

Yup, already added my vote. :slight_smile:

And, sorry, just to mention re: the possible Geiger change to TD throws - I don’t see how new Troq doesn’t win that MU, if that’s the change. It’s already a faaaairly close MU right now, just because Geiger’s harder to play than Troq, and none of the proposed Troq nerfs do anything to truly change the nature of the MU from his side, imo.