So Cosmo was in the middle at the start of the round?
Then Shang-Chi on the right wins against Zola while this play loses, and it feels like that has to be an option the opponent is considering. Otherwise they would have played Red Skull on Cosmo.
This season I’m creeping into the upper 50s trying to get to 60 again like last season (previous best). Last season the climb into the 60s was a cakewalk with a surfer deck but it stalled out there, and this season it’s taken longer for me to settle into something that wins consistently. A Cerebro-2 was actually surprisingly consistent for me until suddenly it wasn’t. Now I’m just working with a sort of “generally adaptable” deck since I don’t have Shuri, Thanos, or Galactus.
Got to 94 at the start of week 3, but then was having absolute shit RNG and nothing but Galactus and Thanos decks. Dropped into the 80’s, got back to 96 a few days ago, then everyone played that stupid friggin Lockjaw Thanos deck with Leech.
Fuck Leech. Especially in this deck.
Now back to 93. Still think I’ll hit infinite, but not loving how common the Thanos and Galactus decks are. Basically means if you don’t have Aero, Red Skull, or She Hulk then good luck winning.
My deck has Aero, She-Hulk, and Red Skull!
Same. She Hulk, Shuri, and Zero were some of my most recent unlocks. So I very much have recently contributed to the issue.
Because while I would like to be playing my JaneJaw deck, it just loses more to Thanos Lockjaw. The card draws just make that so consistent. It’s not prone to the same RNG fuckery I fall to. If Thanos was down a bit, it would be fun and viable.
Same with Sera, I also just unlocked Sera and Surfer (my luck is such that literally all the best Series 3 cards aside from Aero I unlocked in my last 12 cards, though I did get Death, Wave, and pre nerf Leader in my first 10, so I did have early luck. It’s just the meta shifted), but that’s not in a great spot right now. It can win, and I have, but finding a lot of Sandman these days.
And Combo decks just have it real hard. I got Gambit last week, and while Gambit-Wong is fun, there’s so much disruption in Cosmo, Armor, and Aero that it is hard to justify. When you rely on card draw to get the combo, and maybe get it fully half the time even with Zabu and Psylock to help, and then of the times you get it maybe 75% of the time you get hit with Cosmo, Aero, or Magneto? Blech
I don’t think there is any combo deck good enough these days to either beat the big bad decks, or get around disruption. Which makes me sad, because when Sera and such were dominating the meta, I didn’t have them. But now that I have Sera and Surfer, they’re just not good.
Correct, Cosmo was down in the middle. They played Shuri left and then dropped Red Skull on right. I initially thought of putting Shang-Chi on the right to kill Red Skull, but decided to try Magneto on the left, and since I had priority, Cosmo moved over and denied their Taskmaster.
Thanos/Lockjaw is kind of busted.
I bought Thanos a couple of days ago, and then averaged .78 cubes / game going from rank 84 to 100. And this wasn’t playing it seriously like the climb last season, this was playing while watching TV. It also includes about 30 less successful games before I figured out the ways this doesn’t work like a normal Lockjaw deck, and you can’t for example run Jubilee.
Looking at the stats, it’s pretty clear that the core problem is Quinjet giving a discount on the infinity gems. Games where I draw Quinjet were absurd at 1.15 cubes / game.
(Ignore Black Bolt at the top of that list. I tried to get some boosters for it to be able to spend an extra 25 credits that’s triggering my OCD. so just stuffed it into a Deathwave deck.)
I’m inclined to agree. I think that the stones abilities are powerful in their own right, and a small tweak to the verbiage and mechanics so that the stones count as starting in your deck, and don’t trigger on Quinjet would help.
The other thing is Leech. Turns out getting Leach out early, turn 3 or 4, and either for 1 energy, or where you don’t keep its downside (only 3 power) in play? Yeah not cool.
Abilities like on the Reality or Space Stone for 1 energy is also insane. Look at comps, cards like Cloak, Psylock, and Scarlet Witch. Being able to get those for free is nuts.
What’s the point of having a card that operates on “cards that don’t start in your deck” if you then rephrase those cards so that they count as starting in your deck??
There’s plenty of other ways to add cards to your hand from outside your deck, like Moon Girl, Sentinel, the entire SHIELD posse, Mantis, Cable, White Queen. Quinjet was played with all of those (usually to support a dino).
Space Stone doesn’t even have a comp, nothing else gives you the ability to move units of your choice out (rather than in). It’s perfect for Lockjaw, since the effect sticks for the next round even after the Space Stone has been replaced.
Right, I understand that there are other cards that also start outside your deck. I just don’t understand specifically redefining the Infinity Stones when they also start outside your deck.
To me it would be like saying “Magneto doesn’t count as a 6-cost card for purposes of Titan”.
In fact my primary deck since hitting infinite operates exactly on those principles!
It’s a fun deck, and more than capable of winning. It’s not ‘Thanos Lockjaw’ good, or even ‘Shuri Red Skull’ good, but can hold its own well against even those. If Thanos hits all stones that tends to win, and Sandman is a problem, but the ability to play lots of good cards cheaper has value. Coulson is secret MVP here.
It still works plenty, it’s just in all other cases you require other cards or locations to proc off the Quinjet. So you get 2, maybe 3 hits on a good game. Sentinels for 1 are good, but do clog space.
The big difference is the stones have good abilities in their own right, and being able to play them for free, and guarantee there to always be targets for Quinjet discount, and draw more each turn? It is stupidly OP right now.
The stones are good, and with Lockjaw are ridiculous value, even at 1 energy. Making them count as starting in deck for purposes of Quinjet doesn’t negate them or reduce their utility, it just curbs some of the turn 5-6 abuse they can dish.
Those other cards require either location RNG, or action on the player part to generate. It’s, best case, turn 1 Quinjet, turn 2 Cable, then turn 3 you can play a card at discount. Maybe.
The stones completely omit any middle step. And Thanos Lockjaw would still be good with that change.
It’s totally arbitrary whether Thanos has the ability of “at the start of the game, shuffle the six Infinity Stones into your deck” or “before the start of the game, shuffle the six Infinity Stones into your deck”. No additional exceptions need to be made in the text of other components, unlike in your Magneto example, so it seems fundamentally different.
There’s no thematic or mechanical reason for why one of the two would be better than the other, so if a balance change needs to be done, it’s a pretty tempting lever to pull.
But you don’t just redefine cards and say “Well those decks would still be good.” Someone can generate crazy-powerful cards using Odin and Wong, but they don’t just change the rules to say “Odin’s power isn’t repeated when played on Wong.”
I would argue that there’s no such thing as “Before the start of the game”, unless you’re talking about building the deck yourself. It seems arbitrary to redefine a game event as happening outside of the game, just to make a card-specific exception.
Let’s assume for the sake of argument that we and the developers all agree Thanos is too powerful and needs a balance change. If you don’t think that, well okay, different discussion I’m not trying to have right now. So, Thanos needs to be rebalanced…
…so sure, that’s exactly the kind of thing that’s on the table for discussion. Some balance changes are simple changes to energy or power, but others are more dramatic reworks of how the card works. Look at the change to Leader, increasing his power but redefining how his power worked. The change to Leader doesn’t cause any unexpected exceptions to how it interacts with other cards, it’s just a very big change to what the card does.
I’ll grant you that @jsnell’s proposed Thanos change to “before the start of the game, shuffle the six Infinity Stones into your deck” does have a more nuanced interaction (or lack of interaction) with some specific cards like Quinjet, but it would be no more complicated than understanding effects that happen after the game like Dracula or Captain Marvel. At worst you misunderstand it once, you read it closely, you understand and move on.
We’re not making a per-card exception to the stated effects as in your hypothetical Wong/Odin example, we’re making a fundamental change to the effects as written that will necessarily affect interactions with other cards (indeed, that’s the point), but consistently so.
The Zabu nerf did specifically call out the Spider-Man and Absorbing Man play, so they do indeed outline changes based on specific card combos.
Oh boy, new season, it’s loading
I got to thinking about the hypothetical of “Wong and Odin are too powerful”. For my part, I don’t think that combo needs to be nerfed because there are good counter plays and it’s hard not to telegraph it, but in the spirit of the debate I’ll start from the same position: assume we and the developers all agree that playing an Odin to a Wong location is out of line with the meta, being abused, and needs to be balanced down.
This requires a little bit more suspension of disbelief because it’s likely some third card that’s interacting that we’d be considering (is it Wong + Odin + Gambit? + Ironheart? White Tiger? Hazmat?), but again we’ll just assume Wong + Odin is devastating on its own and we need to fix it.
I don’t think anyone here would argue that it should be fixed by rewriting Odin to say
On Reveal: Activate the On Reveal abilities of your other cards at this location. Odin is unaffected by Wong.
or rewriting Wong to say
Ongoing: Your On Reveal abilities at this location happen twice, except for Odin’s.”
We could potentially increase Wong’s energy cost to 5, making it harder to play those other cards with a Wong and Odin combo, that would be the most trivial change possible, but perhaps we agree that makes Wong too expensive to use at all, even without Odin.
You could absolutely get weird with it and dramatically rethink aspects of the card. What if we changed Odin to a 5 energy cost and gave him this text:
Costs 1 more to play for each of your cards at this location. On Reveal: Activate the On Reveal abilities of your other cards at this location.
Now for the same original cost of 6 you can play him to a location with exactly one other card—if you want to play him somewhere with more than that, you’ll have to have some other method in your deck to boost your energy on that last turn.
This change could certainly also be determined to be so limiting as to make Odin useless, and might be rejected on those grounds, but it would still be a fair solution in principle designed to break up a specific combo that’s being abused without writing specific card-to-card exceptions or conditions into effects and powers, and I believe that’s a reasonable approach in keeping with existing powers and the history of balance changes so far.
This doesn’t tell you much else about Thanos other than to serve as an example of where I’m coming from on how I see them thinking about balance changes to cards. And I may be way out of line with the developers, but it might be better context for my Thanos thoughts above.
Yes, let’s assume for the discussion that Thanos needs to be rebalanced.
Right, and I have no problem with redefining a card’s specific powers. But the suggested change for Thanos would be adding a new gameplay concept that doesn’t really make sense (“Before the start of the game…”), and would effectively be there to make a gameplay exception for one specific card combo. Are there any other cards that have one-off exceptions like that?
Both of those happen “at the end of the game”, not “after the end of the game”. There is no “after the end of the game”, just like I think there should not be a “before the start of the game”.
I agree that card nerfs are made (and should be made) to specifically counter specific card combos; I just disagree with the idea of making one-off exceptions to cards. Changing the Infinity Stones to “Before the start of the game…” makes them a specific exception to the “Cards that don’t start in your deck…” rule. It would be like changing Absorbing Man to say “Copies the On Reveal ability of your last card, except if it’s Spider-Man”.