And if you really hate recycled Void, recycled Apeirophobia is even worse as you literally cant do a thing without any cards.

Ok when you lose all characters it will not remove your hand, but Hastur will get enough stories by then and when you eventually play a character he can keep recycling.

 Except playing around Apierophobia was not at all difficult for any balanced deck.

 Deck with no T/Willpower with cards like Bloated Leng Spider,  Dangerous Inmate,  Erich Zann, Lost to the Madness against you or no skill? Really I dont see this space to play around, first one or two turns probably yes, but it does force you to play weird stuff and losing hand after few turns is still painfull. New Apeirophobia will still discard hand so its tougher to play recycling, plan a more devastating play etc, just your left with two random cards insted of zero.

Hmm maybe im not clear.

I really would like to see how can you work around it. For me it seems like working around it will put you so behind it doesnt really help.

And Yog/Hastur Aperio recursion can have stuff like Blood Magician just to give T to your highest skill character. It is expensive but if you destroy all hand so opponent cant do much and keep recycling Aperiophobia it should be still worth it.

 Well… you could try playing a human faction. Most of them don't have willpower or terror available in any strong amount. A rush deck or tempo control out of Miskatonic or Miskatonic/Silver Twilight just sends tons of weenies to stories and forces you to return cards to hand as soon as you try to get a presence on the board. Toss in Combing the Archive and you don't even have to worry about going insane or being wounded by way of struggles. You can resource the handful of characters with willpower you have if you facing a deck with Hastur, and everyone else you can safely put them into play.

The cards for the most part are centered around 2 cost so a 2-2-1 domain has you dumping stuff out every turn and drawing additional cards so even if they hit someone with Apeirophobia you want to stay insane you can ditch the cards or of course use a card that cancels or cures insanity.

With Seekers of Knowledge coming out in three months or so this strategy is only going to gain steam.

About Eibon, i'm thinking this card should be banned because you don't need to do a specific strategy, that card help ALL decks so it useless because if you don't use it, you'll be in trouble.

A deck non using restricted card, will put Eibon and will powned opponent deck.

This card is brainless, skilless, strategicless => go ban !

KrissS666 said:

I think we need a better criteria for banning cards.

Ignoring my usual arguments for not banning Eibon, it’s clearly not on the same level as say… Endless Interrogation.

Eibon is merely a well stated 3 cost neutral character that is can be surprising and is difficult to get rid of for the cost of 2 success tokens per jump.

Endless Interrogation will empty an opponent’s hand, likely on your first story phase, giving an opponent almost a zero chance of coming back.

You can fight a well stated character with ‘any’ deck, you can’t fight (at least not with any real consistency) that much of a hand disadvantage so early into the game.

To me, that is a huge difference.

For me the line for banning cards comes in when a card can too easily create a completely unfair situation. Preferably to the point where… the only way you can win the match is to run it yourself and hope to plays yours first or else likely lose the game.

Eibon is a strong card, in which most decks could benefit from. He is something you have to at least consider when building a deck. True, this guy can wreck some decks that are poorly built or built by players with a smaller card pools (which is why DoE tends to dominate more casual scenes). However, in its current state, it is most certainly not ban-worthy. Many decks are perfectly viable without the use of Eibon.

Didn’t mean to rant on you there. ;) But seeing the words like skill-less again… usually makes the Magnus angry! RAWR.
 

in fact that's the point i want to focus :"Eibon is a strong card, in which most decks could benefit from."

what's the point to have a STRONG card which , not most, but ALL decks could benefit (only thoses using a restricted card can't, but without the restriction they will !!! ).

that's the same with Master of myth :all deck can use it so all decks will use it (because cost neutral resource , cheap cost AND very strong in defense).

But as it's a defense tools, it's less critic than eibon with investigation icon !

I don't understand the good point to have a card that suit in all decks, that's non-sense in a game using different strategy depend on factions used.

And why ban this card?, because without it, the meta won't change but with it , it's a pain for many decks.

Lot of players remove it in casual game, but if you want to compete, you need to focus on it…

Plus, i can say an other thing : as you can use it from your hand to play by paaying success, only the player in advance can use it so it will be worst for the player in trouble: you can't tell that card save you when you're in trouble, because it give more advantage to the player with more success (so basically the player in better position to win).

That make a bigger gap between player conditions!

KrissS666 said:

I call some serious bullcrap on that assertion.

KrissS666 said:

This assertion is bullcrap in an even more major way. The kneejerk crying for card bans needs to stop if people are to be taken even remotely seriously. With such blatant dismissal of cards, it is very easy to just as easily and blatantly dimiss those opinions that lack any cogent reasoning as to why. I normally lurk to read these forums, but enough is enough already.

For over a year, I didn't even consider DoE for any deck. It's not just because my wife hates the card, but also because he comes with a trade-off. If you use him too much, you will never have enough success tokens to win. If you use him to speed up getting a fat character out (a la transient resources) then you short yourself in the long run. I happen to put him in a Jamberg/Yog deck because he finally fit somewhere that made sense.

The fact of the matter is, he's a good card. He's not broken (anymore). He doesn't belong in every deck. I treat him like any other good card; I'm wary of him, but I make sure I can handle him if I see him. Last I checked he still dies to a Shotgun Blast, A Small Price to Pay, Sacrificial Offerings, A Single Glimpse, Many-Angled Thing… He still gets bounced back to your hand with LJF or IoHH…

Hes not broken, but he does have best set of icons + willpower and auto recycling, maybe not that cheap, but often you can use 2 sucesses on story your opponent is winning in order to prevent it or to fight on other one. I think having him in most top decks proves hes worth it - i think it would be more interesting to see more variety. Nerfing him more so hes more situational rather than generally really good might help… but i guess all decks would just switch to rats and some fractions who have weaker chars would be put even more behind without him on table.

Glimpse seems to be more of a problem, but here i wonder how it will develop after players get used to id and find some solutions. The idea i think is fine, it just needs to be checked how much a "normal" deck needs to fight Glimpse and maybe give some cards that can deal with glimpse to fractions that have too much trouble. Its actually interesting as there are effects that put successes not in the story phase etc, maybe there are some unorthodox deck ideas that will shine against this. If not maybe some kind of errata like "put glimpse on bottom of the deck" or sth like that that would hurt recursion. idk…

KrissS666 said:

Basically, unless one of the other restricted cards is central to your deck, the Descendant is a very good choice. If you look over recent tournament decks, the Descendant is not the #1 choice, it's just one choice among many. And that is how it should be.

Ok, it was just my feeling and i explain why !

It's just when all decks you make, you auto-remove this card because it's an unfair card… maybe restricted isn't enough because in tournament you don't compete always with fair players, but if this card don't bother majority of players, keep it

 The idea of fair strategy in competitive game is really stupid:

http://www.sirlin.net/articles/playing-to-win-part-1.html

If there is a legal strategy that wins the game its good. Not cheep or unfair, good,  just play it. If it turns out to be unbeatable it needs fix, if players adapt its not broken.

With less competitive players just don't use cards that you don't like. (I still think some external list of "too easy to use by new players cards" would be nice for semi-competitive play)

My suggestion of factioned costs to put characters into play was to preserve flavor and theme and was not meant to address balance issues. I put 'cheat' in quotation marks to indicate I did not mean literally 'breaking the rules'. In the CCG there were cards designed specifically to help marry certain factions. It was effective and quite flavorful. I share your outlook on 'fairness' in competitive gaming Zephyr and jhaelen your evaluation of Descendant. Thank you Magnus Arcanis and Penfold, without the reason your posts bring to these forums I would have fled long ago!

Penfold said: