I wrote a grumpy novel. Contains twice the daily recommended dose of grump. Sourced naturally. TL;DR at the bottom. (I wasn’t even planning to write this stupid thing. But I made it, and now you have to read at it. Or TL;DR it, whatever.)
Some of us may disagree with this post, but at this point, can’t most of us tell that something needs to be fixed? Short-term, because you can now build a Magmar deck out of nothing but good cards that don’t hinge on your other cards to be good, with at least three of them being nuts.
But also fixed long-term, because whatever method Counterplay uses to make new cards spits out results, on a pretty regular basis, that are game-definingly strong in the right combination, or worse, by themselves. And they don’t tend to fix them unless they’re really bad, and then they have a track record of destroying them.
Inquisitor Kron could have been released as, or nerfed to, a 4/5. If that was still too strong, then something else could have been done, maybe 3/5, or 4/6 without provoke. Nope, punch him straight down to 4/4 and expect he’ll still see play, I guess in replace decks? Except those don’t have enough support to be a thing. We need more enablers than aethermasters and those replace-your-hand guys, or it doesn’t matter how many payoff cards we have, come on. The point is Kron went from a three-of in literally almost all top-tier decks to vanishing into the…aether. …Get it? …Anyone?
Meanwhile they also consistently produce seven-mana-plus cards that are so powerful they end the game if not answered right away with very little chance to come back, yet these cards see no competitive play and get called bad because Counterplay’s spent the game’s whole history loading it up with such newbie-tear-inducingly efficient and powerful removal that expensive cards with no effect the same turn and no dying wish just get erased, or dispelled and reduced to a sad vanilla.
Ritual banishing. Kill your thing to kill their thing. No we don’t care how far away their thing is or what’s between you and it, no we don’t care how much health it has or how much effort they had to put into getting it out, it dies. And how many cards do we have now that go “it dies” or “it’s vanilla” with not a care for how strong or impressive it is? And good thing we have them too, because as it stands all these absolute answers are the only armor between you and your opponent’s nuclear handgun.
Huge drops that no one plays aside, cards in the upper cost range with immediate impact tend to have that immediate impact in much the same way as a meteor, and there are plenty of cheaper less-scary-sounding cards that still have amazing immediate effects and/or will still murder you and empty your wallet for spite if you can’t deal with them cleanly.
Counterplay seems to like big, intense effects that can be described in small amounts of text and are easy to understand. There’s something to be said for designing cards this way, I suppose. It’s a good way to generate initial hype. It makes the cards feel punchy, cool and exciting. At first. Then you start to realize that the effects are stupid. Do you really think your game will be boring or something if you scale back to have effects that are merely large, rather than all trying to compete with each other and Jupiter for the title of largest object in the solar system besides the sun?
Silithar elder. Rebirth. Okay. Makes a silithar elder egg every turn. …What?
Grandmaster Nosh-Rak. Have some stats and some keywords. I’m sorry, the enemy general takes how much more damage? Half again rounded up? That would be a lot of extra damage right there. But it takes too many words to convey the point I guess, or it doesn’t sound punchy enough even though that’s pretty huge, or they don’t want to make people do math as complicated as half again rounded up, so it’s double damage. Whereas spiral technique does a flat eight for the same cost, and doesn’t leave an insanely threatening minion behind.
Gate to the Undervault. Can never be dealt with once it’s done. Makes demons forever. What’s a demon, a small token with an ability or something? Um. Well. Remember klaxon and vorpal reaver? Cue the Abyssian girls forming a metal band. Six, six, six, the number of the beast.
The old enfeeble. Everything’s trash now. For three mana. Exept zero-attack walls for some reason, which is a dumb off-flavor interaction. Seriously, why would you code it to set minions to 1/1 instead of lower? Having the ultimate debuff buff certain things just feels bad. But the main problem was it ruined any enemy board that wasn’t mostly wraithlings for dirt cheap, and instead of reworking it they just raised the cost to five and killed it as dead as Inquisitor Kron.
Swarm. Any kind of effective swarm. Have your mass answers ready, they cry. Don’t have them, you cry. That’s basically it.
And circulus’ ability is still insane, the only thing holding it in check now is it’s so fragile. Why not buff the stats to 2/2 and limit the number of illusions it can give you to one per turn? It wouldn’t die to pings anymore and it would still pay off after a single illusion. Your two-drop doesn’t need to generate card advantage and/or 2/1’s at the rate of two or three every freaking turn. But “Whenever you cast a spell, do this,” is easier to understand and sounds more “awesome” than “The first time you cast a spell each turn with this on the board, do this.” Heck, you could cut out “with this on the board” and just have it work that way without saying it, if you’re worried about cluttering up the card text. Same thing with blue conjurors and their endless arcanysts, although that’s somewhat more justified considering it doesn’t happen on their first or second turn.
And this is without getting into card combos with nuts effects. Assassination protocol, should have seen that one coming, you can’t just go out handing pseudorush to everything, conditional or not. And who enjoyed playing against artifact Songhai? Who enjoys playing against firestorm mantra Songhai? I’m guessing not a ton of people. …Flawless reflection.
Once you leave the newbiesphere, the whole game hinges on insane threats that are held in check only by insane answers. Meanwhile at least four or five hundred cards drift in the abyss of not-good-enough, and don’t see top-level play no matter how well-designed they are because they don’t have a high-enough power level for cost. Counterplay, you put effort into creating those cards, designing and naming them, giving them art and animation…so why won’t you fix them? How can you be afraid of breaking your game or whatever by making weak cards stronger, when you already break your game by releasing cards that are way too good, and then leaving all but the worst of them that way, ensuring the card pool stays eternally narrow?
(Okay, I hope I didn’t make any major mistakes, I’m tired of editing this behemoth. Why do I keep doing this to myself?)
TL;DR Counterplay seems to design their cards more by feel, flavor and cool factor than by what’s actually balanced, and it produces cards with a cool concept and stupidly low power level like suzumebachi and astral crusader, and cards that trainwreck the matches they show up in.
@ThanatosNoa, @stormshade, @ anyone who cares to listen, feel, flavor and cool factor are the right starting point for making good cards, no doubt, but it feels like that ends up being the stopping point in the design process enough of the time that it’s making things go seriously wrong.
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. Compliment well received though 
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