So far I have loved everything about this game. I haven’t played ranked but I’ve spent two days now just grinding Pandora. I really love everything about Pandora EXCEPT this Hammer of Aoros card.
Of course I’ve lost games to other treasure cards as they are meant to swing the game. But they should only swing the game ONE TIME. Your opponent has some crazy play and now you have to deal with it. The problem with Hammer is its infinite value.
The issues I have are:
-
There is increased RNG. The more he draws it before he fatigues the more value he gets as 3 resources for 5 damage is pretty damn strong.
-
It prevents him from ever losing to fatigue.
-
If he does fatigue its actually an advantage as he can use it twice per turn and kill you from max HP in two turns.
-
If he also gets the discard his deck creature, its an instant win if you can’t immediately kill him.
There is completely no counterplay to this card. Maybe in ranked it is different but its pretty dumb to have a Pandora setup where you think “I have to try to draft an aggressive deck in case he gets hammer.”
There is no way this card should be in Pandora.
Iona’s Mirror is almost twice as good as [insert treasure card here]!
Don’t get me started on Magpie! 
Honestly, it’s a really strong treasure, especially in an aggro or burn deck, but I find it’s pretty rare to lose to it. Sure, if you build your deck with fatigue as the only win condition, it’s going to get you, but I usually build grindy value decks and still outrace it unless I’m already being crushed by the time it’s played. Sometimes even if I am getting crushed, my treasure will just outvalue it and stop me getting crushed if it doesn’t get drawn again really soon.
Imo it could probably stand to get a moderate damage or Faeria nerf, but it’s not really as crazy as you make out, since unless it can immediately end the game because you’ve taken a lot of damage already, it doesn’t surpass the more “tempo” treasures until it’s drawn a second or third time, by which time it’s often too late to make up that deficit.
I guess my frustration isn’t that it’s overpowered but rather there is ZERO counterplay. You have no way of removing it from their deck. So if the game goes to fatigue, you simply lose, without being able to do anything about it.
Every other treasure tends to do something powerful - but you can then at least have the opportunity to counter it.
In my own experience, this card’s power is off the charts, even compared to the other treasures. The ability to hit face for 5 damage, possibly multiple times, verges on broken - and yeah, there’s very little counterplay since you can’t even guarantee yourself healing when making a Pandora deck (and you have no way to know the opponent might have a Hammer until you actually see it, unlike cards like Scourgeflame Specter which are really obvious a few turns before they appear).
If the winrate for this card is well above 50%, I’d like to see the ability to hit the opponent’s orb with it removed (or at least reduced in power to 3), or to have its cost increase by 1 faeria every time it’s used.
It’s very important that Treasures are relatively balanced (against each other) in Pandora, because players don’t get the ability to choose anything they want to add to their deck. Card imbalance actually creates unfair playing fields in this mode.
(P.S. - I also feel like Equinox Automaton is an extremely powerful treasure, but I don’t see it get played very often, which surprises me because its reliable lifetime utility is insane.)
