As I do with most of my posts, I’ll start with a story:
We were at about mid-game, when my opponent suddenly pulled out a whale. As I was playing mono-green I did the best I could - taunted it, and began hitting it with my creatures. In about 3 hits, it was down, and I got my swallowed creature back. The next turn, my opponent placed down another whale, and I knew I lost that match…
I don’t blame my opponent. After all, while the 8 lands are hard to place initially, once the lands are there, they may be re-used, and since the second whale was already in the player’s hand, who can blame them for using it?
My problem is that, being a 6/8 with flying, swallow and charge 3 makes the Azure Skywhale the most powerful creature in Faeria! Let’s compare it to other cards of similarly match-deciding power:
Garudan, Azrai, Tethra, Baeru, Tarum and Ostergoth - all are expensive cards to summon. As they are Legendary, they are limited to 1 per deck as well.
Crackthorn Beast and Soul Eater - both powerful cards, but their exact power is decided by random factors.
Icerock Behemoth and Dream Reaver- expensive
Scourgeflame Specter - needs to hit the orb directly for maximum benefit.
As you can see, they all have big drawbacks. The Azure Whale has none. I suggest it should be made a Legendary, to make Faeria fair again! Pun intended
I am still not convinced this is the way to go. It’s still possible to get more whales, they get a new synergy with Magda and Time of Legends and it really only solves the problem with the card being too good for a while, because new broken synergies are bound to come, putting us in this position again.
Plus, it also doesn’t fit the game thematically. Legendary creatures are THE unique characters of the game. One of a kind. Fugoro, Seifer… these creatures are, well, legendary. On the other hand, Oversky is full of sky whales, it just breaks the immersion.
Right now, the things I don’t like are the fact that swallowed creatures can’t move when they’ve just been released, which makes the mechanic even less fun and rewarding to play against. Then, I’m worried about this being yet another board-ignoring mechanic. I think we have enough of these already.
I believe that the most intuitive way of changing the whale is to make it only swallow adjanced creatures. It doesn’t bring any contrived weird limitations, makes the board matter more and at the same time makes playing the whale much more predictable, easier to prepare for and more difficult to plan.
Now it’s mostly a universal autopilot answer to everything bundled with a win condition without needing much thought put into it. But the design itself is intersting and good. I want to see it work.
I’m actually starting to get more and more concerned about the Wild cost mechanic that was introduced with the expansion. While swallow can be tweaked to be actually fun, I’m slowly getting the impression that wild lands are going to be very problematic in the future.
Not a big problem - Aurora’s creation is an Epic card, expensive to craft and rare to get. Very few people would bother running 3 of those
This would be harder to program and make the description unnecessarily long. Legendaries are already pre-programmed as something you can only have one of, so making the whale Legendary would be easier.
Changing the Swallow mechanic in general, so that it only works on Adjacent creatures, is IMHO, the absolute Best way to nerf it. Right now, if a deck contains 3 Whales and 3 Crystal Flowers, the player has a massive 20% chance of drawing a swallower, neutralising any threats for long enough to win, unless the opponent has lots of removal. The adjacency requirement would at least make the placement of flowers harder and the wales easier to counter.
If the Swallow mechanic gets nerfed in any way suggested on the Hub boards, the Wild cards will no longer be overpowered. The only problem I (and many others) see is the so-called “loss of unique colour identities” due to being able to include many of the same cards into literally any deck
You can have only 1 Legendary specific card in your deck. While only one instance in play of a set of whales makes it not Legendary at all, because you can still have three of them in your deck and play all three of them from your hand as fast as the opponent clear the first ones.
Programming that condition is a joke (i m a developer).
The long description is not relevant for a good mechanic in play (and there are pop-ups to add info too, as it already works pretty well for all key words for what I have seen).
“Swallow only adjacent creatures” is a very strong limitation for several reasons: easy to summon important units in secure lands; it requires land development most of the times while attacking (it’s what happens similarly with barracks, very occasional effectiveness but this time you have to create the land below flower/whale), and that limits the use of the wheel too forcing to use land creation instead of +1 or draw card just to use a swallow unit. THIS implementation is harder to implement than my suggestion for the number of procedures that it invokes, and affects heavily the current game design and the balance of the whole expansion probably, because their statistical effectiveness has been used by testers composing decks using all the new cards (also with the ones not released yet). In practice they know whales are strong removal most of the time, so they should also make a chain of nerf to make easier removing new strong cards (ex. all the new legendary cards that at the moment can be easily swallowed).
Playing in God league I can assure you that dealing with only one whale at time is not a big deal at all, it has the same stats of Ogre Battler in practice (Ogre costs 2 more faeria but just 2 special lands). The problem is the summoning of (cheap) whales in chain (in particular with 3-wishes / Aurora creation combinations) or a very early summoning (with land ramps decks).
Also the balance of the game doesn’t considerate the rarity of the cards. EVER. The rarity just affects the average battle chests number that f2p/semi-f2p players have to open to get full sets or to craft the missing cards.
It is true that card rarity stops being relevant once the cards are already in the deck. However, the harder the cards are to obtain, the fewer people will have them. The percentage of people at God rank, who are the only ones practically guaranteed to have a complete card collection, is always going to be relatively small.
This is probably the main problem with the Oversky - all the new cards are available, as full sets, to anyone with either time to grind the gold, or money to pay for gems to buy the expansion, regardless of skill level or experience with the game.
Regarding the rest of your post, I’m glad that the community here writes such constructive, well-argumented posts. The other 2 threads on the subject, “Swallow everywhere” and “The expansion did more harm then good” are also full of great suggestions. With this kind of feedback, we’ll get the nerfs we want in no time at all!
I don’t think card rarity is a consideration at all for the game balance. It may affect how easy it is for a new player to get into the game, or how well the company turns a profit, but it really shouldn’t affect the balance of the game much at all. Aurora is legendary - and therefore very rare/expensive, but she found herself into nearly every blue deck before Oversky. Similarly, the Dreamweaver or 3 wishes decks were full of very expensive cards, yet very popular in the meta due to their unique playstyles and competitiveness.
