Slam introduced a cool concept of attack radius, and I thought of some others that might be interesting. I also suggest a nerf to slam.
Pierce
Swipe
Shockwave
Nerfed Slam (Red is full damage, purple is reduced damage.)
Uuuhhh someone has lost to green am I right? Slam is not that powerful if you are not an idiot and you know how to position your creatures
You mean it’s not that powerful if it doesn’t work? Lol. But no, I use slam and think it’s pretty OP, especially when I’m using it around the enemy orb. A slam creature can potentially hit 20% of the board for 7+ damage, and it can even avoid retaliation by targeting a structure/orb/weak creature.
slam is obviously a good mechanic is not easy to play around it and sometimes is not even possible.
however slam alone is not that insane i think the combination of slam+mobility is really broken, sagami+slam ability is insane. But if u just think about kodama slam and jump for only 7F that’s the real broken staff i think
I’ll agree that slam can be annoying to play against especially if you don’t have an answer to it, however I don’t agree that it’s OP. If there is ever a creature on board with slam, never bunch your creatures together no matter how far away that creature with slam is.
It’s fair to have a threat that forces a player to spread out creatures, but it shouldn’t be able to one-shot six creatures with 7 life per swing, not to mention surviving to continue wreaking havoc. That is legendary level threat. If that wasn’t already enough, giving those creatures mobility and the ability to splash damage onto and off the enemy orb is way over the top.
I truly don’t feel like I need it to be that strong when I play. It seems like overkill and like I’m not playing fair.
True it can one-shot six creatures with 7 life per swing, but realistically when does that ever happen? Against a beginner who is still trying to figure out the game mechanics maybe but usually its just killing 2 creatures at a time.
I like your ideas and have always been waiting for Slam being reduced to “deal 1 damage to all adjacent creature”.
Reduced damage (like 50%) might sound good, but is a nightmare in game, as you will always have to calculate, especially when it’s an odd number. Having the bonus of 1 extra damage to all adjacent targets is still a powerfull and yet not OP ability. It does also allow for small creatures with slam.
Someone on discord had the idea to slam only “leftover damage”. So example: You slam with 6 attack on a 4 life, every creature around the target will receive the 2 damage which wasn’t used to kill the initial creature.
Of course, that means quite the opposite of your suggestion of making slam usable on low attack creatures. But it has easy calculation and makes counterplay a bit easier (play high hp stuff/taunts).
That aside, I agree with @BeeTwo that (current) slam becomes problematic, if you pair it with movement tricks (especially on the same card).
On topic: I like the new suggested mechanics of other AoE-damage effects. I’m not sure whether it’d be too easy to dodge in general (= too niche to use them). But I think it’s worth a try.
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Using overkill damage to splash to adjacent spaces is creative and does kind of make sense. It’s hard to anticipate how balanced it would feel without trying it.
Good point that it’s easy to avoid the abilities I suggested, and in fact the same strategy to avoid slam could apply to them. They might still prove useful, or maybe they would be best paired with mobility or haste. Or maybe they aren’t needed at all. Maybe slam accomplishes the goal of forcing the opponent to spread out creatures, and the only counterpart we now need is something that forces the opponent to group creatures up.
I like some of your suggestions, especially Pierce, which would make for a good midrange utility ability. (Ugh, try saying that five times fast!)
As Slam is designed to make it much harder to block big, expensive creatures, I think that any rework which removes this advantage of Slam would be counterproductive. Instead, its “hidden power” should be removed - the perhaps unintended edge cases where it seems unfairly good.
In the case of Slam, I think that’s the ability to destroy other big creatures without needing to fight them. Creatures with Slam can attack chump creatures, structures, or orbs and destroy opposing big creatures (for some decks, those big creatures are the only tools they have to deal with Slammers) without even needing to fight them.
If a creature using a Slam attack took damage equal to the highest attack power out of all creatures it damaged, instead of damage equal to the creature at the center of its attack, I think that would be a fair and fun rework for the mechanic. Slam creatures with relatively middling life totals, such as Wavecrash Colossus, could be given 1 extra life to compensate.
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