Why i as a player am losing interest in faeria

Balance Discussion
#1

Fair warning, this is a very long post and might be a little negative to some, but i write it because nobody else wants to be a boogieman, and because i honestly love Faeria and am sad to see the state it’s in and where it has been heading for a long time. So read it if you will, i appreciate any debate or even counter arguments people and especially abrakam has

So i’ll have to be the one to air this out, since nobody is talking about stuff like this thread is going to be mainly about. I especially feel that a lot of the top tier players we see in tournaments are very very unvocal and they could imo have a big impact on faeria’s future since a lot of people listen to them and follow them on twitch and so on; But here is the crux of the matter:

I started playing faeria in the beta i think about 2 years ago at his point. What i loved about the game then, was that it had cool art, was very f2p friendly, and one of the biggest reasons was the good balance and an interactive board. Don’t get me wrong i still like Faeria over all other ccg’s/tcgs i’ve played, and i’ve played A LOT.

But ever since we saw the first expansion/dlc last year in oversky; The game has gone further and further away from what i fell in love with: We’ve seen cards getting added time and time again, that completely upsets any resemblance of balance the game has had. Card’s like the old skywhale that dominated for more than 6 months before getting ‘balanced’.

We’ve seen green losing any color identity they had, with cards that ignores the board like deepwood stalkers, GB frogtosser, they’ve gotten teleport in sagami grovecallers and now in dwordia and vulpines; they have the best buffs, the best heals, mobility, they can get deathtouch if they go green/blue, or just add laya or assassins, they have jump, they have flying, they have the best land ramp, the biggest creatures, best splashable cards, like tosser and emerald salamanders and is generally the best color to make a double/triple colored deck with.

This is all in 1 color that should be a stompy color scheme like in all other ccgs. And this is only in green, there’s still blue tritons that are ridiculously overstatted, and has atleast 3 different cards that can transform any win condition into a crappy creature, then there’s humbling vision which for only 3 faeria and only 2 lands ALWAYS gets value no matter what you play it on, and is in and of itself a counter to any ‘big creature’ or win con. There’s plenty of other cards that have no thought behind tbh, but these 2 colors are just the biggest offenders. And have been so since oversky. Also yellow rush is also a problem but is a lot harder to balance around.

This is just to give a very lenghty example of the problem with faeria as is; The balance has been ruined over and over since oversky, and each dlc we see, we see more ‘meta’ decks and cards that dominate most decks and ladder/casual/tournaments. There’s also card’s that NEVER see any play, and haven’t gotten a rework for atleast 2 years.

All of this is a huge problem imo, but for me the biggest letdown is the lack of originality and board interaction we see in cards. There’s so many cards that completely ignore the board state, and there’s a very small handful of cards that have specific ‘rules’ that dictate how they’re played or has any drawbacks.

To give an example: Deepwood Stalker is a 3 faeria cost 2/4, that ignores the board and gives value without any drawbacks or though behind it. If there’s something it can kill on the board then you just smack it down and profit; Instead of giving it a ‘rule’ to abide by like fx: Gift - Deepwood Stalker fights a creature on board, but can only taget creatures that cost x faeria/a specific enemy color/creatures next to where you play it, or any number of other specifics and drawbacks that makes it harder to play and get value.

This is just 1 card, i could give tons and tons of similar examples with similar ‘rules’ and i am not a game designer or anything of the like. I feel abrakam has a hard time uttilizing the board that they made themselves for their card ideas. I saw somebody on reddit (i think) who talked about red events like flameburst being affected by the board, like only working in a straight line so creatures could chump block it and you could play around it, or something similar.

Which i feel is exactly what the game needs. More interaction with the board, more limitations on (excuse my french) bullshit op value cards/plays. There’s probably hundreds if not thousands of ways to use a board in an original way, but the trend we’re seeing is the opposite.

For inspiration look at Magic The Gathering; there’s cards that only work when specific states are achieved, or cards that work better against a specific color, but is bad vs others. Like a card that has the equivalent of deathtouch vs let’s say a red card, but gets nothing vs a blue or green card. This is something i feel is cool, and fun but has drawbacks and makes deckbuilding and making value plays harder. MTG also has cards that can discard, can counter spells/creatures, has graveyard plays (not viable for how faeria is, but it’s just an example). Even something like a card that ‘silences’ card text would be interesting to see in Faeria.

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#2

  1. Which cards “NEVER” see any play?

  2. Every color has cards which completely ignore the board. Are you suggesting that green should be the exception because of all of the other advantages it has?

  3. I notice you didn’t mention red decks. They seem to have fallen out of favor among competitive players, but they’re really the best answer to yellow rush, as well as to deepwood stalker and frogify. If you make your opponent pay for his wasteful attacks, there will be fewer of them.

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#3

  1. let’s look at some neutrals then: defender of the homeland, unlikely hero, goki, cutthroat bandit, fortune hunter, vanilla imperial guard (not the event), intrepid explorer. Just to name a few neutrals. Then let’s look at green: tiki chieftain, elderwood hermit, seedling (very niche card), tiki healer (another very niche card), these are just ‘some’ of the cards i can name on the top of my head, i can give examples for all colors too.

  2. A valid argument if you haven’t read between the lines in my msg, i only wrote about green as an example, because if i had to write the same amount about each color, it would be an even bigger thread that it already is. You’re missing the point i feel.

  3. again, i did not mention red because it would be too much writing to mention all colors. I gave an example with flameburst, also i like how they changed firestorm, it makes it very board depended. And red being an answer to yellow rush and stalker is true in some sense, but not a proper ‘fix’ or balance in any way. Nothing is a counter to frogify i don’t understand your reasoning with that statement.

#4
  1. Some people, like myself actually like the comparative “lack of colour identity” because it allows for multiple deck archetypes for each colour.
  2. I have no idea what you have against deepwood stalker. The “fight” ability doesn’t protect it from damage. It is a lot less powerful than Emperor Kaios or Tree of Everlife.
  3. The cards you have mentioned in your second post actually see a lot of play in Pandora. There are some that never seem to see any play, but they are either underpowered or confusing: egg of wonders, wavecrafter, Shozen, farm boy, Three wishes. But only about 5% of the total card pool. Ironically, you’ve never mentioned the above cards
  4. Just imagine what Faeria would be like with “silence” - will we see inactive wind gates? Deactivated taunts? Fish drowning in the ocean?
#5

I like this post. It’s a topic we should openly talk about to help make faeria a great experience as it evolves. Personally I’d have to agree with Nettlesoup as colors gain different abilities through new cards there are new decks now that make use of old cards. I’ve been playing Apex Predator again because of all the beast supports that blue green gets. And again to have multiple deck archtype for different colors gives the game more variety. The ladder is a mixture of decks right now being played, and I think that’s a good sign for a game.

What I absolutely have to agree with Paroxysm is that the cards should be more interactive with the board. I think we’re all missing the main point Paroxysm is making. It’s not the color identity so much as the lack of interaction the cards have with the board aside from land requirements. I know there are cards like emerald salamender or the whole archtype of rakoans require meticulous land placement, but that’s not interaction.

That’s not to say the devs aren’t thinking about this. Zephyr Vulpine, and Dwordia shows that dev are thinking about the game in this way. I just hope they can continue that line of thought and produce more fantastic cards like those.

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#6

If colors do not have any identity, why make them in the first place? Everything could just be wild cards or neutrals. so your first point makes little sense to me, and multiple archetypes does not equate no color identity, if that was true why make a color that focuses on fire? Or whatever?
Color identity is good because it makes it so people have to be really creative and put thought behind their decks and interactions, instead of just playing a color that is basically ‘the best’ at so many things, like fx green is. Another thing color identity does for me personally: it gives me a choice in what i feel is my favorite color because they have this or that unique feature that others don’t. So i completely disagree with your first point nettle.

your second point is again not seeing the forest from the trees. Using a 3 cost creature to lets say remove a 7 cost creature, or even a 3 cost creature that has gotten elderwood embraced>ruunin’s guidance, but then gotten it’s health lowered in some way;
Even if the Deepwood dies from the fight ability, you still gain a huge value/profit since the opponent has used 1. more faeria than you, 2. atleast 2-3 cards and this is only by playing a vanilla stalker. There’s so much hand buffing now that even just playing a priest of everlife and getting a stalker buffed, makes it into a 4/8 for basically 6 faeria, minus what the priest collects. And stalker was just an example, hence not seeing the forest from the trees.

Silence would have to be tuned for faeria of course, but yes those examples would be cool, because they open up more interactions like fx a card that does the following: Target a silenced card on board and sacrifice it for 2 faria/half it’s faeria cost, even something like: Turn a silenced structure into a 3/3 triton (or whatever).

see? More interaction, and still requires specific scenarios/rules to work, if you meet someone who doesn’t use silence in their deck then it’s a dead card/could be a dead card, depending on how the card works it could even have a less impressive effect against non-silenced cards/units/structures.

Sometimes cards needs to be useful in specific scenarios or have a drawback that you have to think about. As it is now, very few cards has any.

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#7

One thing i do want to agree with though, there’s more and more old cards that see play yes, which is good and healthy for the game.

And nettle, the cards you mentioned for pandora are probably true in the sense you make of it. But you don’t balance a card game around a random playmode like pandora/draft. You balance it around casual or ladder. THEN tweak those cards for other playmodes or make alternative stats/interactions for those specific playmodes - well in my opinion anyways.

#8

I think they stick to the color pie very well. It’s actually very clever how they’ve managed to give green tricks while still keeping them very limited.

Green’s movement is very restricted. The jump creatures are all meant to attack gods, so the Jump mostly just helps them get from your side to next to their orb. One can’t even attack non-gods, and another sucks at attacking creatures but gives you cards when it attacks gods. You can see the foxes coming a turn beforehand and their movement is still based on forest placement. Grovecaller is the biggest wildcard, but is still based on forest placement. You can generally look at a board of green creatures and know exactly what their movement options are, and be able to play a creature three spaces away and know that it will never be touched.

Red is really the color that is meant to have zero mobility. No jump, no charge, no teleporting. So I would say they stick to that pretty well. Green is meant to have movement options that are niche and predictable.

So my point is that I think the devs adhere to the “color pie” quite well.

A Fight card’s value is intrinsically attached to the creature’s stats. Deepwood Stalker sucks against 4/4 creatures because it’s a 2/4. That makes it different from a burn spell. I can double Seifer’s Wrath a 4/4 Triton Warrior and it’s decent because I spent 4 faeria to kill a 4 faeria creature and damage my opponent. If I double Deepwood Stalker a Triton Warrior I’ve spent 6 faeria and gained nothing. So… combo removal in green isn’t really a thing. And the Fight creatures are extremely predictable since their efficiency relies on the Fight creature’s stats, so you can play around them, which makes them far different from burn or combo removal. I think, like green’s movement options, its Fight creatures fill a niche that is very predictable and easy to play around.

I think green gets to stretch in different directions, but they still keep their same slow, plodding, predictable pace. Just look at how hard it is for them to kill a 3/5 Emperor Kaios if I place it next to my orb. They’d need three Deepwood Stalkers to kill it (9 faeria). The Jump creatures mostly suck against it, or are too inefficient to bother with. The other options require them placing a forest near him, which leads to a predictable attack path. The fact that I can drop a 3/5 on my side and green is mostly helpless against it just shows that they’ve stuck to the color pie pretty well, in my opinion.

(Hunt down is kind of the exception, but that’s a tribal card.)

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#9

I see what you are saying. But no matter what there will always be strong cards that unlock the potential for multitude of possibilities for decks. They have to take the risk of making these cards to keep the game fresh.

The game feel very balanced to me but I will admit value removal plays are super frustrating but you can play around them.

I do wish legendary cards were more specific in where you have to make them fit in a deck instead of this card is too good it has to be in every deck.

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#10

Couldn’t agree more. Cards like garudan, aurora or radiance mk2 are almost always good in any match, no matter what deck you or your opponent is running. I would definitely like to see less all-round-awesome legendaries and more limited synergy legendaries.

#11

I believe this is really the root of the Problem.

The strong - possibly overpowered - Cards get hit with the nerfbat, dissatisfying the Players who liked that playstyle (e.g. for me the Firestorm nerf made me abandon red decks, because that Card was nice counter for yellow/blue decks spamming cheap Units, which only Garudan can deal with now reliably. Once. In case you draw it. And have the resources.). I think what would help alot more is looking at the weak Cards and buff them to get more interesting. (Since all decks are stored on Abrakam’s Servers I guess they can easily pull statistics what Cards apply here, but what Paroxysm listed is exactly the Cards I’d list aswell)

Every deck can only hold 30 Cards, which means there is an opportunity cost besides the land/faeria cost of the Card aswell. i.e. you could add a more useful Card to your deck. IMO there are alot of Cards which are just not very attractive unless you are going for a very limited and corner-case Strategy (e.g. Illusions of Grandeur as win condition).

Regarding the stricter rules for Deepwood Stalker or Events becoming restricted similar to ranged attack Units I disagree. The choice where to attack is what makes these Cards attractive, and if the game rules get more complicated it just alienates more Players as they cannot build decks the way they want, but are extremly limited to what isn’t too difficult to Play. Due to the randomness of the board and order in which you draw Cards it would get too big a risk to play certain Cards and they won’t get used in decks.

my 2c,
Warshade

#12

You have some really sound reasoning behind your argument, and some of it i agree with and some of it i don’t:
Green didn’t have any teleporting when i started playing, the only color which had any sort of teleport or specific movement tricks was yellow (and triton banquet in blue), which makes sense since it’s the color of Deserts and Wind.

Teleport makes no thematic sense in a color that’s about slow moving forests, slow growth and The Cycle of Life/rebirth. There was of course Horse Master at that time, but any color can use it. Which brings me to my next point; You state that you can ‘play around’ green movement tricks because you can predict their movement options, which is in and of itself true. But the same could be said for any of the colors, so it doesn’t devalue my example of greens abilities.

Also red has Grappling Hook, and can also use Horse Master still. So no they do not stick to your idea of the color pie here either. Red is supposed to be the color of Fire and Controlled/Random Destruction. Which is why they have burn events, ranged units and things like Hellfire. i do however feel red is one of the colors that stick most to their theme, along with yellow. But as i stated, could still be improved with more focus on the board, so in that sense i agree that they “adhere to the ‘color pie’” well.

The ‘color pie’ isn’t just about movement tricks though. It’s about sticking to the colors theme, and making the colors feel unique because of said theme. Which green does not adhere to at all, and the same could be said for the other colors in some way or the other too. In a more limited scope of course.

Now lastly your example of double Seifers on a Triton Warrior vs. double Deepwood Stalker is again true at face value, but you fail to mention or even comment on another point i made in a reply msg: Hand buffing. Green has so many ways to hand buff into obscene stats/values for literally no cost at all, except for 1 card which is Ruunin’s Presence; They have Spirit of Rebirth which is incredibly easy to get value from or ‘focus’ on a Deepwood Stalker with, there’s Priest of Everlife which by itself gives you a 4/8 Stalker for 6 faeria.

Which is a direct counter to your example of Triton Warrior, AND you get 2 creatures that can collect, and your stalker will still be a 4/4 - All for only 6 faeria. Thats only 2 faeria more than Tritons cost. And that gives you +5/+9 worth of stats + 2 collectors, of course it’s random if you draw the stalker for the priest buff or not, but it still CAN happen. Then there’s Court Jester (not used often but it also works with Stalkers), There’s Tiki Totem, which isn’t a hand buff, but still makes it into a 3/5. And possibly a few more ways i haven’t mentioned or thought of.
And even using a vanilla Deepwood stalker on a 1-2 health creature on turn 2 to stop collection and put down your own collector for only 3 faeria is imo ridiculously OP, yes Seifers can do the same and give 2 dmg for 1 less cost, but thats 1 seifers less to use on higher priority cards later in the game, while deepwood stalker is just 1 creature out of many others in any green deck. Also Seifers doesn’t pay for itself like a Deepwood Stalker can do by collecting.

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#13

I agree with your point about legendary cards. But i disagree with the game being balanced. And cards that unlocks possibilities is what i’m basically suggesting. Hence all my examples of ‘ideas’ for card interactions (like my silence example)

#14

@Warshade

I completely agree with what you’re saying here, but at the same time i still would like to see some reworks on cards that see a lot of play too.

I understand what you mean with this, but one of the biggest if not the biggest ccg/tcg Grand Daddies of all time; Magic The Gathering, has done this with great success for years and years. Just because faeria has a board and a 30 card limit, doesn’t mean the rules/interactions can’t be more specified or with incooperated drawbacks in mechanics. Complicated is good imo, it gives more options and choices (in this context anyways).

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#15

Just getting back into Faeria, so sorry for the necroing. However, I agree with this post a lot.

The only bits I don’t like are the suggestions to add mechanisms that work different for different colors or costs, or other highly complex rules like target a silenced creature. “beast” etc is already seems too much to me. Emergent complexity is the better complexity IMHO.

I very much agree with criticism of green’s lost identity. I think it lost more identity than any other color, for exactly the reason you’ve said - to much ignoring the board (teleport, attack-a-creature). It needed more marching deathwall instead.

I think ages ago I said that it’s hard to add cards to the game without making it worse. Similar to the problem with losing color identity: The more variety there is in what your opponent might have in hand, the less you can predict it, which reduces the distinction between good and bad choices.

I actually left Faeria for a year (approx) due to oversky board-devaluing balance issues (eg. swallow). It’s slightly better now but still worse than before oversky. I’m not fond of wild lands either. I really like corrupt though.

For stalker I wonder if you could reduce its gift range to 2 tiles or something.

#16

Hm, stop playing Faeria with the oversky patch. That ruins the fairplay beetween buyers and gamers. Now with the new Cards … not even better. Money makes the deck. Played a while, but without buying the new cards…no chance against em.

#17

Why anybody rarely mentions most played board-ignoring cards - soul drain, wrath, flame burst? Those are auto-includes. I would like to see them nerfed (stalker too - 3 or 4 forests).

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#18

Have to politely disagree with you there…

Firstly, I reached god rank last season without having spent a single penny on the game, I think that proves that there isn’t “no chance”. It wasn’t maybe as easy as it might have been if I had used some DLC archetype, but I don’t think it was harder than I remember it being before oversky.

I personally like the challenge of crafting a deck that works against the current DLC meta game. And actually finding a decklist that allows you to beat multiple different DLC decks and reach god rank against all odds is just the best feeling ever. I get frustrated too sometimes, but I don’t actually think the balancing is that bad. All the cards in the expansion(s) have their pros and cons. And i’ve experienced many times that the cons are definitely there. Sure most of the expansion cards are more versatile and have quite a few powerful mechanics that the f2p cards don’t have, but I don’t feel it really makes a difference in the face of good/bad draws and skill differences.

And I will await the angry response(s) that I always get cause I pick fights I can’t win…

#19

The main problem for me is to counter the powerful cards. mostly loosing a endgame by only one card. the balance of some new cards is for my opinion …

#20

I see your point. The new cards generally have more swing value than the f2p ones. I don’t usually reach late game so often so I don’t feel I have the experience to have an extended opinion on that =P