Like I said before, all decks with the exception of some particularly greedy combo decks are trying to fight for the board. You keep imagining a color that can be well balanced without the ability to reasonably fight for the board, and I simply don’t know what you are talking about. Are you saying you would actually want a color in faeria to be good at greedy combo and basically nothing else?
For the most part, no. Though that is merely a result of assasin having too inefficent of a body. If it was made better, then red decks could play it and it would help the RvG matchup. It still wouldn’t fundemantally change how the colors are ordered on that axis though, it just shifts the entire curve if that makes sense.
My best example would be ultra-defensive, structures and ranged, with faeria generation, faeria well poisioning or collection inhibition, stealing or damaging other player’s faeria, healing, etc. You could make it so that they have to balance blocking/defense vs doing other stuff with fragile units kept safe behind the defense.
Here’s some ideas for a color like that:
Wall structures.
Structure that absorbs non-combat damage dealt to adjacent creatures.
Structure that taunts and heals and can be healed by spending faeria (activate).
Structure that knocks out faeria wells for 3 turns at the cost of 1 structure HP.
Creature with knockback that lets you move target creature after combat (so you can put defense back up).
Event to convert low health enemy into grave which occupies tile and must then be destroyed.
Catapults and similar creatures that can shoot over friendly units.
Event to plant mines (structures with 1 hp that deal 8 damage to attacker) adjacent to friendly creatures.
Structure that gains 1 life per turn and can steal 1 faeria from opponent per turn once over 8 life.
Ultra-high HP ghost that can swap places with adjacent friendly or enemy units but cannot deal damage.
Event that can repair all structures by 2 HP.
Structure that increases HP of adjacent structures.
Creature with production that deals 1 damage to opponent god but removes 2 faeria.
Event that gives a building protection and taunt.
Legend that repairs adjacent structures (production).
Legend that prevents structures being attacked by units that have moved that turn.
Structure that reduces all enemy attack power by 1 (like a global reverse kobold barracks).
Etc …
So basically you’re trying to defend as many tiles as you can so that you can fill those defended tiles with functionality like faeria-blocking/stealing, ranged damage, global damage.
That is a color that has terrible mobility and very little cheap removal. Yet it can be balanced and is complex.
If green actually get that much mobility with their big dudes, they can just aggro really hard without even trying, simply because it’s easier to get a big dude set up than the opponent drawing removals in the top cards. Hence green right now already can overwhelm many decks simply with wood elemental and 7/7 openers, if opponent didn’t draw lucky removals.
Also green’s movement right now is the best for transition a defensive creature for offensive, making green able to clock some one simply because green has some big creature that is not answered.
I really don’t know why people keep complaining about green being weak except for historical reasons.
Your arguments are deeply flawed and overly simplistic.
There’s been a lot of focus on red vs green and red’s lack of fatty removal… but if red had fatty removal, then red burn would be pretty much unstopable by green. Fatties is one of the few options against burn that green can actually pull off, not the only, but the most universal and new player friendly(other options include: lifegain focus, combo decks, and aggressive dash rushing, but these involve basically counter-building against red’s dominance in that situation).
And here i am going full Neutral deck. Coz i’m boring :3
To be honest i think its rather difficult to balance the colors, you have to consider their playstyle and the Neutral cards that are available. The option of giving Green creatures Charge is there from Syland Horsemaster’s Gift ability.
I haven’t played that long, but from what i gather Green has no way to remove units, and just relies purely on brute force. Queen’s assassin can counter this for Red Decks, but since you can only have 3 and the majority of the time Green will just spawn new brutes after, it makes it difficult to deal with unless you have removal spells also.
If i’m not mistaken, Red decks love to fight due to dealing God damage whenever they kill/enter combat. Throw in some Safeguards and that allows you to do some serious damage to Green Decks, on the flip side, there are cards such as healing song to counter it.
However the potency of all this depends on the players Map control, and naturally, the luck of the draw.
I’d say this is provably false. Green has the means to compete in mid range and even excel better than red with the right draw. This is due to the fact that green has a lot of potentially or even guaranteed high value buffs that buff his/her creatures way beyond their faeria cost.
For instance if you have Eredon’s effect in play and Tiki Totem that’s a 2/2 buff for your first monster every turn for just 2 cards. That puts the vast majority of your creature library out reds kill range thus making our burns inefficient. Even if one has the Flame burst for the totem it’s still not a loss for the green player. Tiki Totem is 3F and so is Flame Burst, it’s an even trade that completely screws the red player if he/she don’t or can’t take it.
This is is not even taking into account any of greens other buff cards like Spirit of Rebirth that also has potentially unlimited value if not removed in a timely manner.
This is also compounded by the fact that some of said “giants” while helped along by cards like Elderwood Embrace don’t necessarily need said cards to become huge. Thyrian Golem is great for his mana cost but needs 5 forest. Wild Avenger has a good starting stat line and becomes increasingly harder to kill the more we damage you. Oak Father gets harder to kill with every forest, and Primeval Colossus becomes more efficient with every colored land you put down.
These are all things that occur naturally as the game progresses and thus we have little options for counter play. If red had a giant killer it wouldn’t make giants obsolete any more than Flameburst makes 3 health creatures obsolete. In most cases you’d be trading card for card and a similar cost in faeria, it only becomes a great value for the red player when the green player invest 2 or more cards on the same creature.
I notice that people tend to overstate the value of removal, yes it’s great, but you still need to make good trades and maintain map control to win. The majority of time we play non-aoe removal we’re getting equal or lesser value out of it. If removal can no longer do just that than it becomes weak, seeing as that’s about all red has going for it that means red becomes weak as well.
As for oddball mechanics that could make a faction function vastly different I don’t see how this suggestion would actually hinder that. Said faction would only be played if it could counter basic strategies that currently see play and could only exist in a balanced manner if said strategies had a chance against it. Green’s not the only one capable of making giants, yellows not the only one capable of rushing. This ain’t as simple as each color being R<P<S, they have their unique specialties but that don’t mean they should be entirely limited to just that and thus easily countered by anything that’s good vs their infaction specialty.
