Firestorm needs a change

How much Faeria should it cost?

By the way, this Firestorm doesn’t hit friendlies - only enemies.

Old (current) Firestorm is broken in my opinion.

To be honest I see 2 uses for this : target your own orb to clear 3 attackers around it (mostly against Yrush), or destroy a cluster of small minions blocking the path to opponent’s orb (in a Rrush). It might have some more situationnal uses, like a punishment for someone who didn’t know the card …

Anyway, for the reference, Flame Burst used to be able to pay 3 more to deal 3 damage in a Meteor-like AoE, so it was 6f (but you still had the choice to target one enemy for 3f, and it could damage gods, and had 2 mountain requirement).
With this reference, I’d say 6, maybe 7f would be a fair cost. But maybe if devs have changed Flame Burst, that’s because they didn’t like that effect at all ?

That’s a good point. It’d be nice if a dev shed some light on why old Flame Burst was changed. For now, we can only wait.

After reading your post, I think 8 Faeria is too expensive of a cost.

This rework is better but still like Foxclear said it becomes way to situational, Which reduce its effectivness. You never want to have a dead card in your hand.

I still don’t see any problem with Firestorm after reading through all this, except for new players being surprised by its existence.

If you filled your board with 4+ creatures at 3- hp against a deck that played 2 mountains already, it’s solely your fault. Firestorm is meant to keep exactly these situations in check. Nothing wrong there.
It’s always the player, who swarms the board with lots of small creatures, that enables Firestorm to have insane value in some (pretty rare) situations.
In order to render your deck completely useless because of Firestorms existence, you need to:

  • build your deck only of 3- hp creatures and
    -play it recklessly, ignoring the possibility of a 2+ mountain deck playing Firestorm.

Otherwise you just lose 2 or 3 (very cheap!) Creatures to a 6 faeria, 3 land-requirements card. Not what I’d call insane value. Especially, if you consider that most of the times the creatures killed by it didn’t even have 3 hp, but only 2 or 1.

Killed 2 Khalims Follower and a Monk by it? Congratulations on the rush player, he still has 1 faeria advantage over the Firestorm player.

Dealt 12 damage total on 4 big creatures? Congratulations, you spend 6 faeria, without removing anything fron the board yet.

Cut a long story short, do not deliberately play into Firestorm, seeing it coming by 2+ mountains placed, and complain afterwards that it hit you hard. (No offense)
It’s not that hard to play around it. The card is pretty straight forward. If you already have 3 or 4 creatures on board that’d be killed by Firestorm, stop playing more creatures with 3- hp and save your Faeria instead!
This way, if your opponent plays firestorm now, you will fill the board quickly within the next turn, while your opponent has to pass another turn before he can do sth. like that again. And even then, he still didn’t play anything that threatened your orb.
If you play like that and Firestorm still hard counters your deck, well then you probably have just found the reason for its existence. Because without it, the meta probably would only exist of these decks.


Regarding the element of surprise for new players: This might be solved by the upcoming single player content. Maybe there is a challenge with the (AI) opponent playing lots of board clears, so new players get aware of such cards and the ways to play around it.
If there is no such challenge, the devs should make one. No reason to change the card though, at all.

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First off, I really appreciate your and Foxclear’s views and like to discuss with you guys, so no hard feelings either way!

I understand all this, but again I’ll try to make my point clear, which seems to be overlooked all the time.

The card itself doesn’t bother me much, but there are a few things that get influenced by it.

  1. It’s just the cheaper version of Garudan which to me is plain boring. Sure you could change him instead, but see below.

  2. Again you come from the tier 1 decks side, which is just a part of the game. Casual / fun gamers may play different cards like Winged Demon, Skyguard and others that will all be annihilated by that single card.

You may say that’s your own fault playing those cards, but I say those cards are meant to be played, so why does a card exist, that keeps you from playing them? There’s no other single card that can kill specific decks by itself.

  1. Your math is wrong there. While it’s true that you may have killed only a few creatures (that may even have a lower total cost!), that can be enough to decide the game. We are playing chess on that board, so every single part may be important.

Getting back to the math I was talking about. The win-by-cost ratio may not be great, but if I get rid of 3 of your cards with a single one, than that’s great! Now, how would people feel about Firestorm saying “deal 3 and draw 2 cards”?
incoming storm

Modern card games have always been about card advantage, as that will give you options and most probably the win in the end. It’s really that simple and that’s the reason why mass removal is as popular as it is. It grants you card advantage, the most important thing next to your mana / Faeria.

Now take in the positioning and the Faeria you might cut him off from and you know why Firestorm is not just a 6 Faeria event.

Regarding the 4 big creatures… maybe it’ll cost me 2 Firestorms then, and I still win the card advantage and probably the Faeria total + positioning, too.

  1. Red already got massive removal and Groundshakers to spread the damage. There will be new cards and I’m pretty sure red will gain more damage stuff, as it’s the color’s thing and I bet that this will become a problem at one time. One sided removal should only exist as an exception like Garudan. Groundshakers are already very good, but 1 damage is hardly removal.

  2. If I face a deck containing red, it doesn’t help at all to watch his mountain count, as it’s pretty easy to ramp them up. So either I already did place my stuff, or he keeps me away from it which may delay my game significantly. Not to mention those situations, where you need to defend yourself or just need to hold your ground (wells)…

The influence of this card is by FAR more complex than just counting up the Faeria cost.

Actually that’s totally incorrect. There are a lot of cards that kills specific decks by themselves (they’re just not good enough against others, or the deck they counter is not played, or whatever). Look at Wavecrafter Killing a Dream Deck, look at Blood Singer killing a sacrifice deck, UE kills an Apex deck … Well, Firestorm is killing swarm decks and that’s fine.That’s how it should be : each deck should have a hard/soft counter, otherwise it will be dominant.

Now concerning card advantage (CA) : You’re right, in a lot of games, CA is important, and can even be a win condition. Faeria is no different, however CA has less impact than board control in Faeria for 2 reasons : the wheel lets you draw up to 2 cards per turn, without doing anything special, and your creatures on the board will build you an advantage by their mere presence (namely harvesting).

You’re right when saying Firestorm’s importance cannot be counted in Faeria cost only. It kills harvesters, disrupting your buildup and letting them build their own, making it an effective anti-control tool. There’s also the threat that your opponent might have it. The mere existence of the card, even if it’s not in deck, will influence your behavior, forcing you to commit less to the board, and wait until he uses it. But at this point, you should be able to repopulate your board. So you’ve lost one turn of harvesting and a few low HP creatures, when they lost 6f. Fair trade. Maybe you had a creature that survived the Firestorm and they finished it with another blast, or an attack. That’s still fair as it costs them more than 6f now.

Regarding the big creatures, well, yes if you’ve got 4 big creas on the board at the same time, and haven’t used them prperly and your opponent has managed to get to 12f … maybe you missed some occasion or didn’t play correctly. Double Firestorm is deserved punishment :wink:

You may be right by saying that new cards with damage might be added later on, but you’ll still be limited to 30 cards in your deck. Assuming there won’t be powercreep (and I hope so), I doubt that the things will change much, as you have already pretty solid options right now (I really hope that there will not be enough damage cards at some point to make a “each card of my deck is blast damage lol” type of deck)

When facing Red, just keep in mind the card exists, don’t play right into it, offer him a bad deal where he has to play it if he has, so that next time he won’t have it, after all, there are 3 copies max in a deck (sometimes less), plus Garudan, once they’re all gone … :slight_smile:

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[quote=“Foxclear, post:47, topic:693, full:true”]
A lot of stuff[/quote]

When you mention da Fox, he will instantly jump out of his hide. Doesn’t work with Taiyo, though. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Sure there are cards that can keep other decks in check, but I was looking for instant demolishing. You can handle a Blood Singer and a Wavecrafter within the game and the Apex player still has a strong deck, but cleaning the board in one turn is quite different. Decks with low HP will never see any light against Firestorm.

But let’s not waste any time here, as I’m not looking to argue about the card effect itself, even though I think it’s a bit too much in a red shell. Anyway…

… my main points didn’t get answered again.
What about casual decks / players?
What about the similarity to Garudan?

Well, here I am, sorry for the delay. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

As for new/casual players: You can not balance a game perfectly around both, new/casual players with only a part of the full collection on one hand, and full collection competitive scene on the other hand.
Faeria, as many other card games I suppose, decided to balance in favor of the competitive scene. Imo, this is not only the correct, but also the only viable decision to make, if you want to keep the game competitive.

Otherwise (giving a new player basically everything he needs) you’d either make a big part of the full collection irrelevant, or give the new player a very big part of the collection, which wouldn’t work with a f2p model.

The only thing you can do, is to give new players a different or slightly greater starting pool than they receive now.
I agree, that the pool right now is not perfect; many important key cards are missing. In fact, so many that you can hardly build a decent deck off of it, and this is indeed a problem.

I don’t know whether this was changed with the new single player content (and its rewards), as I can’t play it right now (on vacation and stuff).
But I think the game already did a good job so far regarding how many packs you earn early on due to gold rewards, lvl ups etc. You can argue about the details, especially rarity of cards like Firestorm, though. A big AoE shouldn’t be epic, but either rare, common or - with one or two copies - included in the starting paket.


As for Garudan:
First, saying that Firestorm is a cheaper version of Garudan is plain wrong. Yes, he costs 10f 2m, Firestorm 6f, 3m. But you can’t just ignore the 6/6 flying charge 2 body, that is worth at least (!) 6 faeria (I’d say 7) for itself! So, for the whole value you get, the Firestorm component of Garudan is actually cheaper than Firestorm itself.

Second, yes, there’s already Firestorm that does the AoE, so Garudan us not quite as unique as Asarai right now. However, Tesra isn’t really unique and Orosei only in that regard, that your whole board is transformed. The transformation itself isn’t unique either.

As for the rest of your previous post:

  1. basically answered by Fox. Also, see above.

  2. As for the “3 cards for 1” math: Take into account that the 3 cards you already played probably had a lot of impact at the point they get Firestormed and they were probably much cheaper than 6 faeria.
    If you play low health cards only, you probably play rush or some other kind of tempo deck. Therefore, you don’t care too much about card advantage, as your deck is - seen as a whole - weaker than your opponent’s control deck. Your win condition is tempo. Threaten your opponent enough to play the Firestorm(s), but hold something back, to recover from it, once it’s played.

  3. see Fox.

  4. playing vs red is the only information you need to be careful. Adjust your playstyle as told above and see whether you can win (and if not: learn from your mistakes). The first mistake you can make, is to blame the opponent’s cards/luck instead of asking yourself if you made a mistake.

Slowly and timidly pointing its muzzle out.

Just to add that to me, Garudan simply feels like a 4th OP Firestorm (instead of Firestorm being cheap Garudan), more easily splashable (that would actually be the only card in the game I could consider playing 2 lands just for splashing it), which doesn’t have any actual reason to exist in the game (after all, dealing with swarms is Firestorm’s job already), so I do resent the fact that Firestorm and Garudan are similar. But that’s Garudan that should be changed, not Firestorm :angry:

Goes back into its lair.

Hehe, so there he dwells. :wink:

Yah, Taiyodori got me wrong there. I was only comparing Firestorm and Garudan by cost alone (Firestorm being ready more easily, especially if used multiple times).

I agree that the dragons are too easy to splash (making them not so legendary to their color). I’m pretty sure that’s because of Day of the Dragons (which could reduce to land requirements, though).

Ok, you would change Garduan, while I would change Firestorm. Nothing to add I guess. :stuck_out_tongue:

Now, to put this to rest and as I’m fighting windmills (not saying anyone is right or wrong here), I will just burn everything down by playing my Firestorm and don’t dare to cry for this being too much value for a single event! :smiling_imp:

Yes! That’s the spirit! We made him come into the Dark Side! Job Accomplished!

sadly,
most of the time thats the only way to get devs attention, just abuse broken stuff as much as you can.
n hope for a ■■■■ storm of even more players…

had it in a pack those days n well insta pick for each red deck.

Sometimes it’s the best (or even only) way to falsify your own assumptions. By playing only against it, you might feel it being op, because you continued to play decks only that are meant to be countered by this card. :slight_smile:

@H8Man :
The problem about changing Firestorm instead of Garudan is that there’d be a lack of (usable) big AoE clears, because you can only have 1 Garudan, but 3 Firestorms.

any card with infinite value cant be intented. its simply game breaking.

it needs atleast a limited number of targets.

That’s one of the reasons why I would do it that way. :wink:

I guess I can’t add anything new here, so we can agree to disagree, as H8Man said. The rest is left for the devs. :stuck_out_tongue:

As for the “infinite value”, I can only repeat myself: It’s you (the Firestorm’s opponent) who gives this “infinite” (= theoretically limited by the tiles on the board x 3 damage per tile) value by swarming the board and deliberately playing into a Firestorm.
If you don’t want your opponent to receive that much value with a Firestorm, just don’t swarm the board with 3- hp creatures and add some 4+ creatures to your deck. (If you’re afraid about your harvesters, give the Yak a try, it’s 2/4 and pretty cheap (and cute!))

Adapt your play- and deckbuilding style, if something doesn’t work out for you. That’s what strategy games are all about, after all: Adapt to each new situation you’re confronted with.

On another note, your infinite value argument applies to any AoE clear, even plaguebearer, famine or groundshaker. Want to change all those as well?
If you think about it, the neutral and 1 land requirement AoE cards are even worse: You can see a Firestorm coming (2 mountains + 6 faeria = threat incoming). But there’s no way to see a plague bearer + famine combo before it hits you. (For the same damage!)

I’m on your side on that one, but to be fair, mentioned human cards do damage to all creatures. :wink:

Just to add my two cents without having read the entire thread:

Firestorm is massively overpowered and needs a nerf asap. Many good suggestions have been made already so I will skip on that here but I like the idea of limiting it to a number of targets e. g.

This card is a game breaker and I do not consider it fair, for me it takes the fun out of the game every time it is used (and it is used quite often). Take action now @devs this is serious.

This card is punishment for overcommitting to the board. If you play around it (i.e. not play lots of creatures when your opponent will be able to cast it), then the card itself becomes bad value. If you nerf it even the slightest, it will not be worth playing anymore and you’ll see swarm blue with Garudan in each game. Definitely not what I want, personnally.
Sure, it’s a punishment to new players, but new players have to learn the lesson of not overcommitting, just like in any other CCG.