General gameplay and balance issues

Feedback and Suggestions
#1

Hello @ all,

at first I want to tell you, that i really like Faeria and I think it is a great game.
But there are some things that could be improved (of course, regarding that Faeria is early-access…).

I play Faeria now for aproximately 4-5 weeks, reaching God-rank a few days ago: And there starts the problem :wink:
I think reaching God-rank is too easy at the moment.
Getting bonus stars for a winning-streak and for winning against a higher league opponent is too much I think.
Getting both together - 3 stars for only winning 1 game - is really to much.
In Hearthstone (the only other TCG I played yet) the problem is solved by removing the winning-streak bonus for all players above rank 5. Don’t get me wrong: I think Faeria is a much better game than Hearthstone, but in this specific task the point goes to Hearthstone. The problem with the higher league opponent-bonus should solve itself when there are more players in the game.

The Meta:

Actually there are four different decks that dominate the meta:

  • Yellow rush
  • Yellow mobility
  • Red rush
  • Decks including “Three Wishes”

All other decks are seen really seldom.
I’m totally aware of the fact that there will always be the so-called Tier-1-Decks that are strong and will therefore be played by most of the people.
Regarding my own experience so far i can tell the following: From rank 5 on I startet to play with the Yellow mobility-Deck, seen by every player in last month’s “Monthly Cup”. Within only one day I managed to climb to God-rank and the follwing day i climbed from #79 to #25. On the next day (getting a little bored of always playing the same Deck for days) I decided to test different other decks (except the four I named already) including different kinds of blue, green and combined Decks…
I went down the ladder rapidely to #90 at the moment and i think that i would be rank 5 again if it was possible to lose God-rank within one Season…

Theres is one thing that I blame the most for this:

Removal spells:

Yellow and Red are having a massive amount of spells which are able to remove minions completely without any kind of board-interaction, such as “Last Nightmare” or “Firebomb”. Additionally they have spells which are able to finish off injured or low-health minions (“Seifer’s Wrath” or “Soul Drain”) plus having an additional bonus such as self-healing or damaging the opponent’s orb. Personally I think that this is not very balanced, especially regarding the fact that Green and Blue are missing such spells completely.
I really much like the way you created the Blue Cards instead: No “Hard-removal” or “Execute-like spells” but spells that are weakening creatures (“Humbling Vision”) or hex creatures (“Mirror Phantasm” or “Frogify”). Theses spells make it necessary to plan a following board interaction if you plan to kill an opponent’s minion!

Other balancing issues regarding Yellow and Red are already mentioned in other threads, such as the rush-Decks of these colours doesn’t get out of steam because of cards like “Zealous Crusader”, “Firebringer” or “Hate Seed”.

The Mulligan:

I really hate it when I get the same cards that i chose to discard. I think you all understand that point without further explanation… :wink:

Three Wishes:

I think the cost-reduction of the drawn cards is too strong. Getting for example a 0-cost “Soul Drain” is ridiculous.

I really like the idea of the “structures”. I think they should be “buffed” to be more important.

General ideas:

I would love to see special minions that are completely immune to any kind of damaging spells as a special ability.
I would love to see a minion with the special ability to disrupt the next spell played by the opponent (only once of course).
I would love to see a spell that banishes one minion for one turn, for example to ignore a taunt for one turn without killing it or to protect a minion for a short while.

I think I stop now, apologizing for my bad english :wink:

Bye
Knethaggis

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#2

What i really wanted to say:

As a former chess player I woult love to see more board-interaction, as for example in MonoBlue-Mirrors.

If I take Yellow Rush as an example: The last thing they want is interaction with the opponent’s creatures.
They are only interested in rushing forward to the enemy’s orb, placing two or three desserts in its near and finally charging down the opponent’s orb with haste-minions until their Crusader is large enough to finish the game. Every threatful enemy minion will get killed by “Last Nightmare”, “Choking Sand” or “Drain Soul”, while suffering not any kind of Faeria-lacks because of “Khalins’s Prayer”. Not a very tactical gameplay in my opinion!

Well ok, I know that it is not that easy, and even the Yellow-rush-player has to think about optimizing his ressources…
But as you may recognize: I’m really annoyed by this deck! :wink:

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#3

I do agree with most of what you said in your previous post, especially that it might be nice to see some restrictions for the currently global removal spells, but I disagree with what you’re saying about Yellow-rush specifically.

It’s more tactical and board dependant than a Red rush or a 3-wish (which I believe are both no-brainers to play), considering the spots you put your lands, and there’s a bit of interaction that Yellow-rush wants (hello vampires !)
However, I do believe that the deck is flawed, as the pressure is usually only on the defender side, which can hardly retaliate (although if he can, then he will most likely win the game, as Yellow-rush is not a good defender).

But having gone all the way from rank 10 to god with barely any losses with this deck (and owing half of them to mirrors), I certainly agree that it would need a nerf (a cap on Crusader, and a way to make Vampire not that worthy to play against a single unit would be a good thing I believe)

#4

Hey guys, this is a great discussion. I want to touch on two things specifically regarding Firebringer/Zealous Crusader and how they relate to the design of Rush decks in general. I’ve seen these two cards mentioned repeatedly in Discord and here, but I’ll just use this particular thread to post some insight.

We’ve mentioned previously that we intentionally created cards like Crusader and Firebringer because we discovered they serve a crucial role in a good matchup. We played the game for years without them, and the issue was that control decks have no incentive to actually push a game to a conclusion after stabilizing. If they aren’t under threat in the late game, it’s best to just turtle forever and keep making your defenses more and more impossible to break through.

The only way to stop this is by giving the rush deck a really scary late game. Control can stop the early push, then is incentivized to counter-attack before rush can finish them off. This is a game flow we’ve enjoyed a lot in other titles, and is necessitated by the mechanics of faeria. It looks really unintuitive coming from games like MTG and HS, because control decks basically have no reason not to attack once they have board control. But in faeria moving a unit to the far side of the battlefield and building lands there means giving up other resources spent on defense.

There are two main ways to give rush “inevitability” which encourages control to actually end the game once they have board control instead of turtling forever. We can let rush decks bypass defenses entirely via hyper-efficient removal, moving blockers away or getting huge direct damage (making long term defense just impossible)… Or we can give them cards that become extreme value the longer the game goes. The first option is the seemingly more intuitive one, and we tried that first. Unfortunately going entirely in that direction (a little is fine) really messes with things - because it becomes so easy for rush decks to make defenses irrelevant that control players have to do crazy things… Like summoning creatures on every space around their orb. This used to be the correct move at high tier play, and you’d do this before even thinking about harvesting in many game states.

Zealous Crusader and Firebringer are much more manageable and don’t mess with the early game. They give the rush deck something to look forward to and can be answered with removal spells.

TLDR; These cards were designed for a highly specific reason to solve a particular problem. While it might seem odd for players used to classic TCGs to see rush decks walloping in the late game, faeria’s unique economic system needs to be designed for differently than a classic mana curve.

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#5

Hey @DanF thanks for the clarification (I say clarification because you’ve talked about this a little bit in the past).

Before my actual argument, I suppose I should give you reasons why you should waste any time listening to me. The main thing I have in my favor is that one or two days after the first Faeria Monthly Cup I climbed from rank 5 to peak at God #10 using only yellow rush, an archetype that around that time Cappuccino, ranked #2 on the ladder, said had a winrate of 20% against top players. Since then I’ve played basically only yellow rush, despite the meta shifting drastically to include more yellow rush and counters to yellow rush, and have been consistently above 1700 elo.

Second, I’m only speaking here about Zealous Crusader and not about Firebringer, with which I have less experience, and for which I think fewer of my counterarguments apply.

Your thought process is good, but I can’t help suspecting you are missing something about how yellow rush is played. This is pretty odd, because as the developers you know the game very well. If I had to make a guess how you could make a mistake like this, it would have to be your conception of the word “stabilization”. This is a concept of game flow you say you’ve “enjoyed a lot in other titles”, but the way it applies to yellow rush in Faeria is limited.

The central example of stabilization is: the rush player has managed to get in a lot of hits to the opponent’s orb, but eventually the defender outvalues them and places a taunt or covers up the nearby deserts with their creatures. This is the situation in which Zealous Crusader promotes a counterattack.

The problem is that this situation simply doesn’t appear that often. This is for two main reasons.

  1. Zealous Crusader is cheap enough that players can drop it before their opponent stabilizes, which prevents stabilization. That is in fact its primary purpose (other than a one-turn faster clock in a yellow rush mirror) and it is in decks because it is amazing at that. So rather than improving yellow rush’s chances in the late-game, it simply extends the early game longer.
  2. Yellow Rush, unlike Red Rush and Green Rush, is currently the farthest possible a rush deck can be from pure SMOrc while still being rush. Its creatures, though cheap and with haste, have low attack, and it takes many hits to fell a god with just followers and monks. The advantage yellow has over the other rush styles is its amazing economy and cheap creatures. Together, these mean that though yellow’s creatures can be removed easily, the yellow player can still maintain an economy that, though weaker, is competitive with the defending player. But because of its comparative lack of mid-strength creatures, if the defending player ever manages to get the economy lead, yellow doesn’t have the resources to come back. This would be the right time for Zealous Crusader to be useful. But the thing is that once they get the economy advantage, they have to spend all their resources on defending against a possible crusader, turtling up, rather than counterattacking. In this way Crusader ends up being perfectly counterproductive.

[details=Click Button for More]Since I am an amateur game designer, I have ideas on how to fix this. On the other hand, I strongly suspect my opinions on this aren’t wanted (and anyways, the only thing I really have any knowledge at all of is the current yellow rush in the current meta). I’ll compromise by putting it in “hide details”.

Change to the deck type: some of this is already the case, but if you can’t create an urgent incentive to counterattack by a creature that grows over time (which Zealous Crusader does not do), you can do it by the passage of card draw, where if the yellow player assembles a combo in hand, they can break through your defenses regardless of how packed they are, or by the passage of faeria collection, where if you let them get enough faeria, they can play their ultimate creatures that lets them win momentarily. The important thing is that both of these incentivize counterattacking in the way a static (at least once they stabilze) overstatted large creature does not.

Changes to Crusader:

  1. Make it gain +1/+1 every turn you play no cards while in your deck. Counterintuitively, this would promote counterattacks, because once yellow can’t find a way to attack the orb, they can simply wait while their crusaders grow, and then the opponent has to do something before they get too big. This interaction doesn’t exist with the current crusader, because when yellow is helpless, it can’t increase its crusader’s strength, so there’s no urgency about counterattacking.
  2. If you don’t do that, I suggest capping the strength of Crusader at 10/10. This wouldn’t change anything about how well it succeeds at your goals, but it would at least make people complain less.

[/details]

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#6

Hey Dan,

thanks for your comment on this topic! It’s good to gain some insight in the thoughts you made while creating those cards.
To be honest, I feel in a very bad spot contradicting you in some points (because you have much more experience in such things than I have), but I have to…

Firebringer is much easier to deal with because its stat-gain is “only” +1/+1. From my point of view, “Hate Seed” is the real threat of Red Rush. Also, Red Rush has (at least most of the time) no Haste-creatures and has to deal more with Faeria-gaining than Yellow has. These two things make dealing with Red Rush easier than with Yellow.

Zealos Crusader would also be “fine” if Yellow had no or less Haste-creatures. The common Yellow Rush Deck has at least 9 (!) Haste-creatures and it is impossible to prevent them from attacking your orb. Only way would be

Even if the defender reaches this goal, his life-total would be seriously below 20. And Yellow has plenty of options to deal with such a defense (Vampire, Nightmare, Soul Drain, Choking Sand).
And don’t forget, that at least Green has no removal spells at all.
The problem with the Crusader is, that it regularly grows out of reach with nearly no effort of the attacking party.
If you don’t have any removal spells, you need to sacrifice all your defensive creatures to kill one (!) crusader that costed the attacker only 5 Faeria.

Therefore, I insist on Yellow Rush being imbalanced. :wink:

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#7

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On both occasions I am forced to turtle because I know that if I expand even a little, a zealous can come down. In fact, because zealous can grow so huge, I have to keep my creatures as defensive as possible and am not able to go on the counter attack because I have to trade 4 or 5 things in if he plays Zealous and still have defensive creatures to cover lands and trade into other threats that the opponent might place. In both examples I am so far ahead it would be ridiculous if the rush player won, but I can’t close the game out purely because Zealous is a thing. In the second example I got an entire new layer of creatures onto the board before I started pushing face.

You didn’t address in your post the most common request for Zealous and Firebringer; to be cap them (For me it should be at 8/8, so they would be in line with the blue collossi). This would be perfectly acceptable, they would feel somewhat fair to play against, would still solve the same problem that zealous/firebringer are (supposedly) currently solving but would actually allow the defensive player to start counter attacking to close the game out.

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#8

I’m glad, that Xerxes also answered to this thread (Btw. Hi! :wink: ), because that reminds me of various games I had to play against him and his Yellow Rush.
I can’t give you exact numbers, but I think I only managed to win once or twice (playing different kind of decks) while losing countless matches (at least it feels like that…) .
Maybe that is simply because he is a better player than I am :wink: … I don’t know. But the things he wrote above, are really true in my opinion.

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#9

Hey @DanF, thanks for giving us your insight on this matter ! :wave:

But however, while I can see the idea about Firebringer (not sure, I haven’t played enough Red rush which is damn boring to have on opinion), I can’t possibly see it applied to Crusader, simply due to all the tools (especially removal) in that color. It’s so easy to make the kill through a light defense, that you cannot simply let a Crusader (or Vampire, or Death Walker) live a turn, or it will be able to close the game with a single removal (Sometimes, the same result is achieved by a single rush, but that means you’ve let your opponent deal too many damage to you early on, so that should not count here). But Crusader can easily get to crazy stats much before “late game” (I’ve never seen a “late game” in my games, either I crush my opponent with cards like Crusader or Vampire in mid game at the latest, or he manages to retaliate in the same time frame).

The real problem is simple and can be summed up like : Y rush has possibly everything in their toolbox, and most of the time you can’t defend against everything without commiting fully to the defense.
To make the parallel with another game I’ve played a lot (Duel of Champions, which also had a board positioning) : when defending against rush I knew that he could do a few things possibly, but I could defend against at least the most evident ones. While playing against Yrush, I expect anything and try to defend against everything. I may be speaking about other games, but I think that when a rush is outvalued while not having achieved enough, then his win chances should drop. Here, they don’t, because they will easily get the value back.

I really don’t think that capping Crusader at 8/8 would change much (I’d still play it for the same reasons), but that would at least be a starting point. Maybe the problem lies, once again, in the fact that Yellow in a jack-of-all-trades color…

And a last funny thing : rush’s role is to keep greedy decks in check, but the best land positioning against Yrush is to go directly for both wells and not play in the center, which is exactly the land positioning of a greedy deck. To meditate :smiley:

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#10

Thanks for your detailed thoughts. Unfortunately, I don’t have time to comment on all these posts (barely have time to read everyone’s responses and feedback as it is - you guys are great). Just wanted to mention, as you brought it up, that we too have quite a bit of experience with yellow rush. For example, I piloted it nearly exclusively last season to ensure that I understood the matchup at its highest levels - despite the top consensus that it was weak - and quickly broke into top 8 gods with it. I can also assure you, we’ve watched hundreds of matches involving yellow rush in its various forms piloted by the best players of the day. We spend a huge amount of time and attention on the decks players talk about the most, whether positive or negative.

If you disagree with our beliefs about the matchup, we completely respect that. Faeria is a rich and deep game with lots of room for evolving theorycraft. Some believe that the crusader doesn’t do enough to threaten the control deck in the late game, while others believe it’s unwinnable. But rest assured, we definitely have a lot of experience playing with and against the archetype as well.

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#11

I can perfectly understand that, and I do believe you’re better placed than us to judge these things.
I admit that it’s a beauty to see a top player like Kingdanzz fending off a rush with ease, and I understand that it could be viewed as weaker in the top spots. However, these are players that know how to defend against it at perfection, which are a fraction of the whole player base.
But if the very same archetype is a problem to the rest of the players who don’t know how to achieve those results, then it’s not in a good spot, and we can see it through the amount of negative feedback concerning it, coming from varied levels ranging from new players to experienced players who have reached god, but are still a mile from the level of the top.
To the best players, it might be fine to play against it, but if the rest feels that it’s killing their fun, then I believe there is something wrong about it

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#12

I do not have fun playing against rush.

I don’t see how a crusader 6/6 or 8/8 on turn 4 is easy to deal with.
I don’t understand why it has charge 2.

But I do know that yellow has access to flashwind and cards like soul drain, wind soldier or last nigthmare to clear the path for a huge crusader in “late” game. Basically it is as ridiculous as this, rusher play his huge charge 2 minions in front of his orb and next turn hit your face with it. This does not make too much sense to me.

Also I know that control decks rather draw cards to get answers for the upcoming threats and build a great wall to defend against all the tools yrush has access than setting up the lands to counter attack. The only deck which can skip the land building phase is yellow with mobility. How surprising it is that one the best way to counter yellow rush is using the same tools it is using against you?

Faeria has a board and wells, why don’t you rather promote this instead of making the core of the whole game around decks that build lands straight to your face.

I wish you gave more tools to move accross the board or prevent movement (root, snare, poison?) to all the colors.

Only yellow has it for now, it makes it so versatile and powerful.

I am pretty sure the game would be more enjoyable to play and watch if it was not only about knowing how to defend against rush (and being lucky enough to have the correct answer at the right time, considering they literally have access to all type of threaths at any point of the game…) but to fight and snowball on the faeria wells control.

I mean yellow “tempo”, “mobility” or “control”, call it whatever you like, is an awesome deck because it is versatile and can adapt its gameplan to any opponent deck.
It can win with starving the opponent by winning the faeria wells control,
it can win by rushing a too greedy opponent deck that can not answer the mobile threats in time,
it can win by defending early game and setting up fast counter attack with windborne champion and desert twister,
…

Why don’t you just promote this kind of archetype or counters to this archetype?

Green having access to root, poison ( x damage per case moved by a creature), … would be an interesting way to go imo.
Blue being able to freeze?

I don’t know, but I hope you will consider an other way to go for your future expansions instead of keeping the core of the game being about rush.

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