first of all, this is not a complain nor am i asking for any kind of buff/nerf or anything of the sort. just discussing how the changes will affect the card (just the card, not event the meta itself) and it’s usage (or lack there of)
tl;dr: imo the card wasnt played before oversky, but it had its niche uses. now i think that’s kinda gone.
so, by reading the path notes (and if my brain doesn’t play trick on me, it’s like 1am here) Wild Growth is now a 1f create a random forest, right?
i get why this card wasnt played before oversky (unless it was, and i just dont know about it, which would probably render most of this post meaningless…). it was basically too random and it affected land placement: something that people usually want to be very accurate with (so randomness was not wellcome)
i get why this card was played after oversky. it was just and easy ramp in the land department in order to quickly get to those sweet sweet 4 and 8 lands to be able to play the ever present Crystal Flower and Skywhale
but now we are back to where we where before. i might be completely wrong here; im not the smartest card player out there, but who is gonna play a 1f make a random forest when paying 1 more faeria you can remove the randomness by choosing where the land will be, choose what color the land will be and draw a card? (i mean, yeah, sure. people that want EVEN MORE land generation or f2p like myself that maybe dont have Earthcarft or the memoria to craft it. but i dont think that’s the point)
and what’s is the problem?
well, i dont think there IS a problem per se with the card. it wasnt played before, it will likely not be played now. we’re back to square one. and square-one-Faeria was cool, right?
true, but now the card seems just… bland. before it was a bit of a gamble. you always got the land development for those Thyrian Golems, Oak Fathers and Primaveral Colossus and you might actually get lucky and get the forests on nice spots.
now it’s just cheaper and weaker. it’s like the power wheel. whenever i make a forest w/ the wheel i am not choosing to +1 (i.e.: "paying 1f). that’s what Wild Growth does. 1f for 1F. only it’s random.
“but it lets you make several forests in one turn!” well, that’s what the elemetals (and Earthcarft) have always been there for, right? and guess what: they let you choose where the forest goes
before, it had this kind of “burst” in land development. not as much it’s position, but its amount, so you could suddenly drop a Thyrian Golem out of nowhere. that was it porpose. and it never saw play. now that the “burst” is basically gone (even if it maintains the same value of 1f -> 1 random forest), i dont see why you would ever put it anywhere. but then again, i may be completely wrong. it wouldnt be the first time. this is just a first glance oppinion.
now if you’ll excuse me, its 1:39 (god im slow at writing these things) and i am going to bed. tomorrow i may come back and fix this post. the look, the wording, the probably several typos, the readability (if that’s how you spell it…), etc.
In my opinion its nearly useless right now because it is simply too less influence to justify to put a card of these into a deck as it is right now. Like you said it should mostly be a smarter idea to either use the power wheel or to integrate another card which has greater influence like Earth Craft, Earth Elemental or even Seed Sower.
I do not want to offend anyone but the most recent rework of Wild Growth (from two random forests to one random forest) shows that the game designers really didn’t got that this card could be used to push the land acceleration hard so that Skywhale, Crystal Flower and Yakkapult (beyond others as well) can be played very early. However, this is not a problem in the first place since the game designers always can make balance changes and who on earth could foresee everything in a complex card game like this? I do not like the solution that was brought here at all, though. In my opinion they have “fixed” the problem on the false place. It really would have been better to change the cards that cause the balance troubles (Skywhale, Crystal Flower, Yakkapult, Frog Tosser [even the 4/4 one]) instead of changing other cards which were obviously rather weak beforehand and corrupting other valid strategies. These cards should be nerfed according to a lot of people nevertheless.
The sad thing is that I used Wild Growth in a forest deck based around Oak Fathers, Thyrian Golems, Primeval Colossus and Everbloom Wisps. It was a great way to push your Everbloom Wisps, land accelerate fast to get Thyrian Golems and cheap Primeval Colossus and to get strong Oakfathers. Now this possibility is gone making these kind of decks weaker. However, I don’t think that I (or someone else) would have played these kind of decks these days any more because the strong and costly creatures mentioned above get swallowed and the game is lost for the green player.
I did see it occasionally - mostly in mono-green giant decks. It wasn’t ultra rare, although I don’t have stats. With the nerf I expect mono-green won’t run it as often.
I wonder if it could be a temporary change. Pretty unlikely, but here’s why.
Swallow is getting played a ton. I’m not sure what it’s like at top-end god, but it’s played a lot at low god and below. But it’s being played partly because it’s seen as OP, going by comments here at least.
Because it’s OP, rushing lands to use it is a good idea.
Once swallow is nerfed, rushing lands to use it won’t be as powerful.
Wild Growth no longer needs the nerf it just got.
It was more interesting (IMHO) and unique in its old form, so switching back will make people happier.
It was also an unnecessary nerf to green giant decks.
In the past few weeks out of all the decks using wild cards I never saw it used. I’ve only seen it used in mono green where forest counts mater. In the wild decks they just used Earth craft and Elementals because nothing important really happens until turn four where they easily already have six colored lands. Wild Growth was not needed at all.
My only guess is its a nerf to mono green or a nerf in expectation of new cards or in expectation of a wild nerf requiring more wild lands on the cards.
I agree with this. I think creating two forests could be OP with new cards. However, I don’t understand that the devs didn’t nerf Earthcraft, which has been used in almost every multi color deck these days. Imo, Wild Growth will never be used because it’s just inferior to Earthcraft.
I agree with this - wild-growth gives 2 lands at once for 2, which is nice. Earthcraft gives choice of land acceleration and card draw in one. You get to thin your deck, which is always awesome (unless you’re playing a stall deck). Wild growth could help make a strong combo deck, but it’d be a one-trick pony and if not, then the oversky cards are the ones that need to be nerfed. What’s amazing is that while Whale and frog tosser were being ridiculously abused - almost none of those decks had wild growth. Almost all of them had earthcraft.
