You sound like a color defender. Rather than looking at the game as a whole you are trying to defend it because its good for your favorite color/deck. The problem is that it is to versatile and to good. I’ve tried three different decks. Big Green, Red Combat Burn, and Yellow Sacrifice. Frog Tosser single handedly disrupted all three of them.
You have to be very careful with “comeback cards” because what happens if they are used when you already have a slight lead or are equal? They completely give you the advantage. Look at doomsday arguable the most “comeback card” in Faeira. It costs 9 mana, sets your mana to 0, takes half your life, destroys EVERYTHING, then ends the turn not allowing you to do anything more. It fairly decisively resets everything and the sooner you play it the more it hurts you. It is reserved exclusively for getting a second chance. This is how all “comeback cards” should work. You should never be able to play it to break a stalemate or to hold an advantage. If that is its role it should be your exit strategy when you already failed once and are heading to a loss to get a second shot at it.
Your arguments would also hold more water if say Frog Tosser only showed up in green decks. Then yeah it would basically be a green card. But no it shows up in many decks and has been called an auto include by expert players.
I’m not defending anything. I’m stating my opinion on a card wich I like and found fun to play with while trying to explain why I think its in a good position as it is. If people wanna nerf it the devs will most likely do it and a nerf will surely follow.
From all of the colors green is actually my least favorite one, only deck im playing having anything to do with it being in a GB enchantment deck. It just seem that players have grown accustomed to the OG OP cards, and anything that could help deal with that should be removed or nerfed immediatly.
As the overskye goes on, more powerfull card will arise, and people should get accustomed to new metas and decks, if we all keep on playing GR crackthorn, sacrifice decks, blue jump, yellow rush and all that, the game gets very boring.
Ok then. In my opinion the metric of a good healthy meta for a card game with distinct colors is that each color has a deck in the top X while multicolor decks have two or three different decks in the top X. Each deck being different with a different feel. Each of those decks should have a counter in the meta that it can win against but takes a huge deal of skill/luck to do so.
Unfortunately real life doesn’t produce results that clean but its the ideal that I judge games by. If a deck ever takes over more than 15-25% of the meta the game is fundamentally flawed in my opinion.
That’s why cards like Frog Tosser rub me the wrong way so much. When they shut down so many different decks and can be added into many decks those decks it counters are automatically excluded from the meta.
So many swallows, and some of them because 3 wishes… I think this card increases the problem. Happy to know that developers think of changing 3 wishes.
Too soon to change the Oversky cards but it seems to be a problem with the whales. The flower is a good alternatives to some cards like Frogify ; maybe it would worth to be as expensive.
Frog tosser, even at 4/4, still seems quite OP to me. Compare it to Firebomb. Sure it has more land cost, but 2L2F2W isn’t all that much.
Wild growth - yeah, changed - weird. It seemed totally fine to me. Is this in response to the new cards? Because if so, IMHO they should try to balance the new cards around the old, not the other way round. Wild growth now sucks unless you’re after the event synergy.
I would say yes, I do not know if it needed the nerf, but with it it was quite common to see whales on 4’th turn and a lot of the new cards. Maybe they wanted to make sure they come into later stages of game when you have a shot at defending against them as opposed to early stages and snowball out of control.
I think their goal is for land requirements to be a balancing mechanism allowing for lower faeria costs - so late game cards would be relatively cheap, but restricted to late game due to land requirements (like crackthorn was). They’ve pushed the envelope there with cards like frog tosser, so now land acceleration becomes a balance concern. I imagine they hope to wind up with a meta like this:
Rush decks use 1-3 land requirement cards which give a consistently strong early game, but weaker late game.
Midrange decks use a mix of low and medium/high land requirement cards giving them consistency
Control decks use lots of high land requirement cards - so super strong in late game, potentially weak early game
Some combo decks use land-ramp cards to meet land requirements early - and suffer from inconsistencies and specific counters as a result. Wild growth allows for this without many land ramp cards, which is why it’s getting nerfed.
You said that green lacks removal before frog tosser. This is true, but should green have removal? Green already was the strongest colour last monthly cup. Also every other colour has weaknesses too, like red for example lacking hard removal and heals. And I don’t want any other colour to have more damage removal than red, because that is red’s strength. If you play for lategame that is fine in my oppinion, but then you should not be able to contest the board in the early game but you should have to hold until you scaling comes in. If we need a change on green, then it should be how removal like swallow works on big creatures, because once they are summoned they should be really hard to remove, otherwise they are not worth their cost. By no means they should get support from cheap hyper-efficient creatures. If you want board control, play any other colour.
Also 4/4 for 5 with combat and an extra frog is still to strong. If your frog tosser does not survive, then you had a removal for 4 + an extra frog for 2 which means this card is 120% cost efficient (compare it to a verudian force which is 116% cost efficient). If this card removes some stuff and survives its cost efficiency can go up to 200% cost efficiency (depending on how badly wounded this card is and what it trades into). If you have to spend 2 extra fearia to get rid of this card (for example by trading a frog into it or use seifers or soul drain or emperor’s command), then the cost efficiency is at 160%.
As a player who currently runs a deck with Azure Skywhales I can say they are very effective, sometimes just too much. They are very universal and easy to cast even with the 8 wild lands requirements and have no downside in stats / abilities.
But what bothers me more is the flavor itself - why a creature can swallow a bigger creature which stands on the other side of the board? I would expect limitations for swallowing adjacent creature (same that Bomb Sliinger has) and/or swallowing creatures with less life than swallower’s power / life. Former wouldn’t nerf them too much as they are not color specific, so they are easy to be placed on any land type, while the latter would strongly affect them. On the other hand it would open the world for new creatures with swallow ability and smaller bodies.
how about the swallower loses health and power based on the swallowed creature. So swallowing a collector, you get a nice fat whale. Swallowing a monster, you wind up with a little whale that has to run around the board to avoid getting killed. Opens up some interesting dimmensions to play, and leaves whales potentially strong in some situations, while not being OP. This way you can’t reliably combine your win condition and defensive removal into one card.
Although perhaps no body is using this,maybe i should mention that whales can swallow friendly creature.Bobrossw I really like your suggestion,as supplement:If you swallow a friendly creature.
you GAIN health and power while if swallow an enemy creature,you LOSE health and power.
Here you can see my foolish attempt to play blue / green without whales or flowers in my deck (Trying to buff frog tossers in hand for massive throws, also playing the new jump minions).
whale two turns in a row, and I’m not playing yellow, so my frogify is completely useless.
I could just add whales like everybody, but I just feel dirty doing that.
This is not a calculated play from my opponent in any way, he just slams two of these in a row and I lost the game.
So frustrated right now. playing against whale with blue yellow events…even I had almost full board control .they come back after the first whale.the only way to win is to make my deck more aggressive.why play anything else if the result of the game is written after 8your opponent have 8 lands?why not just run a rush deck??tried my best but got crushed anyway.0 chance of winning.
full board control ,4 creature on board 1collossus ,my opponent just used a whale and I know i already lost.because my opponent can just 3 wishes into 0 cost copy of my creatures and events or use anonther whale.to deal with the bigger threats.since it takes 2-4 basic creatures to trade with a whale and they can’t even do that because the charger 3.He can even go orb if he have some saved faeria. Economy means nothing anymore.my creatures are not well placed because they are trying to gather faeria -not around the opponent’s orb.
Even playing a mirror Whale match is frustrating as you just cannot swallow it. Played many games in which I saved them in my hand for better use, but later I realized that whoever plays Whale first has incredible tempo and economy advantage. Also when opponent keeps spamming them with Aurora’s Creations, there is a very little chance to catch up.
I wonder who was the guy responsible for testing this mechanic - I expect some fix soon.
It seems OP on paper…forget about testing. 6/8 vanilla for 6 is a solid deal. That’s like Verduran Force. Add charge 3, much stronger…oh and flying…so stronger still. We haven’t gotten to swallow yet and it’s already something that should cost 8 faeria at least. Now swallow is probably on par with frogify - removal with some conditions. Except unlike frogify, the conditions are backloaded. In frogify you give your opponent a creature now. In swallow, you give the opponent back a creature in a different location (maybe) later. So I think it’s fair to say swallow should cost somewhere around 5. So basically whale gets 13 faeria worth of value for 6. Unlike cards like soul-eater, you don’t really have to jump through hoops to build a deck around it either. You just get absurd value for cheap.
I think, as was said elsewhere, it’s possible that the effective cost of lands is being largely overestimated or misinterpreted. 8 wild lands is not difficult for a 3 wishes player or a green giant player.
There’s also the issue of how balancing plays out at different skill levels. Land costs are probably more relevant for higher skill games (lower skill games fluctuate more and the game’s result is usually determined later than for the highest skill games, and the longer a game goes the cheaper land costs seem). This is probably not a huge issue here, though.
But some games have really been hurt by ignoring this skill/balance relationship. SC2 is a good example IIRC - unevenly adding huge APM-focus elements then balancing around ultra-high APMs that only professional players can meet.
Balancing for different skill levels is always nearly impossible. I think the best they can do is balance at the competitive level and leave the learning curves for different decks unbalanced. You wind up with a few easy to play decks that can allow unskilled players to rise the ranks and then slightly different metas at different ranks. The very skilled players will still take those easy to play decks farther than unskilled players, and/or play harder to play decks in ways that effectively counter the easy decks, so in the end, it’s not much of a problem.
The problem comes from making inaccurate assumptions about the course of play - thinking that 8 special lands will usually start around turn 8 and not turn 4 or 5.
