First, I’d like to say that even if I personnally don’t like RNG very much, I understand that it’s a necessity in a CCG (the concept of CCG is RNG-based after all _ card draw).
But there are different ways to use RNG in a game : a good, constructive way which rewards adaptation skills, and a bad, destructive way which simply introduce chaos. And various ways inbetween.
To illustrate it, imagine a die roll at the beginning of your turn, which has an impact on the game :
- The constructive way could go like this : Roll a die, at the beginning of next turn, this happens. It allows both players to adapt to the random event and develop strategies accordingly so that the random event has the best outcome for them.
- The destructive way could go like this : Roll a die, this happens. It’s brutal, you can’t adapt or anticipate or anything. It’s just breaking your strategy. Now add the randomness of whether you roll a die or not at the beginning of the turn, and you get what we currently have with atrifacts in Pandora, more or less. Bad design.
- An inbetween way could be like this : Roll a die, at the beginning of next turn, this happens to a random creature. It allows players to try to control the effect to an extent. For me, it’s still bad design, but not as much as the previous one.
As a few examples of RNG cards in Faeria : spellwhirl belongs to the constructive one (enabling the player to make decisions after that happened), Orosei belongs to the destructive category (do I really need to explain why ?),and various buffs that occur on a random creature (like sagamis) belong somewhere inbetween. As a side note, UE tends to belong to the destructive side, but you can still control it to an extent.
To finish this post, I’d like to talk about Orosei’s design in particular.
With the new 7f archetype that grants cost reductions, you won’t get full value of it.
It didn’t see much play before outside of this,so I don’t think we may see it in another greedy deck.
In Day of the Dragons, it’s the worst dragon by far (but with the most useful color to the deck) : you don’t want to play it after your others dragons that have been cost-reduced, but you want a more impactful dragon to reverse the board when you play DotD (you often have a small board at this point and need a reversal). After all, the first dragon you play will have cost you 18f effectively.
So the best way to make proper use of Orosei seems to be with a swarm of gift minions which have already used their gifts. Those minions tend to have low life, and are vulnerable to AoEs, so … not a very consistent option.
As a side note, no interaction at all with the new Magda (even if you have cost reduction, you don’t really want to evolve her, do you ?)
So it would be nice if we could see a rework of this baby (yes, once again), but at least, it would be great if we could pick which creatures get evolved, in order to spare our valuable ones.
That’s all for me ! Please, don’t follow the HS path, you don’t have Blizzard resources to survive the hurdles.
