Original Post — Direct link

Team 5 seem to be designing new cards around rigid packages, or even at times practically designing entire pre-built decks. I'm not sure what caused them to take this direction on card design, but I seriously hope they reconsider. Many of the cards that have been revealed so far are designed with hard synergies with the other cards they're released with, leaving little room for deckbuilding. I know I'm not alone in holding this opinion, I've seen in repeated a few times during this reveal season so far.

Obviously releasing cards as packages is nothing new, but the lack of flexibility in the cards' design has become noticeably narrower in the last few expansions, Sunken City in particular. Take Murloc Warlock for example: at launch, the deck built itself, literally. You were stuck playing almost every available Murloc card in standard. Curse Warlock, while not quite as narrow, still requires you to run all of the Curse cards because they scale together.

Compare this to something like the Soul Fragment package from Scholomance. By design you wanted to get as many Soul Fragments into your deck as possible, but there were many ways in which you could do that. Control Decks ran the spells and Malicia for the removal and healing. Aggro decks ran Spirit Jailer simply as a good 1/3 Demon with the added Bonus of healing. There was even room to build a midrange deck with all the Soul Fragment cards together. The point I'm trying to make is that the Soul Fragment cards, while designed as a package, had applications outside of a single intended use.

Now look at some of the new archetypes being revealed so far for the new expansion:

  • Shaman: Every card revealed so far is for Evolve Shaman. This isn't that bad, nothing about these cards is requiring you to run them all. There's still room to pick and choose which ones you want to keep. Regardless, you're probably not going to see any of these cards outside of a dedicated Evolve deck, which historically has always followed the same gameplan of cheating out expensive minions as early as possible.

  • Demon Hunter: This is where things start to get noticeably more restrictive. By design, the Relics require you to put other Relics in your deck to make your Relics better. In a vacuum each Relic is fairly weak, I might even go so far as to say unplayable by itself. The chances of just one Relic being played for a specific use looks slim. If at any point you put a Relic into your deck, you may as well just vomit the rest of the them in there as well.

  • Warlock: The worst offender so far IMO. It's just Murloc Warlock all over again, only now with Imps. All 5 of Warlock's cards that have been revealed so far are centered around this Imp mechanic. I have no idea who thought this was a good idea, the deck these cards are pushing is literally just Demon Zoo with the added caveat that you can only play 1/3 of the Demons in Standard. You don't get to choose which cards you want to run, you just vomit every playable Imp into your deck in order to ensure your other Imp synergy cards will be active.

For the very clever commenter who points out that I'm complaining about lack of variety when we haven't even seen all the cards yet, that's ignoring the point I'm trying to make. The issue is that this type of design removes player agency and drastically reduces the creative potential of deckbuilding, something that (in my opinion) should be at the core of any card game. If a big chunk of cards for a class are designed to only fit into a specific deck, then anyone who want to play something else is stuck with the few remaining cards outside of that one archetype.

External link →
almost 2 years ago - /u/Cgsongbird - Direct link

Originally posted by [deleted]

[deleted]

Lol

Jk. We're not dismissive jerks. Reading feedback and gauging community sentiment is actually a really important part of the design process. Funneling through to find productive criticism isn't always the most... fun activity. But it's important.

almost 2 years ago - /u/Cgsongbird - Direct link

Originally posted by [deleted]

[deleted]

Well I'm on Reddit so...

Nah it's all good lol. This is a particularly package-y set because we wanted the Suspects/Covenant Spells/Locations to work in the same archetype, so we knew it was a bit over compared to other sets. We did make an effort to create some powerful standalone pieces throughout but reveals have been pretty geared towards packages so far.