Today's bad card is the last card to be released by the CC. And what surprise it was. I invited the Chairman to write a "good card" section for it since he was defending the card to me. I sort of mini-debate. He declined. I'm going to call him out on politics on this one. I don't think he wants to offend any Midwest players out there by hanging out with good ol' KillerB on his blog. No big deal then, there won't be any defense of Surprise Party, just me crapping all over it.
Why: He's my favorite Jem'Hadar. Cheap, has two skills you always need, and let's you do missions with 4 or 5 peeps. What's not to love? It always makes me sad when I have to kill Odera'Klen with Our Death is Glory to the Founders. But... it's not my life to give up... and it never was.... Anyways, I guess this is the opposite of today's bad card. Here we have a nice, simple non-unique. And there, a card that breaks the very fundamental structure of the game.
Why: Did you read that last sentence? I'm starting to become like Worf, and hate surprises. This card came out of nowhere, I wasn't a fan of that. I remember the last surprise, Peak Performance, one month before the World Championships in Germany. Broken Terok Nor was a great surprise after spending all that money to fly to Europe. I'm not just kicking the dead horse of Peak Performace, but it's kinda the same feeling. It's the issue of "auto-includes" in decks. Non-unique Rituals were a terrible idea. Everyone packing this same card is the same thing. Besides the gameplay reasons, it just looks bad for the game. It reminds me of Q Referee cards in 1E. Let's get to the gameplay reasons now. I'm no math whiz, just a junkie with a monkey from Jersey, but if my opponent gets this card out Turn 1 and I don't for a few turns, I only have 87.5% of the counters he does. Here we are running a 100 meter sprint and I'm spotting him 12.5 meters, that makes my chances of winning pretty slim. The cost on this card is also misleading. You get one counter back the turn you play it, so it really only cost 1. Have a Party Atmosphere out, and it's free and raining extra counters for future turns. The game is simply based on 7 counters a turn. Only a few cards change that, and they're hard to get off. 1E was a doomed game because it had no costing mechanism. It was really "One or Free", that's what it turned into. So 2E came along and learned from that mistake. 7 counters a turn, and everything is costed based on that. Even screwing with it by one changes the game completely. It lets decks do things that they normally couldn't do. So when one player has it out and the other one doesn't, it puts someone at a serious disadvantage. When both players have it out, we're playing a whole new game where cost is different. I remember when 1E "jumped the shark", when DQSS came out. From that point it was all downhill. I don't know if Surprise Party means 2E "jumped the shark", but I have a sinking feeling in my stomach that it does.
No comments:
Post a Comment