The LiquidLegends Lounge - Page 1408

So Duelyst is a lot like Hearthstone with a 5x9 grid where your hero can also move around and attack. The other major difference back in February this year, before its official release, was that you drew 2 cards per turn, and could and also put one card back in your deck each turn in order to draw a random different card. This combined with a small hand size of 6 cards emphasized combo plays with occasional curve toppers, depending on the meta. There were cards that drew you other cards, of course, but these mostly sucked. Really bad.

Then they did a huge change right before release where they switched to 1 draw and added hero powers. The hero powers I don't really care about, but the switch to 1 draw profoundly affected the game. They did some stuff to try to balance around it, like rebalancing some of the draw cards and adding a few new draw cards. Most of the 6 classes had one class card draw option that they could include 3 copies of in a 39 card deck, and most of these were highly situational, depending on things like dying minions, summoning minions, or having a minion next to your general on the board. The neutral options, meanwhile, are rather snowbally (Duelyst contains a *lot* of decent snowbally cards in the vein of Hogger or Gruul rather than just having strong cards like sylvanis or n'zoth). There's. a 2/4 which draws an extra card for both players cards at the end of turn, obviously a snowbally aggro card. A 1/5 which draws a card every time it deals damage. A 2/3 which draws a card every time it moves. Then there were a few other options that are plain meh, but, here's the other thing: pretty much every one of these draw cards was 3 mana, taking up the same mana slot.

Moreover, just to punish you for running too many draw cards even more, they changed the start of the game from draw 3 mulligan up to 3 to draw 5 mulligan up to two, so you basically begin the game with a full hand. If you miss your turn 2 play (which pretty much nobody wants to do) you already have a full hand. This makes having draw cards in your opener even more awkward than in hearthstone. End result: decks became wildly inconsistent, and I often find myself topdecking and praying for a card draw option. It's like playing mage with only acolyte of pain to generate card advantage.

Now, over the past months they have added a few more draw cards, but no one plays them cause they're bad. They added a neutral 2/4 that create two copies of cards from your class, and virtually everyone plays *that* instead. The first expansion set is coming up this month and there are a few new card draw options but most of them are very situational. And there's a bunch more stuff involving putting random cards into your.hand.

The funny thing is, the whole motivation for the 1 draw change, as stated by the devs, was that it was too difficult to balance non-aggro decks to make them good. Yet the decks Duelyst labels "control" these days are to Hearthstone's "control" as Hearthstone's "control" is to MTG's "control". It just means you've found a way to run a tempo curve with higher mana minions so that your topdecks are better than the other guy's.

I could go on about how Duelyst overly relies on silence similar to pre-standard Hearthstone (except worse), but this rant needs to end sometime today.