iamthedave;n10250852 said:
The problem is less that the coinflip is bad, and more that whoever gets to play the last card has a massive advantage. Introducing extra mechanics to make people fight over who goes first/second doesn't change the in-built issue that whoever plays the last card has a massive advantage. THAT can only be fixed by a complete game overhaul and/or the introduction of secondary win conditions.
You can win your last play by getting card advantage in various ways - you can only reverse the coinflip if you have a spy and your opponent doesn't. And if you lose the coinflip and your opponent has a spy, you sometimes lose on the spot, and even if you don't the comeback is going to be really hard. That's the core of the coinflip issue, and how it is connected to the Spy problem.
Which again brings me to my initial idea - remove spies from the game and only give the first player a pseudo-spy. That will allow the first player to reverse the coin and it will prevent abuse of the coin, making the game a lot more fair.
As for the last play - it is advantageous, but overall it is not the be-all-end-all problem. If you win the last play, you get to play 1 card unanswered, which is really important for some Win-cons, like Ciri:Nova, which is actually pretty terrible if you don't have the last play since there are multiple answers to her. So playing Ciri: Nova requires you to execute a certain gameplan with suboptimal deck, making her balanced overall. Other similar win-cons like Xavier and Olaf function the same way - they just give less points since they don't require you to disrupt your deck. For most other win-cons, getting to go last... doesn't really matter. Jan Natalis+Horn? You can just play smart to avoid Scork hitting more than 1 unit. Paulie into Els into Dorf? - you likely have a unit larger than the dorf on board, if you don't you screwed up, and Scork doesn't even give that much value in this situation, anyway - 13 or so points is pretty weak. So yeah, the last play is not so much of an issue, it just allows you to play some wincons safely, and get maximum value out of Scork. Otherwise it's not very impactful, so I don't think it is the part of the problem we should be focusing on.