Dont change it, remove the ability alltogether.
There are layers to the game, you Ideas of how do you build your deck.
Is it around a particular combo? do you want to bruteforce your opponent down? Are you gonna focus on shutting down their game plan? Maybe a sudden tempo push? Usurper single handedly removes any layers involving leader ability.
Lets see how many reasons i can come up with:
1st - Ability doesnt add anything to the game. Why would you have a Leader that straight up reduces the amount of interactions, of content in it? Its simply badly designed.
2nd - It invalidates several archtypes. Monster swarm? Nope. NR pulling? Cant do that. I can go on if you wish. And its not even a counterplay. Its simply passive, cant be baited, cant be avoided, your only "play" around it if dumbing down your own deck building process to forego leader ability.
3rd - it gives a pre-game advantage to the NG player. If you play usurper, you KNOW there is going to be no Leader abilities in game. Your opponent doesnt. Even if he doesnt build his deck around his leader (and lets face it, competetive side of any game involves min-max attitute, wich means you basicly should use a synergistic leader), he still has to respect other leaders, depending on the meta. So if lets say, Arachas queen is too popular, people gonna look at tremors to clear the spiders, Epidemics, lacerates, maybe graveyard clearing for the Hag. If you play Usurper - well, you get the idea.
This game has had its fair share or "Wild boar club" cards, those that were just hillariously bad. Alot of ridiculously OP stuff like first iteration of weather. Several outright poorly designed cards like DBP.
But Usurper is pretty much the worst thing ive seen in Gwent. It manages to be both distructive to the game itself (point 1), poorly designed (point 2) and OP (point 3). Honestly, seeing THAT in HC for the first time made me simply go alt+f4 and play some TW. Then i saw Burza post about Leaders being WIP and decided to give it a go. Its still beyond troubling that after all the time Gwent team acuumulated with CCG design, this could make it into any build. But we will see.
Yes but NG is supposed to be the control faction. There has to be a way you can control the enemy leader, even if it's not this way, and even if it's not absolute. Otherwise your opponent can just exploit the synergy and there's nothing at all you can do about it.
Secondly, everyone says Usurper should be changed. I don't see anyone suggesting Morvran, Emhyr OR calveit changed. Why is that? oh so you are only going to change what annoys you? The rest are fine being the weakest leaders in the game then, is that it?
It comes down to this:
> NG is currently the only faction that lacks any sort of synergistic leader with any archetype.
> Why is that? Because it is designed as a control faction, countering what the opponent does and plays (confirmed by Burza in the Ask a Dev Thread)
>As long as this is the design line that the game devs take, NG will always focus on controlling the enemy, than building its own value. And as long as that's a priority, it will keep lacking synergistic leaders. Which really only leaves it with the Usurper as the only viable choice.
Changing the usurper as such, will require a radical change in the direction Homecoming is taking, in that the change will need to give NG at least one, if not more, proactive archetypes, and leaders that can synergize with those at least as well as Bran, Arachas Queen, Foltest and the like can do with the archetypes and cards they support.
I am sorry, but I have to disagree with you my friend! He doesn't get the same value as the opponent. While the opponent builds his deck around his/her Leader synergy, Usurper's deck will expect nothing from his leader and there is a significant difference here. Usurper knows what he is going to get (or not), but the opponents don't.
Except there is really simply no alternative here mate. Say I want to take literally ANY other leader and make a Nilfgaard deck. What are my options:
Emhyr (worst leader in the game in its current iteration)
Morvran (ok, but still sucks compared to literally everyone else, like Eredin, Bran, Harald, Eithne, Foltest, Henselt, etc)
Calveit (the only decent option, still well below the likes of the aforementioned leaders)
Even if you change the Usurper, I believe this game needs some way to control the value leaders are getting. And additionally, as mentioned above, NG will not only require at least one, if not more leaders supporting their archetypes, (which right now, are a joke and playing "pointslam" with NG is infinitely more successful and forgetting synergies), but also an expansion OF said archetypes.
In order to change the Usurper into something "healthy" for the game as most people here put it, the entire faction will require a radical shift in direction. And if the devs are reading the feedback, I really hope they know it before they go through with such a change.
