[Suggestion] Rework card-drawing spies
In this post I’m going to discuss card-drawing spies only (Cantarella and Co) so whenever I mention spies it is about this type of the spies only.
So I see the following problems with the card-drawing spies at the moment.
1. Power disparity.
2. Availability disparity.
3. Autoinclude.
4. Specific SK only spy problem.
Let’s start with the first one:
#1 Power disparity
Since the new season patch landed we have 2 different powers for the spies 11 (NG, NR) and 12 (MO, SK, ST). Let’s call them Small Spies (SS) and Big Spies (BS). And let’s consider the following situation: person playing a faction with BS is going first at the match and win it. In my experience, it almost always means that this player is at least one card behind. So we proceed to the round 2 and the winner is throwing his BS in an attempt to reestablish the card number parity. But the problem is that his opponent is smart enough to be playing SS and he also has it in his hand. So on the board we have 2 spies with the winner loosing the round due to his spy having more power.
Carryover aside, if you play a faction with BS you are in a considerable disadvantage just because your spies are worse. That’s it for the problem #1.
Now a problem #1a which is relevant to this one. Even if you and your opponent have the same power on the spy bodies and your opponent has some carryover (you do not) then spy exchange will also do not help in restoring the parity in cards. It also applies to Rainfarn as he can play the spy with a body on your side.
So until you are in the situation when you have a spy and your opponent do not, you have pretty low chance to restore the card parity if you were unlucky to go first. Which leads us to another problem.
#2 Availability disparity
The same situation as in the previous problem. You were unlucky to go first but this time you do not have a spy in the first round nor in the second one and your opponent has one. It might very well be the case that with such condition you will win the first round but will pay for it with 2 card disadvantage. And if your opponent doesn’t have any carryover (or Elven Wardancer, for that matter) you will shorten the disparity to 1 card only. And if he actually does have some presence on the board right away the round 2 starts you might proceed with 2(!) cards disadvantage.
And it is becoming even worse if we consider 2 different deck types: one with thinning and another without it. A thinning deck will have an upper hand in the spies battle as it has better chances to have one in hand.
Summary: if your opponent has a spy and you do not you risk to be in 1-2 cards disadvantage throughout the game. And you can not deny it. You can prevent Ciri, you can prevent Ocvist but you can do nothing about an opponent's spy.
And with that I’m done with the coin-flip related part of the spy problem so let’s move to a different one.
#3 Autoinclude
From my ladder experience there are very little decks which do not have spies in them. In fact I can think only about high-tempo Dwarfs (with NR recently) and Mill Nilfgaard and do not remember anything else. Anyway, almost every single deck which gets played has spy in it. The reasons are shortly described in the previous 2 problems and should be understandable by anyone who is playing the ladder.
Having a spy in every deck creates a rather silly situation: in theory we have 6 slots for silver cards but effectively we have only 5! That reduces diversity and, in my opinion, hampers a user experience with the game. Why? Because spies are not bringing anything to the archetype you are trying to create (except maybe for the spy NG) they are just a burden you have to include because otherwise you will have to play with card disadvantage every single time you happened to get the blue coin-flip. For example, playing a reveal deck I want to include every single card which might synergies with my _reveal_ archetype and Cantarella is a real waste of the slot if we are talking about the reveal thing only.
Summary: [almost] every deck has to include a spy reducing the diversity and forcing a player to include a card he would otherwise never used.
#4 Specific SK only spy problem
This one has nothing to do with other spies but with Udalryk (SK spy) only. This spy works fine with the Discard SK but it doesn’t work with everything else! I’ve been playing Warcry SK since the open beta start and its ability was always harsh to me. In the best case you are presented with a priestess and some bronze unit: it is an easy choice. But given 2 golds or silvers? It is just bad.
Comparing it with other spies non-discard Skellige players are in disadvantage. At least other spies are not punishing their players.
So these are the problems I see with the spies. Now I’d like to present my solution to these problems.
Solutions
I’d like to start with the simple solution to one problem and eventually go deeper and more radical until all the problems presented so far in the text are solved.
So we starting with a simple change: we will set all spies to have the same power. Whether it will be 12, 11 or even 15 is irrelevant. They all will have the same power. It effectively solves the problem #1 but not #1a.
To solve the #1a problem we need first to introduce a radical change to the spy system. We promote (call it demote or whatever) a spy card to a different status. As we have a leader which is a core part of the deck we will have a spy ability which will pertain to the deck. So instead of having it as any other card in deck it is now similar to the leader card in that it is always available to play. So a deck is now becoming a thing with minimum 25 cards, a leader card and a spy card. And it solves problems #2 and #3!
Now we have 6 silver slots which are ours to control and we always know that in case of a dire need we can use our spies to help us in battle! With what I’ve put before we solved #1, #2 and #3 problems. We are yet to solve #1a and #4 but for this we need to go deeper.
Coin-flip solution
Having everything changed according to the previous description we can potentially solve the coin-flip problem. And the solution is actually pretty simple. The spy ability of the deck will be available only to the player who is going first in the match. The player who is going second will not be able to throw his spy in that match.
And this effectively solves the problem #1a which was introduced due to the carryover possibility. As your opponent doesn’t have a spy he has no means to deny your restoring card number parity. So if you started the match and your opponent doesn’t have a spy you are very unlikely to have 2 cards disadvantage with winning the first round. I’d argue that most of the 1st rounds w/o spies are more or less the same: if you are going first then you can win it with 1 card disadvantage. At least it is my experience.
Note, however, that with that change the spies should be changed to not be easily interacted with. You should not be able to kill it with Menno, copy with anything or recast with Emhyr, Decoy you name it. It is one way thing which you cannot deny or repeat. It is not a spy anymore, actually. It is a different game entity the whole purpose of which is to restore the balance. And it also removes the disparity in what spies currently are: spy NG can throw Cantarella with little to none cost in some situations (which aren't rare) gaining a card advantage with almost zero price.
Still this solution requires one more thing to be viable as with what I've described so far a loosing user can actually get an upper hand with the cards: user with a spy (former loser) with that solution will actually get a card advantage if he was 1 card behind and won R1 because he can throw his spy to get one card back and the opponent will have to spend at least one card making him one card behind. So throwing a spy should be the last step a player allowed to do in the round. After he put out his spy he should be forced to pass. It looks more like a workaround than a solution, though. And this is the only thing that bothers me in this solution.
With all that we solved everything except #4 problem.
Finale
If we implemented everything up to this moment why do not we push even harder? Why having different spies with different abilities when we can have a simple coin-like thing? So we remove distinction between spies creating the only one, name it with some fancy name and make it an ability. I believe that the best spy ability is the one from Thaler.
So we have this “coin” as the player ability which he is granted if he is going first. This ability creates a body on your opponent’s part of the table and give you a choice of 2 top cards. You choose one to keep and the other one gets shuffled back into the deck. After you activated the ability you pass.
In this post I’m going to discuss card-drawing spies only (Cantarella and Co) so whenever I mention spies it is about this type of the spies only.
So I see the following problems with the card-drawing spies at the moment.
1. Power disparity.
2. Availability disparity.
3. Autoinclude.
4. Specific SK only spy problem.
Let’s start with the first one:
#1 Power disparity
Since the new season patch landed we have 2 different powers for the spies 11 (NG, NR) and 12 (MO, SK, ST). Let’s call them Small Spies (SS) and Big Spies (BS). And let’s consider the following situation: person playing a faction with BS is going first at the match and win it. In my experience, it almost always means that this player is at least one card behind. So we proceed to the round 2 and the winner is throwing his BS in an attempt to reestablish the card number parity. But the problem is that his opponent is smart enough to be playing SS and he also has it in his hand. So on the board we have 2 spies with the winner loosing the round due to his spy having more power.
Carryover aside, if you play a faction with BS you are in a considerable disadvantage just because your spies are worse. That’s it for the problem #1.
Now a problem #1a which is relevant to this one. Even if you and your opponent have the same power on the spy bodies and your opponent has some carryover (you do not) then spy exchange will also do not help in restoring the parity in cards. It also applies to Rainfarn as he can play the spy with a body on your side.
So until you are in the situation when you have a spy and your opponent do not, you have pretty low chance to restore the card parity if you were unlucky to go first. Which leads us to another problem.
#2 Availability disparity
The same situation as in the previous problem. You were unlucky to go first but this time you do not have a spy in the first round nor in the second one and your opponent has one. It might very well be the case that with such condition you will win the first round but will pay for it with 2 card disadvantage. And if your opponent doesn’t have any carryover (or Elven Wardancer, for that matter) you will shorten the disparity to 1 card only. And if he actually does have some presence on the board right away the round 2 starts you might proceed with 2(!) cards disadvantage.
And it is becoming even worse if we consider 2 different deck types: one with thinning and another without it. A thinning deck will have an upper hand in the spies battle as it has better chances to have one in hand.
Summary: if your opponent has a spy and you do not you risk to be in 1-2 cards disadvantage throughout the game. And you can not deny it. You can prevent Ciri, you can prevent Ocvist but you can do nothing about an opponent's spy.
And with that I’m done with the coin-flip related part of the spy problem so let’s move to a different one.
#3 Autoinclude
From my ladder experience there are very little decks which do not have spies in them. In fact I can think only about high-tempo Dwarfs (with NR recently) and Mill Nilfgaard and do not remember anything else. Anyway, almost every single deck which gets played has spy in it. The reasons are shortly described in the previous 2 problems and should be understandable by anyone who is playing the ladder.
Having a spy in every deck creates a rather silly situation: in theory we have 6 slots for silver cards but effectively we have only 5! That reduces diversity and, in my opinion, hampers a user experience with the game. Why? Because spies are not bringing anything to the archetype you are trying to create (except maybe for the spy NG) they are just a burden you have to include because otherwise you will have to play with card disadvantage every single time you happened to get the blue coin-flip. For example, playing a reveal deck I want to include every single card which might synergies with my _reveal_ archetype and Cantarella is a real waste of the slot if we are talking about the reveal thing only.
Summary: [almost] every deck has to include a spy reducing the diversity and forcing a player to include a card he would otherwise never used.
#4 Specific SK only spy problem
This one has nothing to do with other spies but with Udalryk (SK spy) only. This spy works fine with the Discard SK but it doesn’t work with everything else! I’ve been playing Warcry SK since the open beta start and its ability was always harsh to me. In the best case you are presented with a priestess and some bronze unit: it is an easy choice. But given 2 golds or silvers? It is just bad.
Comparing it with other spies non-discard Skellige players are in disadvantage. At least other spies are not punishing their players.
So these are the problems I see with the spies. Now I’d like to present my solution to these problems.
Solutions
I’d like to start with the simple solution to one problem and eventually go deeper and more radical until all the problems presented so far in the text are solved.
So we starting with a simple change: we will set all spies to have the same power. Whether it will be 12, 11 or even 15 is irrelevant. They all will have the same power. It effectively solves the problem #1 but not #1a.
To solve the #1a problem we need first to introduce a radical change to the spy system. We promote (call it demote or whatever) a spy card to a different status. As we have a leader which is a core part of the deck we will have a spy ability which will pertain to the deck. So instead of having it as any other card in deck it is now similar to the leader card in that it is always available to play. So a deck is now becoming a thing with minimum 25 cards, a leader card and a spy card. And it solves problems #2 and #3!
Now we have 6 silver slots which are ours to control and we always know that in case of a dire need we can use our spies to help us in battle! With what I’ve put before we solved #1, #2 and #3 problems. We are yet to solve #1a and #4 but for this we need to go deeper.
Coin-flip solution
Having everything changed according to the previous description we can potentially solve the coin-flip problem. And the solution is actually pretty simple. The spy ability of the deck will be available only to the player who is going first in the match. The player who is going second will not be able to throw his spy in that match.
And this effectively solves the problem #1a which was introduced due to the carryover possibility. As your opponent doesn’t have a spy he has no means to deny your restoring card number parity. So if you started the match and your opponent doesn’t have a spy you are very unlikely to have 2 cards disadvantage with winning the first round. I’d argue that most of the 1st rounds w/o spies are more or less the same: if you are going first then you can win it with 1 card disadvantage. At least it is my experience.
Note, however, that with that change the spies should be changed to not be easily interacted with. You should not be able to kill it with Menno, copy with anything or recast with Emhyr, Decoy you name it. It is one way thing which you cannot deny or repeat. It is not a spy anymore, actually. It is a different game entity the whole purpose of which is to restore the balance. And it also removes the disparity in what spies currently are: spy NG can throw Cantarella with little to none cost in some situations (which aren't rare) gaining a card advantage with almost zero price.
Still this solution requires one more thing to be viable as with what I've described so far a loosing user can actually get an upper hand with the cards: user with a spy (former loser) with that solution will actually get a card advantage if he was 1 card behind and won R1 because he can throw his spy to get one card back and the opponent will have to spend at least one card making him one card behind. So throwing a spy should be the last step a player allowed to do in the round. After he put out his spy he should be forced to pass. It looks more like a workaround than a solution, though. And this is the only thing that bothers me in this solution.
With all that we solved everything except #4 problem.
Finale
If we implemented everything up to this moment why do not we push even harder? Why having different spies with different abilities when we can have a simple coin-like thing? So we remove distinction between spies creating the only one, name it with some fancy name and make it an ability. I believe that the best spy ability is the one from Thaler.
So we have this “coin” as the player ability which he is granted if he is going first. This ability creates a body on your opponent’s part of the table and give you a choice of 2 top cards. You choose one to keep and the other one gets shuffled back into the deck. After you activated the ability you pass.
