4RM3D;n7737510 said:
It's like Borkh (Villentretenmerth) and Pavetta made love and gave birth to Boretta Rot Tosser.
Rot Tosser is basically a timed Epidemic, only targeting the opposite side. It has a buff and penalty. Lets compare it with other cards:
- Epidemic (bronze) => added effect: "double the effect" => becomes silver (Pavetta).
- Scorch (silver) => added effect: "opponents rows only" => becomes gold (Igni, Schirru)
- Scorch (silver) => added effect: "double the effect" => becomes platinum (non-existent; too OP) => added penalty: "timer" => becomes gold (Borkh)
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- Epidemic (bronze) => added effect: "opponents rows only" => becomes silver => added penalty: "timer" => becomes bronze (Rot Tosser)
Rot Tosser is okay compared to other similar cards relative to their quality.
Giving it a 1 turn timer does not warrant it being downgraded from silver to bronze using your drastically over simplified power calculations, imagine if they made katakans a 1 turn timer and bronze that would be sickening, your method just doesn't work. You can either respond to it with a decoy or lose in some manner, if you need to fish for a counter the timer does nothing to weaken the unit, the only thing it does is disguise what is in essence a bronze Pavetta! 1 turn timers would maybe grant the tosser a slight increase on base strength not the ability to field 3 of the things, ultimately timers are poor balancing mechanics as it often comes down to whether you have the means to deal with them or not, and sometimes timers improve units (kambi/Borch - play more cards you are going to lose or pass if possible).
You've completely glossed over the most game breaking element of this card and provided no response to it. It grants the user FREE strength value, there is no 1 for 1 card exchange that results in a zero sum trade, in card games this is utterly unacceptable. Again no matter what card you use to counter the cow you lose a bronze card and gain zero board power whilst the tosser is granted 4 strength, its always a win win for the user.
If the cow only dealt 2 damage to the row it would be acceptable to be able to field 3 of them as the victim can choose to ignore them, but at current you're forced to respond if possible. They very often become 16 strength bronze cards if not more, I'm not saying that the proper use of a card should gain no advantage over just using an 8 strength card the problem is that the proper counters to these still grant an advantage for the original user. 3x4 strength rows are very common in NR, ST is varied but often has many neophytes on a row or 3x3 mercs etc, Monsters and SK are often even more painfully effected by these tossers.
The only exception to this lose lose for the opponent is the decoy interaction, which can only be done once, when you consider it cost the opponent their decoy the returned cow would need to remove 14 pts of value to break even. With the way NG plays they rarely have rows stacked with similar strength units so the effect the cow has on them would vary drastically, + the NG can just decoy them back, this is healthy game play IMO hence why I feel they need to be restricted to 1 card.
As long as these destroy units, bypass quen/shields, (quen shields should block scorch/epidemic/igni style effects as they are somewhat worthless at current due to the sheer amount of bypassers) and cannot be taken out by units like wild hunt warriors the list of counters is low and very costly. If bronze cards baseline at 8 strength then manticore/spores/epidemics etc would need to be used to take out or provide 8pts worth of strength throughout the game, this means using them against the cow has made the tosser worth 12 points - that is gold tier minimum strength in a scenario you deemed 'countered'!
I can think of a whole bunch of solutions to fix these but the quickest/easiest in my mind is making them silver as the others I've mentioned would require changing some fundamental mechanics; Quen shields changing to be non bypassable and archer style units able to effect all non gold units friend or foe would take away from SK identity.
These are one of the most over powered units in the game at current, with vico medics being another though often due to problems with other cards, such as Blue Mountain Commandos.