Hmm, you make a good point. Also the flavour you described was what I was thinking of. He’s like a first responder, straight on the scene to arrest people.
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Being able to disable more than one unit per turn with some cost/restriction would be another option, I can’t imagine the Dominion being a fan of public gatherings.
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I just had a truly spaghetti idea but what if Arresting Constable were able to arrest a number of units equal to the number of opposing heroes? Actually, scratch that. I don’t think that would work the way I would want it to, unfortunately.
It could be cool if it had some sort of contextual effect if Jail were in play under the same player’s control. Like maybe if Jail and the Arresting Constable are in play together, any unit that arrives from the Jail is exhausted?
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I like that last part exhausting units that arrive from jail. It’s an easy enough change. I also would like " jail is free to play"
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Yeah I love the idea of there being synergy between the two
Hey @FrozenStorm and @Nekoatl (and anyone else who might be interested), Sirlin specifically said in Discord about an hour ago that he’d appreciate someone playing some games of Blue vs Black with the only change being “you cannot play Vandy” to get a sense of how much she warps the matchup. Everything else in Demonology is allowed, no other restrictions or changes of any kind. You up for trying that?
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I recall identifying Vandy’s quick and efficient ramp-up in power as the most oppressive part of the Blue v. Black matchup, but I think removing her entirely would gut Black rather harshly. Still, I’d be game to try it, for science.
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@Hobusu does that include Vandy spells? If so, I agree with @Nekoatl that it would be pretty crushing to black. I feel like it’d be more interesting to replace Vandy with Troq but keep Vandys spells
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An alternative while I remember:
Deteriorate and Sacrifice the Weak are good cards, but fine on their own. The problem is that they’re both in the starter deck, allowing Black to easily wreck a lot of patrol setups if they draw both on Turn 2.
Make Sacrifice the Weak a Demonology spell.
I have not put much thought into what to swap out into the starter deck, but my default choice would be Dark Pact, with an additional gold cost: Soul Stone in the starter would be horrific (maybe not if you removed the stat boost?); Shadow Blade on top of the card drain from Thieving Imp would probably be bad, too.
@Nekoatl you want to try a few games of “Black but replace Vandy’s card body with Troq (as a black hero)”? Spells stay the same (vandy’s spells, including Meta) but now you can’t easy level and you don’t get the resist / doom / card fetch?
I think that actually would roughly even the matchup out, probably to more like a 6-4ish for Black, instead of the total lopside that it is.
Sirlin wanted you to test just not playing Vandy, which does mean not being able to play her spells either, yes. He said it would be useful to know how much the matchup depends on her and her spells—obviously the intent isn’t to actually remove Vandy from the game forever, but rather to go from the current extreme of “Vandy is the best hero in the game with the best spells” to “Vandy is so pathetic you never play her” and see whether the rest of Black is still strong against Blue or if it’s just Vandy that makes Black appear so strong against Blue.
Please play along with it instead of doing your own thing, this is the first time I’ve seen Sirlin himself specifically make a request related to balancing this matchup.
This is the strongest point in favor of doing Sirlin’s test, because it’s really telling that your immediate assumption is “this matchup that’s incredibly lopsided in Black’s favor maybe completely falls apart and is horrible for Black without this one hero.” He needs to know whether Black overall is balanced and Vandy alone is the problem or whether Black as a whole is also too good, and this is the way he believes is best for finding out.
Maybe doing the Troq test suggested above would be good after doing some of Sirlin’s test for another point on the spectrum, but we want to establish the end points first.
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I agree with Frozen that the Troq replacement sounds more interesting to me, but I also agree with Hobusu that we should indulge this experiment first. If Sirlin is asking about this, maybe a Revised Edition is in the works, in which case, I’d like to support his creative process.
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It’s not so much that “I think Vandy is the most broken part”, @Hobusu (sorry I feel like you’re proxying for @Sirlin here, not meaning to come at you specifically), but that “ANY color with one of their heroes and spells removed would be lopsided”.
Having one less hero means less ability to juggle heroes as blockers, and completely removing one set of counter options.
I’d feel the same about “Just Remove Garth and All his Spells” or “Just remove Orpal and all his spells” without replacing them.
That’s why I suggested replacing Vandy with “any other body” (Troq being an obvious worst choice). I’d be fine with testing the changes as suggested, but I think it’s way more interesting to test it in a more independent of losing a whole hero sort of way.
So I feel like “Replace Vandy’s Body with Troq’s” OR “Replace Vandy’s spells w/ Troqs” makes for a better test
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He’s said on Discord that he’s toying around with a revision but it’s not one of his main projects, so don’t get your hopes up too high… but he has been discussing the game and changes he’d like to make to it more on Discord recently, so he’s clearly at least interested in doing it at some point. It’s likely that any revisions will appear on the Sirlin Games Patreon, so join that at the Silver level if you’re interested!
No worries!
Sure, and of course Sirlin would have been aware of all of this when he made the request. If you want you could discuss it with him on Discord, but like I said, I believe the intent here was that current Vandy is at an extremely high level of power and Sirlin would like to see the most extreme opposite end of the spectrum: so weak that you never play her, ever. It’s perhaps similar to how while he was balancing Street Fighter HD Remix Akuma was at various points either the weakest character or the strongest, which helped him get a better sense of where his final power level should be. He also talks about this kind of thing in an article on balancing games.
Bul like Nekoatl said, couldn’t you at least humor the designer of the game on how he wants you to test a balance change to his own game when he’s never made a request like this before for Codex since its release?
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I’m 100% game to test things, I’d just rather have a discussion about it first. Looking at the discussion on discord as it stands, it doesn’t come across as a strong request to “Please try testing this”, more a general musing about possible things to try.
I don’t even think Vandy is the strongest hero in the game, hands down. I think Garth and Zane are at least on the same tier as Vandy, and perhaps stronger than her.
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Here’s my new idea:
One of the things that makes Blue weak in general is that it doesn’t have very many “real” spells, compared to other specs.
Pretty much everyone has one pretty weak “never tech” non-ultimate spell (Note that Vandy and Garth do not … hmmm. I think Drakk is the only other hero with 3 good spells, although the other red and green heroes don’t have any real dead cards like Now and Later or Hallucination)
Blue, however, only has Law with two good (midgame) spells, Peace with a build-around Boot Camp and a medium pump spell, and Truth with the (midgame) Free Speech.
My proposal would be to replace Hallucination (leaving Dreamscape as the “build around”) with something that provides early defense, especially against Black.
Perhaps summoning 3 1/1 illusion soldiers that are trashed at the start of your next turn, as a 1 cost spell (or 5 as a 2-cost: full the patrol zone with weak temporary units for a turn!)
Or, to be more specifically anti-black, give all non-patrolling enemy units (and heroes?) -1 HP until end of turn (Illusionary Exhaustion)
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If by Now and Later you mean Ready or not I would beg to differ. Situational yes, but Ive come to teching 1 off it quite often when going future. with a void star that 18 flying damage in 1 turn, which just often wins me the game (or they have not taken 2 damage/a blocker or two, 18 flying overpower damage generally wipes their board clean) Which Im pretty sure buts geiger in that 3 decent spells list. But I would also add Grave, Rook, Midori, Arg, River, Bigby… actually quite a lot! Even some of the ones that are left like prynn I would say their least teched is still useful, Vortoss Emblem comes in whenever Im facing a really aggresive red player.
I can’t help but think “we already have a card called Now!, so what would Later… be?”
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Target unit/hero is moved to the future with 2 time runes and gains forecast.
Target Non-this spec hero is trashed. Return them to play at max level at the end of your opponents turn. (similar idea could be done with units +1/+1 runes)
Put a hero into play from a command zone at max level. They may cast ultimates this turn as though they had been maxed at the beginning of the turn. At the end of the turn return them to the command zone. (option to give them haste here instead of the ult clause)
All Heros become max level.
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