I was hoping in the ideal world, Black finds some weakness to another color so this food cycle is circular and healthy but I guess it was a false hope.
That would be good, yes. I think I’ve said before in the balance threads that, from my perspective, we don’t necessarily need to tweak Black and Blue so that they’re roughly equal with everyone, just enough that they are beaten by / beat someone, so there’s a reason to pick them in a multiple-match / tournament setting. Enough that a monocolour tournament without bans is viable.
Speaking of which, it might be nice to have a monocolour tournament at some point, probably with Black banned. It might get some more newcomers, and not everyone on the forum likes multicolour.
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Agreed 100% that every matchup doesn’t need to be equal. In fact, having a circular food chain will be more fun and find natural balance in the recurring tourneys.
I may be making this up, but circular food chain was something I thought sirlin was specifically trying to avoid in his design.
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Waaaaaaat? Really? That is very interesting! Can you provide a little more color as to why? I think it is just a natural thing to have. Trying avoid it IMO will almost always not be successful. I don’t think I’ve seen anything that actual does it successfully including Codex.
Having a strictly circular chain, i.e. a single loop with hard counters, would obviously not be great. However, for Black and Blue, it would be an improvement to what we’ve got, and for the other colours we don’t have that going on to a great extent anyway. Outside of perfect balance, you’ll always have some small cycles if nothing is strictly dominant, you just hope the counters in them aren’t excessively strong.
I’d love to know where Sirlin said that, though. I only know of what’s in the design articles on his blog and what he said on his (non-Patreon) podcast.
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I mean, the whole design philosophy of the game is that each player’s codex should have enough versatility to feasibly counter any strategy the opponent uses as long as you can predict it, so Sirlin definitely wouldn’t want a situation where you have to switch to a completely different codex to counter an opponent.
Note that there are weaknesses built into each faction, such as how there are only a few upgrade removal cards in the game and some colors just don’t have any, but if there’s a strategy that’s so dominant against a specific faction in monocolor that you have to counterpick with a different codex entirely then Sirlin has gone on record (primarily through Discord) saying that until that imbalance can be fixed players should ban either specific cards or the entire problematic faction (and we know from testing that just banning Vandy from play results in Blue vs Black becoming a surprisingly balanced matchup for how simple of a change that is). This is referring to “normal” tournaments to be clear, obviously don’t ban things when you’re trying to adjust the balance as part of an event!
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“Feasible” is the key word in that opening paragraph, I think. There’s a difference between a game having disadvantaged matchups, and it having matchups so lopsided that the match is decided before you start.
Making Blue vs. Black balanced is a good example of something that, holistically speaking, I’m not sure is a good idea, because in the process it might make Black disadvantaged enough against the other colours that it would become the new Blue. Maybe this would all balance out in the end, after enough iterations, but I don’t think the forum player base is large enough for that to be feasible.
I don’t think anyone’s goal has ever been to make it a 5/5 matchup, just to make it not a 9/1 matchup. I think that’s fair enough to do as long as the focus is on reducing Black’s power level (if it’s possibly too strong against two factions then that’s an obvious sign it needs toned down) and making tweaks to Blue so that Garrison+Sergeant isn’t so much better than every other strategy that faction has.
It’s fine for there to be hard matchups, but ideally they wouldn’t be so hard that you’d feel like you need to switch to a different codex just to deal with it.
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I imagine this is basically derived from his stance of “you shouldn’t lose at character select” (which I don’t have a strict reference for but have definitely seen expressed before). I think that sure, asymmetrical designs tend towards some level of cycling/carousels, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying to design against them and avoid them. (c.f., Nirvana Fallacy)
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