I suppose I ought to clarify my position, then. I believe that Jaina should have a similar amount of incentive to combat-reveal her Flame Arrows as the other zoners I mentioned do for their Jacks, especially as she is supposed to be the Phoenix Archer, and currently she does not. If I’m understanding the situation correctly, the problem is not just that Flame Arrow is too weak (though that doesn’t help). At least part of the problem is that unlike Grave and Geiger, whenever her Flame Arrow gets blocked the opponent still gets to draw a card and return the block to their hand in addition to only taking 2 more damage than she deals to herself to get the Arrow back. Both Grave and Geiger do more effective damage than Jaina when their Js get blocked while also denying the draw from blocking. I also don’t think that making Flame Arrow a Linker (as suggested earlier) would help this problem since that does nothing to make it better on block. Rather, my idea would be to have an ability on her J that worked something like this:
Flame Trap [End of Combat]
If either side of this card wins combat or deals block damage, the opponent doesn’t draw a card from blocking and you may search your deck for a Jack. (Shuffle your deck if you searched it.)
This would be in addition to changing Flame Arrow to 2.4 speed and/or increasing its damage and block damage by 1. Credit to @thehug0naut for the idea of fetching a Jack, which I like because it changes the tradeoff the first three times you either win combat with an arrow or get blocked from “do I just give up having this arrow or pay 3 life to keep it” to “do I replace this arrow with one from my deck for free or pay 3 life to build my hand.” Combined with making it so the opponent doesn’t draw from blocking them (which was taken from Grave’s Lightning Trap), the hand size change goes from +0/+1 for Jaina (depending on whether she buys back) and +2 for the opponent to +1/+2 and +1.
I don’t know whether this ability and some tweaks to Flame Arrow would be enough to make J good, though I suspect making Charge Shot a better dodge followup would do the rest of the work. If we take the Charge Shot change that @FenixOfTheAshes suggested (not saying the other versions were bad, just that I like this one—substitute your own preferred version as needed), you get this as her Jack:
Flame Arrow: 7 damage (6 block damage), 2.4 speed, 1 cp Ender
Charged Shot: 10 damage(9 block damage), 5.0 speed, 2 cp Starter
Ability as shown above
Like I’ve said in my previous posts on this topic, I’m not a Jaina player so I can’t speak from knowing her well, and I’m not an expert player with any other characters so I don’t have that going for me either. I don’t mind if any of my specific ideas get shot down as long as they can inspire someone to come up with even better ideas. That said, I’d like to think this is a good idea…! 