I think any character that warrants enough substantial rework to the point where people are writing up entirely new decks is going to be irresolvable by consensus. The Jaina conversation doesn’t seem to be aligning on any concept beyond “should have a good jack” and “should be Grave-like, but rushdown-ier” and I doubt that it can. Those are such broad concepts that there’s a ton of valid levers you could pull to realize them.
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Maybe it’s worth putting together a minimalist proposal that satisfies at least the “should have a good jack” and “shouldn’t be completely dominated” criteria, and see if we can get consensus on tweaks, rather than complete rewrites (the rewrites can be saved for N different variant versions)
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400 messages in 10 days 
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I think special dodges should be sacrosanct to a significant degree. If Midori, the character with a defining trait that his special attacks can’t be normal-dodged, cannot prevent special dodges from working against him, then other characters probably shouldn’t either.
Aces are already odd numbered as per Argagarg’s Ace-block on KD.
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Putting my money where my mouth is: how about making Jaina’s fast-J a 1cp linker that can recur for free when its combo’d into from an attack or a knee bash, and making slow J actually charge by giving it some quantity of pumps?
I’m not sure if those actually fill the holes in Jaina’s kit, though.
I like this approach. Just so we’re all on the same page, can someone clearly explain why Geiger dominates Jaina? If nothing else, we’ll need an explanation for her section in the Bureau of Balance.
Thoughts on Jack and the future
I still think this is the best way to make Jacks worthwhile as a combat-reveal:
J* Flame Trap [During Combat]
If either side of this card deals block damage, the opponent doesn’t draw a card from blocking.
Combined with whatever stat changes to Flame Arrow and Charged Shot make sense for improving her bad matchups, this would make combat-revealing Jacks similar to Grave combat-revealing his own Jack, but with more block damage and some self-damage. I removed the “search your deck for a Jack” and card draw parts of my first and second versions, respectively, for two reasons: (1) I realized that getting card advantage off of it could be oppressive against grapplers, and (2) this way lets me cut out everything that isn’t the core of what I wanted Flame Trap to be.
I do think Flame Arrow at least needs buffed so that the ratio of block damage to self-damage is at least 3 (to match Lightning Cloud’s 3 block damage), and as long as it doesn’t make any matchups unfair it would be nice if Flame Arrow could trade with other projectiles like Lightning Cloud and (especially) Fast Time Spiral. I could see the damage being boosted to 8 to match Lightning Cloud’s, but this should do as a starting point:
J* Flame Arrow: 7(6) damage, 2.4 speed, 1 cp Ender
Changes to Charged Shot should be handled carefully, I think, to make it a useful tool for Jaina’s bad matchups but not cause it to become oppressive in her good ones. At the very least, though, I think it needs to be kept at a minimum of 2 damage stronger than Flame Arrow, leaving this as the smallest change from 2nd Edition that does so:
J* Charged Shot: 9(8) damage, 4.6 speed, 2 cp Starter
Points worth considering for the future:
- Should Charged Shot knock down?
- If so, how fast should it be?
- If so, should it be a Starter or a Can’t Combo move?
- Should the damage of Flame Arrow and/or Charged Shot be increased further?
- If so, how much?
- If so, should the block damage also be increased to match or should it be left as-is (for example, a Flame Arrow with 8 damage and 6 block damage and a Charged Shot with 10 damage and 8 block damage)?
- What needs improved to make Geiger no longer dominate Jaina, and what are the smallest changes that would allow that without making her good matchups oppressive in turn?
I’ve never liked the “Linker Flame Arrow” idea, ever since it was first suggested. It makes the Phoenix Archer even less likely to combat-reveal her Arrow (which I feel should be a key part of her game plan at least early on for the flavor of “this is an archer, she should be shooting arrows at people”) since she’d rather use them after hit-confirming with one of her better moves, especially if she gets them back for free if she combos into them instead of combat-revealing them. She also already has lots of other cards to use as combo-filler, mainly Kings as high-damage Linkers, Aces as high-damage Enders, and normal chains to get those Aces and do pretty good damage while you don’t have Kings.
Charge Shot being a pump move isn’t a bad idea, but I don’t think it’s necessary. It already conveys the key part of charging up by being slower than Flame Arrow, and I like that it’s immediately clear to new players what the tradeoff between the two sides is in a way that having it be pumpable might not be—I still have to re-explain pumping to some of the less experienced players in my area because it’s not entirely intuitive.
So no, I don’t think either of those is particularly useful or even improve flavor.
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Just make Charged Shot something like a 10 damage, can’t combo, KD, speed 9.0, throw with an ability that lets her buy it back. Now she can fight Arg, Degrey, and Geiger maybe. Then change UP so it can only rotate normal attacks and 6 into a attack/block.
Edit: Or maybe this doesn’t help at all vs Arg, stupid counters
I’m curious about this too, because as someone who plays neither of these characters, it doesn’t seem like it should be one of the most lopsided MUs in the game, just from a glance. And learning things is cool!
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Wow, that’s really bad flavor to have a charged-up version of Flame Arrow (a projectile attack) become a throw (which normally involves, you know, grabbing the person instead of shooting them). Jaina probably needs better throws, but that’s not at all how we should go about it.
There was lots of talk of making Charged shot be a slow attack that beat blocks or different colors of J beat different types of dodges it just makes more sense in Yomi to make that thing a throw. When trying to convert a spacial game into a card game with no spacial element some things might not line up so well.
I had thought about that, but I don’t want to be the one explaining to new players why an arrow counts as a throw when all other throws in the game involve grabbing people with hands or legs instead of shooting them with an arrow. I don’t think we should table ideas that require new players to make such a huge leap of logic, even if they would improve balance.
Game Balance Myth 2: Sirlin only cares about balance.
From the outside, I can see why someone would think that because I work on games that require a lot of balance work. But the testers who work with me would laugh at this. I’m the one always pushing back on balance changes because other things are more important: good flavor (mechanics expressing the right personality), good dynamics, and elegance. I want fewer words, fewer elements, things to be as simple as we can get away with, and for characters to feel right. If you allow balance to rank higher than those things, you get a terrible feeling game. You get stuff like the huge guy made of rock having fewer hit points than the young ninja girl. If you make only balance changes that respect all the constraints I mentioned, it’s hard work but you can still have a balanced game.
If that’s the case we can call it something different, imo. I don’t claim to know whether this version of J would be helpful to Jaina at all, but if it did, I wouldn’t reject it just because it’s not an arrow type move.
If this would help, why should it replace Charged Shot instead of Knee Bash?
The arrow is so large that you can’t block or jump over it. But it takes awhile to charge up that you can walk up and throw them. Charging up to power level 9000 and all that.
Or you could just do what MJ said and rename it.
Because It would be nice if Jaina had more blocks.
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I mean, “Charged Shot cannot be blocked or dodged” is pretty parsimonious, word-wise. Leaving it as an attack would mean that it would beat faster throws (not sure if that’s a good thing), and win ties with equally sped throws (again, not sure if it’s a good thing). I’m not sure if there’s anything else that hinges on the attack/throwness of the move.
EDIT: I guess the grapplers would be pretty unhappy about that, actually.
Assuming he’s interested in sharing them, I would be very interested in @JonnyD sharing his thoughts on Jaina as a character as a whole and her easiest/toughest MUs. If he has specific changes he think would be helpful to the character, that would be rad too.
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It would be helpful in general if the people in this thread with significant experience playing Jaina could do the MU discussion piece, because that would help focus people’s attention/suggestions on what elements of her kit could be tweaked to cover the holes without giving her an accidental 9-1 somewhere.
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