Some starters can have occasional bad splits. I think everyone here’s had a game that felt uphill because they got all their good spells/units in the same hand. So, suppose we used the following variant:
Both players choose their starting hands. For forum purposes, Player 2 would start the thread with a post giving their starting hand in a spoiler, so they don’t see Player 1’s turn first. Player 1 would then choose their starting hand, and post their first turn as normal.
Any thoughts? I’m not sure how this would affect balance, you’d still have a lot of variance in Turn 3 draws. Maybe it just means some of the less-popular starter cards would completely disappear.
Personally I like this idea on general principles, more choices mean more chances to outwit/be outwitted by your opponent and less randomness means less chance of a terrible starting hand ruining the early game.
However, that last point about unused starter cards does seem annoying… I doubt there’d be many cards this would make permanently redundant but I feel there are surely ones you’d end up only ever using in specific matchups.
As for balance it would surely mix a few things up but I can’t see it skewing any particular matchups too far… it would be annoying to play against a Vandy that always had her starting crew to drop on the board though
I guess it kind of depends on how significant a role draw-variance has on making specific match-ups good or bad. Like if Black vs Blue is trash no matter how good Black or Blue draws, this won’t have much effect, but if Blue Never Wins if Black draws perfectly on T1…
Now I’m imagining a variant where the blue players always gets to pick the black players starting hand. Probably also needs to pick their own starting hand. I wonder if the worst possible split vs the best split would actually have any impact on that matchup. Might make it 40/60 instead of its current 10/90 win rate.