MArcomage

I think it is too effective for its cost

Compare it to locust swarm

Well, since you asked...

Compared to Locust swarm, Reformer costs significantly less, does more damage (even if it does restore wall in the process), and has the Mage keyword giving benefit even while the card sits in hand unused. It's far superior to Locust swarm, the only disadvantage being the lack of any effect if the opponent does have some wall.

DPsycho wrote:
Well, since you asked...

Compared to Locust swarm, Reformer costs significantly less, does more damage (even if it does restore wall in the process), and has the Mage keyword giving benefit even while the card sits in hand unused. It's far superior to Locust swarm, the only disadvantage being the lack of any effect if the opponent does have some wall.[Emphasis mine]

That's a pretty big "if" to be sweeping under the rug. It was a net zero effect on your opponent's wall+tower! The wall building is a huge drawback. For it to be effective, you either:
- Need to be using it as a finisher (enemy tower <= 40).
- Need to have enough -tower cards to finish off the tower damage without touching the wall (but if your deck has -tower cards, why would you have reduced your opponent's wall to 0...?)
- Need to have some cheap way to get rid of the wall (i.e. Ent, Warlord, etc.). In this case, the value of the card is questionable.

The comparison to Locust Swarm isn't quite apt. I think it's a well-balanced card.

It's clearly meant to be a finisher or to be paired with other tower-attacking finishers, yes, but it's a very inexpensive one at that, and most others (I can think of Vampire as an exception) don't have a token keyword making them passively useful. I still feel that it needs to be more expensive and lose Mage to be comparable at its current numbers.

I think we could be comparing it to Dark ritual, a more expensive Rare, rather than Locust swarm.

We should also consider how easily this would go with Barbarian decks. They don't use gems, and they do the most damage when there's a wall to negate, some even without the keyword effect.

DPsycho wrote:
We should also consider how easily this would go with Barbarian decks. They don't use gems, and they do the most damage when there's a wall to negate, some even without the keyword effect.

Funnily enough, after the recent change to the barbarian keyword, the barbarian effect is far more powerful when there's no wall to attack.

Anyways, I don't think there's any clear analogue you can point to and say "This card is like X but better". It does more damage than Dark Ritual, but it also has a very strong precondition which Dark Ritual lacks. If Dark Ritual only worked when the enemy's wall was 0, it would be laughably bad.

dindon wrote:
Anyways, I don't think there's any clear analogue you can point to and say "This card is like X but better".

Exactly. That's why I don't think we should be comparing it just to one card but to many. I've yet to see enough to change my mind about this one being too good at what it does in too many ways.