MArcomage

Playing this after playing Iskander the Rider will net a whooping 45 Recruits and King Lionheart wold net 40 Recruits

Bard, uncommon, 1R
If last card played was recruits cost only
Gain half of its cost
If last card played was a Legend
Recruits +15

I'd LOVE to see it in game. Not because of Legend support, but because it could be the essential part of Barbarian deck. You know what? Rename it to Skald and give Barbarian to it - and it will be perfect.

Glad you like it.Done

I feel the Barbarian keyword makes it too easy to summon in such a deck. If you're going to add the keyword, it needs a cap to the gains.

So we have one who wants Barbarian and one who doesnt we need someone to break the tie

I would never like to see a card which gains just about 45 recruits with a single recruit as cost. I can get behind the half cost of a card, but even this effect needs a cap, since the output can become just absurd. Such a card should never give more than 15 recruits (See Ancient ruins as an reference, i already put a discount for the condition). So it would be needed to add a cap and to remove the legend condition.

DPsycho wrote:
I feel the Barbarian keyword makes it too easy to summon in such a deck. If you're going to add the keyword, it needs a cap to the gains.

Why?
We have 9 common Barbarians, 10 uncommons and 6 rares, so if this card was added, Northern mountains and Tribes of east would summon it with 1/26 = 3,84% chance, and Gladiator would have 5,8% chance to summon it. It's on par with, say, chance to draw Archmage with Mage guild.
About gains: it's basically like triggering Soldier token at the cost of one turn. Sure, it can recover your recruits after playing Devastator or War elephant, and it perfectly fits Urk, but in other cases you'll get from 4 to 13 recruits (and those 13 are half of Crugg's cost, which makes it only slightly less gimmicky than +53 recruits after Bahamut). I don't think it needs any limit.

Lord_Earthfire wrote:
I would never like to see a card which gains just about 45 recruits with a single recruit as cost. I can get behind the half cost of a card, but even this effect needs a cap, since the output can become just absurd. Such a card should never give more than 15 recruits (See Ancient ruins as an reference, i already put a discount for the condition). So it would be needed to add a cap and to remove the legend condition.

Oh, come on! Do you think that it really matters? Iskander, Bahamut and Dragon squadron are finishers, so in 99 percent of cases you won't get a chance to play this card to recover your recruits because it's GG. And even if you do, even if your opponent survived, he'll be at 10-15 tower and in 99 percent of cases will probably die at your next turn.

You're ignoring that it would have the added effect of being a Barbarian card itself, and one that is ridiculously easy to play for those token gains or Uncommon trigger.

It needs a cap. Or if not a cap, some other limit to its versatility.

DPsycho wrote:
You're ignoring that it would have the added effect of being a Barbarian card itself, and one that is ridiculously easy to play for those token gains or Uncommon trigger.

It needs a cap. Or if not a cap, some other limit to its versatility.

Okay, then what about Gladiator? An uncommon Barbarian which is easy to play, has basically -1R cost and summons a Barbarian.

NG_Beholder wrote:

Oh, come on! Do you think that it really matters? Iskander, Bahamut and Dragon squadron are finishers, so in 99 percent of cases you won't get a chance to play this card to recover your recruits because it's GG. And even if you do, even if your opponent survived, he'll be at 10-15 tower and in 99 percent of cases will probably die at your next turn.

Im not talking about the big finishers. Take Koshei the deathless, black unicorn (which is an uncommon), mother of dragons. Thats easiely more than the cost of the card as a return. And then we get to cards like black dragon, where you have the chance to defend against a single one and then got some time to recover. Woops, 20 recruits for completely nothing! This card turns the 10% of the times where you survive the finisher (and it happened to me more than you think with cards like orc regiment and some dragons) into unwinning states except you fire something like castle beyond stained glass or something.

Abyssal Viper got an equal conditional recruit gain and it is capped. I don't see why this shouldn't be. Even if later a card which pays for itself (like sea monster) finds its way into the game.

And gladiator is quite a pushed card, but it can't get into ridicilous numbers.

NG_Beholder wrote:
Okay, then what about Gladiator? An uncommon Barbarian which is easy to play, has basically -1R cost and summons a Barbarian.

Yes. Gladiator gives you +2 recruits. I wouldn't say that the recruit gains for the Skald concept should be capped that low, but Gladiator is properly balanced for its cost, keyword, summoning effect, and near-negligible damage that qualifies it as an attack card for discarding effects.

It's a really good comparison because it doesn't do anything amazingly, but it covers a lot of bases and includes a summon that may or may not prove useful. The current proposed concept for Skald is too effective, doesn't have a random element to it, and would only see play when the gains would be amazingly high.

Well i thought about it and it might be too OP with Barbarian as Barbarian has 2 summoners so i thought about actions which could be taken to make the card more viable

1.Remove Barbarian
OR
2.Add a cap of 15 recruits per card (the total cap would be 30 if played card was a Legend)
OR
3.Increase Skald's Recruit cost

#3 could be interesting as it would require that the player has nearly that many more recruits before playing the expensive card, running the risk of the opponent drawing the means to discard it during those extra turns. A similar situation occurs a lot in Undead decks.

Lord_Earthfire wrote:
Im not talking about the big finishers. Take Koshei the deathless, black unicorn (which is an uncommon), mother of dragons. Thats easiely more than the cost of the card as a return. And then we get to cards like black dragon, where you have the chance to defend against a single one and then got some time to recover. Woops, 20 recruits for completely nothing! This card turns the 10% of the times where you survive the finisher (and it happened to me more than you think with cards like orc regiment and some dragons) into unwinning states except you fire something like castle beyond stained glass or something.

This card can give 23R after Koschei, 22R after Black unicorn and 21R after Mother of dragons. But I don't see first two as big problem since Undead are mixed-cost, and Legend-based deck is mostly gem-dependent, i.e. this card doesn't synergize too well with those keywords. Mother of dragons... well, maybe. But you can summon, say, Seiryu or Dragon golem with it, so these recruits would be completely irrelevant.
I'd understand complains about, say, 20R gain after playing Royal dragoons, but these ones?

Lord_Earthfire wrote:
Abyssal Viper got an equal conditional recruit gain and it is capped. I don't see why this shouldn't be. Even if later a card which pays for itself (like sea monster) finds its way into the game.

The difference is, you don't waste a slot in most valuable section of your deck for Abyssal viper and you don't need to actually play the card which costs at least 20R to get 10R.

DPsycho wrote:
Yes. Gladiator gives you +2 recruits. I wouldn't say that the recruit gains for the Skald concept should be capped that low, but Gladiator is properly balanced for its cost, keyword, summoning effect, and near-negligible damage that qualifies it as an attack card for discarding effects.

Well, than Skald could have 1 attack.

DPsycho wrote:
It's a really good comparison because it doesn't do anything amazingly, but it covers a lot of bases and includes a summon that may or may not prove useful. The current proposed concept for Skald is too effective, doesn't have a random element to it, and would only see play when the gains would be amazingly high.

If we are talking about Barbarians, than you can get 23R after Devastator, 19R after War elephant, 15R after Urk and... that's all. Any other card will return 10R or less.
And in what way summoning a Barbarian in Barbarian-based deck is worse than regular draw? Barbarian is the only keyword that can trigger every turn with full hand, so playing Gladiator with full Barbarian hand means two guaranteed keyword triggerings even if you got, say, unplayable Devastator.

This card can give 23R after Koschei, 22R after Black unicorn and 21R after Mother of dragons. But I don't see first two as big problem since Undead are mixed-cost, and Legend-based deck is mostly gem-dependent, i.e. this card doesn't synergize too well with those keywords. Mother of dragons... well, maybe. But you can summon, say, Seiryu or Dragon golem with it, so these recruits would be completely irrelevant.
I'd understand complains about, say, 20R gain after playing Royal dragoons, but these ones?

Well, it looks like i was ninja-edited. I was referring to the card when it costed 1 Recruit. No card should ever give more than 12 recruits for this cost, except it has a negative drawback. 5 Recruits is potentional reasonable but still pushed (And i really dislike the powercreep).

I oppose power creep as a reason not to implement an ideao.o

When MeCho's admittable artistic merit demands a concept, and the idea is not an obvious mistake, let him do what needs to be done. I am happy to please you and others and add a few more resources to the card cost, such as when you said Rexella pushes to the limits.

MeCho is not the kind of person. And given what else he plays, under his thought process, the Valve school of game balance, powercreep can be alleviated by the buff of old cards, had we needed to, and they pan out rather well.

Skald is a great card in the regard. I've seen him publish some tosh on the concept page when he takes a piss, mispelling the card name and whatnot, which just makes a card even more valuable when he comes up with a good plan.

Also, in the present case, Skald is an incomparable - There is no example of the same concept in game yet, so we have no clue what would happen until we put a card of the sort into the game first. We're just speculating, that's why the thread is so long. If the card spends one patchtime in the top ten since we made the card too strong? Well, nothing will happen overall, Arthoria has been the prime example of that and everyone is fine with her.

Well, to be clear, i didn't intend to not add the card to the game only because it is overpowered for the cost. The numbers can be changed, but when making concepts, it would be great to have quite balanced powers. And this issue leads to topics of card changes when some cards would be called underpowered when they aren't.

It's not the problem when a pair of cards are more powerfull than others (Although i would still like to see a nerf of anthoria, her attack value should be drastically be reduced, so the legend keyword can be kept and she is still incompareable with lord of time which would be a nice change). The problem is when the overall power of cards increase, the game itself changes in a very drastical way, which leads to synergy decks being underpowered and only individual powerfull cards matter (See MTG's standard-format for that reasons, its almost a rare-only format, why are they even printing commons then?).

Skald is a great concept, but we could take away some work from the developers and add cards to this section with a proper cost.

And ell, you're right that there is no card that is exactly like Skald. But what isn't true is that it's incompareable. It needs some abstraktion though.

-The condition is quite simple met. In an soldier, rush or barbarian deck (which all are aggressive strategies) you are most time playing recruits-only cards. So in these decks, the condition for this card is met like in 80% of the cases. The rest of the cards only summon new cards ti kick in the opponents face or are adding recruits to the player.
-So this card needs nothing counter-intuitive or doesn't require much amount of planning, since it plays perfectly into what you want to do anyway (Except the legend part).
-This creates a situation in which the effect should not scale to high, since the risk/reward ratio is quite low.
-So we an pick a no condition card which givesa compareable amount of recources (I would say in avarage skald gives 10 recruits if played properly) and can adjust the cost on a card with a discount.

Enter magical steel:
http://arcomage.net/?location=Cards_details&card=50

And now we directly see how the legend condition should be balanced: It shouldn't give more than 7 recruits (A 50% discount because legend cards are
rarer than mage cards, but both are equal counterintuitive)

The ceiling of skald is much higher but for this it still got a good variance and recruit cost, because of which it is compareable to a plain gain of the same average amount.

What just really hits it out of the borders are the 15 recruits for the legend card. Or the variance needs a hit with a cap.

Now effects only attack cards