Before the change Duelyst was a great game, afterwards it was just a hearthstone clone, they signed the death certificate right there.
Oh fuck off with this. You're obsessed with a single figure that has implications on card design, while ignoring an entire gameplay feature. In Hearthstone, you don't go to roping because you have to set up a 10-move lethal on a board of wraithlings. In hearthstone, you don't have your whole board afraid of getting near a suited up enemy general.
Drawing 1 card or 2, Duelyst's board-game aspect was massively important and allowed people to compete with pretty garbage decks even if they weren't good at
card games per se, if they had the positoning skills, it gave the game an incredibly high skill ceiling when moving one tile off could send everything tumbling down.
What actually killed the games was
- Amateur card design, where they didn't always account for the boardgame (see Third Wish "lasercats", Star's Fury conga lines)
- Lore and story is all separate text loredump
- Weird monetization post-launch with Rise of Bloodborn and Ancient Bonds
- Developers' increasing distance from the community
- Game format development indecision (the fuck is Rift and why did you take away my Gauntlet?)
- Free rewards repeatedly getting stingier
Like, if you want to say the card draw rule change was a
symptom of the developers having absolutely no clue about what direction they want to take the game in,
sure. The rule change immediately broke the balance of previously unplayed card draw because in draw-2 world,
nobody needed fucking card draw, no matter how good.
Because of draw-2, units with cost 6 or more were mostly worthless because they got way too consistently punished playing 2 cards a turn. Hailstone Prison was essentially hard removal because your max hand size is 6, that is not a good state for your game to be in.
Like fuck, the only reason Eternal ended up being my main card game, is because I ended up liking Eternal's MtG style deckbuilding and drafts more, and I tried it out when I hated Duelyst's meta the most (aggro Magmar playing former control tools in its deck was my breaking point).
In an ironic twist, later expansions added a bunch of random effects stuff (which nobody liked, since they clashed with the game's flow). This would have been an easy way to break tempo consistency for the original draw-2 mode without having to completely redo the mechanics. Unfortunately, CPG always had conflicting ideas (whom they tended to abandon and revive at whim), and their initial stance was "no random effects". When they abandoned the stance it was too late.
Also, I suspect the game turning into a Spike-Johnny tempobomb-fest in draw-2 mode didn't sit well with those on the devteam who tended more towards the Timmy side (to use MtG psychometrics). I seem to remember reading (I only started playing after draw-1), in some early stuff, that a not-insignificant number of draw-2 mode games ended by decking (which was considered a system flaw by at least part of the devteam).
This guy knows what's up.
