Battle of Four Tribes - An exercise in bad design

[Brakkis]

@Volrak

I liked the event. I didn’t find it grindy. The split is a definite improvement.
There’s no doubt it’s a challenging event - these nodes were specifically designed to be difficult - but that’s something I like, though I know not everyone does. It’s also not the friendliest event for newer players, but I see nothing wrong with having a small number of events targeted at one or the other end of the spectrum.

One simple suggestion to improve the experience would be to set player expectations. For many players, it may be just another event appearing on their events page, and they may have no reason to expect anything unusual about the challenge level. If for example, a click-through at the start of the event told them something like “Expert Level! This is an Expert level event. The secondary objectives can only be achieved with high risk, and the enemies deploy cruel and unusual tactics. Are you sure you want to join?”, it may help to better prepare players for what’s inside.

(Also, of course, the Willbreaker bug should obviously be addressed with high priority.)

Look, events being difficult and aimed towards veteran players is one thing and I’m all for it; I was unable to beat Trial of Zeal for the first several times it was run when I started and I understood that I simply lacked the cards and PW’s to do so at the time.

None of these issues are difficulty based. Not one. Every one of these issues can be surmounted. It’s that either the objectives result in a grind (pauper, 6+ tribal creatures), the fight itself is needlessly grindy (Elenda), or the fight is designed extremely poorly with a devastating ability that is far too easy for it to activate (Azor’s Gateway).

I beat Gateway on Turn 3. I lost to it on Turn 4 with the exact same deck. Why? Luck of the draw on both accounts. I can see losing to it by Turn 7-10 if it gets it’s ability off. But giving the node the capability to achieve that ability in such a rapid fashion is absurd. That’s not actual difficulty. Its artificial difficulty.

[Volrak]

@Brakkis

None of these issues are difficulty based. Not one. Every one of these issues can be surmounted. It’s that either the objectives result in a grind (pauper, 6+ tribal creatures), the fight itself is needlessly grindy (Elenda), or the fight is designed extremely poorly with a devastating ability that is far too easy for it to activate (Azor’s Gateway).

Azor’s Gateway is certainly difficult/challenging. It causes many losses, and better deck design and play translates (on average) into fewer losses. It’s also certainly luck-dependent. It’s subjective how much luck-dependence is too much, so opinions can easily differ on that point. Minimising the degree to which luck plays a part can be considered part of the challenge of the node.

Elenda is an example of another node that’s certainly difficult - she caused multiple losses even for some top 10 players, and better decks and play can again minimise the chances of that. I imagine some approaches to that node would indeed be grindy, but again, “too grindy” is subjective, and designing a less grindy but still reliable deck can again be considered part of the challenge.

[Gilesclone]

I don’t find Elenda especially hard ,but I find her very grindy. You play a creature or two, she wipes the board. Repeat until you gradually eat up all her hit points. Not my idea of fun.

[Kinesia]

Because of the way her node works you Blocking Vampires with first strike get bigger fast and just keep growing. Nahiri (and others) can negate her -4/-4 to everything easily and speed things up. You just need to be able to reset the board yourself if Elenda has control and you can’t get it back, but when I have control it’s straightforward and simple. Used to do it with Sorin even but once I noticed the -4/-4 ability it explained some of my problems and things got much simpler playing exactly the same deck with Nahiri!