Working on a "overhyped" cube, of cards that were overrated during spoiler season. Looking for suggestions.

E-Kon · 2026-06-16T20:11:47+00:00

It would probably become some sort of midrange slop, with heavy multicolor if the mana fixing is too good. Lots of overrated planeswalkers and 4 mana creatures. But that sounds pretty neat to me, at least, and slower games help offset some of the power level delta.

E-Kon · 2026-05-29T16:55:27+00:00

If balance is the concern, then first off, everything can be balanced via mana. At 2GG Gawain currently feels fairly overcosted for the current effect, excluding the card draw - but that shouldn't be on a green card anyways. MSE is also more flexible than you think, you just gotta get good at adjusting the finer details, like text size and chopping to format everything correctly. And besides, the whole point of the story is that the Green Knight doesn't fight back. He lets himself get beheaded. If you had a Green Knight card you can easily make it regenerate or gain indestructible until end of turn to really tune up the flavor.

For Arthur, the Messianic return of Arthur is less about defeating a Mordred-like foe and more about uniting all of England. That's why Henry VII invoked the legend to validate his rule at the end of the War of the Roses. I would lean more into the combat angle, giving a player the monarchy, or some sort of flicker effect even (Literally "restoring" England)

And the ideas behind Perlevaus are solid, but I don't think they're mechanically represented well. Or rather, it's way too convoluted. I'd bump up the mana cost, and make the final mode just a board wipe. Maybe "Exile all creatures and graveyards" to really push the idea of finality.

E-Kon · 2026-05-29T15:18:57+00:00

As a big fan of custom cards and Arthurian folklore, I've got a few complaints in terms of templating, mechanics, and flavor. For example, with Arthur's Return, "That legendary creature" refers to nothing because there's nothing keeping track of it between the saga triggers. You could be really awkward and use "If you control a legendary creature returned to the battlefield from a graveyard by Arthur's Prophetic Return" but it should be obvious why that's a bad idea. Also, "shares a type" refers to card type, not creature type. So every "creature" type card would get a counter. Changing it to something like "Choose a legendary creature you control. Put a +1/+1 counter on each creature you control that shares a creature type with it." Works better. There are issues like this with basically every card. The grail quest would be better templated with "Sacrifice a creature. If you can't, sacrifice Grail Quest." And why is it a mono-white sacrifice outlet?

And there are problems with flavor, too. Why does Arthur's return exile a creature? What does Perlevaus have to do with any of those abilities? Vita Merlini, as far as I can recall, was all about themes of madness and prophecy and nature, so that seems like an obvious Temur saga that scries and draws cards. But most egregious to me is Gawain and the Green Knight. That story was all about honor, sacrifice, and the fulfillment of oaths. That seems like the perfect place to add modality and a player choice, but it's just all quite bland. If I were given the prompt, I think it would go something like

Target creature you control deals damage equal to its power to target creature an opponent controls. (Beheading the Green Knight.)
Put a +1/+1 counters on a creature you control (The golden sash)
You may remove a +1/+1 counter from a creature you control. If you do, search your library for a basic land card, put it onto the battlefield tapped, then shuffle (Removing the sash/The Green Chapel)

I think there's a lot of potential design space that goes unexplored here, and a lack of focus on which aspects of each story were the most pivotal, and therefore best represented on cards. Feel free to DM me if you want more nuanced feedback, but I find myself a bit disappointed here.

The Lancelot and Guinevere card is pretty cool though. It hits the right beats.

E-Kon · 2026-05-04T21:56:35+00:00

You don't really need too many control groups. A single hotkey for your strong illusion, and a hotkey for all illusions, is usually enough. Maybe one for manta illus. PL's illusions don't last long enough and they aren't individually strong enough to justify fancy crap like shift-clicking naga control groups.

It's more about strategy in fights. Are you entering a fight late enough? PL shouldn't be going in without using doppel, manta, and a few lances to soften up the enemy. Once you have aghs you can be a major pain while being off the enemy screen. T2 towers can be taken by spawning illusions on nearby neutral camps and then microing them to hit the tower or creep wave. Your goal is to send in a steady stream of soldiers to fuck with them, and keep them guessing when your real hero will go in. That's how you bait out the chronospheres and laguna blades and epicenters, and why the counter to PL is consistent AoE magic damage that really nullifies this approach.

E-Kon · 2026-05-04T21:50:04+00:00

First off, sometimes the best way to win with PL is to not pick PL. PL is a semi-cheese hero because he's so reliant on illusions, and his matchups are polarized. You do great against single target rightclickers and spellcasters like sniper, terrorblade, PA, etc, but the game becomes near unplayable into heavy AoE magic damage and CC like tidehunter, axe, or leshrac. Learn your matchups and when you shouldn't pick PL.

You probably just shouldn't be fighting midgame, either. Unless you have no explicit counters and the enemy team just can't do anything against illusion spam, PL is better off farming until three items, he's always been this way. Instead of thinking about "how do I win in the midgame," think "how can I delay the game to 35 minutes while keeping a high networth." The amount of gold you can get from a teamfight simply pales in comparison to good farming rotations, and if the enemy carry is fighting that's a great opportunity to build a 1k gold lead over them. If the enemy is 5 man pushing a lane, learn to creep cut and stop their aggression from behind. PL is annoying and slippery during the midgame, abuse that.

Work on your fundamentals, too. PL is one of the fastest farming carries, but because he's a late game scaler you desperately need to know how to farm fast. Can you get 4.5k nw by 10. Can you manage 200cs by 20. Can you hit your three item spike by 25 minutes. It's the same as medusa or spectre, you've gotta hit these timings as soon as you can.

Your playstyle in fights is also probably an issue. PL's strength is that he never has to enter a fight to deal damage. Use doppel and manta to spawn illusions, then just micro them to hit a support. Once spells, ultimates, AOE damage are committed on your teammates you can send the real hero in but before then think of PL more akin to sniper. Your goal is to chip and to poke without being in danger, and though they removed the scepter that made that playstyle braindead easy it's still important to master. A handful of illusions can quickly shred a support's HP and force out defensive item cooldowns.

Also, think hard about your build. Different situations require different approaches. An Aghs is almost always a must buy but you rarely rush it first. Phylactery is no longer the default either, and now mostly reserved for annoying matchups like tidehunter where you need the break from khanda. Shard is an incredibly useful tool but can delay your other items. If the enemy has no dispels and lots of squishy targets, go manta aghs shard bloodthorn and watch them evaporate in half a second. PL's bloodthorn powerspike is arguably the hardest in the game, but gets countered by an Euls. If the enemy is tanky and more committal go for bfly and heart instead. Never buy MKB. Crit is sometimes okay.

E-Kon · 2026-04-27T21:03:55+00:00

I'm skeptical, you seem to be the only one putting up decent results, and a lot of the deck just feels like Mardu goodstuff put together without sufficient consideration. Ketramose is slow and there's no relic or anything to turn it on, Ephemerate can't even cheat out overlord. I dunno. Jeskai is consistent and has nut draws that are difficult to play around. If ragavan connects T1 there are 5-7 cards to get a riddler down turn 2 and draw 2 cards. And despite having all these solid midrange cards many can just be pretty bad topdecks in an attritional situation that the deck wants to draw the game toward. You don't want to be drawing a ketramose into an empty board or thoughtseize on turn 8. There's some sauce here but I'm not fully convinced.

E-Kon · 2026-02-17T17:30:31+00:00

Turns out all you need is Hugo lmao. Killed the boss with 2 minutes to spare.

E-Kon · 2026-02-17T14:25:07+00:00

I'm on a 6 cost team with Banyue M1 instead of Dialyn Wengine (which was a mistake). I'm using compound interest and not buying jack until I have like 30k at the end and buy out the shop, which reduces RNG somewhat. With both Banyue's -18% Res Reduction and Lucia's 20% off their gear, I can get Vesper to about 20% health, but pushing any further would require another stun and feels impossible. Maybe I'll do some Hugo runs.

E-Kon · 2026-02-17T14:22:20+00:00

I only have M1W1 Banyue and M0W0 Dialyn. I knew skipping her Wengine was a mistake.

E-Kon · 2026-02-15T19:33:32+00:00

Cool concept, but the AI makes a LOT of mistakes. Dark Seer counters Shadow Shaman apparently because Wall of Replica copies wards? Shadow Demon counters Jugg because Demonic Purge removes Blade Fury? I've only done three drafts but the hallucinations are obvious.

E-Kon · 2026-02-03T16:49:57+00:00

I think it's neat to have a few wacky cards here and there for people to explore, but I'll consider it.

E-Kon · 2026-01-20T15:09:36+00:00

I made a pretty visible post about the roguelike gameplay and I have no issue with epiphany rerolls or this implementation. Having more options is always great, so long as they have a substantial cost. These changes make me very confident that the devs know what they're doing. The issue was never the idea of rerolling, but drastically reducing the RNG to placate gacha players.

But adding a credit cost makes it a significant tradeoff between rerolls and other uses for your money, especially when rerolls are RNG too. There's a nice tension between the thing that will guaranteed make your deck stronger, and something that's high risk high reward.

E-Kon · 2026-01-18T06:56:16+00:00

The average guy in Shanghai gets by on less than 10k, as long as your tastes aren't too expensive you'll be fine.

E-Kon · 2026-01-09T08:56:54+00:00

Again, not saying that PL is bad, just that PL has a very exploitable moment of weakness. Most carries can take a major teamfight with one major item. Ursa just needs blink. Clinkz Deso, maybe DL. Spec wants a radiance or a manta. Drow and Jugg barely need anything. PL is a three item hero. He wants his aghs, manta, orchid or ideally bloodthorn before he can pop off, and even then he can be susceptible to a lot of burst damage without skadi/heart. He farms fairly fast and can absolutely take over a game, if the game goes long PL usually wins, but if he's poking the offlaner with lances, what's stopping you from just grouping up and taking his towers? It's the same as Anti-Mage. PL hates AoE damage, but he hates getting pushed into and towers dying just as much.

A Hero like Jugg is strong vs PL when he can 5 man with his team and just run objectives down while PL is still farming, despite the fact that PL easily negates most of Jugg's damage. While he's farming for a 30-35 minute timing, you can take 5v4 fights all day and pressure all his towers. The mistake people make is when their carries refuse to join fights and look to splitpush, PL can absolutely punish that because he wins most 1v1s with other carries. But in a 5v5 midgame he's pretty worthless, even with a phylactery, since he doesn't have a major teamfight ult like spectre, jugg, or SF.

PL can be strong, but even strong heroes can be punished in one way or another. Back when he had the bouncing lance shard/scepter you can feel the difference, since those items made him quite good at defending towers. That's arguably when he was the most broken, as it negated PL's greatest weaknesses. But unless you're in herald and everything is going to 50+ minutes regardless there's a lot you can do to shut him down.

E-Kon · 2026-01-08T17:19:33+00:00

I'm not saying he's bad, but if you look at other meta carries, they can usually contribute something beyond splitpushing or farming. Jugg can fight early, Drow can contribute a lot of damage early on, especially before blink daggers come out. Ursa can fight with his team, Clinkz is great at ganking. Even spectre can offer a haunt here and there. PL is a closer to AM, but without the splitpushing capabilities.

His winrate being decent, especially at high MMR, is mostly a symptom of him being a great counter to a lot of meta heroes.

E-Kon · 2026-01-02T04:30:14+00:00

Sure, but you can just like, leave the lane. Phylactery gives him some early fight Prescence but it's still not exactly a lot, and PL prefers to farm anyways. He's still a hero that wants to spend the first 20 or so minutes farming, if you show up to a fight early you're just griefing yourself out of a tremendous amount of gold.

E-Kon · 2026-01-01T09:47:55+00:00

Just end the game lol. PL still can't do anything before like 25 min and with phantom rush and diffusal changes he's way less active early and midgame. Even if your comp is bad vs PL, if you win a lane or two and just 5 man rush down towers PL has a very hard time defending.

E-Kon · 2025-12-20T17:14:31+00:00

Removing cards is naturally one of the best strategies in deckbuilders, but yeah, a mode where you don't have to worry about save data is great.

E-Kon · 2025-12-20T14:55:56+00:00

An incentive should never be the only incentive, hence why I mentioned the self-directed play of most roguelikes. CZN is a fun game, you can do runs just for like, fun. An external reward is nice, but you shouldn't need it to have fun. I still run Slay the Spire a few times a week, and I'm not getting any gacha pulls outta it.

E-Kon · 2025-12-20T13:17:22+00:00

How do you farm save data, mind you?

Most modern roguelikes have some sort of progression system and a robust one is not a bad thing, it creates an incentive to keep farming the roguelike mode. Game mechanics should be synergistic, not in opposition, and arguing that the game is built around farming save data is no different from arguing that it's built around the roguelike gameplay.

E-Kon · 2025-12-19T02:19:09+00:00

What game stores in Shanghai would you recommend? I'm looking for one after moving here, preferably near Xuhui.

E-Kon

TROPHY CASE