Exmoor pony is ridiculously overpowered

[ctr123]

If you can play 2 exmoor pony you immediately have a 80% chance of winning.
If you can play 3, I dare say its 95%.

No other card in the game can give you more than 40 points per card without some crazy set up.
But considering that there are 11 pony cards in total, you easily get 60~80 points per exmoor pony with just a little bit of luck.

It would make a lot more sense if exmoor pony gave 5pts per pony card instead of 10.

I've played so many games that I was ahead by at least 100pts and all it takes was for my opponent to draw 2 exmoor pony late into the game for them to overcome the lead.

[lordhavoc306]

In the beginning I also thougt these are ridicoulously overpowered, but after a couple dozen of games this doesn't seem to be the case actually. I won some games with ponies, but more often than not I do not follow the pony path during a game for a variety of reasons:

- the good exmoor ponies are rare: you can expect to get 1, if lucky 2, but almost never 3
- expensive (2 cards), almost impossible to play as a bonus + you cannot draw (for plants, insects, bats, moors, birds, reptiles there are bushes or moors that give you extra cards + they are cheaper)
- little to no synergies with other cards (birds, insects, plants collaborate)

so after all, I do not consider them overpowered anymore

[ctr123]

I won some games with ponies, but more often than not I do not follow the pony path during a game for a variety of reasons:

I will always play exmoor pony just to deny my opponent from playing it, the comeback mechanic is too strong.

the good exmoor ponies are rare: you can expect to get 1, if lucky 2, but almost never 3

If by lucky you mean 30% of the time I agree. It really is not that hard to draw 2 out of 3 cards in a game.

little to no synergies with other cards (birds, insects, plants collaborate)

I don't think this is really an issue considering the the synergy with other ponies is too strong. There are no cards in the game that you can score 50~80pts per card other than exmoor pony and that is broken by itself.

[sweetree]

I partially agree; it is indeed one of the strongest cards in the game. My strategy is to avoid placing any Ponies on an empty board whenever possible and to prioritize card draw after the opponent plays a Pony. This gives me a better chance of drawing Ponies myself and allows me to end the game quickly before the opponent can draw more than two. In fact, playing it without having drawn two Ponies often isn't a great move; it consumes four cards from your hand, offers little synergy, is easily countered, and feels rather clunky. Sometimes, depending on the situation, I’ll simply let it get cleared off the board.

[Spieler des Jahres]

I also think, the Exmoor-Pony is overpowered.
In my experience it's never wrong to keep an Exmoor-Pony if you find it. Either I deny the other player(s) using it or I have the opportunity to play it myself later.

Your overall strategy doesn't really matter, because every other pony gives you 10 points more with it, even the ones that cost 0 cards (I find them quite underpowered: in most cases, they just give the next player three more cards to choose from - but in combination with the Exmoor-Pony they are fine).

I like to compare the Exmoor-Pony to the Dartmoor-Pony. The costs are the same, but with the Dartmoor-Pony you need two cards of the same colour to play a moor. The Dartmoor-Pony gives you 5 or 15 points, mostly depending on the strategy of the other players. The Exmoor-Pony gives you at least 10 points.
I think, even if Exmoor-Pony would cost 3 cards, or you would just get the moor, if the 2 cards needed to be from the same colour, the point advantage would be too high to not keeping the Exmoor-Pony, if you find it.

It's right, that there aren't any card drawing synergies. But you can combine them with other point multipliers, like the horse moors (don't remember their names) and the sheep.

If you play a moor-strategy, you actually can draw one or more cards, for the moor the Exmoor-Pony provides. There is also an Exmoor-cave that needs you to play moors.

[loungelizard24]

Well if we consider all the cards in all the forest shuffle games, the deer, wolves and beach martins in OG still score much higher than the ponies do in dartmoor. And that’s because the deer synergize with each other, the wolves and the leaf icons. For years I’ve complained how overpowered the deer are, and for years if you refuse to play deer you will lose 99 percent of the time against a player playing deer, even if you manage to get all the beech martens which never happens, your chances of winning is still only like a 5 percent chance. So in the grand scheme of things OG Forest shuffle has the most overpowered cards in existence and it is still the most played of the forest shuffle games, simply because the avid forest shuffle players didn’t like dartmoors lower scoring and more balanced strategies, even with the ponies they would rather play OG forest shuffle. Also it seems the ponies show up less often, because of the new cards that draw several cards into the clearing for plants and bugs, there’s a high chance that the ponies will show up along with several other cards only to be discarded before either player can grab them. So that decreases the amount of ponies you’ll be able to grab and of course there’s always going to be a random amount of ponies in each game. I have played several games where I saw 3 ponies at most and I got one and my opponent got the other 2 and I still won because his were for the most moor scoring and mine was for the amount of ponies because I had more moors than him.

Even with the expansion the plant and rodent and bat strategies remain supreme! Sure I put ponies right in the mix of those three strategies, but saying it’s overpowered is a bit off as it’s always going to fluctuate.

Birds still seem fairly low tier unless you are working on rodents or bats and get the buzzard or barn owl on the moor that doubles bird scoring, because it is possible to score high for those two birds.