Which is the worst card (excluding animals and S cards)?

[DoctorFianchetto]

I attribute my high winrate pretty much solely to sailors, and now that everyone is taking them in my games I think the secret is finally out but its why I got to 2nd last season very quickly in relatively few games- I'm having a harder time this season haha

It's interesting how the meta is changing. I am seeing a lot more Sailors and Reporters compared to two weeks ago, and the irritating Make Up Artist/Newcomer/Movie Star decks have vanished. I also see a fair amount of UFO-heavy build which can be really powerful in the right circumstances. I'm not able to keep up and I'm seeing my rating start to plummet. That and my awful habit of picking too many unique cards when I have 2 or more Butlers...

Prince: unlike most cards that facilitate extra uniques, more copies make it more risky, as each copy needs to win the attack...and it has almost no support on the attack - it only benefits from a card which it has as an opportunity cost (Bard), and from a card that every other card benefits as much from (Comic Character).

I'd argue that Prince doesn't need more support on the attack. 5 power wins the flag more than 50% of the time, it only loses against some C cards and maybe a buffed B card. It's a pretty handy final round card. I'd say there are plenty of better C cards but Prince is not bad at all IMO.

[wontaketoomuchtime]

Which do you think is the worst card with a special ability?

In my view it's Stable Boy. Weak base power, its power boost is weak and far too dependent on deck order. Doesn't synergise well with other cards. To get the most out of Stable Boy you have to hinder the rest of your deck by picking a lot of 3 power cards, which is suboptimal since you typically want 4 and 5 power cards in the midgame.

the best cards you want to draw from UFO are : Stable boy, Hermit and Gangster (in that order). And normally vanilla B cards are bad unless you can get a double.

[wontaketoomuchtime]

I actually disagree with everybody here funnily enough- stable boy is a great card in games with haunted house and shipwreck enabled because sailor/reporter/navigator sends him or necromancers to the bottom- I don't think he is good at all in games with either of these sets being cut however.

Butler becomes incredible if you have even 2 of them, unless you draw them first (very statistically unlikely though we are biased to feel it more when it happens)- hitting a sailor or clairvoyant with butler means you can look through your entire deck and know exactly if you will overfill and can send something to the top or bottom accordingly, and thus run more unique cards which is very powerful. Butler is like a smaller vacuum cleaner which is a fantastic card

Hologram is one of the BEST pile C cards because every good player in the endgame has a deck that shouldn't overfill their bench (or at least be close)- hologram has a high (85%+, calculated as the amount of unique pile B cards they aren't running over the total amount of unique pile b cards) chance of throwing this out of whack by giving them an extra unique and causing their bench to fill early. It gets a bit worse if haunted house is in and you suspect your opponent may be running vacuum cleaner/butler.

My pick for the worst card is either gangster or clowns- neither of these cards scale nor do they fit into a powerful deck archetype (gangster kind of fits A.I. decks, but has much better alternatives). Clown is deceptive because it feels like you are making up for losses with extra fans, but really you are just inflating the number of total fans in the pool of players and so unless you win games (which clown does NOT help you do) you can gain upwards of 20 fans and still not make the final. Even if you do make the final, your opponents cards will be better. Gangsters just has too little power to be meaningful, good cards either make your deck better/more consistent or can 2 for 1 with a large number. Gangsters does neither of these.

Butler is awful when you got only one. It means you can have 8 type of cards, but one of them is butler (a power 1), so it's just 7 types of cards. If butler reveals too early, then you are done.

When you have two butler it's better, but it means you spend two picks on butler, which is a power one and guarantee you to lose the first few rounds. It means butler works very bad at low player count because in lower player count the early rounds are more important.

Butler has high ceiling though, it can destroy those best meta decks if they appear in the right order. But I would rather take those meta cards.

And the better your deck is, the worse butlers are. If you have many doubles, it's not effective for butler. Butler is better to remove cards you don't have multiple copies, but most of the case you try to take doubles. Butler is one of the cards that I don't take even I see two of them.

I agree clown is rubbish. Clown ONLY works in high player count, which is not difficult to steal around 10-12 fans, and if you can win the 6th or 7th round, you might sneak into the final with a rubbish deck. There are always people that take butler and make up artists, and keep their newcomers so your clown works. At low player count it is more important to win duels, which you mentioned clown didn't help you to. If I play 1v1 and my opponent takes clown I know I am winning.

[wontaketoomuchtime]

I actually heavily disagree with this. Stable Boy is a level A card that actually scales into the late game which can't be said for many cards. Sure the vanilla 3's aren't great, but there are some really strong 3s crucially Necromancer which synergizes fantastically.

How many really strong 3s are there? I can only think of Necromancer and Cowboy. Blacksmith is not good, also in the running for worst special ability card. Band is a solid card.

Andrewsmile brings up a good point about Sailor/Reporter/Navigator. I rarely pick these cards but I see them popping up almost every game recently. I haven't realised their potential - Stable Boy being a good use case.

I'd probably say Butler. I think the variance on playing a >6 uniques deck relying on these effects is too high and you're usually better off just playing a stronger card instead.

I appreciate that Butler may be overrated, but worst special ability card? Nah. Butler is really annoying when he comes out first or gets locked in the freezer at the bottom of the deck by Lara Croft, but most of the time that won't happen, and it's nice to have that extra versatility because you don't always end up with duplicates of the cards you want.

That said, in my last game I had two Butlers and went too risky with my final round deck (11 unique cards, including Sorceror and Submarine). The two Butlers never saw the light of day, and funnily enough andrewsmile dealt the final bench-filling blow with a Stable Boy

My pick for the worst card is either gangster or clowns- neither of these cards scale nor do they fit into a powerful deck archetype (gangster kind of fits A.I. decks, but has much better alternatives). Clown is deceptive because it feels like you are making up for losses with extra fans, but really you are just inflating the number of total fans in the pool of players and so unless you win games (which clown does NOT help you do) you can gain upwards of 20 fans and still not make the final. Even if you do make the final, your opponents cards will be better. Gangsters just has too little power to be meaningful, good cards either make your deck better/more consistent or can 2 for 1 with a large number. Gangsters does neither of these.

Gangster was my second choice behind Stable Boy, but Gangster can be powerful card in the first three rounds. I prefer Treasure which is the inverse Gangster. Clown does suck - I only pick Clown in 1v1s, almost useless in Arena mode. The extra fans are useful but the chance of you pulling it off is not good unless you're rolling with some Makeup Artists.

Hologram is interesting. To me it's a complete wildcard. It can be awesome and it can also backfire horribly. When I pick Holograms it tends to backfire more often than not. Either it gives them a useful card, or I end up facing a deck heavy on bench cleaners so I'm just giving them more and more power.

Speaking of wildcard - Rescue Pod? I do like the thrill of the Rescue Pod gamble but I do appreciate it's one of the worse special ability cards.

Worth mentioning cowboy works so well in 1v1 games! It can mostly smash your opponent in the middle rounds. In high player counts and final it is different, it is difficult to trigger its ability in the late game because power 3 is not enough.

I also don't think sailor works with stable boy. The purpose of sailor is to have 7 types of cards.It means you put your unique card in the bottom (maybe Champion). When you have stable boy you usually have 2 or more, so you aren't going to bot deck a stable boy.

[wontaketoomuchtime]

Andrewsmile brings up a good point about Sailor/Reporter/Navigator. I rarely pick these cards but I see them popping up almost every game recently. I haven't realised their potential - Stable Boy being a good use case.

In my opinion, sailor is the best card in the game and it isn't even close. If I had to make a tier list, sailor would be in S tier, UFO and clairvoyant would be in A tier, and every other card would be B tier and below. The reason for this is the sheer power/consistency deck control/ordering gives. I think a lot of people are reading this saying "Andrewsmile you fool, UFO is far superior to sailor because I can run 6 uniques and be guaranteed to see my whole deck plus some free bonus cards the UFO gives me, which may even be duplicates!!". This is a fallacy, and I will explain why:

Sailor and UFO actually fill the same role: Allow me to run more than 6 unique cards, while still seeing my entire deck. The difference is that UFO does this with randomly generated cards, while sailor allows you to send a 7th unique card (the only restriction being it must be the only copy of that card in your deck) to the bottom. The choice and freedom of that unique card being something you decided to put in your deck vs 2 random cards is very powerful.

In addition, sailor can do other things as well: it can send vampires, necromancers, stable boys, mascots, teenagers, and anything else that cares about your bench to the bottom, where they can be far more powerful. Having duplicate sailors only makes this strategy exponentially more powerful, and I flat out win about 80% of games where I get 2 or more sailors for this reason.

I attribute my high winrate pretty much solely to sailors, and now that everyone is taking them in my games I think the secret is finally out but its why I got to 2nd last season very quickly in relatively few games- I'm having a harder time this season haha

Sailor isn't the best card. Two vendors / two AIs almost put you in the final. I think you will have >80% victory rate in games you have two vendors/ AIs Having two sailor doesn't. The first sailor let you bot deck your unique 7th type card, the second sailor let you bot deck your unique 8th type card? No it doesn't work. Having many sailor isn't that strong. Sailor is a quite good for me.

[wontaketoomuchtime]

I attribute my high winrate pretty much solely to sailors, and now that everyone is taking them in my games I think the secret is finally out but its why I got to 2nd last season very quickly in relatively few games- I'm having a harder time this season haha

It's interesting how the meta is changing. I am seeing a lot more Sailors and Reporters compared to two weeks ago, and the irritating Make Up Artist/Newcomer/Movie Star decks have vanished. I also see a fair amount of UFO-heavy build which can be really powerful in the right circumstances. I'm not able to keep up and I'm seeing my rating start to plummet. That and my awful habit of picking too many unique cards when I have 2 or more Butlers...

Prince: unlike most cards that facilitate extra uniques, more copies make it more risky, as each copy needs to win the attack...and it has almost no support on the attack - it only benefits from a card which it has as an opportunity cost (Bard), and from a card that every other card benefits as much from (Comic Character).

I'd argue that Prince doesn't need more support on the attack. 5 power wins the flag more than 50% of the time, it only loses against some C cards and maybe a buffed B card. It's a pretty handy final round card. I'd say there are plenty of better C cards but Prince is not bad at all IMO.

In 4p arena you only see reshuffled A-cards in round 3, plus you need many guys to 'redraw' in previous round. So what others take is not that important to you, players just take the best cards they see. And in round4 normally you don't want to take A cards, especially if they are what people previously discarded (no more vendors and AIs )

For me the main problem of make up artists in that you can't bring it to the final. In final you have only 6type of cards, if you have newcomers, MUA, movie star, only 3types left. And for me ghost and mime are actually not good because the 1 HP is just not enough. Mime works awful in a good deck (easy to have duplicates on bench before mime are drawn).

On book reporter is awful too. It has the same ability as Sailor, but it only allows you to bot deck one of your next two cards. Also it works awful with UFO, and belongs to the same type as mascot.

[Andrewsmile]

Sailor isn't the best card. Two vendors / two AIs almost put you in the final. I think you will have >80% victory rate in games you have two vendors/ AIs Having two sailor doesn't. The first sailor let you bot deck your unique 7th type card, the second sailor let you bot deck your unique 8th type card? No it doesn't work. Having many sailor isn't that strong. Sailor is a quite good for me.

Having 2 vendors/AI is certainly strong, it's quite difficult in arena to get 2 of either but even ignoring that if I had a choice between only getting 2 AI, 2 vendors, or 2 sailors on turn one I would take the 2 sailors. 2 sailors works with any deck, vendors and AI kind of shoehorn you into a specific deck and I've definitely had games where I get 2 vendors or 2 AI and then dont draw good 2 power cards or good yellow cards. The goal when you get more than one sailor is not to allow you to run more than 7 uniques, the goal is to stack the bottom of your deck with the cards that most want to be there. My particular favorite is to send a mascot to the bottom and then a necromancer to the bottom, to name one example. Makes those decks very consistent, which in the long run will win you more games

I think you will have >80% victory rate in games you have two vendors/ AIs Having two sailor doesn't.

You misunderstand- I track my games and it's already a historical fact based on my >300 arena games played with 80% winrate that I win games where I have 2+ sailors ~80% of the time (at least I have so far), I can't say the same for vendors or AI- they are good but less consistently good for me than sailors. I can't see any Challengers play history in your profile so perhaps you play in person or on another account so your experiences may differ

[bamb1n0]

Prince: unlike most cards that facilitate extra uniques, more copies make it more risky, as each copy needs to win the attack...and it has almost no support on the attack - it only benefits from a card which it has as an opportunity cost (Bard), and from a card that every other card benefits as much from (Comic Character).

I'd argue that Prince doesn't need more support on the attack. 5 power wins the flag more than 50% of the time, it only loses against some C cards and maybe a buffed B card. It's a pretty handy final round card. I'd say there are plenty of better C cards but Prince is not bad at all IMO.

And a double-Cooked Merman. Again though, winning the flag twice more than 50% of the time requires...winning more than 70% of the time? Which 5 power probably does, to be fair. And maybe I'm playing it wrong, and it's intended to only ever be run as an (8th?) single. I still want to rename it Diva and swap it with Heroine - which would then synergize with Knight's " win with less trophies" schtick.

In summation: I agree with Andrewsmile about Sailor.

[GerrardCapashen]

Andrewsmile brings up a good point about Sailor/Reporter/Navigator. I rarely pick these cards but I see them popping up almost every game recently. I haven't realised their potential - Stable Boy being a good use case.

In my opinion, sailor is the best card in the game and it isn't even close. If I had to make a tier list, sailor would be in S tier, UFO and clairvoyant would be in A tier, and every other card would be B tier and below. The reason for this is the sheer power/consistency deck control/ordering gives. I think a lot of people are reading this saying "Andrewsmile you fool, UFO is far superior to sailor because I can run 6 uniques and be guaranteed to see my whole deck plus some free bonus cards the UFO gives me, which may even be duplicates!!". This is a fallacy, and I will explain why:

Sailor and UFO actually fill the same role: Allow me to run more than 6 unique cards, while still seeing my entire deck. The difference is that UFO does this with randomly generated cards, while sailor allows you to send a 7th unique card (the only restriction being it must be the only copy of that card in your deck) to the bottom. The choice and freedom of that unique card being something you decided to put in your deck vs 2 random cards is very powerful.

In addition, sailor can do other things as well: it can send vampires, necromancers, stable boys, mascots, teenagers, and anything else that cares about your bench to the bottom, where they can be far more powerful. Having duplicate sailors only makes this strategy exponentially more powerful, and I flat out win about 80% of games where I get 2 or more sailors for this reason.

I attribute my high winrate pretty much solely to sailors, and now that everyone is taking them in my games I think the secret is finally out but its why I got to 2nd last season very quickly in relatively few games- I'm having a harder time this season haha

Andrew, the one thing you're missing is that UFO can give you duplicates of cards you already have in your deck. Sailor can win you matches, but UFO will win you entire lobbies. It's upside is unparalleled, and is easily the best card in the game for me.

[Andrewsmile]

In my opinion, sailor is the best card in the game and it isn't even close. If I had to make a tier list, sailor would be in S tier, UFO and clairvoyant would be in A tier, and every other card would be B tier and below. The reason for this is the sheer power/consistency deck control/ordering gives. I think a lot of people are reading this saying "Andrewsmile you fool, UFO is far superior to sailor because I can run 6 uniques and be guaranteed to see my whole deck plus some free bonus cards the UFO gives me, which may even be duplicates!!". This is a fallacy, and I will explain why:

Andrew, the one thing you're missing is that UFO can give you duplicates of cards you already have in your deck. Sailor can win you matches, but UFO will win you entire lobbies. It's upside is unparalleled, and is easily the best card in the game for me.

You're one of the people I mention that thinks UFO is better, and you may very well be right, but in my experience you can only reliably get duplicates from UFO if you have at least 2 of them and you probably need 3 if you are going to plan on it- getting even 1 UFO is really tough in lobbies nowadays which is something to consider if you want to climb the ranked ladder since (and I'm going off on a relevant tangent here) you need strategies that are more likely to put you in winning positions in the long run over many games. If you go for broke every game staying in the A deck through round 4 digging for 3 A.I.s and 4 vendors sometimes you'll hit and win big but you'll lose more in the long run. For me this is why I think consistency is so valuable for climbing and I attribute my #1 rank to sailor (as well as plenty of luck along the way of course).

Also, and this might be another controversial opinion, I value winning matches over winning lobbies because just getting in the final even if you are less likely to win means you climb ranks in the long run, similar to the "go for broke" point I mention above. Playing for big strategies will win you some big lobbies but some games you'll end with 4 fans and be sad you never found any duplicates from your UFO. I'll give an example of this "play for the long run strategy"- If I am going in to match 7 with ~17 or so fans, I have many games where I roll past double vampires in a mascot deck or some other strategy where I skip cards that would make my deck better to instead search for heroine/fan bus because I want to guarantee a 2nd place rather than risk not making the final, even if I'd probably win if I got there with better cards. This is because the expected value is extremely negative once you get a high Arena rank: you will gain maybe 5 points for a 1st place, you will lose 20+ for 3rd place. I don't want to downplay the luck that got me to the number 1 spot but the best advice I can give if you want to climb is to weight upside vs expected value and not treat it as "unparalleled upside" when the odds of getting dupes are actually quite low. Just my 2 cents, UFO is a fantastic fantastic card but I place a (perhaps far too high) premium on consistency