Board Game Arena

Archisian wrote: ↑14 April 2026, 00:29

FrankJones wrote: ↑13 April 2026, 20:27

Archisian wrote: ↑13 April 2026, 00:26 The whole point of having less useful cards is to work around them. That's the strategy of it. Besides, if we don't have bad cards, it would make "tuck" birds like the American, Purple Martin, etc. less powerful.

Maybe. My understanding is that the game designer used an elaborate spreadsheet with a lot of variables with the intent of making the birds balanced, and with the intent of making the strategic component deciding how and when to use the birds most efficiently.

I doubt very many game designers intentionally create underpowered cards just to add the strategy of recognizing which ones are bad.

Yeah, I kind of see it as a side effect of selling the product. That's why I brought up Magic the Gathering, because they for sure intentionally make crappy cards that will never ever get played. They playtest those cards before release, so they have to know the utility of each card. Now, I don't know that with absolute certainty, but I played Magic enough to know that there is no way that they can't know how bad certain cards are. But it makes sense for making money because bad cards, especially commons and uncommons take up space in booster packs and pre-made decks. Sifting through packs and discarding the least viable ones and creating the best deck possible. I definitely know when I started, I had very little idea on the strategy of Magic and just went with cards I liked. I remember my first couple of decks being a goblin and fairy deck because I just liked the cards. I found cards that synergized together with the theme and tried it out. I lost every single time I played because goblin and fairy decks, at least at the time (Lorwyn and Shadowmoor respectively), were terrible no matter what. It would be interesting if WotC play-tested those cards with those synergies, saw how bad they are at competitive, and still released it thinking it would be a viable deck.