Board Game Arena

Just played my first game with the new expansion in the alpha, and wind up man + pearls seems pretty nuts lol. I mean, I won against it happening, but it seems like just such an easy opening move for at least 6 points, is it really suppose to play like that? the only reason i won was because i was running a blood isle strategy and managed to get prism dragon out first round to generate 7+ red mana a turn by turn 2, which also seemed crazy, but are there enough crazy strategies at that point in the game where this windup man play is okay, or is it broken bullshit?

Even in PI windup man is not that strong. It's very consistent, which may be opressive on lower level, because people struggle to find a path to victory in the first place, but without infernal engine it's not great usually. The reason is that it's not enough to end on R4 usually. It will ALWAYS end on R5, but with a pretty low score. If you try to play for R4 ending and fail you will probably lose to windup player, but a strong player can usually tell from the start if they can end on R4. If you play for R5 from the start, there is almost always a path to a higher score on R5. If windup can be mixed with another win condition it's fantastic, but it's easier said than done with his cost usually.

The hard part of playing Windup Man is getting the other points with the low level of resources you've got after playing it. A death essence, two cards, your mage power, that's it.

I'm an experienced and relatively strong Res Arcana player.

After many games in person and on BGA, I do think Round 1 Windup Man is too strong with Perlae Imperii. And even if it's not *too* strong, it's clearly very strong while also being very boring.

In person, we've experimented with some gentle nerfs for Round 1 Windup Man.

On BGA, I wish there was a variant option to just remove it from play.