cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Thorns currently feels strategically confining, this is an examination of why

Baxter900
Protege
I began to write this on the discord, then moved it over here since I realized it was going to be long.

So while bcl43 is on his Crusade to get Thorns buffed, I want to talk about the fact that there's only really two viable (that I've seen so far) thorns builds.

Debatably there are 3 viable builds, but I believe there are only really two.
By viable I don't mean that they can compete at the highest level of competition (which is the criteria that is often used), but that they don't always feel like you're fighting a losing battle (and often lose you the game) when you play them.


Right now there's survival and hollow rush builds
Survival's goal is to stall as long as possible, either while a creature is powered up, or until card exhaustion catches up with their opponent (usually using stronghold heal cards to outlast them)
Hollow rush uses the combos that hollow units can have with themselves in order to buff them and push their opponent off of the map before they have a chance to do much.
It's arguable that buff decks are another option, but I'd argue that in their current form, almost all thorn buff decks are really survival decks that focus on creatures.

So why does this happen? If we assume that each champion is an archetype for a playstyle (which I will) and naturally enhances that, then we can analyze these to decide why there only seems to be two playstyles that are viable.






Eidolon of Earth suggests a buff playstyle. Buff creatures so that they're stronger then throw them against the gates, overpowering your foe. It sounds good, but it's rarely played that way save for when people run a survival build and concentrate all their power into a single creature, then unleash it, forcing people to deal with it or die (and if the opponent deals with it, then the deck loses most often). In that case it's not really a buff build, but rather a survival build focused around a single creature. So why then is a pure buff deck not viable? Well it's due to a couple of different things combining.

The first problem is the weakness of spells in the game. Spells in almost any CCG are a risk. By putting in a spell (or non-combatant card like an item/artifact/fort/etc.) then you're trading the ability to have a combatant. In nearly all of these combatants are both the only real way to attack, and to defend. This means that having no combatants leaves you with only spells to attack, and the only way to defend yourself being to destroy creatures before they can attack. By placing in a spell you're decreasing the total amount of combatants in your deck, and thus your likelyhood to draw a combatant when you really need one. This means that in all of these games, spells are a tradeoff. By placing a spell in your deck you're saying that not only is it more valuable than a combatant in terms of the damage it can do and abilities to the situation, but that it's also more important than the defense the combatant provides, and more important than a high probability of drawing a combatant when you really need one. This balancing of non-combatants and combatants is common to all CCGs. So why do I think spells are worse in Dragon Front? Well it's quite simple; spells aren't less valuable than in other games, but combatants are far more valuable than in other games. In most CCG games, mana is dependent on a factor that naturally increases over the course of the game. Be it drawing and playing mana cards which give you mana each turn, to naturally getting more an more mana each turn, most CCGs play like this. In Dragon Front though, mana is tied directly to combatants. This means that combatants themselves are more valuable, since along with providing offense and defense, combatants are necessary for mana. Not drawing one not only doesn't mean not being able to set up, it also means not being able to ramp up or maintain power. As such a spell in Dragon Front is less valuable than a spell with the same impact in another CCG. Even if they both do the same thing (lets say kill 10% of your opponents HP, stronghold health, whatever you call it) the same spell is objectively worse in Dragon Front than in other CCGs since you're losing more to have that spell. It's also worth noting that this extends to all non-combatant cards.

So why is the weakness of spells a problem? Well primarily it's because there are two ways to buff creatures, noncombatants (spells or built in triggers for buffing. Built in triggers for self-buffing are viable, but those either contribute themselves more to survival decks seeing as they're dependent on time, or need to be set up in the perfect situation to get strong enough to be useful (like heart of the forest). However spells for buffing are dangerous to have in your deck. You can only have a few or you risk starving yourself for combatants, which is more of a risk in Dragon Front than in other games. Because of this it's unreasonable to buff any old unit, instead you need to buff ones that are stronger than others.

That alone though is not necessarily enough to stop buff builds from being usable, however there's an additional difference in Dragon Front that makes buff builds not as strong. In most CCGs, the life total of combatants resets to max at the end of every turn. This ensures that a strongly buffed unit stays alive until a unit that deals enough damage can destroy it. This means that to create a situation of balance, it's rare for health to be buffable with a card (or even from the creature itself) instead damage and effects are added. This leaves open the opportunity to kill it with spells or to sacrifice a strong creature to it. However throwing weak creatures at it only delays the inevitable. In Dragon Front though things are different. Namely, health never resets, meaning that it's possible, viable, and quite common to destroy an incrediably powerful creature with tons of buffs using only lots of low damage units. This is exacerbated by the fact that since low mana units are required on your first several turns, decks are basically required to run with a minimum of 1/3 of the deck being 1 or 2 mana units. This means that often your 19 damage montrosity will die to 3 or 4 low mana and damage units, the end result being that it did practically nothing. This makes buffing monsters useless unless you can buff their health as well, which is rare to be able to do in sufficient amounts. The only good solution to this is regen, however regen is very rare, and regen 1 (which is the only regen given by a card) is effectively a version of armor that lends itself to survival playstyles better than to buff playstyles.

The next issue goes back to the weakness of spells. Because spells are so weak compared to units you can only afford to have a few. One or two of those is unit or fort removal. The rest can be buffs. This leaves you with very few buffs available. Creatures you buff have to have regen, very high health (6 or greater) or some sort of defensive ability, (or have to be at the stronghold with no chance of being blocked, which is impossible to guarantee) otherwise they'll just get whittled down over time by small amounts of damage. Additionally you only have a few spells, so you need these buffs to combo with your targets abilities. This leads to buff decks having very little flexibility, and requiring specific cards to buff, otherwise it's useless. This lack of flexibility combined with needing certain cards (and hurt more by the larger proportion of spells they have) means that buff decks aren't really viable in the current form of the game.

So the next question is, how do we fix this? I think there are two things that are necessary to provide a good, balanced platform for buff decks. The first is we need to cut down on the reliance on spells in your deck. However we don't want to bring all of the buffing capabilities into the creatures themselves, since that decreases the amount of flexibility, and the amount of plays possible. Instead we want creatures that give spells which buff their allies. Supply Bomber is the perfect example of what should be common in thorns. It is a unit and thus gives all the benefits of a unit, but also when it dies it gives two powerful, and flexible, buffs which can be distributed how you see fit. Importantly though, those buffs didn't take up space in your deck, instead a unit did. This is how you create a viable buff deck in Dragon Front, you make it so that the units give you buff spells, not that you have to draw the spells. That alone will go a long way towards helping, but it still doesn't secure flexibility. With that change it still makes more sense to focus all your power into one creature a lot of the time (though not always). So how do we fix that? Simply create a lot of creatures with very low damage but high health. That means that a creature buffed to large amounts can be expected to survive for a significant portion of time. This is opposed to the current game where if I just choose an average creature (lets take druid landwarden as a random example) it's unfeasible to buff it since it will just die quickly anyway. There are already some of these in the game, but most of them are giant or non-thorns. Thorns should have some of these types of creatures since they lend themselves to being buffed.

Do these two thing: Make buff spells come from units rather than cards and make several thorns cards with high health and low damage, and I believe the buff playstyle will be viable.







On to the next suggested playstyle. Pangea tree suggests a survival playstyle. As I've previously expressed, I think this is one of the two viable playstyles for Thorns at the moment, but that doesn't mean more can't be added to it to give it a more distinct flavor. The survival playstyle is the idea of stalling your opponent for as long as possible while you either A) obtain and buff a specific unit to the point where it's very hard to kill, or b) until card exhaustion begins to kill the players, then the survival deck tries to outheal their opponent. This playstyle revolves around Thorns uncontested ability to stall their opponents and shut down entire lanes. It focuses on cheap units with respawn, cheap units that award a bonus to surviving (like combat engies), forts (specifically overgrowth, but sometimes walls and traps), and regen (or regen like abilities like mana moles have). Especially regen. None of these things are especially specific to thorns save for regen and the overgrowth fort. So how do we improve this playstyle? Add more regen and regen-like abilities. The ability to survive is key to the survival playstyle, and in order for it to work units need to be able to take hits, then recover (at least partly) if they weren't hit hard enough. Another thing is that right now survival decks struggle late game. They do this because over the course of a game with a survival deck, your opponent gets to play most, if not all of their cards. Right now having this happen means that they'll often get their strongest cards out which usually focus on killing things. These unfortunately can kill several survival units with ease what with their tendency to have 4 damage and 4 or 5 health, and the tendency of these high end attack cards to run at 4 or 5 damage. I would thus recommend increasing the health of survival units, but lowering their damage. The improvements for this playstyle also benefit the buff playstyle and vice versa. Thus care must be taken to ensure that neither is made too strong by potential exchanges.




Next playstyle. The hollow champion is interesting. He supports a playstyle of making it difficult for enemies to attack, then presumably attacking them at their weakest point while they struggle to deal with your traps. There's one big problem with him. He requires a hollow deck to play, but everything about him doesn't work well with a hollow deck. The idea of a hollow deck is essentially one of units that make eachother stronger and have a few special advantages. This playstyle is mostly enabled by hollow ambushers, the spell which buffs all hollow units, and the fort which allows you to play hollow units on it. Usually hollow decks revolve around spamming the low cost hollow units as quickly as possible to form a defense, then placing the hollow ambushers to make the hollow units stronger, before finally playing a flying unit on the doorstep of your opponent and buffing them, then killing them in a few turns. If the flying unit dies just wait until you get another then repeat. What the hollow playstyle does not need are super strong defenses (they need to win before a strong attack can be mounted, otherwise they lose) which is what the champion gives. This is an interesting conumdrum, and I think the best solution would be to give the hollow champion a different ability. One that specifically helps hollow units. It could be the ability to play more hollow units than your normally would, or to play them in more places, or just a flat buff to their strength. The important part is that it helps other hollow units (or maybe the champion could gain strength for each hollow unit on the field, who knows).




The last champion is the giant druid guy. He does three things. A) He's big, b) He gives you two more druids in your hand, C) He has rush. None of these things are really identified with druids. Before we start this though, it's important to ask, what does it mean for a card to be a "Druid" card in Dragon Front. The answer is, not much, and that's the biggest problem with this champion. We have 3 druids which gain strength over time (though in different ways to different degrees), 1 that kills forts, 1 that respawns other druids, and I think that's all... That's the second problem with druids, there aren't that many. So what does it mean to be a druid? The answer seems to be any number of things. They don't have a clear theme and that's what makes this champion so hard to discuss. For the sake of things though, lets focus on the fact that more than half of the druids gain power over time. Well then we need a champion that supports that, which this champion doesn't at all. In fact, he's pretty antithetical to power gaining druids. Wheras power gaining druids start weak then get strong over time, this guys is just plain big. He doesn't gain power and doesn't start at low power. Secondly he gives you more druids in your hand, the problem is that by the time you play your champion it's pretty late in the game and druids need most of the game to build up their power in order to be useful late game, gaining more halfway through the game isn't that useful. Finally he has rush. How can anything be more out of place on a druid than being able to act suddenly?! If we assume the trademark of the druids is being an investment that gains power over time then how can we call this champion that has a strong immediate payoff a druid? To me this guy is antithetical to the idea of a druid. That doesn't mean that thorns shouldn't have a guy that starts strong (in fact that would be a great champion for enabling and separating survival that buffs a specific creature from survival that outwaits people, as making a champion who is designed to receive buffs would be unique), however that shouldn't be tied to the trademark of druids unless it gains power over time. Instead if we want a champion who encourages druids specifically then we should have one that makes druids gain more power. Maybe "While this champion is alive druid units activate their start of turn and end of turn effects twice" or "Start of Turn: Give +1 randomly to the health or power of 3 units" or something of that order. It should even just buff the champion "Each time a druid unit activates gain +1/+1". The point is it should revolve around druid units in a way that makes sense to druid units, as opposed to the current iteration which is antithetical to the current idea of druids.


There's my analysis of why current playstyles for Thorns are severely limited, and what could be done to help them. In all honesty there are far more playstyles theoretically possible than those tied to champions, but I feel that champions should be indicative of a playstyle, as a playstyle which is synchronized with their champion will always be stronger than one that isn't (since the champion has the power of several cards in a deck). I will admit that for the hollow and druid champions, I did not so much discuss how to enable strategies around them, as much as to make them make sense. This is in large part because I believe that in their current form a strategy cannot be formed around them, as they are antithetical to the cards that would be needed to use them to their full extent. That is not to say their abilities are problematic, just that they are assigned to card types that do not benefit from the abilities present.

I also think that there are many more champion which could be added to enable new playstyles. For example one all around traps would be interesting (maybe a champion which is a trap with the ability "If this trap destroyed an enemy unit gain a copy of this card"). Another interesting potential that would feel at home with thorns would be a flying champion which specifically buffs flying creatures. Another that would be interesting would be a "protective champion" which makes all units immune to spells or something. Or maybe a champion that transfers the HP of ally units that die randomly to other ally units. There are lots of options, and while not all will work, I firmly believe that adding new champions is the best way to add new playstyles to a faction.
2 REPLIES 2

Baxter900
Protege
Note: Turns out "b)" with a capital B changes to an emoji. Sorry about that. Fixed it in the main post.

Baxter900
Protege
I had originally said Impulse was the one crusading for Thorns to be buffed when if my memory serves me it was bcl43. I fixed this in the main post, sorry!