Okay first off, props to that guy for building a really disgusting combo. Jeez.
That said, personally I think Blind Justice is about where it should be. 12 Range is long, but not an entire six-player map, and Valor is not easy to come by in the early game without this sort of chicanery. In the games I’ve played, Blind Justice is a Boss sniper early and midgame, and eventually becomes a legitimate nuke in the lategame as it should.
That’s not to say that the scenario you’re describing can’t happen; obviously it can. But I don’t think it’s necessarily the fault of the Blind Justice; I think that card is just revealing a deeper flaw in the trading systems (both Valor → Mana and inter-player donations).
Before I start writing code to draw ascii tables, I should mention that there’s already an experimental mode that, while not shutting this strategy down completely, does slow it considerably so one player can’t just win in the first hour. There’s also a plan in the works for exactly the kind of custom deck restrictions you suggest! ( I can’t find the link though). Blind Justice is certainly not the only long-range nuke causing balance problems at the moment, so you’re not alone in thinking it’s an issue!
The Blind Justice’s nuke combo requires selling Valor for Mana after every use of Valor Strike + Wealth of Valor + Restoration. The problem, obviously, is that 120 initial Valor is enough that each use provides more Valor than it costs to buy the next use. Let’s assume you always draw the right cards (you have plenty of gold to cycle through to find them anyway), and say you’ve played your initial Cowardly Noble, Blind Justice, and Gnostic Mage:
Gold | Mana | Valor | Action
-----|------|-------|--------------
500 | 20 | 120 | Valor Strike (1200)
500 | 8 | 132 | Restoration
500 | 4 | 132 | Wealth of Valor (1320)
1820 | 0 | 132 | Play Cowardly Noble & Gnostic Mage
1520 | 0 | 132 | Sell Valor for Mana
1520 | 20 | 122 | Valor Strike
etc...
On it’s own, this would be strong but not game-breaking. Of course, the issue is that after five steps, you’ve now got as much or more of every resource than you started with, which pushes the combo over the line from “strong” to “unbounded growth”, placing it firmly in nightmare territory from a balance perspective.
There are a few ways to prevent this combo from going so bonkers. The first is, as I linked earlier, preventing a player from dumping the entire deck into play before the game is ten minutes old. Obviously that would help. Here are some others that look at reducing the efficacy of the combo as a whole, rather than just slowing it down.
Warning: Loads of text ahead!
1. Nerf Blind Justice
This is the most obvious one. If we reduce Blind Justice’s damage, let’s say by half, to 5/Valor, this is what we end up with:
Gold | Mana | Valor | Action
-----|------|-------|--------------
500 | 20 | 120 | Valor Strike (600)
500 | 8 | 126 | Restoration
500 | 4 | 126 | Wealth of Valor (1260)
1760 | 0 | 126 | Play Cowardly Noble & Gnostic Mage
1460 | 0 | 126 | Sell Valor for Mana
...
8710 | 8 | 25 | Wealth of Valor
8960 | 4 | 25 | End Combo
Total Damage Dealt: 6205
Well… we no longer have unbounded growth, but it isn’t much better for everyone else in the game, either. We can’t pay back our allies’ full Valor donations anymore, but we can still do 6000+ damage at long range before the game really starts, and make thousands of gold to boot. This doesn’t seem like an optimal solution.
Maybe we get better results if we also increase the mana cost. Let’s bump it up to 16 while leaving the damage at 5/Valor:
Gold | Mana | Valor | Action
-----|------|-------|--------------
500 | 20 | 120 | Valor Strike
500 | 4 | 126 | Wealth of Valor
1760 | 0 | 126 | Sell Valor for Mana
1760 | 20 | 116 | Restoration
1760 | 16 | 116 | Play Cowardly Noble & Gnostic Mage
...
6230 | 20 | 20 | Wealth of Valor
6430 | 16 | 20 | End Combo
Total Damage Dealt: 4565
Not great. 20 Mana?
4960 | 8 | 23 | Wealth of Valor
5190 | 4 | 23 | End Combo
Total Damage Dealt: 3630
Still nine full cycles, but at least the returns are down to a somewhat reasonable rate. We have burned through the whole team’s Valor, after all. But there’s a problem: we now have a Blind Justice with an ability that costs 20 Mana and does 5 damage per Valor. Outside of this combo (that is, for 95% of players), the card is now garbage and will never be put in a deck. Not ideal.
2. Nerf Cowardly Noble
Okay, so what if we nerf the Noble so he can’t produce so much gold? I’m going to skip the math here: you have to make the card worthless (about 1.5 Gold/Valor, or 25 Mana/cast) in order to prevent the combo this way.
Honestly, this combo aside, I think the Noble is in about the right place as well. He pays for himself right off (if you haven’t spent much Valor yet), then slumps through the midgame when people are spending their Valor claiming towns, then surges lategame once Valor is more plentiful and you need more gold because, as Humans, you’ve militarized large portions of your civilian population.
3. Nerf Both Heroes
Maybe this is the more obvious solution. Nerfing both the Noble and the Justice should bring the craziness down, right? Well, halving both of their effects to 5/Valor and bumping Blind Justice’s cost up to 20…
Gold | Mana | Valor | Action
-----|------|-------|--------------
500 | 20 | 120 | Valor Strike
500 | 0 | 126 | Sell Valor for Mana
500 | 20 | 116 | Wealth of Valor
1080 | 16 | 116 | Restoration
1080 | 12 | 116 | Play Cowardly Noble & Gnostic Mage
...
1570 | 12 | 59 | Wealth of Valor
1865 | 8 | 59 | End Combo
Total Damage Dealt: 3120
Now, this is livable within the scope of the abuse case. But is it livable for the rest of the population? We’ve still got that trash Justice and now we’ve also got a marginal Noble that barely pays for himself if you drop him as your first hero. In my opinion, neither of these heroes will see play with such weak stats.
4. Make Mana More Expensive
Okay, so how about instead we reduce the exchange rate of Valor to Mana? Halving this rate (ten Mana for ten Valor) reduces our end state to 5830 Gold and 7050 total damage after eight cycles, which, again, isn’t great but at least it’s infinite. Reducing the Blind Justice’s power as well gives us very reasonable numbers. With the Justice at 7 damage/Valor and ten Mana for ten Valor:
Gold | Mana | Valor | Action
-----|------|-------|--------------
500 | 20 | 120 | Valor Strike
500 | 8 | 128 | Wealth of Valor
1780 | 4 | 128 | Restoration
1780 | 0 | 128 | Play Cowardly Noble & Gnostic Mage
1480 | 0 | 128 | Sell Valor for Mana
1480 | 10 | 118 | Sell Valor for Mana
...
4280 | 8 | 16 | Wealth of Valor
4440 | 4 | 16 | End Combo
Total Damage Dealt: 3976
This effectively puts an end to the combo. No on wants to spend all their teammates’ starting Valor for 4k damage and Gold, especially considering that you’ve now killed all the other large sources of Valor on the map. The endgame would be excruciatingly slow. So this solves the problem, but at the cost of nerfing the Justice and really nerfing everyone who relies on Valor to get their Mana (looking at you, Dwarves!). This is probably not an acceptable consequence.
5. Don’t Allow The Initial Conditions
Instead of nerfing the human heroes into oblivion, how about we just reject the premise altogether? The problem goes away entirely if you’re not allowed to have enormous piles of Valor at the start of the game. I think the entire inter-player trading situation is broken anyway: it encourages exactly this sort of weird “lending” behavior for the various scaling heroes (Blind Justice, High Elf, etc.). I think several changes are in order, and this discussion probably deserves its own thread, but my primary thoughts are:
- Don’t allow resource trading in the first 12-24 hours at all. This is the least effective general-purpose solution, but at least it helps give everyone a chance to play before one person wins.
- Restrict how much of each resource each player may give to each other player in a given X hour period (ex: 1 Valor/6hr, 10 Mana/12hr, 500 Gold/24hr). This still allows “support” players to donate to the war effort and typical “I need one more Mana to save this town” exchanges, but limits silly hero supercharging.
- Tax inter-player trade by some percent. I’m not sure what the in-game flavor is for this (bandits? government oversight?), but it would certainly reduce the appeal of the “everyone grab one Elf town and dump all your High Elves there, then we all pass around our collective thousand mana and take turns nuking everything in sight” strategy.
This post got pretty out of control, so I’m just going to stop. These are my thoughts!
(I threw together a Python script to let me quickly test lots of combinations of cost/effect values. If anyone wants a copy I’ll make it available someplace and link it here.)