I am finding that Master of Coin sucks all the fun out of a game. The game is about playing cards and trying out tactics with different combos. Then you get a MoC and all that is gone. My friends and I usually play on Hard or Nightmare and still end up winning eventually, but the MoCs just make it a slog rather than exciting. I know they used to take your money and tbh I think that would be better. Even if they only added a smaller percentage to the cost. Double just ruins the early game.
One possible alteration: Could do a multiplier based on the strength of the MoC instead maybe? So that they wouldn’t increase the cost right away but as they grew stronger they would multiply gold cost by str/500?
The idea of a Master of Coin and their low power of 500str is that their geographic location is very important. If they’re close to a player, they’ll be disposed of soon enough. If they’re behind enemy lines, they can indeed be a very big issue. They fight the player on a financial level and should stay away from the forefront where the big, angry men are flailing swords and jaws around.
The mortals, meanwhile, must choose between paying more than the minimum (I assume that the Master of Coin is paying the heroes to stay away and you’ll have to outbid him.) or fight with the base units. Every hero card has to count, you can’t summon them willy nilly.
Plus, considering that the Jester King is more of an advantage to the player than a disadvantage, especially in the early game when the undead are steamrolling over the earliest defences with their hordes, I’d say that a powerful Goblin Lord is a fair balance.
Looking at it, I wouldn’t say that it’s so bad. The orcs have two super-powerful Lords, you just don’t financially notice the burning toll. The humans have a Lord specifically nullifying half the human cards and one that can spiral out of control the moment he claims a giant den. Don’t get me started on the elven ones. Only the trolls and dwarves are equal to the Goblins in terms of forgiving Lords, and that’s mostly because they’re so slow (or in the case of the Trailblazer, isolated from the rest).
I certainly agree with @mammon. The power of the Master of Coin is that he’s one of the only Lords who affects you before the game begins. You often have to bring a completely different deck if you see that there’s already (or could be very soon) a Master of Coin on the board, than you would bring if there was no threat to your card playability. In essence, the Master of Coin about doubles the number of maps there are, as a map without him is a completely different experience–for everyone–from a map where he’s around at the beginning.
I find the Master of Coin to be a fun challenge for the very early game, where everyone really has to work together in order to clear him off the map as quickly as possible. He’s certainly one of the strongest Lords if he crops up before the game starts (right after the Queen of Lies in my opinion), but he’s weak enough to kill and is one of the few enemies who can really force the entire mortal world to cooperate to bring him down.
It was not better, trust me. In his current state, he provides the players with agency and choice: “do I play my hero even though I’m paying a premium, or do I attempt to make do with basic units for the time being?” The old Master of Coin would simply rob the players of all their starting gold, long before you could possibly spend it. There was no counterplay; no decision to be made. Your gold is now gone; sorry you don’t get to train units or play anything ever again.
I understand both your points and to a certain level agree. It adds a different dynamic to the game. My main issue is that it is just not fun. Not being able to play the cards you want to play to try strategies isn’t fun. The other lords generally can be taken down by trying different strategies by playing cards of different types. MoCs rule that out (mostly).
Also, I find that rather than doubling the maps, it is making all maps the same. Not had a game without a MoC in about 6 games now. One game we played had 4 of them. All the games are becoming dull. Maybe that is bad luck but it is ruining the game for me. Can’t play cards (or can very rarely). I understand the point of them and what they are meant to acheive. I just don’t think the outcome makes for an enjoyable game and needs to be tweaked.
That’s a lot. The only time I’ve ever seen so many was a nightmare game of Fountain of Wisdom, where we started with two and barely survived the game in any case. Without knowing anything else about the games, I’d say you and your friends should probably just be placing a higher priority on keeping them from spawning in the first place. Zombie Goblins are easy to kill, or at least it’s straightforward to get an Assassin in play and send it to the mana pool before the boss spawns. If you just started six games and all of them had an MoC on the map at game start… well that just seems like bad luck.
Right now I’m in a 6-player, Celestial Pools on Hard game with 6? maybe 7? Masters of Coin. Can confirm - still not super duper fun. But we’re hanging in at 26% on the Reaper’s Tally!