nah it's just inconsistent
all "on discard" effects in basegame only work on manual discard effects from the hand, but they're worded differently

Relics like tingsha/bandages say "Whenever you discard a card during your turn", while Tactician/Reflex say "If this card is discarded from your hand" even though they both have the same requirements

the most accurate wording for both would be "discard from your hand during your turn", but then you're getting really wordy

Originally posted by Bolimar:

not a fan of the new backpack smack at all

Man, I had an entire reply typed out that explained the thought process behind the change and why we will make the new change but I accidentally switched the page and it got deleted. Here's an abriged version.
First, thanks for the thorough explanation of your point of view, raised your points with the main authors of the core set and there will be a change to the card next update.
Deal damage x times. Synergy: Apply X Weak and Vulnerable.

This most likely won't be what you wanted but we need an X cost card in the Core Set due to ChemX existing and the assumption that every run has an X cost card.
Backpack Smack was too overbearing in its utility and that pushed out other uncommon cards. A Pommel Strike or Slice depending on draw pile size and a lot of synergy to boot. It also covered effects we have a lot of (drawing cards and energy manipulation). That's mainly why we chose this card to be made into the token X cost.

So, why the change? The Core Set is there to give you a strong core of cards that work in many situations and aren't really pack specific. Weak and Vulnerable access is pretty important to characters in some form, so we went for the change to help give most runs access to it while also making the card worth playing at higher energy values.
Furthermore, the Core Set was a bit lacking in a damage payoff card with Smithing hammer being (rightfully) nerfed, so this could cover it.

Thanks for the feedback, once the new update is out and you got to play with the new card I'd be glad to here your thoughts on the new iteration.

Because Deep Dream from the Psychic pack makes cards Occult as you play other cards, it goes effectively infinite with Dead Branch (as long as you have more than 1 card in hand). The only things that can break this combo are generating too many powers in a row, generating too many cards that end your turn, and Time Eater. Awakened One and Corrupted Heart come close to breaking it, but because Dead Branch can generate extra copies of Deep Dream, it is very possible to generate more for future turns.

An idea I had to change this interaction is by having Deep Dream make all the cards currently in your hand become Occult. This allows you to keep the current functionality of playing out your entire hand no matter what, but prevents Dead Branch shenanigans.

I feel like the Monster Hunter pack needs to be reworked or have its identities split into new packs.

The pack's description of "Hunt Elites and Bosses using your carving knife to gain their unique weapons and armour!" implies that the pack revolves around the carving knife. However, most of the cards within the pack do not have synergy with the carving knife. Additionally, the fact that the carving knife gets removed from your deck after you play it does not fit the theme.

The only card that has synergy with the carving knife is the Tranq Bomb card. Its ability to deal non-lethal damage is what you want with the carving knife or any on-kill effect. However, the fact that it's the only card in the pack that deals non-lethal damage means that you have to get lucky or know which packs you're offered to try and pick up other packs that have non-lethal damage. Moreover, assuming that there are other cards with the "non-lethal" keyword in other packs, you wouldn't know about them unless you've played with those packs extensively.

The keyword "non-lethal" should appear more often in the Monster pack's cards overall so that you're more likely to get the carving knife kill. Also, the carving knife shouldn't get removed from your deck if this were to happen, as it would become more reliable to rely on the cards you get from bosses to do damage and not the cards from the pack.

The "Hunted" keyword feels like it should be in a different pack, along with the Greatsword. The "Hunted" keyword works better when you can use a high damage attack, and the Greatsword's gimmick of not using energy to gain more damage works with the "Hunted" status way more. I'd rather see this playstyle in a different pack based on applying "Hunted" for low energy cost and then passing with energy left over to build up attacks or blocking cards that increase based on energy not spent.

On an unrelated note, the enchantment cards should glow or have some visual cue when you hover your mouse over a card that will trigger them. The tooltip is confusing, and even if I know it will work with shivs, I'm still not 100% sure which cards it triggers from.

I respectfully disagree with most of your hunter pack feedback.
Hunted is especially important for carving knife because of its lackluster base damage, and if you apply it on somebody else, you make it easier to not kill your real target in case you only have high damage cards.

Non-lethal is a shortcut. You don't need to have the perfect card that always allow for carving knife, half the fun is setting up the enemies so that you can kill them with your weak card for great gain.

Greatsword perfectly plays into the hunter's pack themes by allowing for biding your time to wait for the perfect turn to unleash massive amounts of damage or to specifically get enough damage to reduce the enemy into carving knife range.

Pretty much every card in the pack has implicit synergy with carving knife, they're basically all support cards so that you can use it and get monster cards.

Originally posted by (Gk) Erasels:

I respectfully disagree with most of your hunter pack feedback.
Hunted is especially important for carving knife because of its lackluster base damage, and if you apply it on somebody else, you make it easier to not kill your real target in case you only have high damage cards.

Non-lethal is a shortcut. You don't need to have the perfect card that always allow for carving knife, half the fun is setting up the enemies so that you can kill them with your weak card for great gain.

Greatsword perfectly plays into the hunter's pack themes by allowing for biding your time to wait for the perfect turn to unleash massive amounts of damage or to specifically get enough damage to reduce the enemy into carving knife range.

Pretty much every card in the pack has implicit synergy with carving knife, they're basically all support cards so that you can use it and get monster cards.

1. non-lethal could be used more because it is a downside. sure you can do 20 damage that wont kill but who cares when it wont kill. non-lethal only has synergy with things that are "on-kill" effects. otherwise its a bad effect to have on a card because you would rather kill the enemy most the time unless you have a card that gains a bonus on getting a kill. half the fun could be trying to survive while trying to get your carving knife while the enemy is at low health and scaling and the only way you can deal damage is from the strikes you started with or the other packs.

2. the Greatsword is better than all of the rewards you can get from the carving knife. why get +10 strength when you can just. not spend 2 energy to get more damage. the greatswords gimick of not spending enegry to increase its stats I love. I just think it would fit better in a pack dedicated to that as a rare card and not an easy to get card.

3. hunted. you can not make the point that "it makes it easier to not kill your real target" when most elites/bosses are on their own. there are 5 elites that are on their own and 4 elites that have summons. and 2 elites that are before the heart, which unless your going for the heart wont come up. first act the only boss that summons things is slime boss which. you wont even be able to use the knife on because it splits up. the second act has the collector and the automaton which means your more likely to use hunted to "not kill your real target". the third act. the only ones are doncu and deca that you could use hunted to "not kill your real target".

apart from that little bit. hunted I feel like it would be better in a pack based around not attacking the target and just gathering your strength to one shot the bosses with the greatsword otherwise It does not help the carving knife.



sidenote: poison would be better than hunted for a status that syngrises with the carving knife. with poison counting down you could poison the elite/boss enough that by the time the poison runs out your able to get the kill with the carving knife. you would have to keep track each turn on if you need to add more poison or not because unless your able to draw inf and have inf energy your not going to be able to get the exsact amount needed + the boss could end up clensing itself so you would have to do new maths.

edit:using corpse exsplotsion and poison I was able to bring the collector down to 2 health within range of the carving knife. poison has way more syngery with carving knife than the entirety of the monster hunter pack

Monster Hunter Pack:
Carving Knife being Fleeting always is annoying, but it's fun. My only issue is that the reward is not always worth the effort, and the upgrades for many of them suck. Also, some elites/bosses are extremely hard to get it on, and the reward does not match the effort required.

Act 1: Inferno Daggers sucks. Slime Hammer is basically impossible to get and should be way more insane than what it is. You should be basically skipping carving knives for all of Act 1 except for the Guardian or if you want the Core Blinder/Core Blaster from the 3 sentries. The other elites are difficult to carve.

Act 2: Gremlin Lance is weak. A card that gremlin horn's on kill ends up being inefficient most of the time.
I'm not sure how I feel about Hyper Blaster.

Act 3: Giant Head is weak, but it is also one of the easier ones to get.
Timepiece Tiara is weak. I don't think it would be crazy for it to give 3 strength right away. Compare this to Donu Amulet.

Act 4:Spire Shield and Spire Spear are AWESOME. Worth jumping through the hoops just to get one of them for the heart fight.

Hunted is fine because having an extra damage multiplier that stacks in a multiplicative manner with other damage multipliers is extremely powerful. Alone, the Monster Hunter Pack is somewhat weak. Most of its power is in Tranquilizer Bomb and Hunter Rank. With certain packs, it scales extremely well into the heart fight. (If you can get there).

After playing more with the monster hunter pack and testing it with packs that add poison cards, I've found that poison has more synergy with the carving knife than the cards from the monster hunter pack itself. I've been able to get the final kills with the carving knife more often, which is quite fun, as I'm able to consistently lower the health of elites/bosses down within carving knife range.

However, I haven't had any reason to pick up any other card from the monster hunter pack apart from carving knife. Even though I've been able to get the last hit several times while having the carving knife, I sometimes get within last hit range without having the carving knife in hand. I honestly think even more now that the monster hunter pack needs a rework because of how much more fun I've been able to have with the carving knife while using other packs to make it work better compared to using any of the cards from the monster hunter pack itself.

I will keep playing like this so I can form a better opinion on the boss/elite cards because they are all bad at the moment when you consider the risk = reward factor when you are just playing with the monster hunter pack cards. However, I'm hoping that this is what the monster hunter pack is meant to achieve more often in terms of setting up on-kill effects the easiest out of the packs.

I will also keep playing like this just because it's the most fun I've been able to have from the carving knife since being able to kill multiple elites with the carving knife is satisfying. The only downside is that because the carving knife gets removed on play, I'm having to hope for the card to show up in the card pool at the end of combat. If there was a keyword that says "removes self from your deck permanently and replaces one of the card rewards with itself," that would be great.

I will say one last time that the monster hunter pack should just be split into two because Hunted and Greatsword are one side, and the other side is Carving Knife and Tranq Bomb. If you're playing with the intent of killing enemies, you only need the Great Sword with Hunted cards sprinkled in and ignoring everything else. If you're playing with the intent of using the carving knife, you need another pack to have consistency with getting last hits with it, ignoring everything else and sometimes picking up Tranq Bomb.

I think the flow pack is very powerful. Its ability to turn card draw into pretty much any resource you need (damage and block) is extremely powerful, i am thankful you already nerfed the better gamble rare so the deck cant trivially go infinite anymore because it exhausts but since many of the other packs have good tools to fill your hand and/or have discard/draw synergies getting this pack generally makes runs way easier. In particular the interaction between dexterity and the blow flow card is extremely powerful and makes it so you can easily generate 50 block a turn

I just played my first run using Jockey, and the pack is way over tuned. I like the packs focus on draw and draw related effects, but cards like starting gun have way too much value. Starting gun is a common, does strike level damage to all enemies, and shuffles 2 insights into your draw pile. This pack alone would be strong, but it gives way too much synergy with no effort to all other packs in the mod. Put simply, it enables infinites too easily. Also the card Trample, which is a common, is objectively stronger than the rare card The Spin, as the scaling effect of The Spin doesn't scale with strength.

Originally posted by Doodleblah:

Originally posted by Marnok:

I got Frostbite and Growing Affliction from a "booster pack" potion, which reduced the play cost of each to 0. This allowed me to instakill a boss - GA returned to hand and played for free infinite times. That's a pretty niche occurance but I thought it worth mentioning.

same thing can happen with snecko or a madness

We will likely change Growing Affliction to eliminate this infinite. Even though it requires specific cards to set it up, having a combo for infinite damage with any source of Frostbite is a bit too high impact for when this niche situation happens.

Originally posted by Breyzer:

Not sure if this is intended or not, but when socketing gems the card explicitly says that it can only be applied to other cards with cost of 1 or more. However, if you decide to socket a gem to an unupgraded card with cost 1, and the upgrade then reduces the cost to 0, you still keep the gems effect.

Yup, it's something we know about. It lets you sneak a gem onto a 0-cost card, but it requires some setup and only works for certain cards. Plus a bunch of the cards you can do this with exhaust or are powers, which makes it a bit less valuable to have gems in them. I haven't seen anything too broken because of this, so haven't felt any need to change it.

Originally posted by Doodleblah:

the prism is a fun card but ive never actually managed to make the payoff worth it so far. definitely a nice idea though!

I found it really poqweful if you have some +strenght. It helped that I had the power that gave +1 strenght whenever I played a colorless card (upgraded for init) and also had the Shaman Pack and the Sword to create more colorless cards. In the end, I often ended fights with 10+ strenght and the Prism basically one shotting enemies (though at that point most of them were at half life)
Maybe that was only my luck speaking, though. For The Prism, you want your deck to be small, obviously, and you also want to have 4 energy (to be able to play the last fragment and then the Full Prism in the same turn)

Grand Opening is really, really bad and probably needs a complete rework. It has no synergy with anything outside its own pack. Almost all innate cards are either upgraded powers or have exhaust, so after turn 1 it does nothing and the powers+surge are useless. And the cards have pretty mediocre numbers to make up for how heavily you have to invest to make them do anything. I took the pack expecting it would be mostly cards that help you draw the cards you need turn 1 (ie draw 3 card with innate and/or a bonus on turn 1, an innate seek that is cheaper/more effective on turn 1, an innate energy card). The only card like that is Battle Prep. I went the whole run without picking a single card from it because they all just have mediocre stats if you don't already have other innate cards. Also because I got a bottled tornado with an expensive power and it does not treat bottled cards as innate. I guess now that I'm thinking of it, the "discard innate attacks to deal double damage next turn" card is probably meant to combo with that attack that's stronger after turn 1, but even so it's extremely narrow and doesn't work with anything from other packs.

Not a whole pack but a single card: "Et tu?" seems overpowered. It invites a 1:1 comparison with the silent's shiv dance, but compared to that it grants 1 extra shiv, gives the shivs retain and the character has better access to strength and exhaust synergies. This is only counterbalanced by being uncommon and exhausting. It's not run-defining, but it's a filler attack you will never regret taking.

Fairy and Prismatic really need to make it clearer what does and doesn't count as off-color. If you can, I'd suggest that if you have those packs or have any card from them that cares about off-color cards, the game should draw an icon on all off-color cards to make it super clear. In any case, the fact that certain packs (like the silent poison cards) seem to count as off-color removes the needed setup and thus destroys the balance. I would really suggest you just blanket not count any non-generated card from any pack as off-color.

The fact that you don't start with any card that creates or evokes orbs (unlike the defect who has both) makes it hard to get orb-focused decks off the ground. You can't take anything that evokes or gives focus until you have 2-3 sources of orb, or any orbs that need to be evoked (like shadow, blaze or oblivion) until you find a source of evoking. Otherwise you risk those becoming dead cards. Even if you pick two packs tagged with "orbs", they'll still be a minority of the cards you see and the deck will veer in another direction unless you force it. It's as strong as any other build once it's established though, and you can definitely make your deck stronger by tossing in 1-2 cards that spawn orbs. By comparison, decks centered on debuffs, strength/die/weapon effects with multihit attacks, or general attack/block cards practically build themselves.

Lunacy from the Eldritch Horror pack feels underwhelming.
Here is the thing:
- it costs life
- it is random
These two combinated leads to following situations:
- you are not able to pay life, since you do not have temp life or healing avaible (yet)
- you use Lunacy only for it to hit an unrelevant card
- you decide to no longer use Lunacies
- you draw Lunacies you generate, which have now become dead cards.

I do like the concept of it, but it just feels so weak if you are missing the required synergies. Basically, you need multiple nameless Mists, or some outside pack cards that grant temporary life.
It also feels like some cards seem a bit too weak, probably accounting for Lunacy highrolls.
- Page of the Dead is a huge gamble. Your Lunacy will most likely hit another card, and the 2 cost card you generate may or may not be useless or at least ineffective. These having neither exhaust nor ethereal, it can easily be something that clunks your deck
- Nameless Mist needs card generation. 5 + (2)x defense (even if the x is better than block) generally means you need to at least play 3 cards affterwards to really get value out of it. The upgraded version is better, yes, but it still wants to play multiple cards. This is fine if you heavily lean into the pack with multiple lunacies, but otherwise...
- Gaze the Void is in a similar situation. It only becomes acceptable with 1 Lunacy, and generally wants 3+, meaning you need a lot of sanity loss as well as sustain.

I did have a reliable source of temp HP when I played the eldritch horror deck, and didn't focus on lunacy, but I didn't think it was particularly weak under those circumstances. 1 HP is a pretty trivial cost if it happens 1-2 time per fight but admittedly could add up if not. Seems like the obvious solution to that concern would just be to make Lunacy ethereal, so if you don't want to pay the life it won't clutter your deck.

As for nameless mist, it's a common block card and it's good in some situations. The problem is those situations are never the beginning of the game with your default 3 energy and basic cards, which is when you're most likely to settle for a common.