Bad Planeswalker Designs

Ryudhyn

The new Chandra and Dovin Baan are examples of very badly designed planeswalkers, because of their use of Energy.

In a game like this, planeswalkers are the unifying part of decks, where each Koth deck may be different but the fact that they're all Koth shows that they're a quick ramp/aggro deck. You can use any Red cards with him, but he has a style. This is seen throughout most of the walkers, and it is good.

With Chandra and Baan, though, the fact that they use Energy means that they can only be good with the Kaladesh set. New Planeswalkers should enable new decks, either by new color pairs or new abilities that make lesser strategies viable; but each planeswalker should be versatile enough to make SEVERAL types of deck work.

Liliana, the Last Hope is a similar example, being only able to use zombies; she is at least a little better since Zombies are printed all the time and she can be a generic reanimator strategy, but the point is that each time a new PW is released it should be specialized enough to bring about a good strategy, but general enough that you can use it with cards from any set.

Good examples: Koth (fast ramp), Garruk (creature swarm), NewJace (card draw / long game control)

voodoo_gremlin

Energy is such a problematic mechanic to begin with.

I play a card with energy. A few gems are energized, but my opponent will always get a chance to eliminate them or even worse use them against me. Also, there are better cards that don't need energy, ie Deadlock Trap vs. Suppression Bonds.

The fact that they're trying to make block specific/mechanic specific planeswalkers doesn't bother me. I like Gideon 2 very much even without the possibility of new allies in the future.

I'm hoping to see a fabricate specific Planeswalker for Aether Revolt, Ajani or Tezzeret could fill that role. Fabricate is also a much more playable mechanic.

wereotter

Nissa could be made a fabricate planeswalker too, but I am willing to predict that she'll be energy as well once she's released.

Consider the Emrakul's Corruption secondary objectives and new planeswalkers:

Arlinn is the werewolf tribal commander, the red/green node wanted you to summon werewolves

Jace created clue support tokens, the blue node wanted you to create 8 or more supports

Sorin is the off one with wanting you to cast vampires, but with the way his deck often is built, Drana's Emissary, Defiant Bloodlord, and Bloodhound Vampire means he's a good one to fulfill this objective.

Now look at the Inventor's Fair:

All three nodes has energize 5 or more gems. Dovin creates energy, Chandra creates energy, so... Nissa will probably create energy too.

wereotter

Side note:

I actually think Dovin is a good planeswalker. His abilities play well into themselves, and his final ability is absolutely brutal, especially if you have an Empyreal Voyager to energize literally the entire board. But it is a long-game set up to make that happen.

By your other comments Sarkhan is similar pigeon holed into using dragons, which there are few of, and all at rare or mythic rare. It's another planeswalker you play for the colors (I use him for madness vampires with Smuggler Copter) and ignore his skills.

hawkyh1

my experience when using dovin is to not focus on trying to use
energised gems. his colours brings variation to a deck. compare
his 3rd ability of 3/3 for each of your creatures on every overload.
mundas vanguard(rare) can only give max. 2x 1/1 activate bonus
if you are lucky enough to match both activated gems on that round.
instead of trying to find ways of creating overpowered creatures
in one round, I try to play it as a bonus strategy should the battle
drag on. you do not need to or want to energise the whole board.
just enough to match one or two overloads when your creatures
are in position to attack, can sway the battle in your favour.
his first ability is a bit pricey, but his 2nd and 3rd ability work
well. I'm surprised how playable he is in the event.

HH

wereotter

I've got Dovin giving +5/+5 currently which is why it's easy to energize the board with Empyreal Voyager. Once I've overloaded twice usually one hit will fully energize the board.

Centur3xo

I want to take a stance on the other side - Dovin is great, it focuses on energy and mana and his colour combination is a breath of air after all X+Red previous Planewalkers. Yes, he specializes in energy and you need some cards from KLD to play with him in events.

But over time - blue control and white power ( life link, first strike) and you'll see how it plays. This game is not only about aggro and ramp up of red.

I'm really tempted to play him in coalition events but I have no chance to practice fun and new white-blue decks in single player (not enough challenge there) . thus tend to stick to old proven Red+x walkers and decks.

He is great because of his colours, not his abilities.

Same with Sarkhan - mana rates are the best and 7 spells in the deck makes him very fun to play and his colours are very good for some annoying and fun to play decks. He can make dragons out of anyone (RD anyone) or make a dragon and return your creature with pact. Pair it with Harness the storm (and Avaricious dragon if you have) you have infinite caster\lockdown deck

Lili2 is great for mana rates - she has a alternative Blue+4 which saves you when playing against your colour destroyers like Ormendahl in Avacyn event

Torch of defiance - can't support her - single colour, and low HP - still challenging. Need to play more to get her 2-3rd abilities but she has it's own place in the game.


How many general purpose PWs do we want ? How many of them will be in the dust corner of our vault ?

Wax

Ryudhyn wrote:

The new Chandra and Dovin Baan are examples of very badly designed planeswalkers, because of their use of Energy.

[...]

You're right, of course... But as you probably already guessed, the reason they are designing PWs like this is to increase their revenue. By developing new PWs to enhance a new game mechanic (like Energize/Overload) that was introduced in an expansion, it motivates players to spend more resources. And I think the way they are doing it is pretty tricky, too... It's like they kept the power level of the new Overload mechanic JUST low enough so that it can't really be used optimally without buying a new PW that's built around those mechanics.

Sure, if you had access to the entire set of cards in a new expansion like this one, you could probably put together a decent deck that utilizes the new mechanics. But if you've got an entire set, you've already spent a lot of money to get it. If you have the amount of cards of the average player, you're usually not going to be able to utilize the new mechanic in a very efficient way (meaning, it's not worth it when you can just use a better deck with existing synergies)....

And since not everyone is going to spend a ton of money to get a full set, they introduce these new PWs that provide abilities that make up for the difference. I suppose it's both good and bad; good in the sense that they're giving us more ways to utilize the new mechanics, but bad because if they just designed the cards with a high enough standard of quality, we wouldn't have this problem in the first place.

MagicTG and Hearthpwn are good examples of card games where new game mechanics are balanced pretty well, and new expansions are designed so that you don't have to own the ENTIRE SET (or at least the "key" rares) just to be able to use the new mechanics the expansion introduced effectively.

I think D3's biggest problem is that they don't know how to design common and uncommons. They have a bad habit of under-powering commons and uncommons to the point of rediculousness. Not only do they release commons with EXACTLY the same abilities, they release new ones with STRICTLY WORSE abilities than those that already exist. I could understand this practice if they were at least designing the newer, weaker cards with secondary effects that have the potential to be better with future synergy, but that's not the case. Like I said, they keep designing duplicate and very-similar commons and uncommons with strictly worse abilities.

It's like, with MPQ, the "real" card meta only belongs to the rares and mythics. They save the little innovation they're able to produce only for those rarity classes, which basically means each expansion is only about obtaining a few key rare and mythics.