The implementation differences between paper.

Kinesia

Gems as a mana source is a huge improvement to the paper game, it feels great and works really well, but some of the other changes made in implementation don't work as well.

3 creature stacks resulting in tokens stacking increases the power of some strategies and reduces others, green especially has some of its strategies removed and nothing added. It can no longer choose between a lot of small creatures or one big one to overwhelm defenses because only big creatures count now. It's frustrating but not a huge problem except for Green.
This also makes a lot of creature control spells far more dangerous.

Cycling is not meant to Exile cards. It's meant to discard them. That it doesn't means that some of the _intended_ synergy between cards just doesn't exist, and some of the space for emergent gameplay is diminished, making some of the cards categorically worse within the environment then they are meant to be and reducing possibilities.
eg. The First strike Minotaur in one of the event nodes (I've searched, cant find the card to get the name) lets you discard a card to get +2/0 and this _should_ work with cycling too but it does not.
Also Vile Manifestation is specifically meant to count cycled cards as being in the graveyard but it does not. You have a hardcoded fix for Oketra's Attendant but the situation can happen with other cards and it doesn't work with them.


Then we have the cards like New Perspectives and the Monuments that are meant to reduce the cost to do particular things. Because of the way you have implement cycling this has become broken. It used to be that if mana was on a card then it only worked on that card, but cycling uses mana off _other_ cards and this is what leads to problems.
eg. With Bontu's monument and a hand of black cycling creatures I can cycle forever because they get mana on them, but that's not meant to happen, Bontu should only help if I _cast_ them, not cycle them. And New Perspective should only help for Cycling NOT casting like it currently does.
The implementation choice looks ok superficially but the follow on behaviour is bad.


Paper magic has long term appeal because of their rigorous costing practises, word choices and testing. You've relaxed the standards on all of these and it really needs to be picked up again. Get some of the Wizard people to chime in on an ongoing basis if necessary, this hurts their brand, they should want it fixed.

The costing of cards needs an overall. A lot of things are either worthless or broken that shouldn't be.


The words discard, exile, summon, cast are _not_ used rigorously even though they appear in Event requirements. Like "Summon less than 4 creatures", The token cards say "Summon", they should all count but only some do. I think the event requirement is really meant to say "Cast less than 4 creatures" but it doesn't completely meet that wording either. We need consistency.


You have added shields to supports, and we need that and it works well in practise, but we absolutely need the number of shields written on the card, it's pivotal information. Some cards need a relook on how many shields they have too.


This is not to criticise, this is because I love this game and want things perfected.

Thanks,
Kinesia

wereotter

I would add as another card that SHOULD work with cycling but does not is Warfire Javlineer. If I cycle away a bunch of spells, it should see all those when it enters play to do a lot of damage, but because the cycled cards go into exile, it does not. Ditto Enigma Drake on that exact same problem. I agree that letting these cards fill up your graveyard would be a better way to use this ability.