Koth...Nerf him

morgue427

and good luck ever convincing some people that koth run by the ai isnt targeting them directly to ruin their day

Monkeynutts

No he is OP, any Planeswaller that can self sustain is bad.

In events you can't afford to mess about with objectives you have just win or you'll lose.
I tried in HoR and anyone who says Nahiri or another is a great againat him can just shut up. When you have you opp ia on 6hp and he generates 120 mana and smashs you from a standing start its bad.

morgue427

and if i had that same thing happen against a gideon one can i post and rave about how OP he is and how he should be nerfed out of existence?

Monkeynutts

Kind of a poor comment. Gideon 1 isn't used as much and his ability 1 effects one creature, which can be destroyed or exiled and there is very little chance of doing it turn after turn.
Koth can destroy 12 Non-Red gems and match lots of times so he can go again and again turn after turn summoning and casting lots of cards.

Steeme

Monkeynutts said:

Kind of a poor comment. Gideon 1 isn't used as much and his ability 1 effects one creature, which can be destroyed or exiled and there is very little chance of doing it turn after turn.
Koth can destroy 12 Non-Red gems and match lots of times so he can go again and again turn after turn summoning and casting lots of cards.

But then he runs out of cards.  So the strategy is to let him run out of steam before making your moves.

hawkyh1

the argument is not can he be beaten, but is his 1st
ability overpowered/broken due to being incorrectly
priced.

HH

wereotter

Had Koth stuck in a stalemate yesterday where his whole hand was removal and I refused to play creatures so I could track this. With the AI piloting Koth, he will typically go 7 turns in a row of being able to use his first ability and causing matches at least but more often cascades of gems. Afterwards he'd need only one or two turns and he was able to start using it consistently again.

If any other planeswalker was able to use their primary ability every turn, we'd all question its fairness. Koth needed this back in the day as he was the only planeswalker with mana gains on only one color and the only one who retained negative mana on his enemy colors at level 60. Now, however, we regularly have planeswalkers both with his positive effect of large mana gains and negative mana on enemy colors. Liliana, Death's Majesty is a good example of a planeswalker with similar mana benefits and detriments, but we didn't see the game give her a constantly reusable primary ability that nets her mana in the process. 

wereotter

Also let me tell you how fun it was in Hour of Revelation today to watch my Koth opponent go from an empty board to casting two Wurmcoil Engines, Iroa's Champion, and a Scab Clan Berserker from the cascade he got off activating his first ability....

Yes this COULD happen with a lucky cascade on any planeswalker, but I think part of what people are bringing up is it happens with far greater frequency with Koth.

Ohboy

Monkeynutts said:

No he is OP, any Planeswaller that can self sustain is bad.

In events you can't afford to mess about with objectives you have just win or you'll lose.
I tried in HoR and anyone who says Nahiri or another is a great againat him can just shut up. When you have you opp ia on 6hp and he generates 120 mana and smashs you from a standing start its bad.

Have you considered the possibility that you're just not playing against him properly? Or that you've been so used to dominating poorly played ai that you're unaware of your own playstyle flaws? 

When talking about anything in this game being Op, we really need to start separating it into the two categories of user and ai piloted.

On the user side, koth is too high variance to be used reliably for events. His forte is speed, which is why he's used a lot in TG. But even there, he's not the undisputed king. Nahiri arguably beats him in speed, and is more stable to boot. I wouldn't call him Op.

Ai side Op is a whole can of worms. Ai notoriously plays badly. What could possibly be Op? Do we consider anything that has a 5% chance to beat a player as Op? 10%? Because the max value here is pretty low.

And now you have to ask yourself how it makes you look shouting that something is OP because you lose to it once every 10-20 times. 

Mainloop25

Ohboy said:

Monkeynutts said:

No he is OP, any Planeswaller that can self sustain is bad.

In events you can't afford to mess about with objectives you have just win or you'll lose.
I tried in HoR and anyone who says Nahiri or another is a great againat him can just shut up. When you have you opp ia on 6hp and he generates 120 mana and smashs you from a standing start its bad.

Have you considered the possibility that you're just not playing against him properly? Or that you've been so used to dominating poorly played ai that you're unaware of your own playstyle flaws? 

I can agree with you but also sympathize with the comment about objectives. I tend to employ a red-mana-starve strategy with koth usually, and try to limit cascade opportunities that let him build loyalty, but when dealing with trying to get certain objectives, it can be very dangerous to let him build momentum because you never know. In two to three red matches he can have 24-36 mana in a single turn. For a well-crafted koth deck this not very rare. That's enough to drop plenty of real threats no matter how far ahead you think you are. 

babar3355

Well, Koth can be quite challenging for certain objectives I suppose.  Specifically in the red node of HOU.  He is a pretty easy pull when I get him in the white (tons of removal/disables), green (I have never seen him go creatureless), and blue (not sure how to ever lose this node with N3).  But, is he even more scary in the red node than say C1? You better hope C1 drops creatures fast because if she is loaded up with burn spells or gets a bit too much loyalty you are absolutely screwed.

I just don't find him overpowered although he can really explode sometimes.  But I don't lose more to Koth than say a Nahiri Zoo with a really bad board or DB locking me down with  nyx and his merry band of supports.

Perhaps the cost should be 1-2 loyalty higher, but I think he would go from unique and somewhat powerful to basically unplayable.

Gilesclone

In the first HoR a lot of people were playing Koth and Chandra 1.  Now they appear to have switched to Nahiri, Saheeli, and Samut. They're more reliable, have better card selection, and are almost as fast. 

babar3355

Right, I am not sure that kill them before they can hit you for 10 is a reliable strategy.  Especially not when you have to kill 3 creatures.

Most people I know are using Saheeli, AJ1, or Nahiri.

wereotter

babar3355 said:

Right, I am not sure that kill them before they can hit you for 10 is a reliable strategy.  Especially not when you have to kill 3 creatures.

Most people I know are using Saheeli, AJ1, or Nahiri.

I'm using Saheeli for the red node and have regularly been paired off against Koth. He is frustrating both because of his ability to unload a bunch of hasted creatures in one turn as well as the objective itself. If you have to take ten or less damage, you're screwed if Koth has Sammut since that's 14 hasted damage unless you have a defender. And even if you do, you still can get the nightmare scenario of him throwing out several creatures with one use of his first ability, outpacing your ability to remove those creatures.

I think as was stated before, raising the cost of his first ability will take him from being mildly overpowered to being in line with current planeswalkers. Because, let's be honest, if he wasn't one of the most powerful planeswalkers out there, we wouldn't see him over and over and over again. Like 90% of my training grounds matches are against Koth, and in every PvP event I see him more than any other red planeswalker, excepting maybe Saheeli, even more than I see Nahiri.

MDsupa

Red Gems starving Koth only works for the first few turns.  Once he got enough Loyalty, then cascading begins and the starve doesn't work at all.  It does help on certain Play board that normally have less Red, but you can't rely on that.  

I have to agree with most people that the 1st ability allow Koth to keep using the his 1st ability which isn't right. Imagine Kiora 1st abilty allow her to steal not only Mana, but also Loyalty.  She can keep doing it over and over, once every turn. Would that NOT be OP?

Monkeynutts

Ohboy said:

Monkeynutts said:

No he is OP, any Planeswaller that can self sustain is bad.

In events you can't afford to mess about with objectives you have just win or you'll lose.
I tried in HoR and anyone who says Nahiri or another is a great againat him can just shut up. When you have you opp ia on 6hp and he generates 120 mana and smashs you from a standing start its bad.

Have you considered the possibility that you're just not playing against him properly? Or that you've been so used to dominating poorly played ai that you're unaware of your own playstyle flaws? 

When talking about anything in this game being Op, we really need to start separating it into the two categories of user and ai piloted.

On the user side, koth is too high variance to be used reliably for events. His forte is speed, which is why he's used a lot in TG. But even there, he's not the undisputed king. Nahiri arguably beats him in speed, and is more stable to boot. I wouldn't call him Op.

Ai side Op is a whole can of worms. Ai notoriously plays badly. What could possibly be Op? Do we consider anything that has a 5% chance to beat a player as Op? 10%? Because the max value here is pretty low.

And now you have to ask yourself how it makes you look shouting that something is OP because you lose to it once every 10-20 times. 

I know how the tinykitty play against him! I normally win 95% of the time, but in events its usually at the detrement of the other objectives.

You can keep him in check a while, but once he starts hitting his 1st ability over n over ur in a race you normally can win....and if u do uve usually destroyed ur 2nd and 3rd obj in the event doing so.

This is about his 1st ability being over priced and not your ego on how we should play against him and how ur so great at this game.

Ohboy

wereotter said:

babar3355 said:

Right, I am not sure that kill them before they can hit you for 10 is a reliable strategy.  Especially not when you have to kill 3 creatures.

Most people I know are using Saheeli, AJ1, or Nahiri.

I'm using Saheeli for the red node and have regularly been paired off against Koth. He is frustrating both because of his ability to unload a bunch of hasted creatures in one turn as well as the objective itself. If you have to take ten or less damage, you're screwed if Koth has Sammut since that's 14 hasted damage unless you have a defender. And even if you do, you still can get the nightmare scenario of him throwing out several creatures with one use of his first ability, outpacing your ability to remove those creatures.

I think as was stated before, raising the cost of his first ability will take him from being mildly overpowered to being in line with current planeswalkers. Because, let's be honest, if he wasn't one of the most powerful planeswalkers out there, we wouldn't see him over and over and over again. Like 90% of my training grounds matches are against Koth, and in every PvP event I see him more than any other red planeswalker, excepting maybe Saheeli, even more than I see Nahiri.

There's a reason you see him so much in TG. It's because people want to clear TG fast and losing a game or two isn't a big deal if you get unlucky.

And there's also a reason we see him in PvP play. Everyone recommends new players buy koth asap. This leads to a bias towards koth for players who only have a handful of Planeswalkers. For some, koth and chandra might be their only red plane walkers.

But how often do we actually use koth in events when we have the luxury of choice for the red nodes? There's a reason we don't use him, and you can't say he's a top tier walker when you won't consider using him. Is he your top pick for events?


@Monkeynutts
And I still don't get the obsession over guaranteed objectives. Sometimes you should drop objectives. If koth is the only reason that people drop objectives, I would argue that we need more plane walkers like koth. Objectives need to be harder to hit as it is. Rankings are meaningless unless objectives are tough to hit.

Basically the main complaint is that the ai actually poses a challenge when playing koth since koth decks are straightforward, and the ai can pilot it in a semi competent manner. Complaining about something that beats you 5% of the time because you're used to the ai rolling over and taking it is just silly. If other plane walkers were played on the same competency levels as koth is, you would drop objectives everywhere. This isn't about koth being Op. 

Mainloop25

"I know how the tinykitty play against him! I normally win 95% of the time" 

"Complaining about something that beats you 5% of the time because you're used to the ai rolling over and taking it is just silly."

Quoted to agree

Furordraco

Koth is really good. Not at the point of nerfing him. Ai cascades with him, as he would for any other planeswalker. Most of the times ai takes any red gems there is instead of getting Extra turns. Tbh i prefer the red gems then a possible extra turn that may lead to even more cascading. I think no PW deserves a nerf. A buff maybe yes, for poor PW's like Arlinn or Ally Gideon, which in standard formats are quite weak.

Monkeynutts

Ok sure i'm wrong Koth is amazing and the fact he can win when he can get 60 mana a turn is amazing....