Feedback/Discussion: Mono-colour, New Horizons or Bust.

Hi folks. There's an issue I've been feeling in the game for a while, and while I think in every other way the game has been steadily improving and going in the right direction, there's one area where I feel that it's actually going backwards. With yet another nerf coming out today consisting of giving a troublesome card more restrictive colour requirements (in this case, making Hermelion OO instead of OG), I decided to post this and see if others feel the same way. I think this type of change is very bad for the game and leads to reduced diversity in terms of being able to mix different colours effectively. I'm going to make the case here to change nearly every XX-aspect card to either XG or XGG, and nearly every XXG card to XGG or XGGG. That might seem extreme, but bear with me.

Let's go through all the XX and XXG cards in each faction, and see what serious contender decks run them (or used to). I'm ignoring XXGG cards because I think it's totally reasonable that only decks focusing heavily on an aspect can summon their huge bomb cards. Requiring 2 Rage aspects for Red Dragon makes total sense to me and I wouldn't touch that.

**Order**: Easily the faction with the least diversity in the usage of its dual-aspect cards. Spell warden, protector of the innocent, namir, guardian of the faithful are all only run in mono-colour decks.

**Wisdom**: Lamp used to be played with Dominion's Vampirism, but both cards now have double-aspect requirements and the combo is pretty dead at this point - now it's played in mono-wisdom or not at all. Dust titan, storm and reflector actually have seen a bit of play in other decks, but it's worth noting that it's much easier to run wisdom thanks to New Horizons. Also, in the case of storm and reflector, they absolutely require other colours because wisdom lacks any spell-based win condition. Oh, and Thaumic Lab is mono-order or creatureless combo deck only.

**Nature**: None of Nature's dual-aspect cards are currently seeing play at all afaik, though ancient treant once got played in that Order/Wisdom Instill Life deck. But if anything I think that supports my argument, since that deck was enabled by the fact that Instill Life is OGG, not OOG.

**Rage**: Nearly every power-card in the faction either requires double-aspects (phoenix, ram'gakh, dragonfire, advanced zash, red dragon, flame serpent, plus goblin looter which isn't a power card but has potential) or pushes you towards mono-rage (word of fire, burning rage). All you've got left after that are some solid aggressive 1-drops, fireball and fireblast as reasons to run red cards. What is the result of this state of affairs? Surprise, surprise, the most popular rage decks are all mono-rage - whether that's aggro, midrange or control, you don't want any other colours. The one colour you might semi-commonly see Rage combined with is Wisdom, because of New horizons.

**Dominion**: Helm, cataclysm and Karthas are played only in mono-dom or with Wisdom with New Horizons. Vampirism and old Dreyla I hadn't seen in a long time but again, mono or with New Horizons are pretty much the only places I could see them being played. We'll have to see on new Dreyla, but I suspect the same.

**Corruption**: almost as bad as order. Tombs, succubus, tribute all mono or with New Horizons. Dread knight and necro cult not played, but if they were played it would be in mono-corruption.

Notice a theme here? A huge number of these cards are unplayable or nigh-unplayable outside of mono-colour decks UNLESS you're running New Horizons. Not convinced? Well, here's some ideas of what decks and combos might be enabled if double-aspect requirements were relaxed a bit:

**Order + Corruption soldiers/instill**: They share the soldier and knight tribes, as well as a strategic theme of making lots of token creatures. Not to mention Instill Life on Corruption's excellent 2-cost creatures. They would seem to have natural synergy, with decks focused around either soldierspam with Tactician or Instill Life + Flesh Sculptor or both. But not only does the colour combo dilute your Valorsworn Incarnates, Consume Spirits and Words of Pain, but you also massively delay your Tombs and Infernal Tributes. With Tomb/Infernal Tribute/Namir requiring only 1 non-generic aspect, you could run all these cards out on the same turn as mono-corruption can.

**Angels + ???**: Angels has fallen out of favour of late, as it's a mono-Order deck more or less by necessity, and Order doesn't have a complete enough toolkit to make a solid non-aggro deck at the moment IMO. What if you could more easily combine it with Dominion to pick up some Cataclysms and Assassinates? In the current game, that would require you to go all the way to FOUR levels to play Cataclysm. What about Corruption to bring your angels back from the dead? I'm sure you can think of more colour combos you could try.

**Dominion + <faction with tokens> control**: Dominion has Sell to Slavery, Devious Plot and Chalice of Yunx, all of which make sense in a non-aggressive token-generating deck. But Dominion itself has no way to generate tokens. What if you could more easily combine it with cards like Tombs or Order's milita-generating engine without ending up with really clunky level requirements? For example, if you want to get a Tombs up and then cataclysm, it's going to take you a minimum of eight turns and requires you to go to four levels.

**Wisdom + ??? energy**: Cards like phoenix, totems, bloodwell matriarch might form fun combos with an energy base, but thaumic lab/cataclysm/phoenix conflict too much in colour requirements. Going to 4 levels to enable your board clears is not good enough.

**Tri-colour decks**: There are certain synergies that aren't concentrated heavily enough to play in only 2 colours. For example ETB effects + Enchanted Spring. Currently if you want to run 3 colours, you basically can't run any XX or XXG cards. It's just not an option. This is in addition to not being able to run any Words, most of the incarnates and other cards that benefit from stacking one aspect type. Oh, and you have the inherent inconsistency of having 3 types of shrines in your deck (or alternatively, you need to run Wisdom for Obelisk). There are so many things stacked against you if you try to make a 3-colour deck, there's no need to also lock out all the best reasons to run each colour.

These are just the ideas I came up with as I was typing up this post. I'm sure everyone's come up against this problem in some form or other. For example, trying to make a control deck work with a different colour combo to standard Wisdom + Dominion, and realising that without New Horizons you just can't get out the boardwipes you need like Adv Zash or Cataclysm or whatever.

Obviously relaxing colour requirements on everything in 1 go would be a disaster in terms of balance, so I would suggest phasing these changes in over a few months. Note that not every card changed in this way needs to be made strictly better. For example, a card like Tombs of the Damned could potentially be nuts at 3 mana CG, so why not 3 mana CGG? Higher overall aspect cost, but you can run it in more diverse decks. Maybe there are some cards that do need to be double-aspect, but those can be on a case-by-case basis. Instead of like now, when we've got cards like Necro Cult that are just double Corruption for no reason.

Another concern might be making mono-coloured decks obsolete. But there are already incentives to do that. They're called the Word-Of cycle of spells. And some of the incarnates. And consume spirit. And shrine consistency.

**TL;DR** an excessive amount of cards have double-aspect requirements which is really stifling on deckbuilding. And given the last few balance patches which have increased the number of these instead of decreasing them, I think it's a real, valid concern that deck diversity is not going to go anywhere despite all the balance attention the game is getting.