December 05, 2008

Lack of Creativity is Lame

OK I know I said that my next write up would be about X-Factor, but I really haven't had a chance to look at them very much this week. It seems the big story on Magic Workstation is Exiles. Out of all the games I've played, the only ones that weren't played against Exiles decks were those I played against Roy (a total of 5 out of approximately 25). Everyone else seems to have foregone any sense of autonomy or creativity and jumped on the Exiles bandwagon.

I admit, it's a good deck; it's better than good. As you may have garnered from my previous article, I think it's pretty damn amazing. By turn five a regular deck will have garnered a total of 15 resource points. Exiles can almost double that. But does that mean every person online has to play it? Can't we step out of the box a little bit and try something else rather than everyone running variations on a theme? I guess new-and-shiny + wins-almost-every-time is just too tempting to ignore.

Right now you're probably all thinking I sound like a grumpy old man. That's fine with me. For a lot of people, they just want to try out the new teams, see how they play and then carry on about their regular gaming lives. I've been guilty of it myself from time to time too. Perhaps it has a lot to do with my preference toward building thematic and fun decks, rather than "I just wanna win" stuff. I obviously can't claim that I'm not competitive however, as here I am, lamenting away.

It'll be harder to manage building an Exiles deck in real life simply because of the card rarity involved in building some of it. Online that's not a problem. Thanks to the scary prevalence of online net-decking at this point though, I'm tired of seeing Exiles already and I haven't even opened my half-case of Evolution. Yay.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm with you on this. It's hard to playtest anything else against it. I don't think it will be for long though as the next band wagon is upon us... Runaways infinite life on 4.

Anonymous said...

I like Exiles as a team; they are fun to play. But I agree they are pretty ridiculus when you play them. There is no real fun in them when you can beat your opponent easy. I'll stick with Green Lantern :)

Obsidian3D said...

As I have said...they're much worse in an online environment. Having played against a few builds in real matches they don't seem as bad, simply because most players aren't able to get 4 copies of all the rares. But the shift mechanic is still a little broken in my opinion, simply because of their ability to rapidly accelerate their resource generation. Any previous curve-jumping techniques in the game required hefty payments like KOing resources or returning characters to your hand.