4Game

Everyone knows that ball has been dominant since it dropped in the merchants expansion. Other scenarios have seen lots of play too, though not to the same extent as ball.

My take on balls dominance is that it's so good because of it's synergy with NGs strong, replayable consistency tools (Joachim and Roderick). To a lesser extent, high value aristocrat golds im general are so strong with ball. They don't actually push the aristocrat tag, and aristocrats don't have inherent synergy with each other outside of ball.

So what if ball (and other scenarios) only progressed with bronzes? My thinking is this would push the concept of scenarios being archetype boosters, forcing players to build decks with strong bronze synergy as opposed to the mix of random strong golds with no inherent synergy. As a side note, this would also make scenarios easier to balance outside of provisions as it gives a the devs a smaller pool of cards to assess. Obviously this would require a focused archetype design for the relevant tags and more support in future expansions, but I think it might be the way to go.

An example of how this is (almost) done well is in SK. Gedy is currently mostly played with bronze druids and pushes the druid/alchemy archetype. There are low powered gold druids too(I.e. gremist) but they aren't game defining. Obviously it's not dominant, but it's a fairly cohesive archetype with strong internal synergy supported by the scenario. You don't see gedy outside of druid/alchemy (to be fair you don't see gedy at all really, but I think that's a lack of other support for the druid archetype which is a different issue).

What does everyone think?