4Game

Pardon me while I vent my sadness a bit. I'm not trying to troll here; I'm very fond of ST and so wanted to see Harmony become competitive. But these "buffs" feel DOA. Sorry in advance about the length.

Why is Harmony so bad? I know many folks already know, but bear with me while I talk it out. It's easiest to see by comparing it to its sister mechanic Assimilate, which might be the most played archetype in all of Gwent.

What makes Assimilate so good?
1. It's ridiculously easy to proc. All you have to do is play a card you didn't bring with you–that's it. Literally any action of any kind that creates, copies, or steals a card and plays it–any card at all–will proc it. The cards can be played in any order you want. Could be a card you've copied a dozen times already, it doesn't matter. And lots of the created cards create more cards themselves, procing Assimilate multiple times. So Assimilate never hits a wall or runs out of gas.

1. Deck construction is naturally synergistic. Any card–NG or neutral–that creates, copies, or steals other cards will help Assimilate. There are dozens of good options to choose from that synergize extremely well. You get all the face value of the cards and their synergy, plus Assimilate points on top like icing on a cake, just for playing the deck the same way you would have anyway.

It's actually been quite frustrating to see so many new neutral cards recently added to the game that directly benefit Assimilate way more than anything else (e.g., Runemage, Yennefer: Illusionist, Eltibald).

1. Assimilate engines are cards you actually want to play, because they actually help the archetype succeed–either directly creating a card themselves or setting up a later Assimilate (with spying) or improving your board state (with purify)–in addition to producing engine points.

How does Harmony compare? Well…
1. It can be very difficult to proc. It's all based on how many unique unit tags you brought and have in your hand. Unlike Assimilate, only units will proc Harmony; no other type of card will. The units have to be sequenced carefully; the ST player is forced to figure out how to respond to the board state while also playing for unit tags (unlike Assimilate, which can usually proc no matter what the player is doing). And no matter what, you'll eventually run out of tags to put on the board, so Harmony always hits a wall.

1. Deck construction is awkward and non-synergistic. You're forced to pick cards for a particular tag, not because of what the card actually does. Half of ST's units only work well with other units with the same tag (elves, dwarves). Neutral cards and all non-unit cards don't help Harmony whatsoever, so including too many hurts your Harmony engines. So you end up with a jumbly mess that probably doesn't work together in any real way.

2. By and large, Harmony engines are mostly trash. Other than having the Harmony tag, they don't do anything that actually helps the archetype succeed. Just a random mix of weak effects that belong in other archetypes (e.g., poison, movement, handbuff) or nothing significant at all (Saskia, the highest provision Harmony engine, just vomits out a token–woo woo).

You can see that the Black Sun cards tried to help with these problems. I'm not being an auto-hater here. We finally have the first ST cards (other than WoB, arguably) that actually help the Harmony archetype itself by playing them.
1. Chameleon. Your hand usually runs out of Harmony triggers very quickly. Chameleon is a straight-up "hack" really, letting you artificially trigger a few more procs when you'd otherwise hit a wall, which is great.

1. Antherion. Allows you to put units in your deck that you actually want to play and turn them into Harmony engines, so you can get the card's useful effect and some engine points, which is great.

2. Lake Guardian. Again, Harmony procs are hard to get. LG procs in deck or hand, so you're getting an extra carryover point for each proc. Kind of like the Torque of Harmony.

These cards will get some interest going again, and maybe someone will come up with a Tier 3 deck with them, but that's about it–they don't do nearly enough to solve all the problems the archetype has. The other Harmony engines are still trash (the Fledgling buff is nice but it's not enough), the decks are still a jumbly mess, and the new buffs can be removed, locked, purified, or reset cheaply and easily.

And I'm sorry but the new scenario–Mysteries of Loc Feainn–doesn't seem very good at all.
1. You get a one-time point slam that finally rewards you for using a jumbly mess of a deck–ok, that's great.

1. Then starts up the passive boosts, except they barely help because (per my quick check) only 15 out of 118 ST units (13%) have more than one tag, and those 15 only have two. And of those 15, most are "Elf, Mage", so if you put a lot of those in your deck, it actually hurts your chances to proc Harmony.

2. If you want to keep boosting, you can't play a Harmony engine (because the scenario will advance). But you WANT to play Harmony engines because chapter 2 will play a bronze ST that procs them all. So the two chapters actually fight with each other. You're basically forced to try to setup all your engines (save two) before you can finally jam the scenario–and your opponent will be able to guess exactly what you're doing and start removing them.

It's all just so frustrating. I think we all got our hopes up for a reworked Harmony archetype, but this feels like lipstick on a pig–it's a little better but nowhere near competitive.

Harmony needs a complete redesign as a mechanic. Will probably never happen, but it's just so intrinsically handicapped by its own design that it's hard to see new cards and small buffs ever helping.

Assimilate works because it procs off of things NG wants to do and is good at doing anyway–creating, copying, and stealing cards. Ideally Harmony should work the same way, by building off how the faction wants to play. ST decks like to swarm–elves, dwarves, treants, what have you. Harmony should work off that, triggered by number of bodies on the board. Maybe closer to the new Grace than Assimilate actually. Instead of engines, you could have different ST cards gain different effects when a certain number of bodies are on the board.

IDK, random idea, but Harmony in its current version just doesn't work.