Edited it out but eh, sure.
I think the core of most problems in Shadow Era is in it's combat mechanics. The first strike mechanic heavily promotes tempo and the game state can snowball really hard making it impossible to come back unless both players play for tempo, which kills variety. As a result, the game gets a bit boring pretty fast.
There's a bit of variety but most of it is not "you can do many different things" but "you can do the same thing in different ways". The first one is "good" variety and the second one is "bad" variety.
Every deck has to focus on allies, that are good at gaining tempo and board presence which forces practically every ally (Elizabeth is like the only one that isn't) to be good at attacking. This also kills aggro in a sense that every playable ally has to have more health than attack which makes ally attacks tickle more than actually being a thing.
That said, the fact that everything is so ally focused in completely because of there not being any good non-ally things that would allow control play.
All of these things are fixable which is why I played the game for a year-or-so. Most of that time I did look for ways to avoid the things mentioned above and didn't find any. Might be because I'm bad but I don't know.
I also think SE needs a bit more decision making.
Bookmarks