Two Cards and a World of Hurt Stoneskin and Fatebreaker

[FireStormNZ]

Hello everyone,

First a bit about me, I've been playing Shadow Era for nearly 18 months now off and on and when I play I almost exclusively play meltdown, I generally aim for a top 25 finish each season and average around a 65% win rate. I wanted to write this post to give some feedback on two cards that I feel are currently doing more harm than good to perhaps generate some discussion.

They are:

Cinderborn Fatebreaker

and

Stoneskin

Let's start with Fatebreaker, I really think his passive ability should be restricted to offensive abilities. For Fatebreaker to be able to block an Ability like Blood Frenzy is kind of ridiculous and to an extent illogical. How does this monster stop a hero working himself up into a Frenzy?

Moving onto Stoneskin I think this card provides too much for too little cost. In the context of a meltdown game an early Stoneskin can seal board control for a player in the first few turns of the game which is normally extremely difficult to do. The two elements to Stoneskin - damage reduction and invulnerability to a single ability for a cost of two resources is just too cheap. I seriously question whether Stoneskin should protect a monster from a Shadow Energy ability - e.g. Boris' insta kill. Shadow Energy takes multiple turns to build up so for a two resource ability to totally block it seems counter intuitive to me. If we compare Reinforced Armour to Stoneskin we can see that Stoneskin is superior in every way. The exact same damage reduction, the ability to survive a Shadow Energy attack or ability attack and all this at the same resource cost.

I forgot to mention another 'interesting' aspect of Stoneskin, if Zaladar (or Banebow) targets two monsters with their Shadow Energy ability, Stoneskin is destroyed but neither monster gets hit with the ability damage. This is the desired impact as Stoneskin causes an ability to have no effect but I really question whether Stoneskin on one monster should protect another monster from getting zapped by Zaladar's lightnng bolts.

I will be the first to say that in meltdown various cards can have exponentially larger impacts due to the nature of the game (Amber + What Big Teeth anyone?) but these two cards to me seem to be detracting from the game as they limit counter play (Stoneskin in particular).

Does anyone else have any thoughts on how these cards operate? I'm reluctant to use the term overpowered but I do feel that these cards could use some tuning.