Mulligan!!! SHADOW ERA NEEDS IT!

[Leviosablade]

While this poll is by no means official, I just wanted to pop in and say that the conversation about mulligans has been reopened and we are considering it again and will be listening to feedback from players...

Personally, I voted Full Mulligan -1

This is amazing! If I may I have a idea to balance out the FTA

[Xander Spitfire]

Adding a mulligan is linked to the direction the game wants to go. There's an element of randomness in every card games. Beating those odds and dealing with the adversity of not always getting what you want/need is part of a player skills. If thoses odds are too low and leads to a luck-based game, sure mulligan would help.

But LL is pushing the game in a different direction. More draw being added recklessly, cards that cost nothing, ressouces acceleration everywhere, seeking, discard tactics that circumvent the original mechanics of the game. All these things are increasing the stability of winning patern (i.e. the ability to recreate a particular win condition over and over again, which goes against the spirit of any card games, imo).

Mulligan will just increase the stability of these partern to the point of turning this game into a TBS.

[guruofguru64]

Spent an hour thinking about a way to do it without affecting the meta.

Gave me a headache. Here here, no mulligan.

But...

How about this: Give unrated matches the option of some sort of mulligan? This lets mulliganeers have their cake, but keeps it confined from the actual meta. Or perhaps as a gamemode somewhere down the road?

[Umbra7]

The only way I'd be OK with Mulligan, is if minimum deck size was also increased to 50. Otherwise, rush becomes too consistent, and with rush being the most boring deck, it would make the game more boring.

[maskee]

Full mulligan (-1 card) looks good on paper... but it (-1 card) can be extremly well balanced by cards like bad santa and by good draw in general. I think it will help rush a lot and not help heavy controll at all... The game looks well balanced to me now (rush vs control). But as you know every new expansion shift game more to rush and than dev team nerfs cards to balance it back... with mulligan it will be even harder...

[Gondorian]

I voted Full Mulligan -1 under the assumption that:

1) We would try it out to see if it causes any balance issues as an option in custom games first.
2) Players know the opposing hero and whether they are going first or second before they choose to mulligan or not.

I like this because you have the option to pay the price of a card for the swap, but you don't have to take it. Admittedly, you could become even more screwed than you were with the original hand, but maybe then you have to question the make-up of your deck if in 11 cards you can't find something to help you early in the game.

Full mulligan with no penalty will only increase consistency of everyone. Not sure we want that to happen, but there are other things we can do to reduce consistency ultimately (e.g. go up to 50 card minimum), so I'm not ruling it out as an option I'd like to see, but I think it is the wrong option to try first.

No mulligan doesn't get us anywhere - we learn nothing, so this is why I advocate making some kind of mulligan an option first for people to try out and report back. We could then extend to having automated tournaments that allow it as well, etc, etc.

Partial mulligan is what I consider to be the worst of all options because it means you can choose what to hold onto and what to replace for something else. Consistency will rise too much and combos will be easier to get. This works well in Hearthstone because they only allow 2 copies of each card and 1 copy of each Legendary in a deck and they want to give people the highest chance of seeing the strongest cards, so being able to keep what's good and junk what's bad is perfect. For us, with 4 copies of cards allowed and minimum deck size of 40, we would vastly increase the chance of getting a "god hand" to start off. I appreciate I have not spent a long time thinking about all this and I might be wrong, so feel free to correct me if you think actually a partial mulligan would be great for the health of the game.

[Demnchi]

I'm not as for having mulligan in this game as I was back in that old thread. I've played a lot more as of late, and I even my worst hands still churn out victories. The decks are small enough and draw is available enough that you can still likely draw into what you want, especially if the deck is well built. I'm not convinced that the game needs more consistency than it has now. Especially (as Xander mentioned) that we have more draw than ever, we even have tutors now (e.g. Seek, Aramia).

I still think the best approach is to at least try it in some capacity before making it official one way or the other. At the moment, I'm leaning towards simply leaving the game the way it is, I'm just not opposed to giving it a shot.

Although, if we do give it a shot, I agree 100% with Gondorian that partial mulligans would be ridiculous for Shadow Era. It would have to be some other option... and one that is fair to both players. None of that "just for player 2" stuff.

[jacqui]

Mulligan is not needed. Draw a bad card? Sacrifice it. Draw a bunch of bad cards? Sacrifice them. Draw nothing but bad cards? Fix your deck to make it more consistent. As others have mentioned, mulligan only increases consistency of high value starts when the consistency of such starts is already pretty good in my opinion.

[Gondorian]

The only way I'd be OK with Mulligan, is if minimum deck size was also increased to 50. Otherwise, rush becomes too consistent, and with rush being the most boring deck, it would make the game more boring.

We're on the same wavelength! Not sure if that is good or bad.

[Xander Spitfire]

The only way I'd be OK with Mulligan, is if minimum deck size was also increased to 50. Otherwise, rush becomes too consistent, and with rush being the most boring deck, it would make the game more boring.

Rush archetype is an integrated part of a healty and varied meta game. Without it it's all about heavy control and stall decks. I miss attachment Lance with 2cc COF. It was a legitimate rush deck without relying to burn cards.