You seem to be overlooking two huge things:
1) When you play a card from your hand, what happens afterwards? Your hand now has one less card. So it's not free. It's exactly the same cost as having sacrificed it to get a resource, but you didn't do that - you therefore forego an extra resource for the entire game as a result of playing down that Location when you could have sacrificed it to get from 4 to 5 resources for that turn (and have the extra 1 for the rest of the game). The ongoing cost of not sacrificing it but instead playing it down is effectively 1cc EVERY TURN for the rest of the game.
2) The other big cost of a location is the OPPORTUNITY COST of putting that card in your deck instead of something else. Obviously at 0cc to play, you have to get value worth about 0cc. When you top-deck that card late in the game and have 5cc to spend, what would you prefer to come up?
Shadow Knight or a Location? This is part of a wider deck building skill called Resource Curve. Locations really pull your curve down. This will then hurt you later in the game when you tend to have more resources to spend and would like to be able to spend all of them with the cards in your hand (or other means to spend on the board).
Hope this helps.
Obviously because these are two HUGE drawbacks of using Locations instead of just "normal" cards, they have the in-built mechanism to counter each other as well as be a threat themselves. This saves running a bunch of different counters because any Location is a counter to the others, but each time you counter you are still using up a card from hand (that could have been sacrificed AND could have been a different card instead if you skipped Locations from your deck). I personally thought this was genius and elegant and innovative (know any other games that do it?), but I'm obviously biased!
Bookmarks