Prevailing wisdom is that to be a top player you have to run a 30 card deck. Any more than that and you're diluting the deck and creating unnecessary inconsistencies.

Prevailing wisdom is that certain cards (Eladwen Frostmire, then Portal, then Sandra) are overpowered and need to be nerfed immediately.

Prevailing wisdom is that if you're a high rated player and you are facing a deck you don't like or get a crappy draw quitting the game is a perfectly acceptable means of preserving your rating.

Prevailing wisdom is wrong.

Thirty card decks are efficient, usually fast to develop and pretty damn consistent as far as draws go. But they aren't the only way to play the game and for people like me, those who enjoy looking around at what everyone is doing the same and poking holes in their communal group-think, they are a real treat.

But Shadow Era has a neat little game mechanic that makes taking advantage of this line of thinking almost too easy. Once you have no cards to draw you take damage for every card you *should* draw. So using strategies that are geared at speeding up the card drawing while interfering with an opponents moves and also compensating for the accelerated drawing in your own deck can lead to some interesting, if sometimes lengthier, games.

As for the so-called "overpowered" cards, everyone needs to quit griping and exercise just a bit of patience. The full first card set is NOT YET IMPLEMENTED. Hell, there is only ONE WEAPON available in the game right now. That's FAR from a complete set and balance shouldn't even really be discussed until such a time as the set is complete. THEN let's see what's overpowered and out of balance.

I understand that Kyle is in a precarious position in that he needs to be responsive to the player base that is already invested in the (incomplete) game. I'm one of them and I've probably invested more than the average person in crystals just to show my support. But responding to complaints of unbalanced cards and overpowered cards at this stage is short-sighted. Let's see what the metagame looks like when we have all 200 cards out there.

As for you high rated players who cower in fear of certain decks that wreck your strategies, ducking out of a match because you might lose is a cowards path and you don't deserve your place atop the ratings. You're cheating your opponents on multiple levels and I for one look forward to the day that such behavior leads to a significant drop in your rating. It's reprehensible behavior and the people at the top of ANY game should be better than that.

Shadow Era is the greatest game I've ever played on iOS and I am hopelessly addicted. See you all on the battlefields!