We've already posted all of our competitive decks though. So, how about you reverse my offer and post some detailed playtests of your lists vs. ours so I can at least give you my insights on your lines of play with our decks? I don't really care who does the testing as long as the results and lines of play are discussed in a transparent way (not just "my deck totally won 10 games in a row!"). Don't you understand I WANT to be wrong about thrower? I really, really do. I hate that deck and its why I'm not playing standard anymore.

Jogo do you have a list you can point me to? We've been meaning to test destruction thrower for a while. Do you just basically play control w/ Naggaroth Spearmen as a finisher, or is it actually playing the Reaper? Either way, theoretically I don't see it having the tools to beat Skaven since so many of destruction's best tools are sorcery-speed & they have a pretty awful support cardpool (basically why Chaos control can't beat them), and it seems like it loses HARD to the order thrower mirror, but I can't say with confidence until we've tested it. @dutpotd, HE/Dwarf thrower is the list me, Clamatius, f7eleven etc are referring to when we whine that bolt thrower is choking the format. Clamatius posted a list a while ago that needs to be updated with the latest battle packs but the core of it is basically unchanged. Lots of "fog" effects (Valaya, Gifts of Aeneron), powerful card draw, thrower as a finisher.

Eh, I don't feel like more pointless logic derails. I appreciate your post, but I'd rather not get into it. I'll leave it here: argumentum ad hominem is not always an invalid line of argument, particularly where the qualifications of someone commenting on a topic that requires intimate knowledge are concerned. Reflecting on this again actually, I realized dormouse probably just took me to be claiming "played in every deck = overpowered, ban it" which really wasn't what I was saying. I was saying "if you think its OK to ban cards on power level, then the fact that WE is played in every deck as a 3-of is evidence of its power and therefore candidacy for banning." I made a lot more points in this thread, but I think that was the source of the confusion, and why dormouse thought I was being illogical (because I agree that the line he thought I took wouldnt be a logical conclusion of my premises). So, chalk it up to a misunderstanding and move on.

Wytefang: Why do you refuse to share your decklists so I can critique them? I am offering to play your decks against ours and outline in detail my strategies and specific lines of play in the matchups. Its entirely possible I am just a terrible player and am doing it completely wrong, and you are absolutely right and thrower doesnt hold a candle to your decks. I HOPE that's the case because I really hate the thrower deck, a lot. So please do us all a favor and rather than settle this with insults, post some decklists so we can settle it with some elbow grease and honest discussion of the results. I firmly believe I have something to learn from everyone. Everyone has a unique pov that is worth taking the time to understand and learn from. I am asking you to share your pov with me, and offering to share my pov in return. I don't understand why you refuse. What do you have to lose?

Order gets a plush Deathmaster, how cute. In all fairness, this guy definitely has 'value' written all over him. Very solid card. I like how Errant Wolf, Envoy and Huntsman get relegated to "etc" in your list of juicy targets though How low order has fallen...

Yes, but you can totally respond to their ETB ability by WNYB'ing them away. BLOWOUT. Corpse Cart. Auto-include in every Skaven deck. What better way to run the "still had all these" than milling yourself with all your resources on the turn you beat them. Not to mention, you beat them with a deck that runs Corpse Cart. (that stings).

Generally I make a point of not responding to your trolling, but I'm going to bite this once: you have no idea what you are talking about. Seriously, just stop spouting your "thrower isnt good!" nonsense all over the place, or else show me a list I can test against thrower to prove your point. Clamatius and I have posted plenty of lists, from Orc/Skaven to Dwarves to DE to Chaos control, and we've build TONS more that we havent posted (HE ramp, empire aggro, empire combo/control, Orc control, the list goes on and on and on...) and we have found NOTHING that stands up to thrower on a consistent basis that doesn't also punt hard against the field, particularly Orc/Skaven and Dwarves. (So no, Grimgor.dec does not get there). Here's what I want you to do. I want you to POST A LIST that beats thrower on a consistent basis and has game against rush/midrange that we can test. I promise you, I will thoroughly test it against thrower, orc/skaven and dwarves and I will post match results, lines of play, the works. You provide the list, I provide the testing. So, its go time. Put up or shut up.

You guys are too excited about card disadvantage... Long Winter is a tool for thrower to help it fight scouts & reduce variance from City Gates/Ancestral Tomb - I can't see it being worth a card in any other context right now. It might not even be good enough in Thrower (and I am betting it isnt).

@f7eleven - its an interesting way to take the deck. Definitely starts to look attractive given that the main HE cards you are casting come quite late in the curve. The prospect of having to overpay for Gifts/Flames is scary, but I think it is definitely worth testing.

Fair, good catch. Still an extremely solid card - 2 cost 1 power supports are playable and this ability when combined with Reap, Abandoned Mine, etc is very solid and will see play in bolt thrower, and probably in dwarves as well. Slight derail, but in general this is what I want our resource and card draw base to look like - synergistic, powerful cards that aren't a degenerate advantage if one player has them but the other doesn't. This kind of design is excellent, and the format would be so much better if all our resource bases looked like this instead of 3x warpstone 3x contested village 3x innovation 3-5x alliances /yawn.

@f7eleven, I'm on the fence. Its definitely an excellent effect to have in the deck, and if not for Abandoned Mine would be a solid 2-3x, but its pretty narrow even with City Gates, Ancestral Tomb, & Mining Tunnels. If we had sideboards it goes in there to fight the scout deck no question, but I'm not convinced. Any thoughts on a list including it? Its probably time to test some standard decks again... Some other thoughts... Ancestral Tomb is so good. Tomb & Mining Tunnels... just wow. Dwarves and Thrower are really badly outstripping Destruction for their resource/draw engines. Master Rune of Spite is the sickness. Order badly needed this card to exist, but boy dwarves did not need the help... I love it. But I hate it. Effulgent Boils is the answer Chaos has been looking for to Clan Moulder's Elite. Shame about Pillage, Lobber Crew etc etc but its a step in the right direction (WTB Wight Lord...). Chaos' early game is so poor that I wonder if this isnt what we can expect from Chaos.. getting loyalty on the board via permanents that answer opposing development rather than build up your own. Bottomless Mine seems bad to me, too vulnerable to disruption for the effect, but I noticed it. It definitely could work in the right circumstances, but Contested Stronghold seems like a better way to ramp if that's your plan. Vanguard of Woe actually seems decent. You definitely think twice about spending a card to kill this guy, though Deathmastering him seems tasty (turn a random card in your hand into a 0-cost pillage). I'm not sure Destruction control wouldnt trade a random card and a WNYB for setting them back that far on resources/cards though. But maybe - its worth a look. Not really impressed by anything else here.

Guy, have you ever studied logic? Argumentum ad hominem is not a fallacy. It certainly can be... for example, the statement "don't listen to dormouse because he's a giant moron" is a fallacy, and not a rational reason to discount your claims on whether warpstone should be banned. However, the statement "don't listen to dormouse because this discussion requires a certain degree of knowledge of the format and he has demonstrated time and again that he simply has no relevant play experience and speaks only in theory" is a perfectly logical means of attacking your position. Yes, it is argumentum ad hominem, but it is not a logical fallacy. Glad I could clear that up. As to my earlier argument being illogical, lets detail it out for you, shall we? Premise 1: It is OK to consider banning a card for power level reasons. Premise 2: If the maximum legal number of a card is played in every tuned deck, no matter what strategy the deck is attempting to execute, then it follows that the card in question is a powerful card. Premise 3: The maximum legal number of Warpstone Excavation are played in every tuned deck, no matter what strategy the deck is attempting to execute. So, the logic is: If premise 2 is true, then it follows from premise 3 that Warpstone Excavation is a powerful card. Then, by premise 1 we can conclude that Warpstone Excavation is a candidate for banning. Note that it would take a more detailed explanation of what "banning for power level reasons" entailed in order to conclude that the card should definitely be banned (I went into this later in the first and subsequent posts, when I detailed the detrimental impact of narrow hate cards and the power level of the hate cards/difficulty of designing effective hate). But as far as the logic that I used in the first post, I think the above is completely clear and reasonable. You may disagree with the premises but that does not make the argument illogical. I made this exact point, that it being a 3-of in every deck warranted discussion of banning the card (and not an outright ban, for which more detailed qualification of what being ban-worthy looks like) when I said this, in the original post you replied to: "Because if you don't, we don't, and FFG doesn't, and no one can come up with a deck that doesnt run the core 9 and wouldnt be improved by adding them, then maybe, just maybe, talking about banning or rotation is justified..." (emphasis added)So I am guessing you misread that and didn't understand that I was not concluding that 3-of in every deck = ban. Care to retract the claim that my argument is illogical?

False, you actually only need to defend 2. I'll give you a minute to think about why... @cyberfunk - Not denying that a deck of all 3 drops is not going to value Innovation particularly highly. But, I'd argue that such a deck could be easily improved by moving its resource base down the curve (to operate in phase 2 on 4 resources/turn rather than 6/turn). However in all fairness this is due to the way the current cardpool looks, and if they started printing a bunch of Temple of Vaul-esque resource generators I admit that Innovation could theoretically become more of a tool and less of a staple. We're a long ways off of that given the current meta though.

RE: removing DM from the format - the problem is, DE and Chaos arent losing to Deathmaster. They are losing to Riders/Moulder's Elite/Pillage/Lobber Crew. DM beats order, destruction decks have plenty of outs to him. Rather than devolve into a long discussion on a hypothetical deathmaster-less format, I'd basically sum up my pov on it like so: dwarves are even more ridiculous, orc/skaven is still the best rock deck, empire and high elves are slightly more viable than they were before but hardly competitive, and thrower still chokes the format. It gets easier for dwarves to splash High Elf's Disdain though without DM to pressure them, so Disdain Dwarves probably becomes the best deck (I'd need to test quite a bit more to say that with confidence though). RE: blocking - If warpstone said on it "you cannot ever block in this zone, ever" it would still be an incredible automatic 3-of in every deck. That's not commentary on blocking being bad as much as it is card/board advantage being insane. You just execute your gameplan around conceding the loss of whatever zone you play warpstone in. That's frequently how you play anyway. RE: innovation - I think you're missing a lot of why the card is so good. Cards on board are just so much better than cards in hand because they represent compounding card advantage throughout the game. If the opponent goes "Spearmen, go" and I go "develop, innovate, clan rats to K, lobber crew, use crew", on the next turn I can play a pair of 2-cost supports or guys to quest and now I am in the mid-game (drawing 3+/turn, using 4+resources/turn) while you are a full turn behind me. How will you catch up when I a pair of 2-drops every turn, especially when my 2-drops in the orc deck are so efficient? You are just not going to beat another lobber crew, a pllage or two, or a couple of moulder's elites, unless you can get to the midgame as fast as I do, preferably faster. Also, don't underestimate the usefulness of leveraging multiple innovations in the late game to recover from a board reset, whether your own Troll Vomit or your opponent's Flames of the Phoenix. Innovation is almost never a dead card, unless you've basically already lost and need to rip the miser's Troll Vomit or Deathmaster or something, but that's not really a good way to evaluate card quality. RE: Limited mechanic, I don't really get why its magic derivative, the design space is far broader than that. Its clearly being used now to limit the pace of resource/card engine development (which it isnt doing very well is it!), so I guess its sort of similar to MTG's land mechanics, but there's no reason you couldnt have a tactic w/ Limited, etc.

I dont think banning Deathmaster would change the meta at all. All of the same decks, with virtually all of the same cards, would still be played. Order would get slightly stronger on average, especially Empire or High Elves, but lets be honest - Dwarves doesnt need the help (and Empire and HE would still be terribad). Like I said, you'd just see Orc/Skaven run Ugrok as a 1-2-of and 3x Troll Vomit, that's about all. Lobber Crew is not a card that should be considered for banning. Its a fine card, on the high side of the power curve (I'd still play it as a 2-cost tactic), and definitely able to give you some tempo and card advantage in the early turns of the game, but it is not broken by any means (no moreso than Zealot Hunter anyway). If I had to redesign it I'd make it restricted to only using its ability on the opponent's turn (to avoid the "get my resources, crew you on turn 2" shenanigans). As to your specific questions: Q: Would you agree that Warpstone Excavation's corruption effect would be reason not to play it in some decks if the environment were somewhat slower? A: Absolutely not. WE is insane. No matter how slow the format is, you always play it as a 3-of, always. Card advantage is vastly better than defending. If you know you will need to defend a zone at some point during the game (and you should know this if you are paying attention) you can find a way to do so even w/ a WE in play. And knowing where to play it (even on turn 1) should shape your gameplan for the rest of the game. Essentially, if you need to defend a zone with a WE in it you probbaly were losing regardless. Q: Do you think Innovation is a must-play for every deck in an environment where all factions have access to multiple 3-cost/2-hammer guys as HE does now? A: YES YES YES YES MY GOD MAN. 3-cost guys w/ 2 hammers are called one thing: A BLOWOUT. They are TERRIBLE. Lobber Crew, Village, go... sound familiar? Clan Rat, WNYB, want to scoop now or do you just enjoy getting timewalked? You do not want to use units for your hammer generation in a meta that is this hostile to units. Just, no. Even if they printed completely broken alliances that cost 3 and gave 2 hammers & a faction symbol for every faction I would still run Innovation as a 3-of, because then I could do horrifically busted things like one of those + develop + innovate into spider riders or contested village. Cheap resources are ridiculously good. Q: Would you agree that we could, theoretically, design Limited cards good enough to displace Contested Village? A: Theoretically if every card in my deck was Limited I wouldnt play Contested Village. So I guess that suggests it would be possible to have enough of my resource base be limited that I wouldnt play CV, but realize that would only be the case if the rest of my resource base produced enough board presence quickly enough to be better than CV is now. Which is basically saying, "if they made the resource accel problem twice as bad, would you still think the issues created by the core 9 today are bad?"... to which I respond, "yes... just less bad than your theoretical uber-resource-accel world". Make sense? Q: What would you think about changing the Limited rule? A: I don't think the limited rule needs to be changed, I think its fine as is. Several cards should be limited though, to make building a resource base harder. Mining Tunnels should be. Alliances DEFINITELY should be. Wouldnt mind seeing it on cheap units (envoy, huntsman) too.

Your reasoning is flawed in the skaven w/ no deathmasters vs. skaven w/ deathmasters matchup. A better example would be skaven w/ no innovation vs. dwarves w/ innovation - the point being, deathmaster is just a strategy, not a defining element of the game. Decks that run innovation (& warpstone, & cv) are operating on a different plane than decks not running them, w/rt their ability to leave stage 1. That's what innovation/warpstone/cv allow - rapid progress to the midgame, or even lategame in the case of some truly busted draws. They compress the available maneuvering room for aggro and midrange decks, and force what would naturally be 'stage 3' decks to be able to survive an aggressive midrange deck masquerading as an aggro deck due to resource acceleration. That's why everything in W:I looks like a rush deck right now. In truth, Orc/Skaven is NOT an aggro deck, at all... it is a midrange Rock deck that looks and behaves like an aggro deck because the format is so incredibly fast in terms of resource accel. That deck (and most other brands of "rush" in the current meta) would play out substantially differently, and have weaknesses that could be exploited by strategies committed to early pressure, without the core 9. As is, midrange is flat out better at getting out powerful guys while still rocking a full suite of disruption (whether orcs' lobber crews/pillages or dwarves tricks) because there is no room for sligh-style aggro to punish those decks for setting up their midgame plan. And in turn, there are no true control 'stage 3' decks because the midrange decks are so fast and punishing that those decks simply cannot reliably survive into stage 3 to setup their gameplan. If we had to rely on armories, cemetaries and alliances for resources and card draw, the space for deckbuilding would grow immensely. Without Deathmaster, we'd just be playing Ugrok as our finisher in orc decks and probably bump up Troll Vomit to a 3-of.

Order in general has a weak card pool, particularly empire and high elves. But order also has the two best decks in the format in bolt thrower and dwarves. So basically, the cards are there to make a couple of very high-powered (but also skill-intensive) decks, but the quality drops off considerably even a few cards past the 50 that comprise the tuned thrower and dwarf lists. From a deckbuilding pov, you will find many more interesting interactions when designing destruction decks, and have to slog through a lot of garbage to find the tuned dwarf or thrower ones.

The problem with hate cards for something like warpstone is that they need to either be *extremely* powerful, or they just don't have any teeth. Its the same reason you happily play Skaven decks with Zealot Hunter in the format. ZH is a powerful 2-for-1, no doubt, but the advantage you gain from having a Deathmaster or Greyseer in play for even one turn can be backbreaking... and the times when they dont have the answer in hand immediately they just lose. So even if you printed cards like the ones the two of you are describing (and note that I already covered a card that doesnt allow enemy units to be uncorrupted, it was one of the first I suggested), the point is that you gain so much of an advantage by playing warpstone and having it unopposed for even a few turns that, by the time the hate card is drawn, it won't do enough to offset the gains. Unless the hate card not only destroys the warpstone but also undoes the advantage of having had it in play (for free!) for 1-3+ turns, it will simply not be good enough to stop the card being played. And anyway, I don't really want the game to turn into a series of overpowered, overly narrow hate cards as band-aids for their design mistakes, when a ban and a commitment not to print cheap resource acceleration fixes the problem much more simply & elegantly.

You're undervaluing board presence & card advantage dude. The strength of warpstone is as means to get card advantage (or resource advantage which you will turn into card advantage), same as innovation. Card advantage wins games. Deathmaster is a very powerful soft-lock card, demanding an answer the moment he hits the table (and often a +cards/+tempo play even when they kill him immediately), but he is not even close to as format-defining as Warpstone, Innovation, and (to a lesser extent) Contested Village. Put it this way. If the gold standard for resource gen & card draw was alliances (which are IMO undercosted at 2... should be 2 cost for a single faction loyalty symbol, not two, but whatever...), you'd see entirely different decks being viable. If we couldnt reliably get 4 cost "worth" of stuff onto the board turn 1, the entire format slows down by a turn. That's HUGE. Deathmaster is just a powerful strategy. The "core 9" are responsible for the tempo of the entire game. Anyway, as far as the three cards you designed, if I had a hand where my turn 1 was "prognosticator, go" or "barracks, go", I almost certainly mulligan. Cannon Fodder is a very interesting design (kudos), but probably only borderline playable is my initial guess... he is what 1-cost hammers should look like though, IE a serious drawback. But regardless, none of these is anywhere close to the power level of Contested Village, let alone Innovation or Warpstone.

Sorry if I come off as rude. I get tired of debates here completely missing the point. As I said above, what we should be arguing is whether its OK to ban cards on power level. Not whether the card is actually powerful or not. So I get annoyed when people keep trying to steer the discussion back to something which is just plainly stupid obvious to anyone who has played this game more than twice. @Laughmask - don't count on it man. That was the purpose of my design challenge a couple pages back: can we come up with cards that could actually see print (IE wouldnt completely destabilize the game) that would make you not want to run Warpstone Excavation as a 3-of in every deck? I came up with some pretty absurdly powerful cards that hose warpstone and even those arent enough to make me even consider not playing it as a 3-of. I mean, you could start designing some really super narrow hosers which are completely unrealistic... for instance, I probably wouldnt play Warpstone in any deck if this card existed and saw play: Warpstone Go BOOM!, 0, tactic: destroy target support card with printed cost 0. If you do, its controller takes 16 indirect damage.This is the kind of card that would have to be printed to answer the prevalence of Warpstone. And even then, given how ridiculously narrow WGB! is, whether to play Warpstone Excavation would still be a meta call (if you think people are running WGB! you wouldnt play WE, otherwise you would, etc). Is that really the direction we want the game to take? Ridiculously powerful cards answered by ridiculously narrow hate cards? It doesn't seem appealing to me, but maybe I just have a failure of imagination and can't come up with realistic hate cards that actually make people not want to play WE. Probably the most promising was the "printed cost matters" mechanic I suggested a few pages back, where you get powerful effects on the cheap if your opponent has cards of a given cost in play, but even the crazy powerful card I came up with (a guaranteed 2-for-1) is not good enough to deter me playing WE. The advantage of having 1 or more WE on turn 1 is just too great. Bonus thought experiment: Consider the "Warpstone Go BOOM!" card above. How high could the indirect damage number be to where you would continue to play Warpstone Excavation as a 3-of even if the card existed? I know I would definitely play WEx3 if the number was 4... but 8 seems like too much. I think 5-6 is probably about right, given that they are almost certainly going to be -1 or more cards in the exchange (even granting 4-6 indirect as worth a card), since they are unlikely to play WGB! as a 3-of since its so narrow, so its relatively unlikely you face the worst-case scenario of WGB! on turn 1.

Two explanations for your warpstone-less deck "totally crushing" decks with warpstone. 1. your opponent(s) and/or your opponent(s) decks are bad. 2. you are using anecdotes which are really just variance to justify your position, despite the overwhelming evidence presented by virtually everyone who has a clue on these forums. These are not mutually exclusive, but I am betting we are getting a big dose of #2. (double-meaning absolutely intended).

Unfortunately, I think this thread is devolving into people arguing "Warpstone isnt really that good" which just means you don't understand the game (sorry, but you don't). What this argument should be about though is whether its OK to ban cards for power level concerns. To anyone who understands deckbuilding in W:I, warpstone excavation is pretty clearly the most powerful card in the format and its not close.

Show me a mill list that beats thrower please? (pm, post here, or if its deck creation link there would be great) Also, using a rule like this for card draw isnt very helpful. One of the cool things about this game is the decisions you make in terms of where to invest resources vary SO much game to game and matchup to matchup. Even w/ the same Orc/Skaven list, and sometimes even vs. the same opponent, there will be games where I am drawing 6+ cards/turn, and there will be games where I am drawing 1 card/turn the whole way. But on average, I'd say 2-4/turn seems about right, depending on the phase of the game.

dormouse said: Wow, you take yourself just a little too seriously, I was clearly saying that a card appearing in every deck x3 is flawed logic to demand it being banned. Is there a credible argument that can be made about banning WE? Yes, is this it? Not even close. The closest you can do is make a side argument about how it does this or creates that, and because it is available at x3 it only exasperates the problem. It is a neutral card, all good neutral unaligned cards are likely to appear in all decks. That is the nature of the beast. If you don't like it I think the problem is more with you and your expectations of the game than the game itself. Wait, so your stance is, "its never OK to ban a card, you just need to adjust your expectations of the game!!." Do I have that right? Surprise surprise that I ask you for a list as a basis for discussion and you respond with drivel like this. I've come to expect no less from you, the guy who probably has the highest ratio of words posted to actual games played on the entire forum.

Its really just a different format. Clamatius and I have been testing single set decks and are not even close to solving it. Dwarves seem really good, triple-faction Destruction control seems OK. Orc aggro seems OK too. To answer your original question, no I don't think thrower is viable in single set. That's one of the best things about the format, actually.