Eh, I'm actually in the mood to explore this issue because just the fact that it's there shows that some things probably weren't considered thoroughly enough, even if it's an optional thing. Pets don't "sound" broken, they're so ludicrously broken on a conceptual level that it has always been sort of amusing for me that someone even made them. I've seen it when people who just like programming and like a game figure out how to mod it and then put all sorts of stuff in there, but since they're not designers or often even hardcore enough gamers they just don't know what they're doing.
The only thing I don't care for in the fantasy mode are the pets and the lives bussiness - I like playing best of 5, I like challenges popping more often, and I like to have a way to earn money without having to ante-beat up shandalar guys. So let me say a few things about that first:
The concept of "old" blocks having ludicrously priced cards is currently broken in several ways:
1) you beat up guys in shandalar, the money in the market loses all meaning. Useless but plentiful commons and uncommons which are worth more than useful rares are a stupid idea in forge, and while it's a fun money cheat I'd prefer an actual no-money cheat which didn't require grinding or mess up the drafts.
2) The draft prices for the ludicrously overpriced sets (legends, antiquities, arabian nights, several others) are insane overpriced just because the cards, and especially the basic lands, are overpriced. This means that if you get stuck with one in the pool you NEED stupid ammounts of money to play it, or grind more until it goes away. This doesn't work at all. Especially because:
3) If you DO get into one of those drafts and win, which isn't too difficult, you get, for some reason, something like 30 boosters. That's a whole box of an overpriced set, most of which you'll never play, but you're almost guaranteed a set of all the chase stuff. And once you do this once, you've broken the bank - you can clear out the whole bazzar, and you can enter almost any draft (and challenge rewards look stupid by comparison). Do this once or twice and you're set for life.
4) You can also turn these ludicrous winnings into whatever boosters, too, which makes putting togather a whole set of something else v. easy.
5) If all this wasn't so, the AI opponents decks wouldn't have to be crazy good. I'm actually annoyed at the difficulty levels and the fact that there's a cap after which you unlock harder opponents. I set the easy at 33 wins, medium at 66 and hard at 99, but even that feel awkward. If you're going for a block constructed quest, you can be 50 wins and many drafts into the quest and not be remotely "ready" for medium enemies with stuff from a newer block or one with a different power level. I've got 0 interest in playing against ludicrous pro tour T1 decks, ever, because I have no interest in playing an equally stupid deck, at least in quest mode. You can't pick up the necessary pieces for that easily or quickly enough, and if you pick them up piece by piece you just ruin all the non-stupid difficulty tiers.
And it's sort of the same with pets - sure they help you against a concentration of the worst design mistakes and cross-block / cross-mode sinergies piled up in concentration, but the problem is that they're, by default, WORSE than most of those design mistakes and total overkill against anything that isn't like that. If I could set the easy wins limit to a 100, medium to 200, hard to 300, I'd enjoy it imensly and if I ever needed a pet against anything in those tiers it would simply mean that whoever was designing that tier arsed up.
Why are they worse than even lotuses and moxen?
- | Open
- Because they are resource free and completely change the game. The fully evolved plant reads as either one or more or all of these at the same time:
"You can play any deck draw-go until you draw enough mana and your win condition and most of the cards the AI can even have in a deck are not a threat to you" or
"You can simply never tap out until you're ready with a control deck, and you need to respond to a lot fewer threats than you otherwise would";
or "Devising a creature based deck the AI can functionally play against you becomes really, really hard";
or "The AI needs more burn to kill you";
or "The AI starts with one or more fewer cards in hand/deck as it'll need to waste removal on something you otherwise wouldn't have, which also means something which might be part of your win condition gets to live and otherwise wouldn't";
or "Diabolic edit reads "Pay 1B spend a card, it doesn't really do what it was supposed to do, any simetrical sac effects aren't very simetrical anymore";
or "You can mitigate the use of several fetches/painlands/shocklands with no real concequence";
or "You don't really have to sideboard or adjust your deck for various matchups to get some of these benefits";
or "You start with at least 3 or more extra life in most matches";
or "If any card is balanced by requireing you to have a creature on the board, it is no longer balanced, even more so because you didn't actually invest anything in game to have a creature on the board";
or "If you're deck would suffer because of a color protection on some opposing critters, as long as it's not pro green, which is actually pretty rare, you're doing good";
or "You get a free multi-purpose/metagame changing permanent on board but you don't have to account for it in deckbuilding, mana base, tapping out, mulliganing, no tempo loss, no card advantage loss, you'll never topdeck it when you need something else, it can't be bounced to the top of your library, etc, etc. Dark Ritual and Moxes and even Black Lotus aren't like that.";
or "The AI will not prioritize this thing because it doesn't really percieve it as a threat, and most removal doesn't actually work on it."
And that's just the plant. If it's even all there is to it, I didn't go into specifics of all the things it lets you do if you actually build to exploit it actively, and not just exploit it passively. But since you can have both it and the pet, it can get pretty bonkers. The pets are marginally less problematic because they are somewhat easier to get rid of via removal, and the AI percieves them as a threat and targets them more than it does the plant (and they don't have wither so they don't lock the board up so hard).
The pets do have their own list of ways they break the game by default, though.
So, I don't really feel obliged to tangle with decks which would require me to have something like that on my side. I don't feel like being able to beat obvious mistakes like skullclamp affinity and such warrants having to use pets. Those decks arent even "very hard" they're just mistakes (and if you build for it you can beat them without even going stupid, back when ravager and skullclamp were meta I had a R/G deck with only painlands at rare which beat several in every tourney.)
TLDR - those things are humongous overkill in any mode. The difficulty increases too steeply anyway and being able to beat someone with those doesn't mean anything. The difference is enormous except in certain matchups (certain board sweepers incidentally take them away, and some decks incidentally bypass them).
What I'd personally like would be the following:
- Ability to play quest fantasy mode with 20 life and no way to increase or decrease it. This just messes up metagames and individual card and strategy balancing for no good reason.
- No limits on how many wins it takes to unlock a tier of opponents, so I can set it to whatever. Even having to do a certain amount of appropriately tiered challenges and/or pay money to advance and definitely confirm it before it happens would be nice.
- Something done to the old sets card prices, draft prices and booster rewards for winning those drafts.
- Something done to the ante mechanism - medium tier opponents are a wealth of expensive lands, and losing a very expensive card means you possibly can't buy it back which is supremely annoying. I'd prefer it if the ante card was selected from an appropriate pool rather than the opponents deck (for various reasons), and if you could ante cards of your choice to match it in price instead of losing random cards mid-match. (I'd keep the ante on personally because I like the idea of winning random cards which aren't in my core pool, but winning them out of decks doesn't work that well).