I’ve seen a 5 Poisoner’s Preparation action. I’ve never tried it because by the time I could get 5 Prep they would be well on their way to victory.
Tallow has one, and he’s the only one. It’s one of the main reasons he’s by far the most worthless character. 4 prep is bad enough, 5 is just absurd. And on a KT teammate as well, impossible to work with.
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You know something funny? When I just started out Queen of Loins felt like a godsend because yay, free supports. It was when I actually figured out the game that I realised what a load she was. Queen of Loins is the starter Pokemon of Hearts’ game.
Also you have no idea how tempted I am to EPA-optimise with a double-King and, I don’t know, Teeth team. But for the same reason I’m stocking up Crimson Books out of paranoia for them one day being very, very plot relevant I can’t help but cling to my trophies. I’ll never forgive myself if I miss the chance to get something like the Wax-Wind Knife again.
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I took a pretty big break from hearts game, I got a bunch of wins back then and settled on my favorite strategy being the no-prep no-skills run (loins, roots, teeth, I think?)
Is there a consensus now on the optimal approach? I see the wiki lists four viable strategies, but doesn’t mention which ones are better. Is it the ones named “Pages of Skill” and “King’s Castle” there?
Hearts’ Game: The Season of Excess will launch Thursday, May 25th.
Be sure to finish your current match by tomorrow!
More details from Bruno on the Discord:
So don’t expect anything super special with the new option – it’s just a replacement for the longboxes
I didn’t want to mess around with EpA or rewards really, because this update is already changing so much. Definitely something we’ll keep an eye on for the future.
The change to how Elusiveness and progress interacts (with the introduction of the new Tolerance quality) means that the math would be totally off, so all the cards have had their numbers adjusted, more or less.
Because Tolerance increases a lot more slowly. In the current meta the ‘early game’ is like, two actions? This change makes it so low-prep, low-progress cards stay viable longer, so they had to be adjusted to account for that
And similarly, later-game cards also had to be adjusted because they are no longer oppressed as much by the increase in elusiveness, etc
This is a big systemic change and I expect next next season we’ll do a lot of individual card tweaking.
W/r/t drafting, my read on this is that drafting in the base set was too easy
So we didn’t expand the number of cards in the draft hand or anything like that. We’ll see how it plays with 11 cards in the set; I think it’s honestly going to be fine.
If it isn’t, well, for my sins I committed to continuing to adjust this over time.
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I expect that drafting decent team composition will be huge pain in unspeakable regions.
Hey folks – as Skinnyman mentioned above, if you’re in the middle of a round of Hearts’ Game in an hour, expect to be forcibly ejected and have your run end. We need everybody out for us to make the changes necessary for the season rollover.
And a quick edit: The Season of Excess has begun!
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My team is all-new characters, and I don’t think they actually work very well together, but that’s OK with me because I’m having fun with them. King of Roses joines King of Spines as “definitely an anime character,” this one probably from Jojo. He was so handsome he made the target lovesick, and then managed to successfully argue to the judges this counts.
Mechanically, there are now characters for Watchful (x2) and Persuasive, and another Dangerous. I’m also seeing some interesting interplay with Preparation, and specifically reasons to get excess preparation. One new character consumes prep to power their attacks, while another gets stronger with more prep.
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I tried the new characters and lost the run badly, quit it after two losses and one win, I had two dangerous and one watchful accomplice, but none of them were good at finishing out a run, once poison resistance got up high everything just gave me like 1 cp of progress. I miss roots….
I got a gold distinction. Anyone top that? Does anything higher exist? Think I stopped at 25 trophies, but for gold you only need one.
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They made preparation into a discrete value instead of pyramidal, so now when something says it requires 4 prep that means 4, not 10. I’m sure that changes the value proposition of certain players. But I’m too busy selling Night Whispers to play with any of this yet.
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At 36 heart-shaped trophies when seasons switched the highest distinction I got was gold as well. I say highest because I also received a bronze and a silver distinction.
My first run was very different than what I was used to in the season of Nascency. I did a Spines, Skin, Ribs team. On the one hand it was a 7/7 win. On the other all of the rounds were won with elusiveness 7 or even matching progress at 8 on the last move. It was more exciting and now that there doesn’t seem to be a mechanical advantage to gathering trophies I actually don’t mind trading excitement for (probably) fewer runs ending in trophies.
I just played my first round with ribs/lures/skins. I won, but even accounting for some bad luck and probably some mistakes I made, it did seem rather slow and ended up much closer than my usual last season.
I have to say I’m not sure I love trophies ending up being essentially worthless, with no tangible rewards for your record at season’s end. It seems like it hardly even matters if you win or lose. For me, that saps a lot of interest out of the whole thing.
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Since Heartshaped trophies haven’t reset (only trophies this season) I suspect one trophy is all you need for the highest distinction and the rest just serve as accumulable bragging rights to speak to your accomplishments across the whole game. That said I’m only at 16 including the one I got in the new season.
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Definitely seems harder. Last season I won with basically every decent strategy I tried, I had a KT run and a Dangerous run and a no-skills-no-prep combo… this season I’m 0 for 2 on putting together good teams, I abandoned my first team when I was at 1-2 in a run, my second team at 2-2.
[edit] 0 for 3, now.
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This new season definitely makes it more difficult to have an easy win, for me at least. Last season the only times I lost were when I forgot to switch outfits beforehand, this time it’s very close each round.
The thing I dislike (although it doesn’t matter much) is that it seems to take more actions now. This is surely due to not having an optimized team, with 11 Accomplices and RNG, but it’s still slightly annoying.
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The thing I like the most about the Queen of Loins is that she gives you a way to dump a bad hand; that’s the ONLY reason I select her, nowadays.
In the previous season, I found the Queen of Loins only useful as a third member for a shadowy team, but only because there were not any third shadowy accomplices.
So far in the new season, I had some successes with a watchful team: creates lots of prep, use these to boost progresses before the tolerance makes it a drag…
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Like Anthony, I got a gold, a silver, and a bronze distinction.