Long Drong Slayers - interested in input

[gregmax]

I felt Shadespire was the best place to get my beautiful Long Drong Slayers out of their box. Of course the cards for Khorne and Stormacsts are irrelevant, so I created a full team with new characters, ploy and upgrade cards, and objective cards (limited to core pack) with decent artwork -  all themed on Long Drong. I then printed it all out on adhesive paper, fixed on cards and proceeded to play.
You can have a look at the deck here:https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1eLGFIoVZ0iZ8V_DyCX9mx4stRhvTl9IlL4oy10Qyzcw/edit?usp=sharing

The deck includes 4 characters, 7 upgrades, 7 ploys, 5 objectives. The rest are the shared objectives and ploy/upgrades from the shadespire decks. In designing I have orientated the team towards securing objectives (treasure) rather than conquest, and the players have upgrades to this effect. The idea is to treat this as a pirate gold rush. 

I've had a couple of games and adjusted the cards" the slayers look awesome, and I find the deck to be lots of fun. but I'm sure there are improvements.

A couple of points:

1. I'd really welcome some suggestions / changes if you have some, the idea is to have a middle of the road game, not some OP-ed version.
2. I haven't done the additional cards - ideas also welcome.
3. Finally, once I manage the copyright - i.e. free to use - I would plan to get a few decks printed professionally for the fun of it. In particular if you have any good artwork for the cards, it'd be great.

Thanks

[Joeggrenaut]

As a Dawiphile I appreciate the thought and work that went into making this.  You've done some great preliminary work for the cards (wouldn't mind knowing how you sampled the Shadespire artwork for your own since I'm trying to make my own Shadespire cards).  A couple of things that jumped out at me that might could use a tweak:

-The fluff behind it seems right, but in gameplay terms inspiring by moving on or next to a hex seems a little too easy. You could feasibly do this quite easily in the first action phase with your entire warband and immediately become inspired across the board. Changing the criteria to something as simple as being directly on an objective (rather than next to) seems like it would make things more fair, since only one fighter can be on  an objective at one time, and Dwarfs can't just zip around the board to all of the unoccupied objectives.

-Grumnir's and Gromnil's pistols being 1 hex range seems awful too short for a pistol. In fact, even 2 hexes seems too short. I understand what you are attempting in terms of gameplay, and you probably want them to have access to pistol attacks since they are so much part of the characters/models, but maybe you could dumb down the attack power and up the range and give them access to a secondary attack that is a solid range 1 melee like on your current cards. Alternately,  you could include several blackpowder ploy or upgrade cards with which the Slayer pirates could shoot their guns, throw bombs, etc. There's a lot of different directions you could go with this one.

-I personally would probably use the stubborn ability extremely rarely. Take that with a grain of salt, but there's not a ton of situations it seems worth giving up a wound to not be knocked back (even more so if you increase the range of the pistols). Like the idea of the rule a lot though. 

That's all I got for now. Thanks!

[gregmax]

35 minutes ago, Joeggrenaut said:

wouldn't mind knowing how you sampled the Shadespire artwork for your own since I'm trying to make my own Shadespire cards

.  A couple of things that jumped out at me that might could use a tweak:

- in gameplay terms inspiring by moving on or next to a hex seems a little too easy. You could feasibly do this quite easily in the first action phase with your entire warband and immediately become inspired across the board. Changing the criteria to something as simple as being directly on an objective (rather than next to) seems like it would make things more fair, since only one fighter can be on  an objective at one time, and Dwarfs can't just zip around the board to all of the unoccupied objectives.

-Grumnir's and Gromnil's pistols being 1 hex range seems awful too short for a pistol. In fact, even 2 hexes seems too short. I understand what you are attempting in terms of gameplay, and you probably want them to have access to pistol attacks since they are so much part of the characters/models, but maybe you could dumb down the attack power and up the range and give them access to a secondary attack that is a solid range 1 melee like on your current cards. Alternately,  you could include several blackpowder ploy or upgrade cards with which the Slayer pirates could shoot their guns, throw bombs, etc. There's a lot of different directions you could go with this one.

-I personally would probably use the stubborn ability extremely rarely. Take that with a grain of salt, but there's not a ton of situations it seems worth giving up a wound to not be knocked back (even more so if you increase the range of the pistols). Like the idea of the rule a lot though. 

Thanks  for the detailed feedback.

Regarding the card background I did all in powerpoint. The trick is to start from the cards which are printed online and empty them. I would send it over if it wasn't for copyright issues.

Regarding inspired, you are right, I just nerfed it.
For the pistols, I will run a few games before changing. The problem I had was that being able to hit at a distance of 2 is such a great advantage because the opposing character needs to Charge to hit you if you fail, that I just couldn't get myself to doing it. I guess I will need a bit more games under my belt to reassess. Alternatively I could blame it on being drunk (I might take the character with the bottle instead).
But then, maybe the others just should not bring axes to a pistol fight...

I really love the idea of adding more blackpowder based cards.

Stubborn relates to the objectives and inspired state - They toughen up 

Thanks again and good luck with your deck.