Talk:Golden Rush/@comment-34904277-20200405194129/@comment-162.234.160.158-20200405202537

The game is definitely losing its fun factor. In the mad rush to make sure there's always "more" to tempt the top players to spend a bit of money, they've completely killed the fun curve for the middle 90% of the game.

It used to be that even the seven day events were worth a bit of effort because a good mix-and-match mythic deck could be situationally useful, and building up an event set deck was still fun because gold wasn't quite so scarce and event difficulty didn't ramp up so fast that soulbindable main sets are the only viable option.

This game takes patience, and it takes restraint. If you don't pay and you don't have a huge stash from the WoF glory days, then you have to pick and choose your events wisely, and I'm okay with that sort of meta-game. However, all of the game changes keep pushing us towards a point where optimal play is repetitive and tedious, putting weeks of grind in between opportunities to make meaningful strategic decisions, and imposing a huge cost for making mistakes or (god forbid) deliberately making a suboptimal choice just for fun.

The best games are expansive as you approach the end-game: Either resources become less constrained, allowing you to pursue fun diversions with a poor cost-to-benefit ratio without weakening your overall position, or the meta-game becomes more complex, allowing you to pick between an increasing number of viable strategies. Smutstone is pretty much the opposite. Play long enough and eventually you hit a point where only three decks are viable, and every gold coin and every bit of dust has to be dedicated to squeezing a bit more out of that deck until you can crawl one stage further on Islands.