I was thinking about raid decks, and about the idea that not only will the boss be morepowerful, but the cards will be too.

I thought to myself, would UDE really make broken sets of cards for nontournament play? What if they wanted to release them as tourney legal in another set? Would they be forced to nerf and neuter, to the point that fans (prickly as we are) complain?

Then I read a post about how this TCG can possibly be easier to balance because of resource costs. Wanna make some uber gear? They can go ahead, and give it an astronomical resource cost. So if Onyxia is so powerful, what if everything in the deck had a huge resource cost? How would that work?

I postulate that raid deck players will have the ability to lay two resources a turn instead of one. Further, they will start with 10 cards, and draw two a turn. This would put them on somewhat even footing with two tuned regular decks, which Jeff has said will be the smallest force able to take on Onyxia, and survive to crack the pack.

What do you think?

Good question. Just think how powerful it would be if the raid deck player had turns in between every heroes turn. Player-Onyxia-Player-Onyxia-Player...That would be interesting.

Why are we worried about the power of the cards in onyxia's deck?

Onyxia isn't a horde or alliance hero. her abilities won't fit any of the classes of any of the heroes. Her cards can be as broken and cheap as they need to be for a giant dragon to own several people in the mouth.

Still needs to be fun to play against...

Basically my point is if they relied on your suggestion to simply make Onyxia an unplayable hero in legal play, and then made all uber cards that needed Onyxia as a hero to play, they would be forced into this same mechanic on later bosses, the 'rules' for bosses would be set. Decks full of cards that are underpriced.

But who says that Kel'Thuzad (I don't know if he's in WoW, but he is in WC3) won't come out down the line? If he does, items like frost nova might be staples in his deck. Would they want to come up with a whole new card? Or would they rather just reprint an older one?

If they reprinted it would be overcosted compared to the other undercosted 'normal' cards in the deck.

If they used a double resource mechanic, Onyxia would have 18 resources or so endgame. Thats a huge material advantage against individual players. Then cards that are 'end-game' in normal decks are midgame in the Onyxia deck. Imagine being able to put a couple of those 9 resource allies out!

In this way they would keep everything as a whole balanced in case they ever wanted to do any crossover cards.

Phew that was long.

If I remember correctly, the starter cards will be special in some way (perhaps silver bordered), so that they cannot mix with regular cards.

So, if Kel'Thuzad ever got a raid deck, he'd be the hero for that deck, and those cards would be relegated to that deck (or possibly other Raid decks), so that you couldn't use the Raid deck's Frost Nova in your mage deck.

But I cannot confirm that, as I don't recall exactly where I saw it.

My own personal belief is that the cards of the Raid decks will be stamped for bosses only, so that when you get a new Raid deck you can mix in the "generic" raid cards that you have from Onyxia to augument your new Kel'Thazad deck.

What if Onyxia's resource drops were worth 5 resources? With no "burn", the boss can get up to casting some might spells quickly. I'm sure UDE has it figured out...we just have to wait and see.

I don't really see onyxia having cards that can be mixed into normal decks unless they were normal neutral cards that were also in her deck.

If a boss is someone that could use normal spells (like frost nova) then just give him other boss only stamped spells, along with spells like frost nova.

They bosses need to be 'broken' in the sense that they can take on several people. This won't make them less fun, but would you rather the raid is just rolled in 3-4 turns because they couldn't hold off the opposition?

I think extra resources is fine but then they would have to have some way to get extra cards which means that they are spending resources on card drawing. Or if one resource counts as two, that's ok since their characters are bigger but they are being attacked by a few char every turn. And they are getting hit back when they attack unless they have the extra resources for armor and such.