noo banninng

I don't think we will ever see this as there is not completely invincible fig or combination of figs. Not in MK or any Wizkids game. I have seen most every type of cheese army and all the "broken" figs beaten. Sometimes because the dice gods were not with people and sometimes because basing Gate Lord with Corpheus :eek: is not the way it is suppose to be done. For everything there is a counter. Whether your opponents have the resources and talents to come up the counter is the big question.

Figure banning? well... i hope not, and i still do believe that they stick with their policy forever.

what makes everything equal? its the dice....

that's a good one.

he's right.
Mage Knight is not only a game of skill.
it is also a game of chance.

and because of that,
nothing can be "absolutely" unbeatable, right?

WK doesn't need to ban figures.

Why?

Becuase the game is evolving constantly. After a few more sets get released, most of the figures that are considered the big guns of today, become dust collectors of tomorrow.

At the beginning of MK, a 14" range or a 12" movement was supreme, now it's commonplace. I'm afraid to see what comes next. Soon the standard 3'x3' playing area will be too small.

The biggest "problem" MK has is the sheer overpowerfullness of ranged figures.

yeah, maybe they should limit
the new releases at 14 inches max.

Hmmmm...and just a few months ago the "problem" was the sheer overpowerfulness of melee figures (KI Swarm was one of the ruling archetypes). Indeed, we see the same complaints about MWDA right now, "melee is too powerful what about range?" The only thing that has stayed constant has been the power of a ML army.

David A. Blizzard

Magic has actually done 2 types of card banning. The first kind was when they just said 'Here's a list of banned cards; you can't use them!'. This was done because those cards were broken.
Now, people like to call all sorts of things broken in MK, but broken cards in Magic were a bit different; they were cards that, when put into proper combination could NOT be beaten by most strategies. This doesn't mean hard to beat, or requiring a lot of skill to beat, it means NOT BEATABLE. In the early days of magic, a complete novice playing a 'power combo' deck could easily whollop an expert player who didn't have one. However, magic had to keep banning cards with new expansions because they never seemed to learn from their mistakes; new cards still let you do infinite combos!
WotC was so bad about learning from their mistakes that when they originally made the Battletech CCG they made some cards that were essentially the same as cards that had to be banned in Magic...and, lo and behold, they needed to be banned in Battletech to!
So far, MK has never had a figure that is truly broken. It would be a lot harder for them to EVER have one since they can only have a limited set of abilities. A model that actually did have a dial that went all the way around would be broken...but we presume they will never do this.
WotC's other form of banning was in saying that only the latest 2 expansions could be played in tournaments...this is nothing but an excuse to force players to keep buying new cards. A know many players (myself included) who didn't play in tournaments and quit buying new magic sets entirely because every single card looked just like an old card with a twist - they rid themselves of the need to keep coming up with original things. It MK ever did this, I would expect to see a whole of players quitting, or at least quitting tournaments!

L5R stated that to. In fact, they had an advertisement at some point "600 Cards. 0 Banned. 0 Restricted".
Of course, that was before WotC took them over, and some people speculate that WotC wanted to make L5R worse to reduce the competition for Magic...just speculation of course. :)

As to figures being "effectively" banned since newer figures are superior...this only really applies if there is NO reason to use the older figure. The person who brought this up mentioned the High Battle Mage vs. the Amazon Drac. Sure, the Amazon Drac bounds better, but she can't make 2 shots, doesn't command, only bounds for 2 clicks, and never bounds and magic blasts at the same time. There's still plenty of reason to go with the HBM instead! Now, if they made a figure that had exactly the same stats as the HBM, and cost the same, but had regeneration of its last few clicks, then they would have made the HBM obsolete.

The people who say that there is a counter to everything are right...as long as the game is reasonably balanced! If say, Corpheus suddenly costs 10 points, and isn't unique, I'm willing to bet you CAN'T beat an army of Corpheus' with any other army that doesn't use Corphy. Doesn't matter what strategy you use. Doesn't matter if you have a little bit of good luck (Astronomically good luck would do it, but I'm assuming that Longshot doesn't play MK :D ). Doesn't matter if you know exactly what I am playing and can plan for it. Probably doesn't even matter much what scenario we are playing.
So, what happens if WK ever misprints a regular figure so that the hundreds digit gets left off the value and it shows as "20" points instead of "220"? If they choose to ignore it, it suddenly becomes pointless to use anything else. So, they had better ban it or errata it!

In WotC's defense, this wasn't the only reason for this. Part of the reason is so that a player who has been playing for a few months doesn't have to worry about the advantage a guy who's been playing since Alpha would have. Even if the depth of cards "Mr. Suitcase" would have wouldn't be advantage enough, the suprise factor of being able to pull out a card the new people had never seen would be a strategic advantage.

I actually had this happen in a local tournament. I put a single Tormented Soul in my army because I had never used one before. Everyone I was playing avoided a figure with 4 damage & Invulnerability. No one knew 3 damage would kill it (or 1 pierce damage).

David A. Blizzard

That in this day of first strike supremacy, one way to even the playing field would be to make Magic Levitation work with some abilities that it normally has not worked with.

i.e., Magic Lev and sneak attack.

If one does not want to go that far, wizkids could simply make a ruling that while one cannot take a movement action following being levitated, one could make an attack action, hence any fig could get first strike so long as you are committed to magic lev in your army....

eh....
whatever....

How about just going to an intuitively obvious rule on ML - you must be in contact with the levitator at the time the power is used. Then allow it to work with any ability. At least we will have prevented bounder's etc. from running away before they can be counterattacked.

First striking by using ML isn't so bad, it's 2 actions at least - first-striking with no possible retaliation (except using by the same ML trick) is bad.

Actually, with the release of Unlimited, Sneak Attack was specifically re-worded to not work with Magic Levitation. It had previously.

Even though Magic Levitation was specifically re-worded to eliminate the 'first strike' advantage that it had?

Going back to the setup that people originally claimed to dislike or hate so ferociously doesn't strike me as a very viable goal. :)

those things were change before big bound became the ultimate dominant force. Those things might have the potential to make pieces that people complain about being unuseable useful once more. Now the troll chieftan doesn't have to wait for Bakus to base him, he can be flung and be certain of getting in a good wallop. T'woud make some think twice about how they use those hitnrun tactics.

And the suprise value of being able to pull new cards that people have never seen before because its a brand new set is different? :D