User blog:Chad Pattan/Dear Nubee: It's Time To Clean Up The Cards.

I've been a member close to 2 years now. Considering how many experienced players have quit the game starting with some of the changes to the events and the nerfing of the ranking rewards, I consider myself a "senior" player. And yes, I feel old.

I have a lot of cards. I have a lot of HUR, GUR, UR and so on. And I do a lot of summoning. I summon when there's a card I might find useful (i.e. Megaera ) OR if the art is simply such that I can't overlook it (i.e. Painter ). In the process of summoning, I do stumble across other awesome cards, or at least used to. Such as Yatagarasu. Or Belisama. But recently I've noticed a disturbing pattern.

Used to be a ton of different summon types. Flip Summon, when it was first released, was awesome fun. I would guess that roughly 40% of my "first time" URs came from the very first incarnation of Flip Summon. Whether that was intentional or not, I don't know. Then there was Select Summon, which allowed two cards for one summon, but gave you double the Maiden tickets. Step Up Summon was permanent and gave you fantastic items, so if you were running dry, you could use this to get shoes and swords without spending Maiden tickets separately. Now, it's like we flip-flop between Valkyrie Selection (which seems to have replaced Special Summon), basic Premium Summon, Box Summon, Step Up Summon (which only gives ATK/DEF buff cards now) and this newer Flip Summon that doesn't really give you any sort of advantage over regular summoning.

Then you have "Guaranteed SR Summoning" which is a joke since you can really only get those tickets by ranking or in AUB, for which you need strong cards. There's no "Guaranteed UR Summoning", which is really what Ultimate Summon should be. But I digress.

Worse, the cards offered in summons, FAW, AUB and RR are all buffers. Every now and again there is an attack card, but nothing like there used to be. Even worse than that, when you do summon, you get a junk ton of R cards. Even when it's claimed that UR/SR rate is increased. Yes, I know it's like .5% instead of .1%, but still. If I do 100 runs of Flip Summon, there's no way - NO WAY - I should only be seeing 4 UR cards and 10 SR cards. Something's wrong.

So it got me thinking. What's the problem here? Nubee's not being overly greedy, because they're giving out bonuses and gems left and right. Buffers aren't a bad thing, but the FAWs are certainly more apt to blast you with a wave and end fights. Chocolatier  struck me as Nubee's way of warning people that this would happen. But still I remain dissatistified. And then it hit me.

The Rarity. It's broken.

You see, Nubee, you have WAY too many cards marked "Rare". The problem is that none of them are "Rare" because all but maybe 20 of them are extremely, terribly easy to get. In fact, I get more of certain "Rare" cards than I do "Normal" cards. That shouldn't happen.

There are almost 4x as many "Rare" cards as there are "Normal" cards (per this Wiki. Normal Cards vs. Rare Cards). Yes, I know roughly 20% of those are/were event-only cards and can't be obtained. But even if I cut them out of the pack you're still 3x the count of "Normal" cards.

So then I look at "Super Rare", and I see that there are almost as many "Super Rare" cards as there are "Rare" - which is to say, 3x as many as "Normal". (per this Wiki.  Super Rare Cards vs. Rare Cards)  Yes I know that roughly half of those "Super Rare" cards are event-only, but the difference is that event-only SRs are still available via summon. Very few SRs are blocked completely, except for AW/FAW SR cards like Infernal Hades or Metatron. So you're still running a LOT of "Super Rare".

There are almost 200 "Ultra Rare" cards. Now here's the root of the issue. Despite there being so many total, over 60% of them are event-only and can no longer be obtained. If I rounded up the number - as I did - that leaves approximately 80 UR cards that can be obtained.

I think the cards need to be reclassified. This in turn should balance out summons such that you're more likely to get an SR card, than a "Rare" or UR card. Still that has that probability going for it, but not so grossly skewed towards "Rare" when they're not "Rare" if it's that easy to get them. The current difficulty of the game is such that more SR cards off summon won't unbalance the game.
 * Get rid of 75% of the "Normal" cards.  No longer available for drop.
 * Reclassify 75% of the current "Rare" cards to "Normal".  Keep the ones that are TRULY rare - like Alchemist, Oracle, High Pixie, etc. and any event-specific ones.  But ones like Black Cat - come on.

The other positive from this is that you're less likely to fill up your presents and leave them sitting if they're actually of value.