In order to improve the very early game experience, and in order to improve the playability of the starters and the balance between different starters, I would like to alter the starter selection. Players will continue to choose an element to start with, but each element will now begin with three different starter decks, as well as a customized amount of additional starter packs in order to ensure very similar total starting wealth between the starters.
The first three quickload deck slots should be populated with a mono, a duo, and a quad (using the quad pillars) built for each element, with slightly different playstyles. Each deck should be effective vs commoners (unmodified) but still be able to be readily improved. To that end, no more than three copies of any individual card is used in any deck, and the decks are designed to be relatively understandable to a new player, while displaying some slightly more complex strategies than simply playing creatures and counting to 100. Broadly speaking, the decks should progress in complexity as they add elements, but all three should still make sense to someone with no background.
In addition to the three starter decks, each choice will begin with some bonus starter free packs (as they do now), but going forward, the number and type of starting packs will vary between the starters, in order to balance both the total wealth value and the quantity of commons and uncommons in each starter. There should be no significant wealth advantage between any of the choices, and as all three decks should be able to defeat commoners, there should be no substantial difficulty difference. Additionally, all choices should start with a broad enough cardpool to allow experienced players to build their own customized decks right after creation.
Aside from the 12 element-specific starter choices, there should be two additional choices. There is no longer a chroma starter, as all starters have enough cardpool to build a rainbow. The first of the two additional choices is "build-your-own", which works as the current "random" starter works (no pre-built starter decks, instead receive 6 free bronze packs and 6 free silver packs), though I would like to rename it from "random" to "build-your-own" and change the icon from the question mark to something else (exclamation point icon perhaps, or the gold icon, or something else). The second is "random" with the question mark icon, which will now mean "choose from one of the other 13 options randomly".
With regard to total wealth value of the starters, all of the new starters (plus their balance packs) have a wealth value of less than one bronze pack away from the wealth value of the current build-your-own starter (i.e. 240 gold). The data in the next post will reflect this. I propose, in addition to the packs noted in the next post, all new accounts going forward receive an extra (free, account-bound) bronze, silver, and gold pack. So, build-your-own would receive 7 bronze, 7 silver, and 1 gold, and each starter discussed in the next post would receive one more bronze, silver, and gold than indicated. This would increase starting (account bound) wealth by 100, and I am recommending it due to having minimal impact on wealth in the long term, while being a good way to highlight the expanding card pool to new players.