Nerf Sundial

[serprex]

Should cost 3/2 , active should be 3

[eaglgenes101]

Example of a deck that's overtuned becase sundial is too cheap? You've said before that you strongly prefer evidence before you make a balanching change  so I'm curious on what deck you've found is dominant which led to this idea.

[serprex]

This is coming from a PvE perspective, & these thoughts are not all my own

An OTK

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Really just

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Sundial is the SoFr of defensive permanents, in that it's so cheap that you're getting the better trade even when the opponent brings PC. It's Fog with cycle. Only decks that shouldn't use dials are creature rushes

Compare them to Dim Shields. The latter takes up a shield slot

A draw is worth 3-4 quanta. Dial's are useful for their effect alone, so the Hasten on them shouldn't come at a discount

You'll be hard pressed to come up with a DG grinder that isn't reliant on dials. Long term I'd like to water down DGs to allow more diverse options against them

The argument to keep them this way is to say that they're an autoinclude which props up an archetype. That archetype seems to be "not rush". EtG's deckbuilding ruleset doesn't interact well with autoincludes

[iancudorinmarian]

YES!!!

[cg]

Also, while I will definitely not be chiming in on every single proposed balance tweak, sundial is a big deal so I wanted to give a bit of clarification on why I changed my mind on it finally
Basically it’s the same reason inno finally went down, which is that it enables an engine that is going to continue to be broken regardless of its payload
Sundial is simultaneously (1) the best stall by a wide margin, (2) cycle/deck thinning, (3) control resistant, and (4) easily playable off nova/splash
It is good enough stall that it is not-infrequently played without light quanta for the cycle and still a really good card
It is also contributing to a situation where it is basically a requirement in order to play against DG. That is more of a problem with DG (which will be addressed separately) than with sundial, but it made the problem with sundial much more clear
The way we are trying to address it is to make it no longer easily playable off nova/splash and bring it back around to being time stall instead of everything stall
Regarding DG, and mostly to illustrate how it demonstrates the problem with sundial, unlike original, basically every DG here can do everything. They basically all have PC/bypass. They almost all have CC. Most have healing.
Defense is 100% useless against DG due to everyone having PC and bypass. Offense is generally useless against DG due to everyone having CC. So there are basically two viable archetypes against DG, which is defensive combo rush (ie fast otk), and solitaire control (ie protect/quint every card you play and totally ignore what their deck is). The latter is too slow for reasonable profit and also usually requires sundial to bridge over to getting its defense set up
So basically you can use sundial or you can go somewhere else
In addition to fixing sundial (which needs fixed for both pve and pvp purposes), I also intend to rework DGs somewhat so that there are more types of DG than just 30 copies of “does everything”
So that more archetypes can play with DG, including otks, since otks will be able to rely on other types of defense and decks generally can proceed without being forced to use sundial to either set up a quinted wall or just draw an otk combo
The goal is and has been “everything works everywhere” (within reason)
...
Sundial makes it possible (and is the only thing that makes it possible, and is a de facto requirement) to beat does-everything-plus-OP-stats decks