Ezren has the power to draw the top card of the deck if it is a spell card when playing an arcane card...
So imagine, you have two Augury spell cards left in your deck.
With Augury you may choose a card type, scan top three cards of location deck and put the choosen cards on top or bottom of the location deck.
What you do ...
1. empty your deck except 2 augury spells left
2. play augury
3. recharge augury
4. look at top card of your deck, augury again, draw
5. go to step 2
This is an infinite loop, where you may scan each location deck easily....
Is the the way the game creators wanted Ezren to be played?
However, there is no fun playing such a godlike character...
Please respond.
Mike
Ezren has the power to draw the top card of the deck if it is a spell card when playing an arcane card...
So imagine, you have two Augury spell cards left in your deck.
With Augury you may choose a card type, scan top three cards of location deck and put the choosen cards on top or bottom of the location deck.
What you do ...
1. empty your deck except 2 augury spells left
2. play augury
3. recharge augury
4. look at top card of your deck, augury again, draw
5. go to step 2This is an infinite loop, where you may scan each location deck easily....
Is the the way the game creators wanted Ezren to be played?
However, there is no fun playing such a godlike character...Please respond.
Mike
A few things might keep you from executing this.
1) Getting your deck down to two cards is *very* dangerous, since you die if you are required to draw but cannot (due to an empty deck). So your Ezren can Augury a bunch, but will need to be very careful as to what he encounters, as he will be sitting very close to death. In fact, there are times where you will take damage / encounter summoned monsters based on the actions of others, so when sitting with a deck of 2 cards there are not many places that are guaranteed to be safe.
2) The Arcane or Divine 8 check to recharge Augury is far from automatic for Ezren. If you fail, it gets discarded. And you wont be using Sages/Acolytes to help, since they'd get recharged into the deck.
3) Augury only works on your current location. Scrying (the advanced version) works on multiple locations, so this is not a huge limit.
4) Augury is not Basic; so you can't start with it. You'd have to find two of them in the course of adventuring before you could even try this combo out.
It's an interesting idea in theory, but in practice I think it would be very risky and difficult to execute.
Examining locations is the thing Ezren is really good at.
Otherwise he's not a very good character at all, particularly due to his complete lack of blessings.
He can become quite good, but it all depends on his spells and these aren't trivial to obtain.
Also, the best thing this combo can do is to completely examine a location deck and place a few cards at the top or bottom of it. While that's very good, it's not going to win you the game by itself.
I agree. Ezren's lack of blessings hurts him a lot given that the Blessing card type is the best card type in the game. (Enhancement for 2-3 player games, explores for 4-6)
He can do 1 or the other, not both, which seems to reverse the roles of the Sorcerer and Wizard in the card game (in the RPG, the Wizard is more versatile than the Sorcerer)
That being said, there's a kind of elegance in the way Ezren can chain lots of actions automatically in the right circumstances in a different way from Seoni (she can chain a lot of actions by blessing and ally discarding instead).
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While Ezren lacks blessings for exploration, he does have options for getting explorations.
1. He can take allies as his card feats to pick up exploration.
2. He has his power to explore again if he acquires a card with the magic trait. That is any card, not just spells, so don't forget about that. (Adventure deck 2 is loaded with spells. The academy appears in at least two adventures if I recall.)
3. He can have augury or scrying in his deck to stack his location in his favor. This gives him 3 possibilities.
- He plays the spell and says "monster". If the henchmen or villain isn't in the top three cards, he puts the monsters on the bottom of the location deck. This is practically the same as up to 3 explorations since you'll now be able to find the henchmen or villain in 3 less turns.
- He says monsters and finds the henchmen or villain. He puts the henchmen/villain on the top of the location deck. This is the equivalent of up to 2 explorations depending which card was the henchmen/villain. And if it was the villain, you can now have your team leave that location alone, spread out to close other locations, spend time acquiring loot and set yourselves up to win the game on one of the last turn. In large groups you often spend your blessing and allies on explorations and hesitate to use them to help acquire boons, but if you can find the villain and place him on top of a location, you can use all the rest of your turns to go looting and spend some blessing to help you acquire some boon, just saving the last turn for the villain encounter. Set yourselves up so that you can close any open locations on that last turn. And take the villain down on your terms.
- He says "spells" and puts the spells on the top, setting up his power when acquiring a card with the magic trait.
- If there are no spells in the location, he says "items" hoping that the items have the magic trait and puts them on the top if they do to set up his free explore. If they are just items you don't want he puts the items on the bottom of the location deck which is the equivalent of free explorations for each item moved to the bottom.
4. He can take a detect magic or two in his deck. This gives him a conditional extra encounter (and doesn't chain with his power because the encounter is not an exploration) but is still helpful. Even through deck 2, detect magic is great for him. Its an auto recharge at the end of Perils if he take a skill feat in intelligence, and he can pick up his next card in his deck if it is a spell after he plays detect magic.
5. He can take the haste spell in deck 2 (if he manages to acquire it) and use its exploration power. It is a recharge of 10, but midway through deck 2 Ezren could have 3 skill feats in intelligence, and two power feats to add 2 to recharging a spell. So he's a minimum roll of 8 when recharging a spell, he's just got to roll a 3 or better on his d12 to recharge it. What's better than a rechargeable exploration? Ask Lini how awesome this can be. And when he uses Haste to explore, if the next card in his deck is a spell he can pick it up. If he does exploring with out being a card down in his hand.
6. Once he gets his roll card, he can work on getting up to +4 to recharging a spell and up to +2 to acquiring a spell. That makes all those other things more powerful.
All that is largely based on the "typical" scenario where henchmen let you attempt to close the location if defeated and to win you must find and defeat the villain.
I agree that Ezren is one of the more challenging to play. He takes more thought and planning than Valeros (my personal favorite) who can just go off monster killing. But I wouldn't say Ezren's lack of blessings hurts him "alot". His "explorations" aren't always true explorations. But they do the same thing as discarding a blessing for an extra exploration, which is save you a turn on the blessing deck. Granted they are more conditional, but they can also be more powerful than a single exploration for discarding a blessing.(3 turns saved for 1 card played. And the card is potentially recharged.)
Side note from reading Ezren's roll card: If you take his illusionist role, he can play an evasion spell and stick the monster on the bottom of the deck. The Invisibility spell just became the virtual equivalent of auto defeat since you can move monsters behind the henchmen or villain. Notice Invisibility lacks the mental trait that so many monsters are immune to and has no limit on how difficult the monster is, so Ezren can still use it against them. And its a recharge of 8. Through power and skill feats Ezren could get all the way to auto-roll of 11 on spell recharge.
Which is why I say he can do 1 or the other (Enhancement or explore)
Half the spell slots that he normally gets as such an advantage over Seoni gets "stuffed" with the Detect Magic/Augury line (which is okay since they are so powerful, but still)
I actually prefer to play Ezren over Seoni. At least the way I've seen her played, Seoni's mostly "blessing blessing attack spell fireball ally explore blessing" whereas there's more options with Ezren. Seoni's powerful, but powerful's not fun for me.
I think a lot of people misunderstand the death rule.
If you are ever required to draw a card from your deck and cannot, your character dies.
Some people read that and interpret it as if the "a" modified the requirement instead of the word card. i.e. "If there is ever a requirement to draw cards from your deck and cannot, your character dies."
I think that is because most people pick all their reset cards up in one move. Instead, reseting your hand should be thought of as being required to draw cards one at a time until you are back to your hand size. If at any point while drawing the cards there are no more cards in your deck and you aren't at your hand size, then your character dies.
It comes up over and over again. But I get it. The game has a lot of rules to learn because you've probably never played another game just like it. And in learning those rules, you tend to not be totally clear on some of them, especially when you read the rules before you play the first time.
I think the same "newness" is why the FAQ and errata are needed. The designers had to come up with how to communicate the rules of a game that had never been communicated before. (Or at least only to a small group of designers and testers.) They assumed people would interpret things one way, but with the number of people playing there were more possible interpretations than they had anticipated.
The first time I was playing Lini, I was assuming that if I discarded a card to change her strength to 1d10, if it was an animal I could recharge it instead. Basically combining her two powers. All because I didn't get that when a power or card requires you to discard a card, that card is treated like a blank card.
I'm sure most people (if not everyone) has similar experiences.
Sigh, where are people coming up with this stuff? If you only have 2 cards total, you have died or will die at the end of the turn because you have to draw up to your full hand size at the end of the turn. So all this stuff with Seoni and Ezren doing impossible things are just that, impossible.
Even if you have only your full hand of cards with the rest of your deck in the discard pile you can *potentially* continue adventuring as long as all the cards you play are either reveal or recharge actions. Emphasis on 'potentially' since that is a very risky strategy.
As to the discussion about Ezren: yes, manipulating location decks with his spells is exactly the way he's meant to be played.
If you only have 2 cards left in your deck as Ezren, you’re in trouble.
You’re forgetting about failing to recharge, which is not a guarantee with Ezren. Infinite loop is not so infinite…
In the rare case that this happens, I don’t think it really matters if Ezren views all the cards in the location with Augury.
Meh, why didn’t I just say +1 Hawk. :)