A Look into the power of discover cards introduced in chronicles of Gagana.
Introduction
Hey guys, I'm darth. You may know me as someone who plays that legendary deck and talks about PSCT in custom cards. However more recently I've been discussing card balance. With the recent Chronicles of Gagana expansion discover (It's exactly what you think it is) cards have been introduced into the game. Notably Thyrian Expansion has been the subject of many balance discussions. Since discover is largely based on RNG and it's difficult to play around for the opponent, I wanted to understand exactly how good discover actually is.
Methods
To find the solution I've taken some samples from AI games, as well as taken some ratings from players, including some top players. For this research I've used seek shelter, thyrian expedition, crystal spice, tiki zoologist and the treasure maps.
Results
Percentage of cards that are the best card to pick from the discover options in rating
Ratings | Seek Shelter (%) | Thyrian Expedition (%) | Crystal Spice (%) | Tiki Zoologist (%) | Treasure Map (%) |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
S | 0 | 0 | 0 | 28 | 62 |
A | 0 | 68 | 48 | 40 | 0 |
B | 86 | 16 | 26 | 24 | 34 |
C | 10 | 12 | 20 | 6 | 4 |
D | 4 | 4 | 4 | 2 | 0 |
E | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
F | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
What this means
This table shows the best rated cards for each activation option. This means that based on my samples the best card discovered by seek shelter was rated an average of B 86% of the time by myself and the others who rated. Ratings are based around C which is the average
Things to note
This data is based off the ratings of a few individuals and took 50 samples. It does not account for situation, therefore certain cards may be stronger or weaker depending on the scenario. This data was made to show a general guide of the strength of discovered cards
Discussion
Every card is skewed towards above average picks in discover. Every card on this list shows a large skewing towards the B rated cards (Strong choice in a lot of scenarios). While Treasure map and tiki zoologist seem to have the biggest highroll of cards out of the list, it is important to note cost and playability, as well as time.
Conclusion
Thus, I conclude that thyrian expansion seems to be the strongest card. It is easily playable and provides a discount to the discovered card. It also carries an alarming 68 percent chance of the best card being A tier rated (Strong choice in Most scenarios) and this seems to be overpowered. I then consider treasure map to be the next highest as it has the highest rate of consistency in above average cards and also the smallest discover pool, however it takes time to activate as it requires shuffling into the deck. Tiki Zoologist has the 2nd highest highroll however it requires a 2f investment and beasts are usually not as situationally good as taunts (like seek shelter) finally crystal spice presents the most value, however 7f+ is often clunky and difficult to play
I suggest Thyrian Expedition and potentially some of the treasure map cards be looked at for some nerfs.
Afterword
I'd like to end this with a thanks to werfs, summerflame, sulphur, and obsidianbottle who gave up some time to rate the cards for this research.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1AlrCNcWndL__J8Ovizr-FExcNRGtOAVf5ILPrpqdE10/edit?usp=sharing here is a link to the discover picks and what they were rated
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1N7rH7DxJEY2LQx9hUB-OskIna09dTZZYQGFCBYdGrK8/edit?usp=sharing and here is a link to the data as well as most of my working for this (in case people have issue with my data). Theres also some additional information if you're interested in my exact pulls and numbers, as well as some graphs to present this more clearly
I'd greatly appreciate if some players higher up could also rate the cards in the first link, especially zoologist as that had the least amount of rating accuracy in my opinion and the more ratings i have the more accurate my data becomes.