What’s up Champions?! BananaCrapshoot here with another article, today’s article I wanted to take a look at Dr Strange since he releases in the U.S this week. This will be the first chance people get to sleeve him up and play unless you imported a deck from overseas or played illegal digital adaptations online. Now we all know Dr Strange is insanely powerful, and today I wanted to talk about why he’s so good and what we can do, if anything, to balance him out a little.
Now the first reason, and the main one, that Dr Strange is so insanely good is his Invocation deck. If you are unaware Dr Strange comes with a 5 card deck, separate from his main hero deck. The top card of this deck is face up and Dr Strange on the hero side, can exhaust the identity card to play the face up card of the invocation deck. 4 of the 5 cards are insanely strong and over the curve by a lot, and the last one is very niche. This basically means you are playing with a +1 hand size all game, because you always have an extra card to play on top of the invocation deck.
Another part of what makes him so good is how consistent he is, the invocation deck is only 5 cards in size, and there is no penalty for decking it out. The alter-ego side as well as Wong are two of our options to discard the top card of the invocation deck, so you can see the 3 cards you want to see all the time, very consistently. You also can play any of the invocation cards if you are stunned or confused as none of the cards are attacks or thwart events.
Then you have stuff from his hero deck like Master of the Mystic Arts where you can play the top card of the invocation deck twice, sure I’ll draw 6 cards thanks very much. Cloak of Levitation which can ready Dr Strange, Protective Ward which cancels all the effects of a treachery card, you see where I’m going with this. On top of his insane consistency and OP invocations, he has a super strong set of 15.
The only possible knock on Dr Strange is that he can’t handle minion swarms, and I don’t think that’s entirely true. While none of his cards deal dmg to multiple enemies, you can correct this with your aspect easily. Besides he does everything else so much better than everyone else it’s ok he doesn’t have an AoE attack.
Now is Dr Strange too good? Maybe, he will only get stronger as the card pool grows. One thing that he should have is a drawback for playing the invocations, magic always comes with a price, and he seemingly doesn’t have to pay that price, besides the printed resource cost of the card, and exhausting. I think there’s a few ways you could balance Dr Strange based on the cost of magic. One is to draw an encounter card every time you shuffle the invocation deck. This is probably the most straightforward and easiest one to implement. And Really that’s the only idea I have that works and makes sense without adding other mechanics to the game.
So that’s it all that to say I think you should get an encounter card when shuffling up your invocation deck. Let me know what you think, what other solutions, if any do you have? Thanks for stopping by, please check out the rest of our articles, the podcast, And YouTube. We also have patreon if you are interested. I hope everyone enjoys playing the sorcerer supreme, they nailed the theme here and he’s very strong! Stay Scheming Champions!