It is not necessary to differentiate between all the runes. With other TCGs it is very common that multiple cards share exactly the same stats, and that would be a perfectly acceptable way to make the 2000 or so runes a bit more digestible to a new player. And if you spread out the millions of abilities, rather than throwing half a dozen of them on each and every champ, you already get a lot of differentiation. By making every champ super special, I find that ironically they all start to feel equally vanilla to me. I remember the horror when a Lich King was deployed, simply because of its crazy range plus teleport. I remember how a simple block + riposte on the Elven Ranger made him a serious threat. Now everything feels much more washed out and generic to me. If you don't take drastic steps to undo the damage that was done over the years by exclusively catering to the veteran player base, you can forget about any type of success with new players, no matter how hardcore they are.
do abilities like +1damage and +4 hp count as abilities? I think they probably shouldn't a lot the most vanilla champions out there are the ones with these upgrades...
From my experience only games that successfully do "different but same" cards are ones with set rotations where its kinda okay to have same cards because original one is probably not playable in tournaments/ranked anymore. Thou I'd love to hear some examples.
Why would it make any difference if they are all playable or not? In other games, players pay for hats or custom skins, I'd love to be able to have more choice which runes I play based on which flavour / design I prefer, rather than its power alone. And of course there will always be minor differences. But so what if one rune only gets slightly better stats for higher nora cost? Or even if it's only a different race or class, providing a different kind of synergy? It still provides you a meaningful choice and let's you customise your deck exactly to your liking. The more abilities there are on a champ, the higher the chance that there is something which isn't actually a perfect match for your BG.
there is so much design space in PoxNora that rotation model is absurdly stupid to even think about...
