Why does AP Denial exist?

Restricting Luminescence on crystal yeti is a godsend when using ST for this reason alone he goes into most of my ST decks just encase I ever come across the AP denial

 

What I don't like about AP denial is that 90% of their matches are decided by the matchup. There's little to no way to play around or against it unless you have a lot of the right counters.

I'll give an example, I play devils on the IS mountains map. He rushes me. He gets a fast armory and equips all 4 of my champs. I magnetize all the equips and have a huge nora lead (cool right?). Next turn, he slaps another 4 equips down and that was the game. My champ lead didn't mean anything even in such early stages of the game since he had the draws he needed.

No theme should be so absolutely 'I-win' when it's theme comes together and the opponent isn't lucky enough to have several counters.

 

I hope we can all agree on the importance of Counter-Play.

If a mechanic does not make the game more interesting to the opponent as well, then i's simply not a good mechanic. And removing bad mechanics like that is not going to turn the game into chess.

The question we have to ask ourselves is, do we want counter-play to be part of regular gameplay, or only as part of the meta? I.e. do we want more strategy, or more rock paper scissors?

 

Ap denial itself is fine and fun theme, but armory is plain stupid.
Just imagine if we had a rune for champ or spell reveal/refund, it would turn any theme into a mess.

 

imo this shows how some things can be fine in small quantities, but when you keep adding runes with those abilities, suddenly it becomes broken. So do you make up new abilities for the new champs? That's complexity creep. seems like every expansion requires a rebalancing of the entire runeset. maybe set rotation isn't such a bad idea after all if the future of every theme is an eventual massive nerf cry once it reaches a critical mass of effectiveness. either that or stop making new runes.

 

The problem that I am seeing here is that AP denial isnt exactly a "theme" - Its just throwing together every anti-AP thing you can find into a deck. This makes AP denial hard to balance because in some cases, it is themely, not-OP, and adds to the diversity of the game without being overly complicated. However when players make the decision to go all-in, it becomes a pain and not at all balanced.

The same is for the example with Armory - it was never intended, unless I really overestimate the designers, to be the linchpin for an entirely new "theme" of the dreaded "equipment deck". It was just meant to compliment what is supposed to be a very equipment heavy faction, but it was overdone.

 

Agreed on the problem with armory, and with the specificity of counters to APD decks... first step: tweak armory. Second step: stop stacking AP denial effects like wicked aura and magnetic pulse. Third step: make unstoppable work properly, and stop allowing APD to work on unstoppable champs... Those three steps will 1) give less of a reward for simply having the armory on the board, 2) disallow the "splashability" of APD effects, 3) provide more widespread counters that are not simply counters, but are useful in their own right.

 

IS/FW zero AP decks still up ?

 

shame one me im the first one who had make such deck with fs then people perfected it XD

 

The mechanic is Toxic to the game not because it stops you from attacking, but because it stops you from playing, thats why it should be removed.

As the famous Doge once said: