The balance between Plants & Zombies

The balance of the game is pretty good. Of course, the devs and everyone who keeps up with these threads should know this... win rates were at least at one time 49/51, and all of our fierce debating and anecdotal bs has been aimed at cracking which side has the slight advantage. These data are actually available!... somewhere. Someone has access to them! Hints are given in these threads that the dev team knows more, even, such as which heroes are the winningest, and which cards they are using.

So, 1) I think we all have to take a deep breath and remember that the people who are most qualified to comment on win rates and balance aren’t us.

2) Plant strategies are, and always will be, more straight-foreword. Plant players have plenty of decisions to make up-front, during deck construction, but the lack of a “trick phase” for plants is not a disadvantage. Playing cards over two phases means ALL zombie tricks come with an opportunity cost. You can choose not to play the trick you planned to play when Tricks hit (in response to changes in circumstances), but you cannot choose to play a zombie instead... and meanwhile, your trick might no longer be relevent. Lost opportunities most likely mean losses... and frustration. Oh, and plants have several ways of zapping your brains or making your tricks irrelevant before you get to play them.

3) I believe that point #2 hollows out the “middle class” of zombie decks. There are good decks, put together by players who understand opportunity cost and how to minimize it, and there are decks put together with too much optimism and speculation, which get hosed because plants get planted.

Conversely, some of the “best” zombie decks out there use few or simple, low-cost tricks. The current Valkyrie build, for instance, is a deck that tends to play only cheap (cost) and straight-foreword tricks, and likes to finish games in the zombie phase. Sports tends to clog lanes with Coaches and doesn’t care if it taps out of brains. Both are popular, I believe, because they’re easy to play... more so, I believe, than for any other reason.

4) Players look for the path of least resistance. Right now, it seems as though plants are the more popular choice (just based on anecdotal wait times... but not just from me), but this doesn’t mean they’re better. It just means they’re simpler. Probably.

4) People are distracted by big numbers. When we complain, we should all of us think long and hard about what’s actually killing us. This is a game to twenty, so it doesn’t matter that that Zomblob has 26 attack or that Pepper M.D. is a 26/26. A 4/4 Starfruit drooped on an open board is far more relevent.

Being scary is not a reason for nerf, and (even though it hasn’t happened for awhile) I’m sick of seeing postings that “card x is so broken... I still won the game, but...” If you beat it, it’s not better than whatever cards you are playing! So continue playing those cards, and relax. Not all wins have to be dominant... or pretty.

5) A new set just came out, so everyone should be having more trouble finding wins. There are more cards, there is more competition, there should be more strategy. UL players have no business calling the game unbalanced because their path to UL was a little bit harder than they predicted. This goes for now, the past, the future.

Any deck that has a win rate even marginally above 50% has the potential to climb to the top, and there are plenty of these available on both sides. The rest is just investment... monetary, to get the cards you want, or time, to grind them levels.