A. INTRODUCTION:

1. COST:

It can be the literal cost to play something, like say the 5 resources it costs to play the original Millennium Falcon

it could be the play requirement of the card on say something like emulate, or

it could be the cost to resolve the card’s die.



2. TEMPO:

3. META:

4. POWER LEVEL:

5. EFFICIENCY:

6. NO HOME!

7. NARROWNESS OF APPLICATION:

8. SURROUNDING COLOR/ALIGNMENT SCHEME:

9. UNDISCOVERED!

You might look at a card and wonder “”. Well today I will be talking about the myriad of reasons that causes cards to dust away in your binders. Keep in mind that all of these categories apply to high level competitive Standard play, not casual decks brewed up for some kitchen table awesomeness, league decks, fun themed ones, or what have you.So cost can mean three different things:generally scale with power relative to how demanding they are to play. Some of them however fly too close to the sun and end up unplayable for either the amount of value they ultimately give you, or end up just being too restrictive to deck building.Let’s take. You have to ask yourself is it worth paying 4 resources for a card that only goes on unique and red character that are also hero, and our pool of cards we can play this on plummets with each of those requirements. So to do this we need a deck that can spare 4 resources in a turn, so all eyes are on vehicle lists for that.And hey they normally run, who can be (and I suppose actually is) a. However, it is much more valuable for those decks to play a couple of 2 drop vehicles or maybe even a 3 drop and just hold the resource as once you lose Rose you also lose the 4 resources you put into the Rebellion Leader.Alright, now take the. It costs 5 resources and in reality that price is just too high. You are going to miss a lot of chances to play things while building up 5 resources just to get a single die on the board.The same goes for characters here. The originalactually isn’t a terrible card except for that. It basically deprives her of any decent pairing.(man that guy needs a better printing),, I could really keep going.None of those characters are terrible on the surface, but when they get to be so expensive they have to be run with very subpar partners they just end up getting shoved to the wayside.There are a few select cards that don’t see play due to their play restrictions.is solid example of this.However, the requirement of needing 10 different symbols makes this card essentially unplayable.is also in the same camp, granted it’s not terribly hard to so much meet its requirement, as it is hard for the dice you amass to not get removed, therefore denying the cost to play.is strictly better thanfor yellow villain, a card that seems plenty of play. Oh except its. Needing to spot two characters with the same title make it essentially unplayable.Lastly, the rarest of the cost inhibitors are the cards that are too expensive to resolve.has to be the best example by far. At a glance a card that does a ton of single target damage, can do solid AOE damage, and that can even blow up vehicles seems like it should be a staple in today’s meta, right?!Theproblem however is that it costs a resource every time you want to resolve that and before you know it thishas hadput through it and we have completely lost price efficiency. This isn’t to mention that many decks just really can’t afford to set aside one resource every turn. Pay sides gate keep a lot of characters too.really kills him, and there are a whole host of other characters who don’t see play for this exact reason.Ever wonder why you never seeplaying his ownor whydoesn’t play? Sometimes a card is strong by its own merits, but doesn’t fit the pacing of every deck that could play it.Vehicles and most supports (andoccasionally skirt by as an exception) are the classic example of this.just don’t have the time to spend several actions playing and activating supports, they would much rather roll in 3+ dice in one action by activating a character and get to claiming that much sooner. On the other hand you have cards likeorwhich you rarely see slower decks playing. That is because slower decks care far less about how fast they go, and would rather just find the time to grab a resource the old fashioned way, rather than give their opponent a resource for free in the process.There are several cards in our card pool that are actually fine by all other accounts, but don’t quite fit into the current meta. Two good examples areandThose two cards have shined in the past, particularly, but really only when they would be seeing enough shields in a given field to justify running them. Let’s look at the. Against shielded characters it can do a whopping 5 damage! However, in a field of shield-less characters it is far more likely to do 2-3 damage, at which point it starts to get outshone by cards likewhich can also do 2-3 damage but haveand a better action economy by not having 3 different damage symbols.is another good example of a card like this.representing 6 damage to characters makes it one of the most threatening die in the game, even with its pay side., if you can’t get the full value by playing against 3wide character decks it has to be left on the shelf, like it was during most of theLet’s be honest, some cards are just bad. Just look at, that card is terrible! To me the text on that card says “”. Developers frequently print bad cards to “help players learn” by showing them what is powerful or not, and that’s fine but to no one’s surprise those cards obviously don’t see play.It does happen at times that a card starts out great, but is eventually surpassed by stronger more recently printed options.is good example of this, the card used to see play, but removal has evolved past it in power level.Characters also obviously suffer from power level issues. I’m pretty surehas never seen competitive play, and old power houses like Awakeningsandjust simply aren’t viable compared to what else could be run in their stead.How about a card like? Atthere was exactly 1 copy ofbeing run. In events months back that would be insanity, but these days in wasn’t exactly eyebrow raising.problem is that it is a 1 for 1 that costs a resource. Now being a 1 for 1 doesn’t necessarily make a card obsolete,sees plenty of play as a 1 for 1, butdoes not have aand is alsoAt the same price as Isolation you havewhich still removes a die, but also messes with another die. If you want to pay one more resource thanyou can start removing several dice with cards likeis just too fair, and therefore not good enough to see play in a meta with such a dense card pool. Admittedly this category is pretty similar to cost, but to me the difference is we are not being gatekept by resources, we are simply running cards that do more for the same amount of resources.Occasionally an extremely powerful card comes along that simply doesn’t have a deck it can be played in.is a great example of this.was busted the second it was printed, but it did not have the critical mass of 5+ drops it needed in villain to be played yet.Thenwas printed and this card skyrockets to being a staple a few tier 1 decks.is another great example of an absolutely monster of a power card that seemingly lacked a home.sat around for several sets, but it was not untilthat the character sets needed for it to be consistent enough to be played came about., were all crucial pieces that this card needed before it could take off.Many Characters fall victim to having no home as well. Afterwas nerfed duringno longer had a viable partner and had to sit on the sidelines untiland laterwere printed.Now no one will callinherent power into question, but he simply did not have a good pairing, and was being outshone by worse characters who were able to make up the slack by having decent partners.Let’s have a look at both our current meta and a card likecould easily buy you anywhere from 6 to 10 health and remove 2-3 dice in a single turn. The problem however is what it is doing the rest of the time… which is nothing. Sometimes a card’s application is too narrow for it to see play.In fact, most ofcousins (, and) all suffer from being strong but too narrow to see any sort of consistent play. No Cheating is another great example of a card that is just too narrow to see play. You will probably find most “hate” cards fall into this bracket. For the uninitiated a “hate” card is essentially a card that is very good at dealing with one specific thing, but does nothing to anything else.This category is always a serious bummer, but it has definitely happened in the past. This is definitely a related category to “”, but I would like to make the distinction that while the “” category means that a card just can’t really do anything meaningful yet, cards here definitely can do something but have a poor supporting cast built around them and end up making it so that they never see play.have been plagued in the past for this reason. Cards likesaw low play in, not because it was bad, but because the only gooddecks wereand unfortunately that is about the only archetype that overly doesn’t care about healing its characters. Any other red hero deck would have played this card, but they didn’t exist at high tier play!Ah yes the last reason a card doesn’t see play, and every Brewers delight. The coveted undiscovered card. There is a very real chance that a card is not seeing play for well… no good reason at all!Maybe YOU will be the one to introduce a card into the meta! Let us know which cards you think could be the next hidden gems!