Why Does Doomsday Excruciator Exile Cards Face Down?
General forum
Posted on Dec. 19, 2024, 10:16 p.m. by DemonDragonJ
Typically, cards are exiled face up, but on rare occasion, cards are exiled faced down, and, in those cases, that is so they can be retrieved, later, but Doomsday Excruciator exiles cards face down with no way to retrieve them, so I wonder why that is, since I see no reason for it to do so.
What does everyone else here say, about this? Why does Doomsday Excruciator exile cards face down? I certainly am interested to hear your thoughts, on this subject.
plakjekaas says... #3
If cards are exiled face down, that means the information needs to stay hidden. Bomat Courier will exile cards that you will only get access to if you discard your hand, you're not allowed to compare the exiled cards with your hand before making that choice.
Doomsday Excruciator exiles most of all libraries, and exiled face-down, because it needs to be a secret what the remaining cards are. That's always the reason to Exile face-down.
December 20, 2024 6:31 a.m.
Seconding wallisface’s justification as the primary reason.
While I think slow gameplay is why the card was designed this way, I think a secondary reason is causing fear for players. When your library is basically non-existent and you have a very quick timer before you are milled, there is a level of stress added to the game - “can I win with the complete unknown I have left before the clock runs out?”
I expect that secondary reason is why it was released in Duskmourn - few other cards in the set can capture the abject terror of the set’s flavor.
December 20, 2024 11:10 a.m.
DemonDragonJ says... #5
wallisface, Caerwyn, did WotC explicitly state that, or is that your presumption? I am sorry if that sounded confrontational, as I assure you that I did not intend for it to, but it is difficult to convey emotion in written form.
December 20, 2024 9:48 p.m.
wallisface says... #6
DemonDragonJ it’s an assumption, but a pretty well-thought-out one. Having the cards exiled face-up only ever leads to worse gameplay.
December 20, 2024 9:53 p.m.
DemonDragonJ says... #7
wallisface, I suppose that that makes sense, but I feel that whether or not an element of the game leads to it being slow and tedious should be decided by the players, not WotC.
December 20, 2024 11:34 p.m.
plakjekaas says... #8
There's no decisions needed on that if the cards are face down, There's no information gained to base those decisions on. Revealing them while being exiled would overload the game with new information, that's what leads to the described bad and very time-consuming play patterns.
Elements of the game that are slow and tedious should be prevented to make it into the game, because it worsens the experience, and therefor the product WotC is supplying. And what makes it into the game is exclusively a decision on their part.
December 21, 2024 1:33 p.m.
wallisface says... #9
DemonDragonJ having the cards exiled face up would not ”leave the decision to the players” - in any competitive environment it would be a strategic requirement to go through this slow/tedious admin.
Even if somebody wanted to be ignorant enough to not check the face-up piles, that doesn’t stop the opponent wasting a bunch of time doing that and creating an unfun 5 minutes of waiting.
If you give players a choice between doing what’s quickest, and doing what’s optimal for winning a game, they’re going to choose the latter. It doesn’t mean they appreciate or want that aspect to be in the game, it just becomes a necessary-evil to play/compete. Games should inherently minimise the amount of unfun-activities they require players to do to play optimally.
Why introduce tedium and admin to a game when its entirely unnecessary?
December 21, 2024 2:51 p.m.
DemonDragonJ says... #10
wallisface, I definitely dislike elements of the game that are not fun, but, if something helps me to win the game, I shall likely choose it, such as tutor effects; I do not mind shuffling my library if I can find the exact card that I need, and I dearly hope that other players share that sentiment, as well.
December 22, 2024 5:13 p.m.
There is an incredibly huge, obvious difference between tutor effects and what occurs here.
With a tutor, you are looking for a single card and, once you find that card, you shuffle up. That slows down the game a little, but, in the grand scheme of things, rarely more than a minute or so (unless you’re kind of a slow or rude shuffler).
Here, you are not quickly shifting through a deck looking for one card - you are looking at every single exiled card with the intent of memorizing what cards are missing and deducing what you have remaining.
It should be abundantly clear why “search for one card” and “search for fifty cards and apply process of elimination to deduce what remains” are so wildly different situations that mentioning tutoring hardly makes sense in this conversation.
December 22, 2024 6:01 p.m.
wallisface says... #12
I agree with and second everything Caerwyn said above.
wallisface says... #2
This feels a little like deja vu... I feel like this conversation has happened before on this site.
If the cards are exiled face-up, from a competitive standpoint players are incentivized to look through the entirety of both their-own, and their opponents, exile-piles, to work out what is left in the deck as well as what could be in their opponents hand. Having players do this would be a MASSIVE time waster and cause a bunch of issues with competitive events.
Having the cards exiled face-up only leads to bad play patterns and an environment where both players best possible option is to scan through two large exile piles to calculate the best plays/outs available to them in the remaining turns of the game. It unnecessarily creates a subgame of admin-work which is just going to be tedious and slow.
December 19, 2024 11:03 p.m.