KoboldLord wrote:Decks are intrusive and fiddly, and they are better off as Nemelex-specific flavor or out of the game entirely. To make a potion or scroll into a useful consumable, you pick it up and identify it. To make a deck into a useful consumable, you pick it up and identify it, and then you calculate the odds of getting a useful consumable out of a deck of that type, and then you flip a card off the top to get rid of it, and then you identify that deck again, and then you flip a card off the top to get rid of it again, and then identify again, and maybe after multiple repetitions you'll finally get a good consumable that you wanted. Or maybe there will be nothing you care about in the whole deck and you will have wasted a few minutes of your time.
Nemelex at least gives you abilities that work with cards to make them somewhat less terrible gameplay, basically being another generic random direct damage/summoning deity only with no upper limit on piety.
How i make a deck into a useful consumable:
I pick it up and use id it to figure out what kind of deck it is, is it is summoning or destruction i am done.
If it is any other type then i decide if the number of id scrolls i have is work issuing in that type of deck, often it isn't (unless i am so far into extended that i have literally anything else i could want) if it is, then i spend an id scroll on it, if the top card is crap, usually i drop the deck and am done, once in a great while i am interested in some effect from a deck, but it isn't the one on top, enough to spend more than one id scroll on it, but that is vanishingly rare.
Since this sequence happens perhaps one every two or three winning games, i consider it a vaguely interesting event, it simply doesn't happen often enough to me to have it be tedious.
I have never once come across a randomly generated deck and thought "oh what kind of stupid crap is this going to be, now i have to spend precious time, wasted on this stupid item in order to be technically optimal"
Now how i read argument in the *commit* seems to be much more of "these don't contribute much to regular game play, and making them nemelex only makes the god more unique and interesting" i disagree with the premise slightly but i find the logic to be sound (if anything, the decks gifted by nemelex are boring, and the ones found in non nemelex play are interesting, plus when they exist, they give you something to do with your id scrolls)
If this is to stay, i would suggest one or of the following complimenting changes:
Wand can no longer be use id'd to discover number of charges.
(Slightly) Reduced generation of id scrolls.