Trump Cards
Counters are cool, but I’ve never been fond of trump cards that require no skill or strategy to use. It leads to the situation where I win automatically because I have X and my opponent has Y. There’s no satisfaction to gain from a predetermined victory in a competitive game. Trumps cards are my second greatest complaint about the typical card-based strategy games. Insane costs are the first (thanks, Magic).
.. Which brings me back to Culdcept Saga, which has the advantage of charging you a reasonable one-time fee instead of asking you to sell your kidneys to be competitive. I’m pretty much at the end of the game now, and I’m starting to see quite a few cards come up that directly determine the outcome of the match. For example, in one especially big match I destroyed all 15 of my opponent’s lands in two turns. He had 9,000 points with a map goal of 12,000, and those two spells dropped him below 1,000.
Fortunately, Culdcept lets you disallow rare cards. Unfortunately, I have lots of cool-rare-but-not-overpowered cards. It’s a shame to have to remove all of those cards from play just to prevent a handful of cards that sap the fun. Regardless, I’ve had a great time playing Culdcept single player, co-op (yay!) and competitively.