by MattShinners
I'm in broad agreement. I love playing the first few quests with new players, and it's always a good time. But if you want to play anything more advanced than the first few quests, it becomes a min/max-ing of your deck.I think the issue is with the quest design. They don't scale each quest; they just scale the quests overall. It would be quite easy to have a novice, challenge, and impossible difficulty just by adding/subtracting a step of the quest from the quest decks (3/4/5 step quests based on desired difficulty). But instead, it's all-or-nothing.
Does this game succeed for the hard-core card player? Yes. But it could also easily succeed for other audiences, and that's a group that's being left behind. Probably because they're in a weird place - they'd like the easier quests, but they won't go out and buy chapter packs.
So you end up with a very easy starter box (because that's all the non-hardcore players will buy) and ridiculously difficult quests in chapter packs (because only the hardcore players are buying them).
Understandable. But you can't fault the more casual players for wanting the game to, in some way, cater to them on a deeper level than just a core set. It is, after all, billed as a Living Card Game to the casual players as much as it is to the experts.