Quote Originally Posted by IllyaPrisma View Post
Especially since Astrodyne feels like such a weak effort to keep the Seals mechanic. SE probably realized in ASTs current design that there isn't actually a need for more than 2 cards and quickly thought of some way to keep 6 cards. Standing VERY far back, the Job still appears to have RNG in card drawing, but when you take a closer look, it's simply the appearance of RNG with no actual quick thinking or decision making.

My favorite line: "All of the cards do the same thing, and somehow you still don't get the ones you want"
Well that's kind of the issue from the get-go. Trying to justify 6 different buffs in this game is highly challenging because you're inevitably going to have cards that are weaker and others that are stronger. With the old system, Royal Road helped a lot at creating a counterweight to grant value to the more niche utility cards, especially Spire who's effect was virtually useless but was the best card to burn. This ultimately wasn't enough to make it a fair and balanced mechanic, but there was logic to it.

The seal system was created as a response to this, enabling them to homogenize the cards into 1 repetitive effect, but it's a colossal failure. It actually highlights even more just how unnecessary the 6 different cards aspect is on a functional level and has felt stupidly clunky every step of the way so far. Even though it's been smoothed out since ShB's launch, it still feels like a mess because there's just no reason to have the system at all the way it's currently implemented.

What's more is the Cards are very heavily linked to the lore of job, and while lore-breaking isn't something they're too afraid to shy away from, foundational lore aspects aren't things they're going to eliminate. If we were to ignore the lore, the most sensible thing we could do would be to cut the card system entirely and just replace it with a single button, but that would get a heavy amount of backlash, and I wouldn't be happy with that solution either. What this means is if they really want to make AST enjoyable is they're going to need to bring the cards back to the drawing board once more and figure out a way to justify having 6 cards in a way that doesn't feel like ass and yet retain a level of consistency that inspired the ShB changes to begin with.