Quote Originally Posted by Sebazy View Post
My personal (and perhaps spicy) take is that Seals go against what I think the cards should represent. If I can get some value from dumping cards that don't fit my exact criteria into seals then IMO that defeats the purpose of the system. I'd argue that even Royal Road is kind of a stretch of what's acceptable tbh. The beauty of HW's card play was that I had to build plans on the fly to adapt to what RNGesus handed down to me and it was immensely satisfying when I found uses for sequences that would otherwise be considered bad pulls (Eg Bole on the Warrior during A12S final adds to allow them to stay out of tank stance and save CDs).

Weighting RNG is purely there to stop variance making or breaking runs ala what we've sometimes seen with Crit variance during prog in some tiers.
This doesn't particularly make sense to me.

Having an overarching mechanic doesn't remove the reward for individual card usage or even reduce in any way the considerations that go into that. It's similar to how an AoE having some rare situational use in single-target combat, or vice-versa doesn't degrade the actions you'd normally perform, but merely adds use cases and reduces the sense of button/ability-bloat.

With it, you want to find an optimal use case for each among, say, Bole/Balance, Spear/Arrow, and Ewer/Spire at some point within each 90s --if prioritizing your own output and able to get an extra self-buff within the fight by fulfilling it per 90s-- or per 120s.

That doesn't reduce the cognitive load of individual decisions made (what cards can I best find use for in the next 60s). It just makes that decision a bit more complicated while also adding a couple extra layers of decision making that shift your priorities over the course of your gauge fulfilment.

It doesn't prevent the likes of Spread or having multiple charges on Draw or even of Royal Road (though unless balanced, RR is a poor mechanic, and even when balanced it's mostly made redundant by a second charge of Draw or any more interesting Card effects). It precludes nothing except keeping things far more simple (and yes, Old Cards w/o RR would be even simpler than New Cards with Seals).

There's no loss to including Seals or any other overarching mechanic besides just not wanting any extra cognitive load.