Quote Originally Posted by HyperiusUltima View Post
The easy fix is just bring Royal Road back and its effects. This would solve all Controller issues with AST and also add depth to the job(since sometimes you need to get rid of that Ewer just to get a Spire, Play, then another Ewer) plus solve other issues as well.
The only way to "fix" the controller issues is to bring back massive imbalance in choices of Card usage so that you either just Spread (Balance > Arrow > Spear if necessary), Expand (Bole or Ewer), Play (Balance > Arrow > Spear) or Undraw (everything else, including whenever Spread or RR have already been used).

So long as there's reason to care who your cards go to, the same controller issues will be present and the game's barebone controller support will show through. Being nearly the only game to have controller support still doesn't make that support actually good, let alone nearly as good as it could be.

If Expand was merely balanced, you wouldn't be able to get away with the wastefulness made obligatory prior to ShB. Instead, you'd likely see RR made retroactive instead of preemptive, so you could use another card on which you did not want to consume RR. You'd likely see RR usable from a Spread card. And even then you'd still want to occasionally place an Arrow specifically on your BLM or a Balance specifically on your gauge-high SAM, which would bring back the same issues short of improved Controller features.