Quote Originally Posted by ForsakenRoe View Post
But if the cards ALL give damage in some way, such that the 'extra effect' is the focus, eg the Mit on Bole, the MP on Ewer, etc. then Balancefishing isn't needed.
I don't think this is a good answer. If the cards have a DPS buff attached to them, then the AST player is heavily incentivized to use them when they're most convenient, such as saving them for buff windows. Any utility you attach to the cards will only ever offer value if the utility is conveniently aligned with a buff window. In other words, you're not going to use a Bole to mitigate a tankbuster, you're going to use it during buff windows, and if that helps the tank, great! If not? Oh well. Not to mention Ewers will never be used on healers for the same reason you never play Ranged cards on healers currently. Why boost the damage of a gimped DPSer when you could get more value from the actual DPS jobs? And none of them benefit from MP regen except for maybe Summoner or Red Mage and only if they had to rapid-fire res half the party since neither even has a way to spend large amounts of MP beyond their raises. Black Mage's Astral Fire negates MP restoration. You might as well bring back TP regen on Spire without returning TP for all the good the MP regen on Ewer would do.

If you want six cards with unique effects, you need to segregate them. Offensive buff cards cannot share a resource system with utility cards, or the utility cards will never see the light of day unless they're made aggressively busted. Hybridizing them is just another flavor of what we have now, just with the off chance that maybe the card utility will do something.