Third Playtest at Kublacon

So I had a short little playtest at Kublacon with Alex, an old AGOT buddy of mine.

I put into practice the new rule "when the winner of a battle brings their cards back to their hand, they have to discard down to 3 before redrawing up to 7. " It really helped curb some of the momentum of the game when someone would carry over 4 or 5 characters a battle. (As a contrast, you don't have to do this when you retreat)

After our playtest we came up with a simple elegant rule, that rebalances the game pretty well.

"After a battle finishes, all cards in the discard pile are moved from the discard to the remove from game pile."

There are a number of reasons this becomes helpful:

Phoenix Down/Raise abuse
-Raise and Phoenix Down are two very powerful cards. In a way it creates a bridge between your hand and your discard pile for playing characters. Is playing with a 30 card hand ever fair? Probably not. By moving your discard pile to the remove from game pile each turn, the revival cards actually become... revival cards. Not teleport-Wakka-in-from-3-battles-ago cards. It also lets me revert Auron back to discard, which creates less rules confusion. One other thing it does that is kickass, is that it adds more balance and thematic value to Quistis.

Quistis' ability reads:
Blue Magic: Tap Quistis to choose a black or white spell in your discard pile and play it at no cost, then shuffle it into your deck.

On paper, it sounds good.
Blue Magic is being able to mimic monster magic right, if a spell has been discarded, most of the time it's been played, and thus, you are able to mimic it. (Of course I took some liberty in letting any spell be used, just to make it not worthless, but you get the idea.)

In the playtest, before the rule was in place this made Quistis an offensive monster. During the game, I played 6 thunders against alex (only 3 are allowed in the deck)

So really, this let me hit a character for 1600 damage with no counterattack and "no recovery" 6 times (no recovery means that the attack cannot be cancelled with potion, cure, or Aeris [so far])

Basically, this made Quistis an invisible long ranged Sabin that could wear equipment ... broken

Now that the discard pile resets every battle, Quistis is in a way forced to "see" each of the spells, which makes more sense regarding her ability. She still has the potential to be powerful, but now there aren't a whirlwind of broken possibilities regarding her. (Now I don't feel bad about giving her 1200 attack instead of 1000 either!)