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Thanks for the feedback! Glad you love the game and like, these are all really valid feedback and I really appreciate it! I want to follow up on several points you raised: not to say a certain piece of feedback is good or bad (they're all good!), just to provide some context as to how we made some of the decisions for the new version.

A lot of your feedback is somewhat tied to the faith/core health rework, which is probably the most impactful change we made. In the old game, faith is intended as a checklist mechanic: the player will have different faith caps at different points of the run, and are expected to more or less cap their faith; although they can achieve that through different means, and maybe increase their faith demands with certain cards like apprentice, but the game is designed around the player having a specific amount of faith income each round.

But this created a lot of problems when we tried to expand the game and add more cards. If we balance the game around a faith cap, then it means that the player should always have ways to reach their current faith cap, which will force us to design the faith generation cards and non-faith cards separately, and always keep them at a consistent ratio (which is exactly how we designed the cards in the old version). While it's easy to design a bunch of unique non-faith cards (with mechanics like random damage or summon), the design space is very limited for faith generation cards. I suppose we COULD have gone the route of having temporary/permanent faith, having followers interact with faith cap, or using other means to make faith more complicated, eventually, the decision is to make faith, or at least those generated by followers, to have the same weighting as other mechanics.

So the idea of the new faith system is that recruiting faith generation followers should be a strategic choice rather than a necessity and that the player should be able to beat the game without any faith generation from followers. We tried to achieve this with enemy faith drop being more substantial and random event options. Ideally, there should be builds where the player will buy high-value cheap cards with enemy faith drop and afford expansive core cards through skipping and faith injection from random events; or, to recruit tons of faith generation followers, BARELY winning every fight due to recruiting another supplicant instead of a templar, and get to big tech cards while still in early game (we'll still need to analyze the playtest data from the past few days to see how viable these playstyles are). We want to get to a place where we can design faith generation cards just like any other type of card, and don't need to worry too much about having an imbalanced number of faith and non-faith cards.

Only showing affordable cards is a byproduct of the rework. If I remember correctly, in the old version the game would occasionally show one card that costs more than current faith but less than faith cap. The assumption in the old version is that the player will be able to afford that card next round if they try. At some point, this feature existed in the new version as well, but I removed it because it constantly made me feel pressured to have a positive faith income, which is not the goal. But this 100% makes locking and planning build worse. I'll probably need to try a lot more things before I can decide how to solve all this. Maybe like occasionally having a recruit event that only shows high-cost cards or something.

Refresh is another thing we struggled with. Having refresh as a basic mechanic works best if the player knows what exactly is in the pool. But we really don't want to pressure the player to memorize every card, or even to constantly check a menu listing all the cards. This is one of the design goals for this project: to create a card game that is more fast-paced and free-form than, say, a deckbuilder. The current plan for refresh is to make it like Hades 1, where you can use tokens to refresh. For example, maybe a follower with "When recruited, gain +3 refresh tokens", so it's less of a basic mechanic and more of a situational/preference thing.

Tbh permanent buff and support follower is more or less the same as faith rework, where we are trying to make something not a necessity. Permanent buff followers definitely still need a lot of tuning -- it seems like they are still somewhat necessary for perfect runs. For support followers, the idea is that we want the player to keep getting more capacity throughout the run, but also want to make follower count part of the build, so that aoe effects like flagbearer can have variable value in different builds. We end up with summons and support followers, which is essentially trading 1 capacity for passive effects. This idea will definitely be further explored when we get to factions, where we plan to create archetypes with maybe just one or two active followers.