Ah yes, what deep insight, I should just be better and not get one-shotted on the first turn. No, I could just go use the meta tactics for getting 10k+ size immediately I came up with a long time ago, but that's boring.
I was going through the game with only a little bit of optimizing, not to mention getting more size isn't going to help the one-shot issue, but I wanted to see what a relatively fresh player would experience. It's horrible. You're forced to use exile cards if they happen to have primed explosives and can't use decks that retrieve from exile (at least I assume, card doesn't even say anything on it), it just so happens that fairy decks HATE having any other card types, they all draw fairies and rely on fairy cards for effects meaning other types cripple your ability to do fairy stuff.
There's also the dominant force shenanigans where they instantly delete 50 or so of your height at will, making your fight completely pointless in short order. Oh and poison too which is less effective and for some reason also does no damage unlike what the tooltip says.
Really, I just want to know what happened, sure the game was easy before but now it's just not fun, I'm going to be forced to rng my way to buying hp or just waiting for hp to build up while just sitting around doing side-quests and twiddling my thumbs after getting my height farming finished. Honestly not convinced you read my original comment fully, but at least it's an excuse to expand on my previous points.
Balance is and always was a nightmare :/
I prefer games harder myself, and found the game originally to be too easy when i playtested it.
So I tweaked things here and there and probably overcompensated.
When I do come back to this (Eventuallllly) I'll do some additional re-balancing on damage + hp pools to hopefully make it manageable without having to dump a bunch of height into cards from the get go.
Yea, I can understand that. This game just isn't set up for difficulty outside of boss fights so wanting things to be actually challenging outside of that is going to be a nightmare.
The problem here is that this would punish new players for not making perfect builds and taking away their means of making additional builds. Like now I know fairy is completely inviable against primed explosives so I should go for a different starter deck.
I suppose one thing I should say is that I really appreciate the beginning height increase letting me immediately grab a deck other than the default starting deck of cards meant for a very different game.
I think late game it's fine for the cards you added to exist since the player should have many options by then and some extra hp by some method, but having the contestants get big so quickly (which I assume is the trigger for thunder hammer to appear) makes things pretty bad. Primed explosives is still kinda bs at the start though.
Good luck whenever you get around to looking at the balance again.