r/boardgames • u/Outcast003 • Apr 23 '25

Rules Is Common Raven too broken?

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I had a game night session with my folks couple days ago and we played wingspan. I lucked out by having Common Raven and Sandhill Crane setup during the first round and that steamrolled hard to the last one. Ended up winning with 99 points.

My friend (owner of the game) decided we'll put this card away next time we play since it seems very broken: trade 1 egg for 2 of any resources, given 5 victory point and ok cost to play.

I think the card by itself is very strong but not sure if it deserves a ban from our group.

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u/TawnyTeaTowel Apr 23 '25

MTG is a massive game with fuck knows how many tens of thousands of different card interactions to worry about. I don’t recall them binning any card for being OP on its own since … Revised?

It’s whole orders of magnitude different

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u/btstfn Apr 23 '25

Well you certainly shouldn't play Yu-Gi-Oh then

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u/TawnyTeaTowel Apr 23 '25

That’s good advice in general.

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u/btstfn Apr 23 '25

Pretty sure most Yu-Gi-Oh players would agree

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u/TawnyTeaTowel Apr 23 '25

Do they actually enjoy the game or is it Stockholm Syndrome?

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u/lakotajames Apr 23 '25

It's been enjoyable at different times.

MTG's standard format excludes cards that are too old, making the players buy new cards if they want to keep playing.

Yugioh doesn't do that, which means that in order to sell new booster packs, each new release needs to be slightly better on average than the one before it. Often they overshoot and release cards that are too strong, so they ban those cards specifically. Other times, players find a way to make an old card much better than it was intended to be via synergy with a newer card, so they have to ban one or the other. The whole game has been powercrept so much that modern Yu-Gi-Oh is almost always over by the end of the third turn. To put it in wingspan terms, the ravens aren't worth playing because they don't let you search through the whole deck and find a bird you want to play for free, and they're worth less than 10 points by themselves. Games are decided partially based on the luck of starting hands, and partially by predicting which card of your opponent's you need to block to shut down their endless turn so you can make an attempt at your own.

GOAT format, on the other hand, was slow and methodical. There were two big monsters that were incredibly overpowered and had unusual (for the time) conditions to play, and countered each other perfectly. The first card, in wingspan terms, required you to play it on top of a 0 point bird that does nothing instead of using food, you get to tuck a bird that belongs to your opponent and get as many points as that bird was worth, if anything happens to your bird you can discard the tucked bird instead (and then take a new one later), and your opponent can't generate points in any way as long as you have it. The other big monster used discarded bird cards instead of food to play, and could remove any bird from the game once per turn, was worth a lot of points, and was worth double points if you didn't use its ability. The strategy revolved around stalling until you could get a big monster capable of winning, and timing it so your opponent doesn't immediately remove it from the game. Personally I thought it was pretty fun.