as one of the two players who inspired the nerfs to be required, I will say that I think the changes were elegant. and absolutely required. being able to spam the board with hob, and a temple is way broken. to the point where you can attack someone for 12dice melee, and then do a free 6plus dice temple shot, and still have a qc to use. ridiculous beyond belief. so if you are running house rules like the old days, priestess should be near 100% win ratio. if not, then they are playing it wrong.
Our local group play-tested the ever-living crap out of HoB/Temple spam and it was hardly unbeatable. And this was before "Lesser Teleport!" Too often the Priestess got (4) HOB out and was already eating 10-15 dmg per turn with no chance of continuing to (6) HOB before dying. It was incredibly "unwise" to cast #5 and #6 in our rushdown testing. Keyword: Rushdown.
Granted, you made the NERF decision with Turtle vs. Turtle in mind, and that kinda bothers me as well.
hob being unique balances the card extremely well. useful, bit not overpowered. which for a card is a sweet spot. not all decks run any. so in general solid useful card.
I couldn't stand seeing every "class/school" running (1) HoB. Guess I'm a M:TG player at heart.
same for temple. there are few cards that have an attack that do not require mana as a cost. I cannot come up with one at the moment, but maybe there is one card that does not. so multiple dice for zero mana is broken. put this way you should come to the same conclusion. even if you restrict it to mage/school only. you may not like it, but can hopefully see the reason why it had to be changed.
Yes, but... You start the match with 0 Temples and 0 Laser-Temples. And we're back to Massive Design Decisions being made for a Turtle vs. Turtle scenario. Rushdown really hurts Turtle-Hob/Laser spam. And here's the rub: There are MANY ways to rushdown the opponent(turtle) but there is only one way to spam HoB/Laser (lay and pray).
I wish these non-mage-specific "power-cards" didn't homogenize the deck-building meta as much as they did/have/continue to do. And I wish Dev/Playtest/QA cared about this issue as much as I do.
Edit: Our local meta died around the same time the HoB/Laser nerf hit... Consensus being homogenization over specialization.
EditEdit: On second-thought, I'm also suggesting I would've been fine with UniqueHoB *and* Priestess-only.