Nerfedlex problems


Deck composition
 - Buffs are much more of a thing now than conjurations / summonings with the deck of war,
   and they're not all particularly good edging on harmful (see individual cards below).
   Triple Draw or Stack Five on merely damage-boost decks goes through the decks quite quickly, too.
   - Card suggestions below. In particular, I have this rough idea of buffing allies too?
     It's unique, but it doesn't precisely help with not necessarily liking the results for the player.
 - Deal Four is much worse with conjurations and summoning and random statuses on the same bundle,
   since the randomness shoots up into a prayer scenario that can easily leave you worse off
   without even getting the deck of punishment effect. Shooting a crystal spear at your just-created
   yaks is a problem in many ways.
   - It would make more sense to have summoning and buffs be one deck ("support")
     and destructive effects be a seperate deck. The deck of punishment bit could probably
     be lost, too, since:
 - Decks are less individually useful, which means you want to keep around and use _more_ of them,
   which means that even with the dearth of inventory weights it's still a hassle to manage
   your inventory. After all, a given deck might not even do anything useful!
   - Decks of the same power and type could stack? This does imply a bunch of further frustrations
     with Stack Five / Deal Four interacting strangely with a renewed deck, but it's better
     than the current situation.
 - Deck of destruction was diluted due to the incomplete card revisions and being part of
   the base for decks of battle. Finding a pure one and then seeing Fortitude or Cloud
   seems quite strange.
   - It'd be somewhat useful to have a split as mentioned earlier, or resort decks,
     or not make combined decks be a burden...

Cards
 - Potion card is bad due to a combination of a lack of controls and having badpotions in it:
   healing / mp at max health / mp, brilliance with a lack of spells that could use it, or
   resistance when facing the inappropiate monsters are already pretty ineffectual. There's
   also a bit of overlap with Gozag's Potion Petition?
   - The badpotions shouldn't block getting a good potion, and to make it a stronger / unique
     / synergistic card the potion effects could translate to any nearby allies, maybe?
     It's questionable to have the bad potions in the first place since you don't necessarily
     care about the not-relevant potion draw.
 - (Obsolete: card was removed in trunk.)
   Metamorphosis is bad for most characters due to unarmed focus. At the very least,
   most characters really don't appreciate spider form or blade hands when drawing randomly.
   You can cancel it, which means you've used up two turns and a card for nothing.
   An inevitable consequence of aping transmutations...
   - Aside from more transmutations revamping / "goodforms" as the rare opposite of badforms,
     the only ideal approach is to remove it or isolate it from nemelex decks?
     Could replace spider with wisp for escaping, and remove focused blade hands for
     vaguely-close hydra form? Polymorphing your allies while trying to increase their hd doesn't
     work with a few summons but would at least have some further attempt at a role and benefit.
 - Blade card, impressively, gets somewhat worse with card power. A weapon dancing out of
   your hands most likely means a character has lost a means of offense unless you carry around
   another weapon or cancel (which requires an awkward swapping interface).
   The stronger weapon brands outside of elec all have unpredictable downsides:
   antimagic obviously drains your mp, chaos has berserk and haste, distortion can blink away
   a ranged-focused monster in melee. Even pain does nothing if you don't have any necro skill
   to begin with. As a result, the straightforward fire / freezing / venom / draining from the
   beginning card are kind of the strongest...
   - Not sure what to suggest. You don't even get very many summons with weapons.
     Dance card also covers just summoning dancing weapons, spectral weapon copy seems redundant
     between Illusion and the actual spell of course (but maybe a top-power copy with some
     buffs and a weapon brand would be enough for the card?)
 - Storm card does, with power: next to nothing, slows you if you aren't immediately moving much,
   high player / ally damage and screwing up player positioning alongside low monster damage. Bit weak.
   - Wind blast? Disc of storms? Tornado effect on the player instead of twister, or some distance
     from the twister? Ball lightnings? Storm clouds? Lots of potential thematic damaging effects
     instead of a complete hodgepodge of effects, and some degree of mixing them could probably
     produce something that doesn't overlap with other player accessible effects.
 - Cloud, in avoiding placing under monsters and being brief, is... extremely ineffectual.
 - (Obsolete: Dowsing was moved out.)
   What is Dowsing even doing in a deck of tactical statuses???? It's nice to have on Nemelex,
   but it's out of place and contributes to cards feeling ineffectual. It's obviously also
   here due to the loss of decks of dungeons...
 - Not very many characters care about Shadow card in the first place, between it being a pre-battle
   benefit and being based in stealth. If you don't have a way to use the invis, it's unwanted
   glow hurting haste or another turn-waster, depending on the user's knowledge.
   - Maybe it should move to escape?

????
 - Like with the potion card above, it'd be cool / unique / synergistic / blah blah blah
   to have Helm and Shadow also apply to allies. Maybe Elixir, too.
 - The current summons are weird in their vague overlap and miscellaney.
   I think it'd be more interesting to amplify the latter aspect than what currently stands
   with more assorted summons and more gimmicked monster choices rather than sticking with
   pretty old stuff. For example, a mixed Forceful Invitation and Plane Rend card could be
   neat, and making Pentagram use rakshasas or something would be nice. There's a whole
   bunch of monsters with weird neat effects as allies that wouldn't contribute much
   to the summoning school but could be interesting enough here.

----

Herd card -> Elements card

It's cool to use monsters mostly not available in summoning spells for divine
summoning, but the majority of the Herd's monster choices are bland melee-only
monsters. Also, power only influence monster numbers and not monster choices,
which is both distinct and means that legendary card is possibly just a whole
bunch of hounds. This seems like an obvious candidate to choose some more
interesting allies while somewhat buffing the heavily-nerfed Nemelex.

This Elements card, while blandly named, still dedicates itself to beastial
choices while getting some more obscure spawns (and even still uses some of
Herd's!) Corresponding to card power, you get one monster from all but one set:

Air: raiju, wind drake, shock serpent
Earth: basilisk, boring beetle, boulder beetle
Fire: mottled dragon, molten gargoyle, salamander firebrand
Ice: ice beast, polar bear, ice dragon

(Yes, ice is bland, ice monsters trend towards bland.)

The choices have some cute chances for synergy and counter-productiveness
in equal thematic measures, and has a power more suiting for a divine summon
than just dumping out eight komodos, elephants, or griffons.

----

Pentacle revision
hell hound and two-three 5s, rakshasa and 4/3, pan lord and 2/1 (!!)