At first I was a huge fan of Mage Wars. Slowly, my friends and I began to learn all the intricacies of the game, and the strategy that became most prevalent was to wait until the last minute and then play a couple of overpowered heal and minor heal cards. I hesitate to call these cards "overpowered" because they don't exactly hurt the other player, but rather help heal far too much.
I don't have the card in front of me, but from recollection, heal uses 8 dice and minor heal uses 5. If you were to play this combo on your mage, you could conceivably heal 26 points of damage, but more likely than not, you're going to heal around 10-15 points of damage each time you use this combo. We were healing so frequently that the games would take an additional 15-30 minutes on top of the already long 45 minutes-1 hour time frame because you essentially had to eliminate the opposing player one and a half times, and on one rare occasion, my opponent's dice rolling was so good that I literally had to kill him twice.
My question is this: in what way can I combat this issue? I feel at times that Mage Wars is more of a Command and Conquer type game where I have to first build my army and then commence a full attack rather than a Magic the Gathering type of game where it is extremely beneficial, and in fact crucial, to come out of the gates fast and hard. Every time I come out of the gates swinging, I find myself running out of gas, I get my opponent down to next-to-no health, he heals, then returns with a nasty haymaker and I go down panting and out of stamina. I've thought about removing the healing cards from our spell books since I'm the sole owner of the game, but that would be the same as making a house rule that only benefited the owner. My friends love healing because it always results in my demise.
I'm looking for some strategy to combat my flaws as well as shorten the game lengths. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
I don't have the card in front of me, but from recollection, heal uses 8 dice and minor heal uses 5. If you were to play this combo on your mage, you could conceivably heal 26 points of damage, but more likely than not, you're going to heal around 10-15 points of damage each time you use this combo. We were healing so frequently that the games would take an additional 15-30 minutes on top of the already long 45 minutes-1 hour time frame because you essentially had to eliminate the opposing player one and a half times, and on one rare occasion, my opponent's dice rolling was so good that I literally had to kill him twice.
My question is this: in what way can I combat this issue? I feel at times that Mage Wars is more of a Command and Conquer type game where I have to first build my army and then commence a full attack rather than a Magic the Gathering type of game where it is extremely beneficial, and in fact crucial, to come out of the gates fast and hard. Every time I come out of the gates swinging, I find myself running out of gas, I get my opponent down to next-to-no health, he heals, then returns with a nasty haymaker and I go down panting and out of stamina. I've thought about removing the healing cards from our spell books since I'm the sole owner of the game, but that would be the same as making a house rule that only benefited the owner. My friends love healing because it always results in my demise.
I'm looking for some strategy to combat my flaws as well as shorten the game lengths. Any help would be greatly appreciated.