Has it become meaningless to draw slugs?

TL;DR: Slugs should be discarded automatically, as this behaviour can be obtained anyway – at the cost of complications while building decks.

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For testing how the slug mechanic works I tested two decks with 9 fixed slots and a single draw slot. The single drawn slot was assigned healing touch only.

Deck 1:​

• • 2 Healing Touch Glyphs
  • 12 Slugs

By right-clicking the slugs as they appeared, I was able to cast Healing Touch twice over 60 seconds. ​

Deck 2:​

• • 2 Healing Touch Glyphs
  • 12 random glyphs, that were not assigned to any slot.
  • 0 Slugs

I was able to cast Healing Touch 9 times over 60 seconds. The setup didn't involve the distraction of right-clicking slugs.

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In summary, it is always better to have unused glyphs in the drawing pool, than to have slugs. Such unwanted glyphs can be "discarded automatically" by explicitly assigning glyphs to all slots; an "Any Glyph" slot can be emulated by assigning every wanted Glyph to that slot.

As a net effect, both slugs and drawing of unwanted glyphs can be entirely avoided, at the cost of having draw-slots, where the deck-builder has to assign every single wanted glyph. Basically, all that Slugs seem to contribute is to make decks harder to build and change.

Wouldn't it then be better to automatically and instantaneously discard slugs when they are drawn, never even displaying them in the skill bar, like it is done glyphs when they are not assigned to any slot?

 

I call those "rot slots" in my begginners guide to draw deck building

https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/f.../begginers-guide-to-draw-deck-building.52341/

 

Great bug report / exploit easily fixed all they need to do is their job.

 

Thanks for the link. I don't see the advantage of having a glyph that was added only to avoid slugs and will never be cast to any slot though.

Say you need 14 Glyphs to avoid slugs, and can come up only with 12 you are actually using. At that point it would be preferable to add 2 junk-glyphs and convert every "unassigned slot" to a "multi draw slot" where all wanted glyphs are assigned -- both to sacrificing a slot for a rot slot and to keeping the slugs. Sadly, it adds annoyance (as opposed to desirable complexity) to deck building.

In such cases the change I suggested would make deck building more convinient, while leaving the resulting gameplay unaffected.

 

First off your not going to be able to convince them to auto discard Slugs, or remove the slug mechanic, peeps been asking for similar changes for 3 years and it's a very very firm no.

Secondly if you want the same effect as "auto discard" slugs.
Then just make sure all the slots are Locked or assigned to dedicated or multi-draw assignments, that will leave the "unwanted" cards have no place they can be drawn, and will consume draw turns but won't appear on the bar.
(Please note this can cause your Draws to stall if you have a bunch of these unwanted glyphs or have an unlucky streak)


As for specific Deck building suggestions, I can't give you any because your not talking about 12 particular cards, your talking about 12 unknown cards.
So I cant say if dedicated Draws or MultiDraws would be better, most likely a combination of both.

 

That was my point; Since it is possible (but cumbersome) to do this to get the same effect as auto-discarded slugs which the existing mechanic, I thought that auto-discarding slugs may be a reasonable change at this time, though I don't know previous reasons for not making such a change; maybe the mechanic was different enough before to make slugs popping up meaningful.

Right now, however, discarding them manually seems like a pointless inconvenience that will never happen in real-world decks at the cost of encumbering the deck-building process. At best they signal "you did something wrong" to new players, but that could be achieved without encumbering deck-building (e.g. by a warning when clicking "done" on an incomplete deck).