Well, that's a pretty condemning first response.
That is precisely what Hunter does.
This first statement is completely unqualified, and simply exists to be contrary to what I'm trying to analyse. I've shown some examples of characters who have hunter built-in to their cost, so exactly how are these characters stronger than if they didn't have the keyword?
Some cards seem to have been designed around a balanced implementation of Hunter in mind. Most Hunter cards feel like the keyword was tacked-on for free, and this problem only got worse as the block moved forward.
I count 41 cards with the Hunter keyword in the deckbuilder. Almost half of them are rarely played, so again, I question this premise. Minions especially have gone through a lot of strength boosts after TTT, so "tacked on for free" is difficult to identify here. How many companions have hunter boosts added for free? I count less than 10. So again, saying this applies to "most" cards seems like a huge exaggeration.
And again, bear in mind that a card like
Fleet-footed Hunter is not getting his hunter keyword for free. It's replacing Archer and any kind of good game text ability.
Thorongil would be pushed even if he wasn't base-10 strength against 90% of the minions in the game.
Yes,
Thorongil is incredibly op, but this hardly speaks for an entire concept.
Castamir of Umbar is op, but that doesn't mean we should scrap Enduring. If every ROTK minion had Enduring, would that make Enduring a bad keyword, or would it simply be an inappropriate use of it?
Hunter is the embodiment of power creep. Hunter benefits from skirmishing older characters, who automatically become weaker against Hunter characters
No, it's really not that simple. Here are some examples in more detail: High hunter characters suffer against low hunter characters (
Faramir, CoI vs
Seeking Uruk;
RiW would be preferable). Non-hunter characters suffer against high hunter characters (
PaNM vs
White Hand Butcher;
Damrod, DoG would be preferable.). Then we have the context of overwhelms: Low hunter companions suffer against low-hunter minions (
Silent Traveler vs
Chasing Uruk;
Derufin would be preferable), and high hunter companions suffer against high hunter minions (
Eager Hunter vs
Gorbag, FR; again,
RiW would be preferable). In these situations (Which are common, because minions have higher base strengths than companions), non-hunters are favoured. Then of course, we have the many neutral situations where whether one character is a hunter or not makes no difference. And defender +1 situations, where exclusive use of hunters or non-hunters is fine, but mixing hunters and non-hunters is punished. So already we have 5 or 6 different scenarios that could arise here, each favouring different sides, and that's not an exhaustive list.
Implementing a binary keyword that only keys off of not-itself is an effective strategy only at driving up sales of related product, and then of polarizing the meta so that only the newer cards can thrive.)
This statement seems to confuse intent with results. Decipher presumably never intended early cards to be op, yet some were. So even if they intended to produce op cards, that doesn't automatically mean that those cards are op (
Elladan,
Elrohir, Sauron), or that they're op in the intended way (
Aiglos, any loop card) and it's pretty clear that many cards (
Sorrow Shared,
Miruvore,
Ranger of the South) were not intended to be super op anyway. What's more, arguing whether a specific card or concept was "intended to be op" is a bit of a subjective rabbit hole.
However, the binary keyword point is the main thing that makes me wonder if the concept could've been done better, which is precisely why I'm trying to explore the full ramifications of the keyword. The trouble is, Decipher liked to keep their keywords bound to certain blocks, which is why
Menace has no Enduring, and suffers a lot because of it. However, this would seem to imply that hunter would've been dropped after Hunters block, and barely appears in Ages End. So, if they'd wanted to do power creeping in the future, they didn't need Hunter to do it. In other words, it was an idea for the cycle of cards in Hunters block, not a tool to make every character better than previous blocks. If they wanted to enforce power creep, they could do that anyway as they did with cards like
Siege Troop.
Right here is where the trouble starts, and the trouble is absolutely independent of cherry-picked "lesser" examples.
Except that it's the op cards that get cherry-picked, not the bulk of the cards. It's highly probable that they would've made those cards op anyway. Aragorn already has a strength 9 version, so nothing was stopping them bumping it up another point, as they did with
Wise Guide. You could argue they feared that this would be too obvious, but that assumes they thought their player base wasn't very smart, and cards like
Durin III,
Grimbeorn or the online only
Treebeard, Enemy of the Hand (W), seem to imply that they just didn't care.