Broken swings

Even though regular work on my game FMB ended years ago, every so often I have occasion to revisit it and look at my work with fresh eyes.  Recently I made some changes to get rid of a particular strategy that was both a little too good and also not terribly interesting.  The key card I had to deal with was

Demonic Rune 
Cost:  2
Every attack you make this turn gets a +2 bonus.

Simple enough effect, and really powerful.  Attacks are resolved by generating a random number from -2 to +3, and with only 6 possible results a +2 bonus is enormous.  On a normal turn you get to make 4-5 attacks, which gives you a total +8 to +10 bonus.  A 2 cost card should give you about +9, so this is totally fair and reasonable. 

The problem is that many other cards grant extra attacks.  For example, the two below.

Berserk
Cost:  0
One of your units makes an additional attack this turn.

Chain Lightning
Cost:  2
Make a Strength 2 attack against 3 different units.

Both cards are perfectly fine and fair on their own, but if you save up cards and bust out these two in combination with Demonic Rune then you have a *huge* swing turn.  I don't mind swing turns, in fact letting people set those up is a big part of the fun, but this swing turn has some problems.  First, it is way too big.  It can easily kill 80% of the opponent's army in a single turn.  Second, there isn't anything an opponent can do to stop you, or to play around it.  You save up a pile of cards, and on any given you turn you can just blow up their entire army.  Lastly, it doesn't interact in cool ways with the board or unit positioning.  If you get to do something really powerful, it should depend a lot on board state and previous choices.  Unfortunately, this works the same way every time.

Berserk and Chain Lightning are good, no alterations needed there.  It is Demonic Rune and its global buff that needs to go.  I figured I should try to make the card interact with the particular way I set up the game's components, and I came up with an idea.  Those random numbers generated to resolve attacks range from -2 to +3, so the game has a deck of 24 cards for each player with 4 copies of each result in it.  You 'roll' a result by drawing a card, and reshuffle the deck when it runs out.  This setup keeps individual rolls random, but this makes sure you don't just roll a bunch of low numbers and lose.  The new version of Demonic Rune uses this.

Demonic Rune
Cost:  2
Shuffle up to 4 cards from your discard pile back into your attack roll deck.

The idea here is that you can always just use this card to get a bunch of +3s in your deck if you want.  However, you can also wait until your deck is completely empty and then stack it full of +3 results.  This way you can know for certain that you hit on 4 consecutive attacks, which can be really useful just for planning, and interacts in powerful ways with certain other effects.

Hopefully this change makes the way people use cards feel better.  I like the huge variety in the deck, and I didn't enjoy how much the game revolved around just getting as many attacks as possible in a single turn and blowing everything up.  There are so many cards that tinker with positioning, speed, and unit capabilities that it was kind of sad to watch them all fall by the wayside in pursuit of pure murder.