Note: I used Google to match our deck descriptions with existing card flavor texts, and then used Google again to check whether the text was in the public domain (the fact that a verse from the Rime of the Ancient Mariner appears on the Scathe Zombies card, does obviously not preclude us from using Coleridge's work ourselves). I may have missed something in wither process, please report if I did.
For the time being, this is unfortunately a loss in quality, since the official flavor texts were obviously better than the replacement texts I thought up in a few minutes. Feel free to replace my texts with something better. This could be original work of yours, or something that's clearly in the public domain. The latter includes classical literature and poetry btw. We already have Milton, Browning, and Coleridge in the flavor texts, and we could certainly use more of that. Unfortunately I've read about 100 SciFi/Fantasy books for every book of classical poetry I even touched, so I'm in a bad position to provide such material, but perhaps someone else can.
I discussed this change with wololo beforehand, because it required changes to decks that weren't made by me.
Please review / criticize.
1. temporarily removed my "Pyromancer" and "Terravore Turmoil" decks. Both performed very badly in my AI comparison done here: http://wololo.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=736
While having low-performing decks is not a bad thing per se (actually we *need* some low-performers, as stepping stones for beginners), these two decks currently throw AI deficiencies into the face of the players (targeting problems / fetchlands), and we don't want to do that. Players should feel that they beat the low-perfoming decks because of their own improving skills, not because the AI can't play its own deck.
I'll re-add both decks after the next release, hoping that we can improve the AI until the release after that.
2. Added "Millage" and "Bad Dreams" decks by Niegen. I see that we are in "bug fixes only" mode since yesterday, but I had announced these additions to Niegen two days ago, and he liked the prospect, so I didn't want to cancel the additions.
3. Updated "Kobold Overlord" deck with two flyers, this is actually a week-old change that I just hadn't submitted so far because it was so minor.
I'll also do a general deck audit to prepare for the next release (respective task will be added to Googlecode tracker). Since we're in "bug fixes only" mode, I'll just fix some obvious mistakes - it's always tempting to do last-minute tweaks and improvements, but I wouldn't want a card or deck that was added late, and hardly tested, to cause problems after the release.
This means we can release the next version with 50 AI decks, more than double than the previous version (which had 24). :)
