Punintended Consequences

if orfevre gains aura, it's a rock song (legend changer, ms. victoria, winning the soul, etc.)

"Are you stupid? My forever stew is hot! It's soup. How is going to imbalance my humors?"

Then a week later I'll be like

You heard her

that being said, I just don't think it's good design.

In that context it makes sense:

1. Since it’s a multiplayer game, with turn order, in general you want to decrease first turn advantage, and first turn advantage tends to compound when you start off with baseline better decks. The entire nature of deckbuilding RPGs is that you, the player is asymmetric so this makes less sense. 2. It becomes easier to teach and pick up, because the base deck will be filled with pretty easy to understand cards and interactions. This is great where you have a game night where someone might be playing this for the first time, but not so much for an RPG you are going to spend many multiple hours on.

3. The games are often built around removing cards from the deck as a vector of deck improvement, and removing that vector would mean that cards either need to be more complicated or the game itself would be too flat. Obviously when implementing a video game card complexity can go up since it’s a program, not a person executing it. 

4. Having deck removal be a thing means that you can potentially have games where deck removal is NOT a thing, so you can have both games where the player builds up very quickly to very powerful decks, or games where the pacing slows down and you have to consider optimizing your deck in other ways. On the other hand, single player deck builders, the game experience that feels most directly awesome is of course when your deck is awesome.

I don’t know which specific RPG you’re talking about, but I have a lot of Slay the Spire playtime so I’ll just talk about that. And there, I think the bad starter deck is exactly what leads to very varied play experiences.

High ascension play with everyone but the watcher involves lots of thinking on how to trade off short term gain vs longer term success since they start out “behind” the power curve, which means you end up playing completely different decks on different runs. For watcher, the strength of the starter deck means you can hold out until you get exactly the deck you want and the game ends up just being the waiting room for “make a rushdown infinite”. Even if that turns out NOT to be optimal play, the period of time where you play just the starter deck can be significantly longer as you don’t need to pick up any card NOW in order to survive the next three fights, which means 20 different runs of act 1 can start to blend together more.