Open Feedback on PV Design

To the KeyForge Design Team,

I’ve been a dedicated KeyForge player since the release of Call of the Archons. Over the past seven years, I’ve invested my time, energy, and money into supporting this game—through tournaments, casual leagues, deck analysis, and countless hours of gameplay. I’ve celebrated the brilliant game of KeyForge, especially its core identity: a game of declared intent, emergent synergy, and creative disruption. But with the release of Prophetic Visions, I feel that identity has been upended, perhaps even discarded.

Prophetic Visions introduce mechanics and power levels that, in my view, undermine the careful design principles that made KeyForge a strategic, fair, and reactive game. It’s not simply that cards are strong— many cards in previous sets were strong. What’s different here is reckless overreach: power without price, effects without interaction, and mechanics that function like sudden, arbitrary punishment.

The most glaring example of this is the Fate mechanic. Conceptually, Fate could have been a clever risk- reward feature. But in execution, it often behaves as a hidden landmine that detonates only after a player has already committed to their turn—after choosing their house and drawing cards. It’s at critical pivot points that some of the most punishing Fate effects are revealed: mass board wipes, hand disruption, random aember swings. These are not just disruptive—they're destructive to the structure of the game.

Not all Fate effects are created equal. It’s a particular subset—the ones that trigger after house selection but before card play—that are most egregious. They render house choice a trap rather than a tactic and punish players for making decisions without information they were never allowed to see. Fate, in this design, is not an interaction; it’s an ambush.

The problem is not isolated to one or two cards. In reviewing this set, I noted at least 13 cards in House Dis alone that deliver effects I would consider undertuned, overpowered, or outright game-warping. Similar patterns appear across Logos (7 cards), Shadows (6), Star Alliance (5), Saurian (4), and Untamed (4). Some cards—like Solo, Atrocity, or Greedy Reprisal—would be egregious even in a vacuum. Others, like Corpulant Collector or Stenter’s Formula, appear reasonable at a glance but combine with other effects in ways that produce oppressive tempo or denial with minimal effort.

And then there are the worst offenders—cards that so completely overstep the boundaries of what KeyForge has historically tolerated that I can only assume balance testing was absent or ignored. The most obvious example is Hoodwink. A single Shadows card, with no Alpha or Omega restrictions, that can steal an entire key’s worth of aember just for having a non-Shadows hand? In a game where hands are rarely mono-house and where this effect comes with no setup cost, Hoodwink reads like a parody of poor balance. It is, quite frankly, insulting.

Other cards like Oh, You Shouldn’t Have!, Cryptic Collapse, Cover Fire, Cosmic Recompense, and Sample 42-C further cement this expansion as one of the most aggressively anti-interactive sets I’ve ever seen. Many offer high-reward outcomes without requiring meaningful planning or sequencing. Fate is too easily triggered. Disruption is too frequently one-sided. Tempo swings are too volatile to recover from. There is no sense of pacing—only surprise and shutdown.

Where earlier sets of KeyForge succeeded by asking “What is worth enabling?”, Prophetic Visions instead feels driven by the question, “What could we possibly get away with?” It reads like design by escalation, not evolution—less a carefully crafted environment and more a showcase of unchecked ideas, stacked atop one another until nothing stable remains.

While KeyForge has always embraced randomness — from shuffled decks to procedural card draws — this has traditionally been tempered by structured decision-making, tactical sequencing, and long-term planning. Prophetic Visions, by contrast, introduces a level of chaos that actively strips players of their agency. When game-defining effects are triggered not by strategic foresight but by blind top-deck pulls, random discards, or unpredictable timing windows between house declaration and first action, the result is neither thrilling nor skillful — it’s destabilizing. Disruption used to be an art — built into key moments and earned through clever sequencing. Now, it feels like disruption has been handed to fate itself, and both players are left spinning. Randomness, when unchecked, doesn’t create excitement. It dissolves ownership of outcome.

If this letter sounds frustrated, it’s because I am. I love KeyForge. I’ve played it longer than any other game in my life. And this set has left me genuinely wondering whether the designers still care about what made this game special. If these are the types of mechanics and card designs we can expect moving forward, then I fear the soul of KeyForge has already been lost.

But I hope that’s not the case. I hope this was a miscalculation—not a new philosophy. So here is what I urge you to consider:

1. Fate effects must be face-up — Players need visibility. If an effect will blank their turn, they deserve the chance to see it coming.
2. Only active house cards should be able to be “Fated” — No more fating blank facedown cards just for value. That’s not strategy; that’s gimmickry.
3. Rebalance through trade-offs — Powerful effects demand meaningful cost: chains, hand loss, self-exaltation. When every effect is upside only, balance dies.

KeyForge has always been about asymmetry, creativity, and risk. But when risk is removed for one player and inflicted entirely on the other, there is no game left. Only spectacle. Please, for the health of the game and the loyalty of the players who still care deeply—re-examine this set. Re-examine your process. And return to the principles that made KeyForge more than just a collection of clever cards.

I want to keep loving this game. I hope you give me a reason to.

Sincerely,
BHawk, A Veteran KeyForge Player