All We Are Saying Is Give War A Chance

My friends, Godtear is a lot of things. It’s a game for thinking people. It attracts friendly and kind people. It inspires creativity and community and joy. It’s many things, but it is Not. Fucking. Soft. Even Lilly. That fairy lady’s trees will devastate your whole family if they roll your exact dodge value. Even Finvarr - that lithe little elf bastard will Katana your ass into next week if he’s standing on a hex. Nia? My girl will blight your shit and then make you eat it.

There is a clear and fundamentally important play style dichotomy built into the core rules of Godtear. You can score in 4 ways:

1. Planting a banner

2. Having a banner up in the end phase 

3. KOing a follower 

4. KOing a champion 

Of course, two of these have to do with banners and two have to do with KOs. That’s how you score. That’s how you win. Every other aspect of the game is just about enabling or denying banners and/or KOs. So, combat and banners emerge as two clear and distinct play styles for champions. By design, these correlate strongly to champion classes. That's high-level and we could get more accurate by complicating the point, but the point stands.

Halftusk has trouble being vulnerable.

The best day of Godtear I ever had was at Adepticon. Some gamer dude brought his tween daughter and the two of them just had the best time. I won my pick of champion boxes as a prize and, since I already owned all the boxes, I let the kid have my free champion box. “Which one do you want?” I asked. “I want one of the RED ones,” she answered, “they KILL PEOPLE.” Damn right, little sister. Hell yeah fuck yeah.

By the way, if you’re some kind of banner snob who thinks combat is crass or psychologically unhealthy, I suggest you take a look in the mirror. What’s this fascistic need to eliminate randomness and dominate space? What emotional banners are you pushing the people in your life away from? At least Rangosh wants to interact with people up close. 

For me, Godtear is at its best when there’s a mix of both playstyles at once.

The combat game is primally satisfying, but it’s also for thoughtful gamers. Dice-rolling tests your risk-management skills, and knowing when to go for a KO tests a player’s grasp of the 5-round big picture and their ability to leverage tempo and opponent psychology. Godtear is special because you get to blend that with the spatial logic of the banner game. It’s Poker and Chess at the same time. This is very cool.

Sadly, I think the game has drifted too far away from throwin’ dice and kickin’ ass. Durthax, Jaak, and Construction have tilted the game firmly towards puzzle-town. All banners and no blood makes Jaak a dull boy.

Puzzle Town is like Flavor Town but with less cholesterol and more puzzles.

Let’s support my wild assertions with some data. So here's the question I'm asking: isthe balance of the game tilted towards banner play? Notice that this is not about any particular champion but about the overall dynamic. It's a big-picture kind of question. A meta question, if you will.

Longshanks is the best source of data we have. In analyzing the current competitive balance meta, do we care about all of the games logged on Longshanks? No. 

Durthax was released in September 2024, shortly after Jamie Perkins told the Objective Hex that Construction would be an official organized play scenario. Games that happened before this are not relevant here unless you think these changes did not significantly affect competitive balance (they did). So we only care about games from September 2024 on for the purposes of this question.

I think we also only care about rated tournament games because we are considering competitive balance. We should also exclude LPD because, although it is the best way to play Godtear, it will also skew our stats because champions are picked into a one-off meta which doesn’t really represent the entire range of possible matchups and scenarios. Indeed, the whole aim of LPD is to get out of a set meta, so generally it will tend not to be indicative of the overall play-style balance.

Filtering for rated SFG4 tournament games since September 2024 gives us a sample size of exactly 100 games. That is probably too small a sample to say anything definitive about the exact power level of every single champion. Some champions simply do not have enough games logged to support strong conclusions. But I do think it is enough data to say something directional about broader class trends and play-style balance, especially when the same patterns keep showing up repeatedly near the top and bottom of the rankings.

The top 10

Here are the top 10 champions by winning percentage within our parameters:

Notice anything? Wow. All the Guardians except poor Halftusk and Helena made the cut. Half of the top 10 are Guardians. Some of these sample sizes are small, sorry, but it’s what I’ve got.

Now, to be clear: this is not definitive proof that Guardians are overpowered as a class. Small sample sizes, player preference effects, and a few standout champions can all distort a meta. Still, the concentration here is striking. Guardians make up roughly a quarter of the total champion roster, but account for half of the current top 10 by win rate. Even when you tighten the cutoff to the top 8 champions, Guardians still occupy 4 of those spots. That is at least suggestive of a real play-style imbalance in the current competitive environment.

More importantly, though, I think the data points toward something deeper than “Guardians good.” Guardians do not just appear to have one or two broken standouts carrying the class. They appear to have a deep bench of broadly effective champions. Meanwhile, other classes increasingly seem to rely on a small number of outliers to stay competitive at all.

Yeah, Kailinn is still off the hook. There are a couple of reds near the top. Overall, though, the top of the current competitive SFG4 meta is as blue-blooded as a Connecticut croquet match. Raith’s presence only underlines the current dominance of banner play.

The Bottom 10

The bottom 10? Glad you asked.

Poor Nia and Shayle don’t get played. I assume this is because Nia is just a bit limited and because Kailinn exists to massacre Shayle. Morrigan also doesn’t really get played because of course. Helena is getting crowded out by better Guardians. But who is out here really taking a lot of actual Ls? Peet is. People are picking Peet with hope in their hearts and getting positively crushed. Peet basically has Raith’s win/loss record in reverse. Lorsann and Rattlebone are posting a fair amount of games and taking roughly two losses for every win. And Fenra, woof, the highest L count belongs to her. She has 28 losses in this meta. Big bad Kailinn only has 18 wins, for context.

One of the rising tides that lifts all guardian boats is certainly Construction. In the old packet, we had one scenarios which clearly favored banner play (Knowledge), one which clearly favored combat (Death) and four that were more or less agnostic (Life, Change, Chaos, Quest). With Quest out and Construction in, there is a hard preference for banners in two of the scenarios and a disadvantage to a banner-focused list in only one. The overall organized play landscape tilts toward banners. 

A Potential Problem

This gets us to the thing I’m actually worried (and sligtly confrontational) about.

If the current balance philosophy is simply “pull every outlier champion back toward the middle,” I think that could accidentally make the overall class balance worse. The top 10 we just looked at suggests Guardians have a lot of strong, viable options spread across the class, while Slayers and Maelstroms often seem to depend on a few exceptional champions to keep pace. If those standout reds and yellows get flattened toward the average while the already-deep Guardian roster remains broadly solid, the aggregate meta could tilt even further toward banners. This is especially true given the organized play document’s official scenarios.

It’s a very nonviolent society out there on the hexes. Everyone seems to be getting along, and for my money, that sucks.

So what to do?

Fortunately there is a community balance pass underway. I am not part of the ahem Council of Eldritch Judgement, which is the 3-person steering committee for this undertaking. I’m just someone who wants to enjoy Godtear. Here in the cheap seats, all I can do is appeal to the CEJ.

Their stated goal is to move outlier champions back towards the middle. I think that is fine as far as it goes, but balance should also consider class identity and overall play-style ecology, not just isolated champion win rates. Losing the meta forest for the champion trees could genuinely undermine Godtear, and nobody is trying to do that.

Here is my appeal:

1. Boost more Slayers. It seems reasonable to nerf Rangosh and  Skullbreaker a bit (maybe not as much as has been proposed), but the real problem with Slayers is that the class is thin. I think we should consider buffing several of them. The Morrigan changes are a decent start, but can we do something for my girl Lorsann? My boy Peet is only rolling 5 damage dice, fam. Can someone see about that? Can Maxen be a real ranged attacker?

2. Help the Maelstroms out as well. Grimgut and Titus are in rough shape. I think Fenra is pretty good, but she’s in a lot of matchups she probably shouldn’t be because the low-end Maelstroms are so stinky. Let my Samurai queen mean Jeen finally roll some actual dice.

3. Hammer Durthax and Jaak. Plunder their riches and give them to the needy.