Amazing mod so far, already at ascension 4. My one gripe so far is that the power that makes your cards cost no gold is extremely powerful with the cards that give you relics. I know that synergies are important to sts, but I'm not too big on "hyper synergies" that completely undo the negative effects of powerful cards. Making them more expensive wouldn't really fix that issue (or kill them outright), so it would probably be better to add some additional negative effect to them, like a base, unavoidable gold cost on top of the original or giving you tons of robbery, making you lose gold with each hit. Or maybe the power needs a slight rebalance, making it so it only reduces the cost of gold by some amount (50%? 100g?) so you still have the synergy, but it's no longer an instant win button. Take this with a grain of salt since I'm still kind of new to the character, but I figured you would like to hear my take. Open to critique.

Thanks for your input!
I always like to hear what other people think (a lot of rebalancing in my last mod came from players making suggestions), though I don't always strictly go with what is suggested. :)

I see your point; since grab Bag and Heavenly Excavator exhaust anyway, that is no downside; and not having to pay 150 Gold is much more powerful than not having to pay 10 Gold.

If I am going to make a difference to how this interaction works, it would probably be on the two relic granting cards; something like "Is removed from the deck if played for free", though I feel that is a bit too drastic. Maybe increase the energy cost if the Gold cost is free instead.

For now, I will leave it as is and wait to see if any other suggestions are made, to make a bigger rebalance update (you never know what becomes stronger or weaker passively by another card being altered.)

Still unlocking and exploring the characters but that's definitely the thing that sticks out to me the most so far, Poverty God Form is feeling surprisingly overpowered.

Spending 3 energy on your first turn is definitely a hard pill to swallow, but once you find a way to do it, it kind of breaks all the other mechanics of the class way too easily. Most fights will end long before you suffer from the exhaust drawback, and its Ethereal effect turns out to be a positive in fights where you *don't* want it. Feel like I'm almost cheating with the ridiculous amounts of gold you can gain on your way to a boss.

Really not sure what should be done about it exactly, but it's definitely worrying how easily it nullifies other mechanics. Too many upsides compared to something similar like Kokoro's emotion locking power up.

Also echo the same thing with Grab Bag and Heavenly Excavator, though I think a good change would be to make them **ignore** Poverty God Form. It wouldn't immediately change things now with how easily you can gain gold anyway, but think it'd have better interaction with other changes.


EDIT: whoops, thanks to steam's ancient and unmaintenanced code, haven't actually been playing with the update from a week ago. Still mostly stand by all it though, even with the energy cost increase you can still just turtle/sacrifice a bit during trash mob fights for an ungodly amount of long term reward.

I'll be honest, Poverty God Form is the card I had the most trouble with trying to find a good balance with.
I guess that's the price of when you want to have a theme for a card (Poverty) and try to build an effect around it. xD;
At one point, the card made you lose all money (in later iterations you lost small amounts of money each turn), due to which cards becoming free of Gold cost was a necessary part of the card. But because of how unfun having no money is in a character centered around gaining it, that part was dropped, but cards being free remained. It may have made the card too powerful in return, huh. ^^;
I'll see if I can come up with some alternate ideas for the Poverty theme (that aren't yet handled in cards like Super Poverty Bomb and World of Destitution). Maybe something like "instead of gaining Gold, do X instead"

Regarding Grab Bag and Heavenly Excavator, I wonder if I should have them remove themselves from he deck after a few uses; even with the money you need to spend, you being able to activate them e.g. 3 times would still be a worthwhile addition to the deck, and you cannot gain all the relics without going to a shop (though once you get Courier, depending on your build, you may still get all the relics. As long as this is not as easy to do anymore, I'm fine with it, though)
I'll play around this thought for a bit.

Just from looking at the cards and getting a feel for how they interact, I think one problem Joon has is having too many different mechanics. There are times where it is difficult to really know how cards are going to interact and what cards actually work well together because of how many different things you need to keep track of. This is especially difficult with some of the more complicated mechanics such as Misfortune, Misfortune (Z), Misfortune (X), and Posession (X).

The solution? Do what the base game does and stick to 2 simplified mechanics for the character.
Take for example the Iornclad: his 2 mechanics are Strength and Exhaust, both of which are simple enough in their own rights. The rest of his cards don't add any new game mechanics, but instead build on either the 2 that he uses or other universal mechanics (statuses, self damage/healing, block). It keeps the player from having to memorize 10 different unique mechanics and their synergies for each character because most of them are shared between all characters.

Think of it this way: if another character happens to get these cards, they shouldn't need to drastically alter how they play just to be able to use Joon's cards in the first place. (Most of) Joon's cards should ideally be able to synergize with other characters without them needing to exclusively play like, well, Joon.
As an example; if you happen to get Joon's cards on another character it's likely you won't be able to even use them due to how most of them require Gold to play, which is much harder for other characters to justify spending because they can't gain gold as easily as Joon can.

For this mod, I think the 2 mechanics you probably should stick with are Possession and Plauge. Both of them are interesting conceptually and can synergize with other characters that utilize/apply debuffs. Possession and Plauge are also fairly unique while also building upon universal mechanics, which is perfect as it means the player doesn't need to memorize 5 more unique mechanics just to either of them work.

As for their implementation:
--- Posession can stay mostly the same by applying 1 random debuff to the applied enemy per stack of possession, but I would reccomend removing the "Posession (X)" part of this mechanic due to it making Posession a bit too complicated. I would also (maybe) remove the restriction of only being able to apply Posession to 1 enemy at a time.
--- Plauge I think is good as is (damaging enemies per debuff stack on them), but to supplement the removal of other mechanics more cards would need to be able to apply it, and applying it would need to be MUCH easier (remove the requirements for applying it). However, the average damage of Joon's attacks would probably need to be lowered to balance out the increase in damage the enemy takes from Plauge too keep this character from being busted.

As for the other mechanics:
--- Misfortune unfortunately does not synergize with practically anything, and Misfortune (Z)/Misfortune (X) are in the same boat but even more needlessly complicated.
--- Needing to pay Gold for cards - while admittedly a neat concept - does not work well with anything else for the reasons stated prior. However, I would still like to see Joon retain the ability to gain gold through her cards, albeit not as much to balance out the removal of paying gold for her cards.
--- Trash is just exhaust + scry. It is admittedly a good mechanic that does work with other characters, but I think Possesion/Plauge are more interesting gameplay-wise and better represent Joon/Shion as characters. So for the sake of reducing the number of unique mechanics, Trash probably has to go.
--- Posession (X) I also talked about earlier. It just serves to make Posession more complicated than it needs to be.

Overall I think this mod has a lot of potential, but it suffers from trying to do too many things at once and not working well with anything outside of it which makes it hard to play at times due to the specificity of its interactions.

As someone who's played StS for years and this mod off and on as much as I could the past few weeks, the last comment is just baffling.

Aside from clearly not understanding the mechanics from their brief skim that lasted all of 5 minutes (All the Misfortunes are the same effect, X is just the reward for hitting the cap, """Misfortune Z""" literally doesn't exist, but I'm assuming you're mistaking the typos that mention Possession Z), I can't believe someone's advocating for "make it less complicated!!!" in a workshop of thousands of mods.

Everything that's been done has been done twice. There's no simple armchair answer to making a unique character now. Not every mod should be designed for a brand new 2 hour player in mind, especially when the veterans need new complexity just to feel ANYTHING from this old game. If it's complicated to you, sometimes the solution might be spending more time with it (the entire appeal of a deck building game).



All that aside, the more I play the Yorigamis the more I feel like basing the majority of their mechanics off a non-combat vanilla mechanic like Gold is going to make true balance impossible. Which is totally definitely not a bad thing!! But a lot of the balance issues I come across are just interactions with other mods that are going to be unavoidable. Farming enough relics with Excavator and Grab Bag while powered by Poverty God Form just turns Queen of Bubble into turn 1 wins, but those are known issues. Definitely starting to agree with the idea of making them remove from deck the more I play, though.


But that's just complaining about the overpowered stuff, the more I move into trying other cards the more I start to really appreciate the balance between everything else. So far I've only struggled with getting Trashed to excel as much as the other mechanics, but its hard to balance a card draw-oriented mechanic without breaking everything. It's pretty hard to invest fully into a Trash deck when you might run into a situtation where you have 3-4 cards you don't want to exhaust, rendering all Trash cards in your hand kind of useless. But considering 100th Black Market is a 0 cost Power and Jo'on has access to tons of card generation, I definitely see it better as a supporting secondary mechanic. Buffing it at all would turn it into something like the Toyosatomimi mod that can just draw the perfect hand every single turn and ruin any difficulty.

I've also been trying to use Shielding a lot more, which is *way* more powerful than I realized because Temp Health is such an underutilized mechanic. The only problem I've had with it so far is that it feels kind of polarizing on wheither you get Possession Stripping or not. Using shielding at all makes it way too hard to utilize Shion's possession mechanics, which makes *any* shielding card a tough pill to swallow when you're unsure of the future of your deck. Possession Stripping solves it in such a powerful way that it renders all other Shielding cards nearly redudant. My only suggestion would be to allow *every* shielding card interact with Possession cards in some way, obviously not as strongly as Possession Stripping, but the current binary state is a bit too extreme feeling.

Originally posted by VMLowell:

As someone who's played StS for years and this mod off and on as much as I could the past few weeks, the last comment is just baffling.

Aside from clearly not understanding the mechanics from their brief skim that lasted all of 5 minutes (All the Misfortunes are the same effect, X is just the reward for hitting the cap, """Misfortune Z""" literally doesn't exist, but I'm assuming you're mistaking the typos that mention Possession Z), I can't believe someone's advocating for "make it less complicated!!!" in a workshop of thousands of mods.

Everything that's been done has been done twice. There's no simple armchair answer to making a unique character now. Not every mod should be designed for a brand new 2 hour player in mind, especially when the veterans need new complexity just to feel ANYTHING from this old game. If it's complicated to you, sometimes the solution might be spending more time with it (the entire appeal of a deck building game).



All that aside, the more I play the Yorigamis the more I feel like basing the majority of their mechanics off a non-combat vanilla mechanic like Gold is going to make true balance impossible. Which is totally definitely not a bad thing!! But a lot of the balance issues I come across are just interactions with other mods that are going to be unavoidable. Farming enough relics with Excavator and Grab Bag while powered by Poverty God Form just turns Queen of Bubble into turn 1 wins, but those are known issues. Definitely starting to agree with the idea of making them remove from deck the more I play, though.


But that's just complaining about the overpowered stuff, the more I move into trying other cards the more I start to really appreciate the balance between everything else. So far I've only struggled with getting Trashed to excel as much as the other mechanics, but its hard to balance a card draw-oriented mechanic without breaking everything. It's pretty hard to invest fully into a Trash deck when you might run into a situtation where you have 3-4 cards you don't want to exhaust, rendering all Trash cards in your hand kind of useless. But considering 100th Black Market is a 0 cost Power and Jo'on has access to tons of card generation, I definitely see it better as a supporting secondary mechanic. Buffing it at all would turn it into something like the Toyosatomimi mod that can just draw the perfect hand every single turn and ruin any difficulty.

I've also been trying to use Shielding a lot more, which is *way* more powerful than I realized because Temp Health is such an underutilized mechanic. The only problem I've had with it so far is that it feels kind of polarizing on wheither you get Possession Stripping or not. Using shielding at all makes it way too hard to utilize Shion's possession mechanics, which makes *any* shielding card a tough pill to swallow when you're unsure of the future of your deck. Possession Stripping solves it in such a powerful way that it renders all other Shielding cards nearly redudant. My only suggestion would be to allow *every* shielding card interact with Possession cards in some way, obviously not as strongly as Possession Stripping, but the current binary state is a bit too extreme feeling.

Fair enough. Maybe I just need to go back and re-learn synergies and whatnot. Either way, your comment makes me think I might be missing something.

As for the "Misfortune (Z)" thing, you're right. It doesn't exist. I was thinking about "Posession (Z)". Sometimes I get which of the two has the whole (Z) thing mixed up.

@NEOSPACE

For Misfortune/ Misfortune [X] and Possession/ Possession (X) / Possession (Z), I need to get better at explaining.
Misfortune/ Misfortune [X] is a singular keyword, with the "[X]" portion being an add-on. Technically speaking, there is no Misfortune without the [X] part, but I suppose I could have done a better job with the tool tips.

As for the Possessions, same thing, they are all the same key word, but the value in the parentheses indicating how many stacks you need for the ability to trigger, with (X) being a special version that works per stack and alongside ChemX.
Again, I take the blame for presenting things in an overly complex manner. I had the choice of over-simplifying things and leaving out information in order to make it easier to read, or to go all out with explaining everything for first time players at more difficulty to understand everything. Since with my last mod, I didn't explain enough, I went the full explanation route. That said, still, I should have done a better job at explaining it seems.


However, like VMLowell said, just sticking with 2 mechanics/ relying on universal mechanics is almost impossible for a mod if you don't want your mod to get lost in a sea of similar mods.
Also, not sure if I would consider self harm and statuses as universal, considering that these are unique to Ironclad... well, I guess the Defect has Turbo and Overclock, which shuffle statuses into the deck. But the Defect has no other synergies with statuses, so I would not want to consider those, as otherwise, I could just as easily describe Misfortune as just "Self inflicted status but given a keyword" (well, it does a tiny bit more, but I probably should have removed Misfortune Storage before going live, as its synergies were scrapped during development).
I can see where you are coming from, though. Too many keywords can easily scare a newcomer off, which is why I tried to go easy with them on the starting cards. Still, just having less to begin with would also solve that problem. xD;


The problem you are facing when you make a class as a reference to existing characters is that you want to recreate their mechanics and/ or their lore from the original work, for better or for worse.
As such, money was the starting point for this mod, and it would never not be money.
Possession was the secondary mechanic, with everything else being tertiary as references or as interesting ideas. I could have stuck with these two, but personally, Plague only exists to make Possession's passive effect more powerful. (It has developed into more of a main mechanics over time, admittedly, but like you said, I have too many main mechanics.) It is too close to Poison for me to consider it as one of the character's defining mechanic though (tbf, I don't really like to make damage over time be a main mechanic with Poison already existing, no matter the flavor).
But that's my opinion on damage over time, and a character who exclusively relied on it would probably still be really interesting.

Possession only applying to one enemy at a time is another result of trying to implement the lore of the original characters (as represented by the supporting character floating behind the possessed enemy), for better or for worse.


"Misfortune does not synergize with anything"
I'm going to be honest, but that is kind of the point. Just like with the Defect's Statuses from Overclock and Turbo, Misfortune exists to allow cards to be more powerful, and that's kind of it.
One can argue if this needs to exist when Money Spending already works like that too, and it probably does not need to exist.

As I mentioned above, Money is one of the core themes of the character, so not including it as a mechanic would be a crime. xD
And yeah, it does not synergize with other characters, but neither does Poison or anything Focus related for anyone but the character the card belongs to. Sure, those cards can still be used for the most part, unless you get unlucky and get Catalyst, but at the same time, this is the beauty of mods IMO: If the player wants to use Prismatic Shard or a class like the Snecko, which grabs a lot of cards from other classes, you can disable any mod that does not work with it. As such, mods are free to delve into areas that the base game cannot, and this is what helps mods, and the game at large, stay interesting. But that's my opinion in the matter, and as this mod's creator, I may be biased here. xD
Also, just gaining gold off of cards alone is a bit boring in my opinion. I don't really like it when cards add a permanent resource (HP, Money, Relics, Potions (although here you are at least limited by your potion belt)), as it incentivizes grinding for that resource. The only reason you can gain Money, Relics and Potions in this mod is because it is counter balanced by losing Money. Sure, you probably make some profit in the long run, but in order not to die, you cannot grind endlessly (I hope, otherwise I need to re-balance more than I thought), and that is all I wanted to achieve.


Possession (Z)... I suppose makes Possession more complicated. When I developed some cards, I ran into the problem that needing only a single stack of Possess makes the effect too powerful, and scaling the effect down would make it too weak or boring. Requiring a minimum amount was my solution for that problem.


All of this said, thanks a lot for your comment!
We may not agree, but I really appreciate reading the thoughts of other people. I hope I didn't come off as too rude when I tried to point out my thoughts, I'm not the best with wording (as seen in the tool tips :D ).

@VMLowell

"basing the majority of their mechanics off a non-combat vanilla mechanic like Gold is going to make true balance impossible"
When put like that, I feel like I cannot disagree with it. xD;
But yeah, that's the nature of permanent resources. The best the mod can do it try to limit the amount of grinding for the resources (which I hope I did fairly well, excluding Poverty God Form).

I'll try to get the next balance update out the end of this week (no promises though), which is going to limit the amount of times Heavenly Excavator and Grab Bag can be used, and completely revamps Poverty God Form. All I'll say is you won't get free cards anymore.

Regarding Trash, that was kind of the idea behind it; a supporting mechanic to get rid off bad cards you generated/ to get to the good cards for this combat quicker, while giving the dilemma of "I don't need this card right now, but it's too good to remove from this battle". (Well, that, and Joon just wasting perfectly good cards because she can buy new ones was too funny of a mental image for me to not turn it into a mechanic)
That said, having 2 One Man's Trash and then Trashing my entire deck is one of my favorite decks in lower Ascensions. Who needs cards when you have 40 Another Man's Treasure in your draw pile, and nothing else outside of a few more Trash cards to generate even more Another Man's Treasure (I think it may have been more than 40 of them, even). xD

I'll be honest, Possession Stripping used to be a card that just dealt tons of damage to an opponent based on the amount of Possess on them, and then removed Possess. But since the character already had enough finishers (and much better ones to boot), Possession Stripping turned into the card it is now.
What I want to say is, the other two cards don't interact with Possess positively is because I, one the one hand, wanted to prevent people to just pick up Possess because it was just too good (in the early play test, everyone went head first into Possession builds), and on the other hand, because I just didn't think of making more interesting positive interactions between the two mechanics once Possession builds were rebalanced.
I'll think about if I can add an additional effect to Misfortune Magnet and Invigorated Sister without breaking the balance and making Possess too powerful again.

Originally posted by NCS:

@NEOSPACE

For Misfortune/ Misfortune [X] and Possession/ Possession (X) / Possession (Z), I need to get better at explaining.
Misfortune/ Misfortune [X] is a singular keyword, with the "[X]" portion being an add-on. Technically speaking, there is no Misfortune without the [X] part, but I suppose I could have done a better job with the tool tips.

As for the Possessions, same thing, they are all the same key word, but the value in the parentheses indicating how many stacks you need for the ability to trigger, with (X) being a special version that works per stack and alongside ChemX.
Again, I take the blame for presenting things in an overly complex manner. I had the choice of over-simplifying things and leaving out information in order to make it easier to read, or to go all out with explaining everything for first time players at more difficulty to understand everything. Since with my last mod, I didn't explain enough, I went the full explanation route. That said, still, I should have done a better job at explaining it seems.


However, like VMLowell said, just sticking with 2 mechanics/ relying on universal mechanics is almost impossible for a mod if you don't want your mod to get lost in a sea of similar mods.
Also, not sure if I would consider self harm and statuses as universal, considering that these are unique to Ironclad... well, I guess the Defect has Turbo and Overclock, which shuffle statuses into the deck. But the Defect has no other synergies with statuses, so I would not want to consider those, as otherwise, I could just as easily describe Misfortune as just "Self inflicted status but given a keyword" (well, it does a tiny bit more, but I probably should have removed Misfortune Storage before going live, as its synergies were scrapped during development).
I can see where you are coming from, though. Too many keywords can easily scare a newcomer off, which is why I tried to go easy with them on the starting cards. Still, just having less to begin with would also solve that problem. xD;


The problem you are facing when you make a class as a reference to existing characters is that you want to recreate their mechanics and/ or their lore from the original work, for better or for worse.
As such, money was the starting point for this mod, and it would never not be money.
Possession was the secondary mechanic, with everything else being tertiary as references or as interesting ideas. I could have stuck with these two, but personally, Plague only exists to make Possession's passive effect more powerful. (It has developed into more of a main mechanics over time, admittedly, but like you said, I have too many main mechanics.) It is too close to Poison for me to consider it as one of the character's defining mechanic though (tbf, I don't really like to make damage over time be a main mechanic with Poison already existing, no matter the flavor).
But that's my opinion on damage over time, and a character who exclusively relied on it would probably still be really interesting.

Possession only applying to one enemy at a time is another result of trying to implement the lore of the original characters (as represented by the supporting character floating behind the possessed enemy), for better or for worse.


"Misfortune does not synergize with anything"
I'm going to be honest, but that is kind of the point. Just like with the Defect's Statuses from Overclock and Turbo, Misfortune exists to allow cards to be more powerful, and that's kind of it.
One can argue if this needs to exist when Money Spending already works like that too, and it probably does not need to exist.

As I mentioned above, Money is one of the core themes of the character, so not including it as a mechanic would be a crime. xD
And yeah, it does not synergize with other characters, but neither does Poison or anything Focus related for anyone but the character the card belongs to. Sure, those cards can still be used for the most part, unless you get unlucky and get Catalyst, but at the same time, this is the beauty of mods IMO: If the player wants to use Prismatic Shard or a class like the Snecko, which grabs a lot of cards from other classes, you can disable any mod that does not work with it. As such, mods are free to delve into areas that the base game cannot, and this is what helps mods, and the game at large, stay interesting. But that's my opinion in the matter, and as this mod's creator, I may be biased here. xD
Also, just gaining gold off of cards alone is a bit boring in my opinion. I don't really like it when cards add a permanent resource (HP, Money, Relics, Potions (although here you are at least limited by your potion belt)), as it incentivizes grinding for that resource. The only reason you can gain Money, Relics and Potions in this mod is because it is counter balanced by losing Money. Sure, you probably make some profit in the long run, but in order not to die, you cannot grind endlessly (I hope, otherwise I need to re-balance more than I thought), and that is all I wanted to achieve.


Possession (Z)... I suppose makes Possession more complicated. When I developed some cards, I ran into the problem that needing only a single stack of Possess makes the effect too powerful, and scaling the effect down would make it too weak or boring. Requiring a minimum amount was my solution for that problem.


All of this said, thanks a lot for your comment!
We may not agree, but I really appreciate reading the thoughts of other people. I hope I didn't come off as too rude when I tried to point out my thoughts, I'm not the best with wording (as seen in the tool tips :D ).

Hey, it's all fine man. As I mentioned to the other guy, maybe I just need to play some more of to get a better sense for synergies and whatnot. After seeing both your and the other person's comments, I'm starting to think that might be the case.

But as for the gold thing I can see your point. I guess I'm just thinking of things a bit differently when it comes to what might represent Joon as a character, but ultimately that decision is up to you (and it's not like centering Joon around money is innaccurate either lol).
Although I still wish there was some way to maybe condense the Possession mechanics and Misfortune mechanics into just two separate mechanics. I don't know how feasible that is without reworking some cards entirely, and I don't know how easy that would be coding-wise, but I still stand by the thought of maybe integrating the (X) and (Z) mechanics into both Possession and Misfortune. Like, I dunno, maybe instead of having a separate mechanic for checking how many stacks are on an enemy, maybe there's a way to just check the number of stacks without needing to assign a separate mechanic to it? I know the Gremlins character in Downfall does something like that with "Broken Shin", as it applies a stack of "Agony" for every 4 stacks of weak the target has without needing a separate mechanic to check for it.
Just an idea, I guess. Maybe it could help solve the problem you mentioned "Posession (Z)" was meant to solve?

But yeah, maybe the rest of my suggestions were maybe a bit too reserved in my design philosophy. I get the need to add more to a character to make it interesting, but I also get the feeling that it can still be done with 3-4 new mechanics (maybe not 2, now that I think about it) in spite of the number of mods that have come out already. Then again, that probably is just me. Given what you and the other person said, It probably is likely that it is the case.

Regardless, I still think the mod overall is really cool and I hope development of it goes well. I know it can be kinda hard to make stuff like this, and sorry that my initial suggestions were not that.... well, good lol

@NEOSPACE

True, everyone has their own ideas of what defines a character. Especially with Touhou, where most of the cast is intentionally left fairly simple/ vague since they only get one pre-boss scene and that's about it. Unless they are lucky enough to get a manga appearance or similar.

I mean, Possession (Z) is just a shorthand for "If the enemy has at least 2 Possess", and Possession (X) is a shorthand for "For each stack of Possess on the enemy (+2 with ChemX)", so while I could remove the keywords and replace it with more text on the cards, I think it is easier to parse with the keywords.
So it really isn't a different mechanic, just a different shorthand expression imo.

I agree that interesting characters can be made with few mechanics (Downfall is pretty good at showing that), but they have to be designed REALLY well if it still can to stand out of the masses (hence the almost). Aaaand I need more design practice (and discipline) for that. xD;
My biggest personal hurdle with using so few main mechanics for one of my own mods is that the most obvious ones (like Strength, Dex and Damage over Time) are already used by the base characters, so to be unique (and not just considered "Watcher but with modal cards" (hello there, previous mod of mine!)), you need to add something very unique to the game, and I wouldn't say any of my mechanics are particularly unique. ^^;

Thank you!
No worries, you don't want to know how many bad ideas I had that no one ever got to see across my two mods. :D

The Bubble Culture Boss Relic seems incredibly niche and underpowered. I feel like 9/10 times it will end your run if you obtain it. Exhausting every card is a huge downside and the Booster Pack at no cards is not enough to really offset the downside of having every card played exhaust, especially with opportunity cost of missing out on an energy relic.

I cannot disagree that there are decks where taking Bubble Culture is a bad idea, but from my own play testing, Bubble Culture tends to be very powerful when I pick it up, to the point where I never even run out of cards because everything dies beforehand.
To be fair, I only tested the relic in low Ascensions.

The Booster Packs are supposed to be a last chance in case you run out of cards and should be avoided if at all possible.

I can give the relic another (few) test run(s) and re-evaluate the power level.
I play a fairly aggressive play style in Act 1, so if this relic is an Act1 reward, I don't have to do a whole lot to make this relic worthwhile, so maybe that is why I think it is so powerful.

The issue with this relic is that it's really niche and really can only be used on a handful of decks. Sure, there are decks in which it's very powerful and honestly that's kinda my issue with relic. 95% of deck archetypes it will actually lose you your run. The last 5% (if you have an exhaust synergy deck with high cost/x cost attack cards which is basically only Ironclad or Watcher), it's an instant win. It's far too polarizing to be a boss relic in my opinion since Boss Relics shouldn't decide a run, but supplement a wide variety of decks to just keep pace with scaling. Also indeed, on high ascension the relic is worse as enemies are stronger and brute forcing isn't as viable as bosses will just tank your pure force. Also you want a smaller deck to have higher consistency, which this relic heavily discourages.

A good way to think about it, in my opinion, is... "If I get this relic as a starting relic for a starting relic swap for any character, is there always a way for me to beat the Heart with it?" And frankly, I don't think that's the case with Bubble Culture.

I really like gold as resource mechanic. However, I'm not a big fan of the fact that stalling the fights for gold generation is heavily encouraged. In some early fights where mobs have no scaling the amount of gold acquired is only limited by your patience.

Maybe that could be balanced by limiting how many times gold can be generated by a card or giving starting relics Mercury Hourglass-like effect. Or perhaps give some "you feel a terrible presence.." type of penalty for intentional stalling.