Line #17 GameBreaker/TabletopGames


1	{{Game Breaker}}s in tabletop games.
2
3	!!Games with their own pages:
4	[[index]]
5	* ''GameBreaker/CardfightVanguard''
6	* ''GameBreaker/{{Gamebooks}}''
7	* ''GameBreaker/MagicTheGathering''
8	* ''GameBreaker/MyLittlePonyCollectibleCardGame''
9	* ''GameBreaker/YuGiOhCardGame''
10	[[/index]]
11	----
12	!! Other games
13	* The Aqueduct in ''TabletopGame/SettlersOfCatan'''': Cities & Knights'' is a potential game breaker. It allows a player to draw ''any'' resource they choose if they receive no production on a turn. If a player only has a few numbers to draw from, the Aqueduct is even ''better'', because it allows the player to take advantage of many custom draws, charging for whatever item they wish to build. Combined with a 2:1 port, a player can gun for commodities too, further increasing their advantage. This is taken up to eleven when a specific resource in the game is extremely scarce, because the player with the Aqueduct may be the only one who can get it easily.
14	* The collectible dice game ''TabletopGame/DragonDice'' has had so many game breakers in its past that a group of fans formed a company called SFR, Inc., bought the license to the game, and spent the next eight years revising the rules to impose something resembling balance. The biggest change was the removal of the "Charge" attack option, which offered the chance to inflict twice as many casualties on the defending army while suffering a similar increase in one's own losses... fairly balanced by itself, but easily broken with defensive spells such as "Open Grave", which automatically resurrected all of the affected army's dead.
15	* ''TabletopGame/VampireTheEternalStruggle'' (formerly known as ''Jyhad''), a collectible card game originally created by Wizards of the Coast (based on ''TabletopGame/VampireTheMasquerade'' by White Wolf Publishing, who later took over the IP), was remarkably well-balanced until the ''Ancient Hearts'' expansion. Along with several minor balance issues, it introduced the action card "Return to Innocence", which allowed one to essentially destroy an opponent in a single action, at the cost of losing an acting high-level vampire card. In itself, overpowered, but not necessarily game-breaking. However, combined with the "Soul Gem of Etrius" card from the Unlimited release, and certain high-level vampires such as "Etrius" vampire from the preceding ''Dark Sovereigns'' expansion, it became far more troublesome. Decks designed to take advantage of this combination were practically unbeatable until the combination was nerfed by a card text errata issued much later.
16	** Another one is Monocle of Clarity: Ask a player a yes or no question which they must answer truthfully. If the question regards a future event, the player MUST play in accordance to that answer. It may not sound too powerful until you consider multiple uses. Step one: Ask player "When I use my monocle next round, will your answer be ''yes''?" Step two: Tailor your next question according to the previous answer. "Will you let my bleeds go unblocked ''for the rest of the game?''" if he said yes, and "Will you block ''any'' of my bleeds ''for the rest of the game?''" if he said no. Your opponent is screwed.
17	** Fortunately, very few players used such the game-breaking combinations, and in group play, all other players would gang up on anyone who did. The game never developed the high-stakes tournament play of other games like Magic: the Gathering, and was balanced around extended group play, rather than high-speed one-on-one combat. Players tended to eschew high-powered combos in favour of more creative story- or theme-oriented decks.
18	* Another fine example from Wizards of the Coast: in their ''Franchise/StarWars Miniatures'' game, a Clone Wars version of Obi-Wan called General Obi-Wan Kenobi, or GOWK, was so insanely hard to damage that it was eventually banned due to dominating the tournament scene. The brokenness was compounded in that GOWK came from a starter set, meaning anyone who wanted one could buy the starter (as opposed to ripping through countless random booster packs).
19	* ''TabletopGame/DuelMasters'' had Bombazar, Dragon of Destiny, one of the few cards that warped the TCG after its introduction (as the TCG was discontinued two sets after its introduction). It was a Fire/Nature hybrid 7 mana creature with 6000 power; a speed attacker (Hast for Magic players), and a double breaker, and when it was summoned, it destroyed all other 6000 power creatures. It then skipped the opponent's next turn, but at the cost of causing its summoner to lose the duel if they hadn't won by then. As a rule, this was usually enough to finish off the opponent, particularly since Bomabazar itself could already eliminate four shields on its own. While the TCG never had a banlist, they did place Bombazar on a watch list.
20	** Soulswap is another notorious example, given that the OCG banned it and tried to make less powerful versions. It's a three-mana shield trigger that switches a creature from the battle zone with one from the mana zone that has the same cost, and since it can be used on either player, on top of allowing one to recover a card that they'd considered lost to mana, it was incredibly versatile.
21	* The ''[[TabletopGame/{{Pokemon}} Pokémon]]'' trading card game:
22	** Slowking from the Neo Genesis set had a Pokémon Power that allowed its user to flip a coin whenever the opponent played a Trainer card, and if that coin was heads, the Trainer card would return to the user's deck without affecting the game. In the Japanese version of the game, this Power could only be used while Slowking was active. When the card was translated to English, however, it was translated incorrectly. The English version of the card not only allowed its owner to use the Power while Slowking was benched, but the power was cumulative, meaning players could flip a coin for each Slowking they had in play every time their opponent played a Trainer card, and if even one were heads, that card would have no effect. While the Japanese version of the card was barely playable (Slowking was not a good attacker, and was easily KO'ed when active), the English version was exceedingly powerful because a player could place one or more Slowking on the bench, prevent the opponent from playing any Trainer cards, and still play a stronger Pokémon as the active Pokémon, which basically shut down the opponent's deck forever.
23	** Sneasel from the Neo Genesis set was simply banned because it was too powerful offensively; by the second turn of the game, its Beat Up attack allowed the user to flip up to six coins (one for each benched Pokémon and one for Sneasel), netting 20 damage per heads, and + 20 more damage due to the two Darkness energies that were on Sneasel in order to use the attack. Along with broken trainers like Computer Search and Professor Oak, this was easy to accomplish, and from the second turn on it was easy to AVERAGE 80 damage per turn; considering the maximum HP for any Pokémon was 120 at the time (and 120 was a rare trait, the average for a fully evolved Pokémon was about 80-90), it's easy to see why this was banned; you simply didn't win if you didn't play your own Sneasel deck. Sneasel has actually been reprinted in a recent set, but it seems that this is really a matter of the rest of the game catching up to it. It's virtually identical to its old version (resistance is now Psychic -20 instead and it has a Fighting x2 weakness), and still a great card, but at 60 HP it's a bit fragile, and there are a number of not-especially-rare cards in the game with more than 120 HP.
24	** Of interesting note is that, while those two cards were not banned in Japan (Slowking wasn't for reasons already stated), the Base Set trainer card Super Energy Removal was banned due to its brokenness. During the time before the first Modified format when it was finally rotated out in the rest of the world, Super Energy Removal was a staple in essentially every single deck and could easily change the flow of an entire game in an instant.
25	** Lysandre's Trump Card from the Phantom Forces set allows all the player to shuffle all cards in their discard pile into their deck, it is one of the very few cards to be banned as it basically allows the player to quickly draw through their deck without any negative effects and increases the length of battles significantly.
26	** One of the most broken strategies possible is to use two cards in tandem: Darkrai Lv. X and a certain Shiftry. Darkrai had one attack that made the strategy work, which put the defending Pokémon to sleep. However, unlike normal sleep, there were two coins flipped, and if both were tails, the Pokémon fainted (both had to be heads for the Pokémon to wake up.). Shiftry's Poke body made it so that all coins flipped were treated as tails.
27	* ''1000 Blank White Cards'' is entirely made out of cards created by the players. As such, anyone can make potential game breakers. Finding game-breaking combinations of cards is how the game is usually won. In most games, some cards with ridiculously powerful (or boring) effects are banned:
28	** Cards that allow an instant win.
29	*** Conversely, cards that allow an instant loss for someone else. Or everyone else. In which case there really isn't any difference.
30	** Cards that give massive numbers of points are occasionally banned, but it isn't very common. This may manifest as a built-in rule to ban cards of a value greater than 1000 or smaller than -1000.
31	*** To be fair, this is more a failure of imagination than anything else. As a wise man once said, "sure, you can make a card that gives you a million points, but how long will it be before someone makes a card that forces you to ''eat'' it?
32	** Cards that target a specific, named player. Let's say that there are three players, Person 1, Person 2, and Piggy. Any player could make a card that says "the person to your left gets 350 points", but no card could say "Piggy gets 350 points".
33	** Cards that cause lengthy delays or postpone the game are commonly banned, too.
34	* The ''Three-Dragon Ante'' supplemental card game for Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 edition had some pretty nasty cards on its own, meant to suck the stakes and your fellow players dry when it comes to gold coinage. The new Emperor's Gambit edition, meant for D&D 4 can be used in conjunction with the original, essentially meant to suck your opponents dry in just a few rounds. Then again, they can do the same to you, but if you are dealt a few unlucky hands...
35	* ''TabletopGame/{{Agricola}}'' has its share of cards popularly seen as broken. Chief offender is the Taster, which you can use to go first in a round any time you feel like it. In a WorkerPlacementGame, that's essentially an auto-win for a decent player.
36	** The Wet Nurse lets the person who plays it get extra workers faster and more easily than everyone else. Every time someone plays it, they've virtually won. Even relatively new players playing with experienced ones.
37	* The lack of balance in early sets of ''TabletopGame/LegendOfTheFiveRings'' is kind of understandable; the development of card games was in its infancy, and designers on the whole didn't really have a handle on the whole "balance" thing. Free "corrupt" gold that accelerated your production to a ludicrous degree if you were lucky enough to get a bunch of it on early turns, an event (Iris Festival) that destroyed every single Shadowlands card in play when Shadowlands was one of the playable factions, a 0-cost action (Breach of Etiquette) that, when played on a Lion clan player on the first turn, resulted in them being totally unable to buy any personality in their deck... these were all merely symptoms of the times. By the time Lotus Edition rolled around, there was no excuse. Lotus Edition was an entire arc of GameBreaker against GameBreaker: no-risk duel decks that constantly refilled their hands and collected rewards as they sliced your guys down vs. pirate decks that created ludicrous amounts of gold by "raiding" even though they could play any one of their very powerful personalities as a follower for a paltry 3 gold vs. Khol Wall, which became synonymous with "cheese" vs. Ratling decks with exponentially-growing horde armies vs. ninjas with confusing mechanics that never actually worked right, and effects that killed personalities near-unconditionally were cheap and numerous... every game was a test of "Whose ludicrous tech goes off first?" It reached its nadir with the "Test of Enlightenment" set, where many of the personalities included had abilities that might as well have read "Battle: Kill, like, five guys. Don't even bow to do it." Some players liked the high-stakes play with single cards deciding matches; others wanted a more tactical game, and for them it was a major selling point that the next block, Samurai Edition, was going to be much weaker than Lotus.
38	** A later game from the same manufacturers, ''TabletopGame/LegendOfTheBurningSands'', was completely broken out of the box; this was eventually explained by the fact that it included a bunch of cards copied from ''TabletopGame/LegendOfTheFiveRings'' without paying attention to how they worked in the new system. The huge breaker? Blacksmith, a card that gave a +2 strength to any character. In Five Rings, where fights were determined by comparing the total Strength on each side, this was a reasonable advantage; but in Burning Sands, where a unit with higher strength was immune from any unit with lower Strength, it was utterly overwhelming and the game boiled down to rushing out djinni armed with swords as quickly as possible. The game died shortly afterwards.
39	* [[TabletopGame/IronKingdoms Warmachine/Hordes]] is generally considered a fairly balanced game. However, most armies in the Mark II edition had at least one example of a Warcaster or Warlock who handily broke the game.
40	** Cygnar brings us the game's most famous example. Epic Victoria Haley. A caster who offers such ridiculous amounts of board control that it's not uncommon to walk away feeling like your opponent is just playing alone while you watch. She has everything from damaging spells that reduce Spd (which stops charges and slams), she can move enemy models into vulnerable positions, she offers one of the best defensive spells against ranged attacks, and just for kicks she can copy any spells cast in her rather immense control range. Just to top it all off, her Feat makes her dominate the board like nobody else. Every enemy model caught in her control range loses either its movement or action AND she gets to decide the order you activate models. A veteran player will know how make you activate your units in such a perfect way that you will feel lucky to be able to attack anything for your entire turn.
41	** Saeryn of the Legion of Everblight has a feat that keeps every warbeast in her battlegroup from being targeted by melee attacks for one round. Which by itself just sounds incredibly powerful, but it really becomes ridiculous in the details. It effectively means that warbeasts are also immune to free-strikes which are all melee. The Legions specialization in fast, often flying, warbeasts means that they are completely free to position themselves INSIDE enemy ranks without issue. Which synergizes perfectly with one of her spells which creates a large AreaOfEffect around a friendly Warbeast which Auto-hits any enemies caught inside.
42	** Epic Lylyth (Shadow of Everblight) is rather infamous for absolutely crushing new players. In any army that largely ignores stealth, she provides Snipe to everything in her battlegroup, and a free additional shot. Combined with Ravagors which have a powerful, already long-ranged attack which leaves a damaging [=AoE=] and continuous fire effects and Bolt Throwers which push targets back. Lylyth's strategy is to completely shred the opponent from across the board while completely ignoring many forms of defense against ranged combat.
43	** It has been nerfed, but the Pirate Queen Skarre was also well known for a technique called 'Skarre Bombing'. Her ability Sacrificial Strike gives her a 10-inch auto-hit attack based on the Armor of a single friendly model that she sacrifices, with her feat also buffing friendly armor by up to 5 (post-nerf it only accounts for base armor), it was easy to end up with an unmissable pow 21 shot. This is a game where a common mantra for players is that even a luck handcannon shot (pow 12) can handily end a game. A pow 21 would devastate all but the hardiest warcasters, if not leave them in a borderline crippled state and easy to finish off.
44	*** Outside the realm of Warcasters and Warlocks we have some units and models that are considered quite gamebreaking. For a long time the innocuous Bile Thralls of the Cryx army were absolutely devastating to any unit heavy armies. On paper they seem balanced enough. Cheap, slow, weak, armed only with a pitiful ranged weapon that they are absolutely abysmal at aiming with, their statline is awful beyond awful. However, they possess a large suicide attack that auto-hits anything caught for fairly hefty damage. Getting an entire unit across the board is almost impossible, but one or two should be easy enough, and that's all you need to completely obliterate lower armor units.
45	* The ''TabletopGame/StarWarsCustomizableCardGame'' had several such cards that broke game mechanics and/or trivialized most games:
46	** The Light Side "''Limited Resources''" card. Since there was no limit to the number of cards you could have in your hand, and your life depended on having a good reserve of cards in your stack, a card that allows you to move cards from your hand back to the stack can be crucial to winning.
47	** "The Professor", from ''Dagobah''. A defensive shield card that forced any opponent, if they wanted to deploy a card with ability for free, to instead use X Force (where 'x' is half the card's stated deploy cost, rounded up). It essentially forced one's opponent to burn more and more Force each turn, to unreasonable levels. This was a game-nuker that unfairly punished about half the cards in the entire card game, and quickly proved to be exploitable to the extreme.
48	** "Padme Naberrie" from the ''Episode I'' set. An incredibly cheap character, she was a breaker in Skywalker-heavy decks, and could be used to deal direct damage to a player based on how many Skywalkers were on the battlefield at one time.
49	** "The Emperor" from ''Endor''. A single-card, non-weapon, out-of-battle character who can bury opposing characters like no one's business (and at any time, no less), with absurd power levels, extra Force generation, and can be further augmented with "helper" cards. The existence of The Emperor (and its impact on breaking the game) forced Decipher to release Mon Mothma to try and counter it (and that in itself became a broken card).
50	** "Krayt Dragon Howl" from ''Unlimited'' screwed with the original design philosophy that the Dark Side was intended to go first in every game. Why? It let the Light Side get Force regeneration ''before the game even started'', and can be defended by an Obi-Wan card that was a tank in combat and could pull Disarmed if the opponent tried to take him down with a weapon. Basically, unless a DS player could kill Obi-Wan on the first turn, the LS had already won the game.
51	* It's hard to set up, even assuming the cards are available in the first place, but in ''TabletopGame/{{Dominion}}'' there's a [[http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/629646/kings-court-x2-goons-masquerade-broken King's Court - King's Court - Goons - Masquerade]] combo which will win a two-player game once it fires, no matter how much of a lead your opponent might have. It does this by emptying your opponent's hand and trashing half of it, ''every turn''. Nothing your opponent can do except watch you gradually throw away their entire deck, including all their victory points.
52	** The second edition of the game modified the Masquerade card (if you have no cards in hand, you don't pass ''or'' receive any) to [[ObviousRulePatch neutralize this combo]].
53	* The ''TabletopGame/StarTrekCollectibleCardGame'' featured in its first edition the "Telepathic Alien Kidnappers" which allow its player to point at a random card in his opponent's hand and guess the type. If the type is guessed correctly, the card is discarded. Because the rules state that all players draw a new card at the END of their turn, the owner of the kidnappers can guess "personnel" at every guess. Since the player rapidly runs out of cards and usually only has ONE card in their hand, this locks out any new personnel cards from being played as they systematically get discarded. Game over.
54	* The Reindeer Booster Pack in ''TabletopGame/{{Sopio}}'' whose effects include discarding the entire deck, adding all discarded cards to your hand immediately and ''instantly winning the game for you if played when you are the current leader''. This is more or less the entire point of the pack.
55	* WWERawDeal had issues with this through its entire lifespan. Some of the more infamous ones:
56	** Andre The Giant is the UrExample:
57	*** Andre didn't get a Backlash Deck (think of it as an in-game sideboard a la TabletopGame/MagicTheGathering), but he got a 100 card deck. In a game where you win by depleting your opponent's deck, and the typical deck is 60 cards, this is already a problem.
58	*** He begins the game with eight cards in hand and an eight Superstar Value, which means in all but a few matches, he's gonna go first. His ability lets you put a card in your hand on the bottom of your deck, draw one card, then make your opponent randomly discard TWO cards and ends their turn if they either played two cards successfully or willingly ended their turn BEFORE they played a second card, so the opponent's hand is going away quickly.
59	*** And then on top of it all, his superstar-specific cards completely break him: [[Film/ThePrincessBride "We Face Each Other As God Intended"]] prevents insta-wins and reduces the opponent's starting hand by one card for EACH Pre-Match card they play. Considering the fact that most decks are dependent on their Pre-Match setting them up for the game, this will either leave the opponent with very few or no cards in hand to begin. And to make things worse, you could use its secondary ability, which causes everyone to discard their hand. Your opponent got to search for one card in their deck but had to reveal it to you. You got to search for TWO cards and didn't have to reveal them, meaning you could grab something to either counter what the opponent searched for or find something to work around whatever they searched for. Other cards were just the frosting on top of the cake of brokenness that is Andre.
60	* The ''VideoGame/WorldOfWarcraft'' card game is generally balanced, but in the Throne block (set 6), Horde faction has several cards which are significantly overpowered even for their rarity:
61	** Mazu'kon is a 6-cost ally with 6 ATK and 6 HP in a game where allies with such stat are very, very rare. Then it has Ferocity, bypassing the rule where an ally cannot attack the turn it enters play. Then if it gets killed by conventional means, it can bring out a duplicate of itself immediately.
62	** Daedak the Graveborn is a 4-cost ally which, when killed, will perform LifeDrain whose power depends on how many resources his controller has. Players usually will have more resources the longer the game drags on, so the later the game, the deadlier he becomes. Problem is, if he gets killed, he'll shuffle himself into his controller's deck so that he can be drawn again later, so playing him early game is still not a bad idea.
63	** Zodzu, Herald of the Elements is a 5-cost 5 ATK/5HP Shaman ally, which is already pretty good, but if you have another Shaman, he'll proceed to deal 3 damage to any target and heal your hero for 3.
64	** There is also Edwin Van Cleef ally from the 6th set treasure pack. 5ATK/3HP that costs only 4 is already good. But then he has Stealth + Untargettable, which means if he attacks ANYONE in your party, you can only sit and watch. He has no Elusive, so he can be attacked, buuuuut, when he comes to play, he brings two allies with Protector, who can thus shield him from attack (unless the attacker has Stealth). As the icing on the cake, when he does gets killed, you can search your deck for his daughter Vanessa Van Cleef, who'll proceed to smack one of your exhausted (tapped) ally for 4 damage just by showing up. Oh, and the Van Cleefs are neutral-aligned, so both Alliance and Horde can have him.
65	* Plasma Missiles in the 4X board game ''Eclipse'' are notoriously Game Breaking. They always fire first in combat and cost no power to fire, meaning that a player can load their ship with nothing but Plasma Missiles and Targeting Computers and blast everything else into atoms before it can fire back. There is a counter - heavily armoured ships - but these ships in turn tend to be weak against everything else, reducing the game to Rock/Paper/Scissors.
66	** A lot of the new secret techs in the expansion, Eclipse: rise of the ancients, directly counter Plasma Missiles. The expansion also add a new game breaker: Antimatter Canon + Antimatter splitter + Point defense.
67	* The Acrobat skill in ''Descent'' 1st edition allows the PC to pass through monsters, which can give them access to heavily guarded locations far before they are supposed to be able to enter them. In ''Road to Legend'', an acrobat can completely break the smaller adventure maps by teleporting into the dungeon, rushing through monsters to the save point in the next room, and teleporting out again, all in the same turn.
68	* In the dark card game ''Lunch Money'', the card ''Humiliation'' can cancel any card an opponent plays, including another Humiliation. This ability is so powerful that the only winnable strategy is to discard cards as fast as possible hoping to draw a Humiliation before attacking.
69	** Worse, Humiliation allowed an enemy to drop a free, unstoppable attack on you. This included some that could take off from 3-7 life points in a game with only 15 life. Furthermore, you could Humiliate in response to a defense, meaning your original attack hits for damage and any other secondary effects, then you get a free, unstoppable follow-up.
70	* In the short-lived and fairly obscure toy/game "Fistful of Aliens", the order-in figure Jangutz Khan was not only virtually undefeatable in combat, smashing a hole through the ElementalRockPaperScissors of the lineup, but also permitted you to field a more powerful lineup for the game.
71	* There was once a VideoGame/MegaManClassic card game. In its last set, ''VideoGame/MegaMan2's'' Wood Man was released. Wood Man was extremely broken and could only be stopped by a single card. It's speculated that the deck was what killed the game.
72	* In the Marvel themed deck building game Legendary:
73	** ComicBook/{{Deadpool}} has a card called "odd ball" which gives him a power bonus equal to the number of previously played cards with odd card values. It itself has an odd card value, meaning that playing 3 Odd Balls gives Deadpool at least a +6 bonus. By stuffing the deck with them a player can devastate villains and almost assure a win; the only solution found so far is to simply ban Deadpool.
74	** In Legendary Villains, Electro has a card ("Supercharge") that gives you +1 attack for every card you discarded before playing it. All of Electro's other cards have a mechanic ("Dodge") that lets you discard them to draw a new card. If you can manage to get rid of enough of your starting cards, and buy nothing but Dodge cards and Supercharge throughout the game, you can end up in an infinite loop, dodging cards and drawing more Dodge cards. You can keep this going for as long as you like, until you decide it's time to play Supercharge and get the actual attack bonus. It does require a lot of time, and specific tailoring of your deck, but effectively gives you infinite attack. The flavor text is "Unlimited power!!", implying that this strategy may, in fact, be the intention of the designers.
75	** Another one is Spider-Man. Nearly all of Spider-Man's cards tell you to reveal the top card of your deck, and draw it if it costs 2 or less. All of Spider-Man's cards cost 2. All your starting cards (obviously) cost 0. So if you buy nothing but Spider-Man cards, it's very easy to end up drawing your entire deck in any given turn. Spider-Man's cards have small bonuses, but when you're drawing your entire deck, you still end up with huge amounts of attack.
76	* Several Plot Quests in "Lords of Waterdeep" give bonuses that on paper don't sound too impressive, but in the long term gameplay can be broken as anything. There are a few that stand out: Drawing an Intrigue and being able to immediately play it after drawing it if you want to, simply by playing an Intrigue anywhere; being able to refund a single cube used on a quest, including a Mandatory Quest; being able to pick up X resource by simply grabbing a corresponding quest; being able to gain owner benefits on your buildings etc. Some of the standard quests do this too, being able to reclaim three agents at once, being able to draw 4 Intrigues ''and'' play them instantly, being able to take all face up quests or all face up buildings at once. The king however, goes to the 'Open Lord' Intrigue, which grants a player immunity to Mandatory Quests and Attack Intrigues, and all for the cost of 'revealing' their lord.
77	** Making these even more broken is when multiple Plot Quests are used in conjunction. Being able to play a new intrigue after playing one is made even better when you score two points every time. Gaining additional resources when you take a certain action is even better when you get owner benefits on a building too.
78	* One of the unlockable classes in TabletopGame/{{Gloomhaven}}, the [[spoiler:Plagueherald]], was shown to be ''extremely'' broken on first release. This class specializes in inflicting two status effects: poison and curse. Cursing an enemy causes a special card to be shuffled into the shared enemy attack modifier deck which, when drawn, immediately nullifies that attack - and since the deck is shared, cursing one enemy means this can affect a different enemy. This class also has a card that causes enemies to take 3 damage every time their attack is nullified, and the ability to spread Muddle over an ''enormous'' area of effect. A Muddled enemy draws 2 cards from their attack modifier deck instead of 1, and applies the worst of the two. What really took this class over the top is that in the initial release of Gloomhaven, there was ''no limit'' to the number of curses you could put into the enemy deck. This card played well could effectively make the entire party invincible and waltz through the dungeon while enemies killed themselves trying to do anything, despite the fact that this class's weakness is supposed to be its low HP. This became so absurdly broken that the second edition of Gloomhaven went out of its way to nerf it into oblivion, not only weakening many of their key cards (with it getting drastically more direct changes than any other class and not a single buff in sight), but also reworking the entire way the Curse status effect works, including capping the total number of curses that can be put in the deck to 10. '''And the class is still one of the best in the game in the second edition''', which goes to show just how insane it really was.
79	* ''Skytear'' had a commitment to balance right from its kickstarter pitch, and generally succeeds, but three cards in particular slipped through the cracks: "Twist Allegiance", which allowed controlling an enemy champion for a single action; "Grapple", which pulled an enemy champion in close; and "Battlecry", which pulled all affected enemy champions in close. The common thread here was pulling enemies in (or with TA, simply making the enemy walk right to you), since in a game where positioning is already crucial and the ability to shove enemies back is at a premium, dragging a champion three hexes into the enemy's jaws was a death sentence. Twist Allegiance and Grapple were quickly banned, but Battlecry posed a problem, being a Champion's [[SignatureMove Ultimate]]. [=PvP Geeks=] were forced to bite the bullet and issue "Avalanche" as a new Ultimate for Brylvar in an early expansion. All three banned cards were given errata for use in casual play, but will never be unbanned in tournaments as the developers also have another promise that "The text on a card is never wrong".
80	* The ''TabletopGame/DigimonCardGame'' for the most part remained a relatively balanced game for many months of its conception, until that is the release of [[https://digimoncardgame.fandom.com/wiki/BT6-016 Jesmon]] in Set 6: Double Diamond. While Jesmon by itself allows you to play any of the Sistermon cards [[https://digimoncardgame.fandom.com/wiki/BT6-082 Blanc]] or [[https://digimoncardgame.fandom.com/wiki/BT6-084 Ciel]] from the hand or the trash, doing so also gives it a sizeable power boost and piercing, allowing itself to attack the opponent's security (the main life source of a player) while also getting rid of a Digimon on board. These effects are already powerful on its own, but combine this with an inherited effect from [[https://digimoncardgame.fandom.com/wiki/BT6-015 SaviorHuckmon]] allows it to attack again simply by having one of the aforementioned Sistermons on board, which Jesmon can do easily. So this effectively means two Digimon from your opponent are gone, you attack the security twice, and if you add on cards like [[https://digimoncardgame.fandom.com/wiki/ST1-07 Greymon's inherited effect]], [[https://digimoncardgame.fandom.com/wiki/BT3-097 A Delicate Plan]], and Digivolving Jesmon into [[https://digimoncardgame.fandom.com/wiki/BT5-086 Omnimon]] after attacking, you can end most games in just one turn without any repercussions. This archetype single-handedly defined the Red meta and other metas to come in Japan for months that ''Creator/BandaiNamcoEntertainment'' had no choice but to [[https://world.digimoncard.com/rule/restriction_card/ limit SaviorHuckmon to just one copy per deck]], and even then Jesmon still remains a powerful force to be reckoned with.
81	* ''TabletopGame/Werewolf1997'':
82	** In setups with a Cop (who investigates players for whether they're Mafia or townsfolk) and a Doctor (who cancels out Mafia kills targeted at a specific player) with no way to counteract them, the Cop can just claim their role while the Town refuses to eliminate anyone and the Doctor stays in the background. The Doctor stops any Mafia kills from reaching the Cop, the Cop keeps gaining results and the Town can eliminate anyone who's picked up as being a Mafia member. By the time the Mafia kills the Doctor, there will be enough results for the Town to pick out the remaining Mafia anyway. The Mafia could try to counterclaim Cop to get the real one eliminated or confuse the Doctor into protecting the fake Cop, but either way they'll lose at least one member.
83	** The Cult, a faction which recruits members, can easily overtake the capacity of the Town to stop them if the Cult Leader isn't immediately killed, which leads to the entire game boiling down to a whack-a-mole chase at best.
84	* ''TabletopGame/{{Wingspan}}'' has the "Power Four": four birds whose activated abilities let you discard an egg to gain two of another resource type, which is a strong conversion rate. All of them can be placed in the Grasslands, the egg-producing habitat, which means that you can get away with de-emphasizing the other habitats in favour of just using the Lay Eggs action and getting other benefits from it too.
85	** Chihuahuan Raven and Common Raven let you discard an egg to gain any two food from the supply, which is a good conversion rate and doesn't put you at the mercy of what happens to be available in the bird feeder at the moment. This also has the advantage of letting you ignore the Forest, which is typically the clunkiest and least powerful habitat. The ''[[ExpansionPack Oceania Expansion]]'' made this ability even more powerful by introducing Nectar, a wild resource that can gain you points if you use it the most, and yes, the Ravens can gain it. Tellingly, the rulebook of that expansion outright suggests leaving out the Ravens if you think they're too powerful with that rule.
86	** Franklin's Gull and Killdeer let you discard an egg to draw two cards, which provides valuable card advantage that gives you access to more options. On top of that, these birds are cheap and require minimal setup before you can use their power.
87	* In the wargame-deckbuilder hybrid ''A Few Acres of Snow'', the intended cost of besieging a city is losing cards from your deck, but that turned out to be a ''benefit'' because it lets you see your best cards faster. Both sides of the board can temporarily trim down their deck and keep only the useful cards. This way, the French player gets the deck reduced to just 4 cards (while a single hand requires 5): 3 fur cards and a trader for instant pay-off, while the 5th "slot" will always be filled with a freshly added military card, always getting money for another draw next round and removing RNG from the equation. Meanwhile British player can reduce the deck to otherwise finnicky to use cards and encroach French heartland ''overland'', either raiding Montreal to the ground (a severe blow to French player) or even block entirely French expansion over St. Lawrance river, going as far as ''settling down Detroit'' in the far corner of the French side of the map, a feat normally considered impossible.
88	* ''TabletopGame/YuGiOhDungeonDiceMonsters'':
89	** Blast Lizard is one from the initial release. By spending the needed ability crest in the ascending amount for each monster level, Blast Lizard can ''nuke any monster, anywhere on the field''. It's a major reason most HouseRules have him banned.
90	** Exodia the Forbidden One. He's not an InstantWinCondition like in the card game or GBA adaptation, but he might as well be. Here he's a level 4 monster with 20 ATK/DEF/HP across the board and two nasty effects: one, he doubles all Crests rolled by his controller while he is on the field and two, he is immune to any attack that doesn't come from a monster with Flying or Tunneling. Rolling doubles each turn will quickly fill out a player's Crest Pool with anything and everything they need to curbstomp their opponent with attacks and special abilities while the power to NoSell 90% of the attacks in the game give Exodia great survivability even with his average stats. Unless dealt with immediately upon summoning (which is easier said than done given his potent attack immunities) he quickly allows the player who summoned him to control the remainder of the game and crush the opponent before they can ever hope to catch up.
91	** Battle Warrior has gone from being one of the weakest monsters in ''Yu-Gi-Oh!'' to one of the strongest. With decent battle stats and a handful of very useful abilities it can provide support to its owner no matter when it hits the table and has a lot of situations it can take advantage of. Best of all? It's an effortlessly easy to summon level 1 that can go toe to toe with even some level 2 or 3 monsters and come out on top. When it comes to cost vs effectiveness ratio it almost can't be beat, though it does have one good competitor to challenge its crown...
92	** Darkfire Dragon is similar to Battle Warrior in terms of brokenness and has similarly potent stats for a mere level 1. In addition to its appealing 20 ATK / 10 DEF / 20 HP it gives the player a valuable Movement Crest when summoned and at the cost of 1 Magic Crest can even gain Flying for a turn. This gives it great survivability and versatility at a cheap cost and allows it to remain useful even if summoned later on in the game.

Context GameBreaker / TabletopGames