History GameBreaker / TabletopGames

* The 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:

* The [[MatterReplicator Aqueduct]] in ''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 UpToEleven when a specific resource in the game is [[BrokeEpisode extremely scarce]], because the player with the Aqueduct may be one of the only ones who can get it easily.

** A later game from the same manufacturers, 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.

* The StarWarsCustomizableCardGame had several such cards that broke game mechanics and/or trivialized most games:

* The 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.

* [[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 Warcasters or Warlock who handily broke the game.

* [[TabletopGame/IronKingdoms Warmachine/Hordes]] is generally considered a fairly balanced game, however most armies provide examples of Warcasters and Warlocks that handily break the game.

** Monte Cook ''[[CreatorsPet really]]'' [[CreatorsPet likes Wizards]], and in 5E, boy does it show. LinearWarriorQuadraticWizards applies, and while a low-level Wizard with paltry HP and a limited spell selection can be a challenging play, by mid-level Wizards with creative players are effectively [[StoryBreakerPower walking cheat codes]]. By high levels, the party has effectively been relegated to the role of audience for the Wizard while they {{Curb Stomp|Battle}} {{Physical God}}s.

* The Reindeer Booster Pack in {{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.

** Lysandre's Trump Card from the Phantom Forces set allows all the player to shuffle all cards in their discard pile into their deck, as it would eliminate the possibility of a player running out of cards in their deck, a victory condition for the other player and increased the length of battle significantly. Needless to say, Lysandre's Trump Card became one of the very few cards to be banned.
** 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 Pokemon to sleep. However, unlike normal sleep, there were two coins flipped, and if both were tails, the Pokemon fainted (both had to be heads for the Pokemon to wake up.). Shiftry's pokebody made it so that all coins flipped were treated as tails.

*** Prior to 8th edition, which was designed to {{nerf}} them, daemons were arguably the most broken army ever released in the game's history. EVERYTHING in the army had at least 5+ ward save and caused fear (Lord units causing terror). This basically meant the enemy was, unless it was Tomb Kings or Vampire Counts who all have immune to pyschology, going to spend most of the game running scared. The rare case your enemy doesn't run, he's dead anyways, since the magic the army can throw around will wreck, the worst case being an utterly broken spell that a Lord of Change has access to called Glean Magic that causes you force a target enemy wizard to use ALL their spells on targets you chose, and they can't be dispelled, and the icing on the cake being that Glean Magic was incredibly cheap, especially for what it does. And that's not even getting to how all the units in the army were incredibly strong and the only things that wouldn't being running away due to fear or terror will get torn to pieces in melee. There's a reason the 8th edition nerfed this army and why it was so hated for how overpowered it was.

** Lysandre's Trump Card from the Phantom Forces set allows all the player to shuffle all cards in their discard pile into their deck, as it would eliminate the possibility of a player running out of cards in their deck, a victory condition for the other player and increased the length of battle significantly. Needless to say, Lysandre's Trump Card became one of the very few card to be banned.

* From [[TabletopGame/{{Pokemon}} Pokémon]]'' trading card game:

* The ''[[TabletopGame/{{Pokemon}} Pokémon]]'' trading card game has had few cards so broken they were banned (most banned cards are gag cards that were intended simply to be promotional giveaways), but there were two notable examples; Slowking and Sneasel from the Neo Genesis set. Slowking 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. Sneasel 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 Pokemon 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 Pokemon was 120 at the time (and 120 was a rare trait, the average for a fully evolved Pokemon 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. These bans were effectively lifted once the set was rotated out of the Modified format (since you could only play them in the Unlimited format then), with only two other cards being banned since, First Ticket due to a rule change, and Lysandre's Trump Card, because the recycling ability it had disabled one way to win.

** 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. As it stands, the game no longer contains any banned cards in either the Modified or Unlimited formats; use anything you like as long as it has a legit card back.

* [[IronKingdoms Warmachine/Hordes]] is generally considered a fairly balanced game, however most armies provide examples of Warcasters and Warlocks that handily break the game.

** 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 realyl 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 AoE around a friendly Warbeast which Auto-hits any enemies caught inside.

** A portmanteau term, "CoDzilla", was used to refer to extremely overpowered Cleric and Druid builds through 3E. In addition to incredible magical power on par with the big magic classes like Wizards and Sorcerers (sometimes ''even better'', and unlike Wizards they don't even have to plan their spells out), and CoDzilla got way better combat and utility abilities on top of that. Clerics could wear heavy armour in a total {{Aver|tedTrope}}sion of SquishyWizard, plus better base attack progression. Druids were even more broken, as the ''Wild Shape'' class feature combined with the ''Natural Spell'' feat let them take on incredibly powerful combat forms while retaining their ability to pump out magic. Here's a given example: a Cleric with the Strength domain can boost his Strength by his caster level for one round, plus Righteous Might, Divine Power, Divine Favour and charging with a two-handed weapon, could conceivably kill 99% of the game's monsters in one hit, and ''this is far from the most optimised Cleric build''.
** Monte Cook ''[[CreatorsPet really]]'' [[CreatorsPet likes Wizards]], and in 5E, boy does it show.

** 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.

** A later game from the same manufacturers, LegendOfTheBurningSands, was completely broken out of the box; this was eventually explained by the fact that it included a bunch of cards copied from 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.

* The ''[[TabletopGame/{{Pokemon}} Pokémon]]'' trading card game has had few cards so broken they were banned (most banned cards are gag cards that were intended simply to be promotional giveaways), but there were two notable examples; Slowking and Sneasel from the Neo Genesis set. Slowking 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. Sneasel 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 Pokemon 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 Pokemon was 120 at the time (and 120 was a rare trait, the average for a fully evolved Pokemon 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. These bans were effectively lifted once the set was rotated out of the Modified format (since you could only play them in the Unlimited format then), and since then, no card that has been released in a regular set intended for play has been banned.

* In the Marvel themed deck building game Legendary, 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.

* Another fine example from Wizards of the Coast: in their ''StarWars Miniatures'' game, a ''CloneWars'' 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).

* The Three Dragon Ante supplemental card game for Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 edition had some pretty nasty cards on it's 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...
* {{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.

* The ridiculous lack of balance in early sets of 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." The fact that the next block, Samurai Edition, was going to be much weaker than Lotus was considered a major selling point.

* [[IronKingdoms Warmachine/Hordes]] is, for the most part, very well-balanced. However, the Hordes army Legion of Everblight is, without a doubt, the most broken army in the game. Just looking at its warcasters and warbeasts provides some reasons why:
** The first reason requires some explanation. In Warmachine/Hordes, there's a trait called Focus or Fury, respectively, that allows you to boost attacks, buy more melee or ranged attacks, or do a number of other things. In Warmachine, such Focus must be allocated in advance by your warcaster (army leader) to his warjacks (big, steampunk mecha that serve as the main war machines for every army), and each warjack can only hold 3 Focus points. Fury, however, can be spontaneously generated by warbeasts (the Hordes equivalent of warjacks, except they're usually animals of some type), with a varying upper limit depending on the beast, meaning that warbeasts can buy however many attacks they need without their warlock's help. However, this is offset by the fact that generating Fury means that there's a chance that they'll frenzy and attack the nearest unit, whether it's friend or foe, next turn, and the more Fury generated, the greater the risk. Quite often, though, the nearest model is going to be an enemy that the beast is in melee with or an enemy that's near them, so it's not that huge a risk to begin with usually.
*** With the Legion of Everblight, however, most warbeasts have a special rule called "Blood Creation," which specifically says that they will ''never'' attack friendly faction warlocks, even in frenzy, which lowers the risk involved in generating frenzy for those models even more.
*** This however is only a game breaker for beginners, as a frenzied war beast can't used any special attacks or abilities and easily be baited into a trap.
** In addition, some of their warlocks have ridiculous feats (special abilities that can only be used once per game, but which are usually quite powerful):
*** Thagrosh, Prophet of Everblight, can resurrect ''any'' dead warbeast on his side. Like the massive Carnivean (a heavy warbeast that is heavily damaging, well protected, and has a special ability it can use that damages ''your'' jack/beast bit by bit every time you hit it). Granted, the beast can't do anything the turn it arrives, but still, spending all that time battering something like that down, only to have it come back - talk about a morale-killer. And if he decides to revive warbeasts that is even stronger than Carnivean such as Archangel? Do please weep, we'll provide the bucket.
*** Absylonia is even worse - her feat heals her completely, then lets her heal ''all'' damage on however many warbeasts in her battlegroup she feels like. The cost to her? One damage point ''per warbeast healed.'' Not per damage box healed, per MODEL healed. Alright, so the best solution is to make sure any warbeast you attack dies right then and there, right? Well, Absylonia also has a spell with a 4-inch Area of Effect that renders you unable to allocate focus or generate fury, so no boosting attacks or buying extra attacks to go for the sure death. Better hope the dice roll in your favor.
*** Saeryn has a feat that keeps every warbeast in her battlegroup from being targeted by melee attacks for one round. This by itself is bad for melee-heavy armies like Khador, but theoretically, even shooty armies like Cygnaran may not be safe as the Legion has a model called Nyss Sorceress on Hellion, who can cast a spell which disallows enemy unit from shooting either (although the sorceress is not a warbeast, so they are not protected by Saeryn's feat). So for one round, you can't melee their warbeasts, and you can't shoot either. Have fun.
*** Epic Lylyth (Shadow of Everblight). Her feat is where it all starts - it gives EVERYONE in her (admittedly small) control area +4 Range to their ranged weapons (effectively giving Snipe, normally an upkeep spell that can only affect one person/unit at a time, to everyone in her control area). But that's not all! It also gives her and her warbeasts one extra shot with their ranged weapons that turn, ignoring Rate of Fire. Of course, most people playing this list will likely take Ravagores (the Legion's main heavy shooting beast) to get the most out of this feat. So how do you counter this? You tell me. You can't hide behind clouds or use Stealthed models (Lylyth and all of the Legion warbeasts have Eyeless Sight, which sees through clouds and Stealth). You can't shoot them first unless you're playing Cygnar, because only Cygnar can equal that sort of range without artillery (18 inches for the aforementioned Ravagores), and you probably won't be able to shoot the beasts anyways since Lylyth has the spell Shadow Pack (which puts Stealth on her and her warbeasts) which she'll almost certainly have activated (and NOTHING has a charge threat range of 18 inches). Use the Choir of Menoth's Hymn of Passage (which keeps enemies from shooting your warjacks with non-magical weapons)? Nope - there's a light warbeast called a Naga Nightlurker that has a Cost 2 animus that makes the target's ranged weapons magical, so the Ravagores can easily get through that if one is taken. Khador's Wind Wall spell (which makes non-magical ranged attacks on the caster and those 3 inches from him miss)? Nope - that doesn't affect magical weapons either. AND the Ravagore's animus (which costs all of ONE fury) makes that weapon's entire blast radius set things on fire (in addition to its corrosion damage aftereffect that already exists), and Lylyth can cast that cheap animus herself to ensure that the Ravagores can boost both the attack and damage rolls of both their shots. In short, if you find yourself facing this list, just concede and save yourself the pain.
** In truth its Warmachine/Hordes has so many game breakers most players find it one of the most Balance Tabletop Game.

*** Lizardmen in general have been bumped one step closer to gamebreaker thanks to 8th edition's broken magic system making Slann one of the few wizards to bypass all the negatives of the new magic system and the added emphasis on large infantry bricks make Saurus Spear Warrior units into one of the nastiest basic troopers in the game. But with the two together you face waves of tough infantry guarding non-squishy wizards that are blasting all of your army into Hell/pieces/ashes. Then they got nerfed pretty heavily in the 8th edition book; they're still very scary, but you can no longer buy Slann that get free dice for everything, the miscast-guaranteeing effects are gone, and the resistance to miscasting is reduced to an option allowing you to add or remove one point from the roll. Of course, they still have some of the scariest wizards and basic infantry in the game, but that just makes them "tough", rather than "the annihilating fury of vengeful, presumably dead gods" as they were previously.

*** Lizardmen in general have been bumped one step closer to gamebreaker thanks to 8th edition's broken magic system making Slann one of the few wizards to bypass all the negatives of the new magic system and the added emphasis on large infantry bricks make Saurus Spear Warrior units into one of the nastiest basic troopers in the game. But with the two together you face waves of tough infantry guarding non-squishy wizards that are blasting all of your army into Hell/pieces/ashes.

** A later game from the same manufacturers, LegendOfTheBurningSands, was completely broken out of the box; this was eventually explained by the fact that it included a bunch of cards copied from LegendOfTheFiveRingswithout 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.

* In the Marvel themed deck building game Legendary, 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.

** A later game from the same manufacturers, LegendOfTheBurningSands, was completely broken out of the box; this was eventually explained by the fact that it included a bunch of cards copied from LegendOfTheFiveRinga 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.

* In the Marvel themed deck building game Legendary, 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.

* 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.