Cardmaster v2.0 - A rework of my first class

Cardmaster 2.0

Back in December of 2015, I created and posted a class I called the Card Master, which was a class that aimed to evoke the feeling of both trading card games and card throwers like Gambit from X-Men and Twisted Fate from League of Legends.

The class got about 50 upvotes on /r/unearthedarcana. Although that isn't much nowadays, at the time it was a fair amount, and it became relatively popular as homebrew classes go. Probably more people discovered it when it was reposted on the dnd-5e-homebrew tumblr, where it got over 1,400 notes.

Over the years a fair number of people have messaged me about the possibility of updating the class—more people than any of my other homebrew—and now I've finally gotten around to doing so.

The class has been reworked from the ground up. The only things that stayed were the theme, the idea of drawing randomly to the determine the spells you can cast, and having card throw as powerful "basic attack." The parts of the previous design that made the class a caster focused on critical strikes were, for the most part, removed. Critical strikes as a spellcasting mechanic remained in only the Devil's Gambit subclass, the Divination option of the Deadly Dealer feature, and in the method of regaining your Card Tricks feature.

Design Notes:

This version of the cardmaster is still in development, and may therefore not be perfectly balanced. I've outlined below some of my reasoning for mechanical decisions I've made with the class, as well as some potentially concerning features:

- In terms of "spellcasting prowess," the cardmaster is meant to be somewhere in between the wizard and the sorcerer. They have a large spell list and can learn a large number of spells, but the mechanics of card magic make it an inherently worse form of spellcasting when compared to traditional casters. As cardmasters cannot directly choose their spells, and they have the least number of spells available to cast at any one time among casters, there is a fair chance that they won't have the spell they want, especially for niche situations, especially compared to wizard's large number of prepared spells and powerful ritual casting.
    Looking at specific numbers, cardmaster's spell list contains 205 spells, compared to wizard's 296 and sorcerer's 188. While the spell list might look larger than the wizard's at first glance, this is mostly due to the fact that I included PHB spells and XGtE spells all in the same list.

- One thing you might notice is that the cardmaster gets a higher number of spells than the wizard at level 1—eight in total, compared to wizard's six. Taking everything into account, having eight spells at 1st level actually makes the cardmaster weaker than if they had six. When a cardmaster draws spells, they need to fill up a 10-row table with cards, and they wouldn't be able to fill that table at 1st level if they had only six spells. Therefore, the table would need to be made smaller—to eight rows, for example—which would increase their chances of getting any single specific card. An optimized cardmaster table will always want to maximize their chances of getting their most powerful cards—shield and fireball, for example—and having a smaller table makes that more likely.

- Unlike the previous version of the class, this version has a variety of early features that make drawing a card that you don't need less of a detriment. The Deadly Dealer feature, given at 1st level, allows the cardmaster to discard unwanted spell cards to empower their card throw cantrip with effects that are generally useful, regardless of the situation. Also, there are two options in the 3rd level Card Trick feature, Copycat and Redraw, that allow unwanted spell cards to be swapped out for more useful ones.

- The cardmaster is a short rest based caster, like the warlock, and is therefore balanced based on Pact Magic. During a short rest, the number of wild cards given to a cardmaster allows them to cast approximately the same number of a spells as a warlock of the same level. A 1st level cardmaster can cast one 1st-level spell, like a warlock, and this near-equivalency continues into the higher levels. They can cast two 3rd level spells at 5th, two 5th level spells and a 3rd level spell at 11th, and four 5th level spells at 17th, for example.
    Unlike the warlock, however, cardmasters also have the option of casting lower level spells, rather than only casting their spells at the highest level. This is a significant power boost to short rest spellcasting, but I believe the inherent drawbacks of Card Magic's randomness balances this out. If a cardmaster only casts low level spells, they will run out of spell cards before they run out of wildcards, and will also be forced to use all of their spell cards, while a cardmaster casting only at higher levels has more of a choice in what they cast, and will then have spell-cards left over to use with Deadly Dealer. The way that drawing spell cards works means that cardmasters are unlikely to be able to cast powerful low level spells like shield too many times, as they are unlikely to draw enough copies to do so.

- One potential concern comes from the Devil's Gambit subclass, which has a 6th level feature that allows you to swap out advantage on a spell attack roll for disadvantage, and then causes that attack to automatically score a critical strike if it still hits. The usefulness of this feature depends a lot on the AC of enemies that you will generally be fighting. If you find yourself fighting a lot of enemies in plate armor or other such high-AC opponents, this feature causes you to lose out on damage, but against very low-AC opponents it greatly increases your average damage. One thing to note is that this feature has been intentionally restricted to work with just spell attacks, as there are no features that are applied to spell attacks after you hit, like paladin smites with weapon attacks. If there were such an ability, this feature would be far more powerful as it makes scoring a critical hit that could then be empowered much more likely.
    From my calculations, in order for this feature to increase your average damage, the targeted creature's AC must be no more than 6 above your to-hit bonus for spell attacks. For example, if you have +8 to hit with spell attacks, the feature will increase your average damage against targets with 14 AC or lower, and will decrease your average damage against targets with 15 AC or higher. (assuming the entirety of the damage you deal is from dice. If you add a modifier to your damage, such as with card throw, this AC threshold is even lower) The average damage increase maxes out at 164.8% of the average damage of rolling normally in the case that you would only miss on a roll of 1.