Nature boasts creatures with amazing stats, but most of them come with a tradeoff: confused. To make the most of your Nature deck, new players need to know the inner details of the confused mechanic.
Has a 50% chance to not hit the intended character and instead attack another random valid character.
There is a lot to unpack in this sentence.
Has a 50% chance to not hit the intended character
OK, so you tell to attack something and 50% of the time it isn't going to listen. Simple enough. Next!
and instead attack another random valid character
If it doesn't listen then it will choose (at random) to attack any valid character (character = creature or God). "Valid" means, for example, that it can only attack frontline creatures if there are any. It can't attack creatures with hidden or order.
If played properly, you can drastically reduce the impact of confusion. For example, if you can clear your opponent's board, you can guarantee that your confused creature goes face.
- 50% chance to go face
- 50% chance to attack another valid target (also face)
This is also the case with frontline. In the screenshot below, the only valid character to attack is the Guild Enforcer. Poor badger.
gameplay sources: CopperPitch's Stream
If there are two frontliners, things change. In the image below, @CopperPitch is in a tricky spot.
The only way out is to:
- Hit the Guild Enforcer with Overgrown Rhino
- Use Vow of Champions (left most card in his hand) to deal 2 damage to finish GE
- Use all remaining creatures to kill the 3/3 frontline.
What are the chances of this going off as planned? It all comes down to the Rhino. When Copper orders the Rhino to attack the Guild Enforcer:
- There is a 50% chance it listens and attacks the Guild Enforcer.
- There is a 50% chance it doesn't listen and chooses its own valid target at random. In this case, that's a 50/50 chance of hitting either frontline.
In other words:
- 50% chance to hit Guild Enforcer because it listened to Copper
- 25% chance to hit Guild Enforcer after not listening
- 25% chance to hit Aegis Commander after not listening
In all, that's a 75% chance of this play going off as expected (the badger is then guaranteed to hit Aegis Commander).
Summary
Playing nature effectively means managing randomness and probabilities. This goes for more than just confused creatures and includes random damage spells like Canopy barrage. Understand the odds and manipulate the board to mitigate the impact of randomness. You'll start winning a lot more games.
Edit: CopperPitch let me know that there is some confusion over the confusion mechanic. One dev said it works as I've described. Another dev has said that the intended character is not included as a random target if the creature doesn't listen to you. This would change the second example to only a 50% chance of hitting Guild Enforcer. Once we get clarity, I'll update the post.