Rush deserves better

Three months.

That's how long Bokuju has been live, and watching real players build teams and actually fight each other has been one of the more instructive things about running this app. You can design a battle system in isolation but you can't fully understand it until you see what people do when left to their own devices.

What I've noticed: almost nobody builds around Rush.

How the move types actually work

A quick recap for context. Strike always hits. It's free, unlimited, and its damage scales off Attack -- the highest stat in the game. Counter and Rush each have three charges per creature. Use them up and you're in pure Strike territory for the rest of that fight.

Counter is a d20 roll: succeed and you deal your base Counter damage plus 50% of whatever damage you just took back at the opponent. It's reactive and satisfying when it lands.

Rush is also a d20 roll. Succeed and you hit two or three times (three if your Speed is higher than your opponent's, two if it isn't). Fail and you hit once. Each hit deals Speed divided by five.

Oh, and Rush costs two Sumi to play.

The problem in plain numbers

Strike: free, always hits, scales off the highest stat.

Rush: costs two Sumi, might not land the multi-hit, scales off Speed which sits in a lower range than Attack across every rarity tier.

Even a successful Rush -- three hits, Speed advantage -- often loses on raw damage to a Strike with Focus, the deck card that makes your next Strike hit twice. That combo costs nothing, always works, and hits harder because Attack outpaces Speed in the stat ranges. Most players figured this out quickly and the Rush charges on their creatures just sit there.

The frustrating part is that Rush's multi-hit upside should feel good. Three rapid hits with a speed-profile creature is exactly the kind of moment the system should produce. But the floor when you miss the d20 is one weak hit after spending Sumi you probably needed for something else. The risk isn't balanced against the reward.

What this looks like in practice

Take a king cobra -- high Speed, naturally fast, exactly the kind of creature that should want to Rush. The special move it gets at awakening will often look something like this:

Fang Flicker -- Rush -- 2 Sumi
Speed ÷ 5 per hit. Roll d20 to hit twice, or three times if faster than your opponent.

Against a Strike with Focus, that cobra is spending 2 Sumi on a gamble that might deal less total damage than a free card that always connects. The creature makes sense for Rush. The card doesn't make the case for it.

Compare to what a Strike special looks like at the same rarity tier:

Crushing Fang -- Strike -- 3 Sumi
Fixed 45 damage. Rare: applies Venom.

Fixed damage. No roll. The rare version adds Venom on top. That's a card doing something clear -- reliable, scales well, and the rare version has a mechanic worth chasing. The cobra's Rush special has none of that pull.

The pool problem makes it worse

When a creature learns a special move, the type is rolled: 50% Strike, 30% Counter, 20% Rush. Even if someone wanted to build a Rush team, the cards aren't there in equal numbers. And because Strike specials are easier to design well -- they hit hard, they name cleanly, they make sense on almost any creature -- the interesting Rush-specific effects that could make the investment worthwhile are rare to see in practice.

The king cobra should want to Rush. A cheetah should want to Rush. A dragonfly should want to Rush. Right now those creatures are as likely to awaken with a Strike special as anything else, and when they do get a Rush special it's usually just a weaker version of the same idea with an extra dice roll in the way.

What I'm thinking about

The Sumi cost is worth questioning first. If Rush is already a d20 gamble and scales off a weaker stat, asking it to also spend a resource makes the floor feel punishing without meaningfully raising the ceiling.

The more interesting fix is giving Rush specials a mechanical identity that Strike specials don't have. Something like:

Phantom Flurry -- Rush -- 1 Sumi
Speed ÷ 5 per hit. Each hit that lands applies one stack of Bleed.

That card has a reason to exist. The lower cost makes the d20 risk feel fair. The Bleed stacking rewards the full three-hit success in a way that Strike can't replicate by just hitting harder. It uses the multi-hit mechanic rather than treating it as a damage multiplier that loses to Focus.

None of this is shipped. Working through it here because the journal has been useful for that, and if you've been playing and wondering why Rush teams feel half-baked, you deserve an honest explanation rather than a patch note.

The three month thing

It still surprises me that there are real players building real teams from creatures they actually went outside and caught. The meta being Strike-heavy is a fixable design problem. The fact that there's a meta at all, three months in, is not something I take for granted.

More on Rush when there's something to show.

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