Half the game is achieving a low via discards. So if you do it perfectly, and lose all your cards, you get penalized?
I also don’t understand why you need to have a card and make a big call risking losing it and losing the pot. That’s literally calling for maybe half the pot, which everyone here tells me is a -EV strategy.
I just think it turns an interesting two way game into an uninteresting one where it’s correct to just play for the high only and back into the low.
While we’re at it, I don’t love the kill Scarney where the top board goes away if the card pops on the discard board. A shitty pair often ends up backing into the high inadvertently.
Scarney is a super interesting game and involves a fair amount of hand reading but it’s the rare game that suffers from variations designed to artificially create action or suspense.
I just don’t like the “back into half the pot” aspect of the variants. They seem like bingo, even for circus games.
Take derailment - sure you can back up to making a board like you would double board or any other game, but the goal is still to have a powerful draw or made nut hand on at least 2 (preferably 3) boards - so there is still a ton of board contextual strategy here.
I do think however that we’d benefit from something that denotes a cardless live Scarney hand. Something like this…
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