@Anonimus35 "Raise some stats"

By the time anyone plays Hearts game with any expectation to win we are already at max stats and have the best equipment we can get for our ambition, destiny, and other choices. During regular play no one uses second chances or moods because there's no need to be so invested in winning with the same EPA no matter what you do but when going for distinctions you realistically can't afford to miss a single skill check due to how run-ending the effects of counterplay are. Explanation below.

"Surely you are not meant to reach 4 Counterplay by design."

I agree. I only managed to do so once when I was deliberately trying to see what would happen. I'm pretty sure its purpose is to hammer home that your chosen team is shit and you should pick better next time. OP seems like they must have been extremely unlucky to be this peeved. Counterplay is bad design since all it does is punish you for playing how you want to but its not QUITE that bad.

@Kislev "but the amount of complaining about counterplay on the wiki is bizarre considering how it BARELY affects actual runs. the worst I've ever seen it do is OCCASIONALLY cause me to lose what might otherwise have been a tie."

Well I'm genuinely happy for you that it hasn't got in your way very much but it sound like you've been uncommonly blessed by RNGsus. In my games and ESPECIALLY when I was trying for pages distinction it felt like every time I drew cards it would be counterplay autofires until I had zero counterplay each time I got any. The elusive increase didn't really make any difference for me but the poison tolerance increase was crippling. This frequently caused losses where I was just 2 or 3 change points away from victory. This wrecked my otherwise promising runs frequently. You don't NEED to ever have more than one failure worth of counterplay at a time for this to happen. My experience seems to be that you CAN'T fail more than two checks in a round with most parties without auto-losing the round.

"RNG has literally NO EFFECT on the payouts and there is NO PENALTY for throwing out a bad team."

It has no effect on EPA specifically. It does make it harder to win and therefore harder to get things which require winning. Hearts game is still fun but every season they make more changes that make it harder to win runs without an increasing amount of luck and resources. If you want your best odds of winning distinctions you need to only use teams that rely on the base four stats (unless you can 100% the KT checks or something like I can but not everyone can and I don't think anyone can do that when going for embalming) and have some relevant second chances stocked up. I remind you that teams are randomly drafted and it's difficult to put together a team with any real synergy sometimes. This is especially true when trying to achieve distinctions. The strategy guide on this wiki is a godsend. Second chances can't be used for advanced skill checks so chances are you will fail at least two 90% advanced skill checks and auto-fail the round if you take your chances considering how many 90% checks you need to make if you're relying on them. You don't just need to get lucky for one round, you need to get lucky for seven rounds out of ten. Not likely.

Moods come rarely and only last for about 2 to 2 1/2 rounds I think if you start one round with full actions (20 actions). Since there are no checks in HG that use Mithridacy free players only have access to rare randomly drawn moods that affect base stats and I guess the one you get at Christmas. For obvious reasons you usually won't have that one. Exceptional friends have additional options for moods and get more out of moods than free players do because they have more max action (40 actions). I see nothing to complain about in that. They're paying to support the game so why would I be upset they get more goodies? That makes sense to me.