v0.9.1 patch notes

Base Card Change

Ice Guard (W6) 2/14 -> 3/11

When talking about cards that flip who's winning the game, there's no base card higher on that list than ice guard. He comes down, immediately reduces burn reach, and the damage reduction often tries making outdamaging the guard player's healing unfeasible. The natural line of course is to switch tactics and focus fire on the ice guard, but the high health total made that incredibly difficult. With this change, this method of counterplay is more available.  Now, Ice Guard can be killed quickly, the opponent will just have to spend a significant amount of resources to do so. I've decided to err on the weak side in this update, but if it proves too weak, it will be buffed to 12 health, most notably surviving a direct hit from an Inferno.

I do think overall a 3 attack ice guard with lower health is likely to lead to less polarized gameplay compared to a 2-attack version with higher health.

Class Shuffle

Mech (Level 4), Paladin (Level 6), and Illusion (Level 6) are getting reshuffled into Warlord (Level 6), Evoker (Level 6), and Illusion (Level 4).

The themes of the new classes are as follows:

Warlord: Takes control of the board. Has the most impactful one-sided sweepers in the game, and has some healing for its own board, but less so that the cleric.

Evoker: Damages the enemy life total directly. If your opponent has a large amount of Aether mana stored up, only against Evoker are you expected to keep a large buffer of life total.

Illusion: Punishes high attack enemies specifically. No longer has generic life pressure - this is now in Evoker's color pie.

With this in mind, Phantom Assassin (4) has been removed from the game. A (4) 5-attack haste is too much face damage to put in any class but Evoker, but also too strong at killing mana generators for Evoker. Instead, Rook's statline has been changed to fill that role, but one turn slower.

Other balance changes

Magic Hydra: 0!/22 -> 1!/15. It turns out the existence of empower severely limits the design space of high health "attack-all" units. This change should lower the synergy this card has with empower, while not nerfing its power level overall.

PEKKA: hp 30 -> 28. A good body, properly positioned, is continuing to overperform in testing.

X-bow: hp 28 -> 26. Similar story as PEKKA.

Rework:

On the face of it, this looks absurd. Gaining life every turn? 60+ total life per game? If it looks that way, it's because you haven't playtested it.

I initially set it at [18]. After 20 games of playtesting, it was buffed, and buffed again, and buffed again, which is why we are here.

The reasoning it's not actually the good is this:

In the games where life matters the most, it's because your opponent is rushing you down. In this case, you're generally getting 9 triggers at best with this, and it would have been even less if I started you lower.

The second issue is how you leverage a life advantage. Generally, this is by leaving a creature you don't want to deal with unblocked. However, doing so shortens the game, lowering the amount of life you get.

The third issue is what happens if an opponent builds a big board with cards like elementals, mind master, and the like. In this case, you tend to get snowballed, and even though you will get 15-20 triggers in this scenario, you'd lose anyways. In this case, having the extra 2 aether might be more important to stop the snowball from being established in the first place.

All this said, this is a lot of life, and there are situations where it shines. Particularly in tense games where both players are afraid of dying, and thus the game gets extended, because players cannot fully commit to an attack for fear of dying before their attack resolves. In these games, 3 extra life a turn will usually translate into a win. The challenge is putting yourself in this situation in the first place when you start the game down 2 aether.

Big Creature Buffs

It's been well known that the big creatures have been on the weak side for quite a while (the difference between 7 and 10 aether is so big), and the release of evoker is almost certain to hurt them. I can't imagine Greater Rejuvenation being much help to them either. As such, they're being buffed.

Musketeer and Musketeer Queen: 20 -> 21 hp Musketeer has been unpopular for a while, but has fairly reasonable stats. Hopefully a slight nudge pushes in into playability. The queen has also been a tad on the weak side, though she's already more playable than the others by virtue of being three blockers. We'll see if 1hp is enough to make her popular. If not, I have other buffs in mind.

Ulamog: hp 30 -> 36. There's two outcomes for an Ulamog game. Either the game goes short and you lose. Or the game goes long, Ulamog gets chump-blocked a lot, eventually dies, and you still have a chance of losing. I'm not quite confident enough to go full "I cannot be destroyed, period." yet, but there's really only one knob to tune here, and I'm ready to take a step in this direction.

[Some playtesting later]

Ulamog: hp 30 -> 10. Now outright indestructible. (Try casting Consume Essence on him, it'll be fun!)

Kozilek: hp 21 -> 28. The conservative balancing of this unit was because of how much value this unit was when played proactively, trading up into a tornado with the resources it provides. Problem: you're rarely in a proactive position, and often your opponent has either a must-kill threat (Mind Master, Hydra) or a creature with 7+ attack that Kozilek would be sent into a dubious confrontation with. (Or just too risky to take to the face when your opponent has a Tornado prepared.) Thus, a significant buff to its HP has been given to try to bring its power level up to Ulamog's.

[Some playtesting later]

Kozilek: hp 28 -> 25. Turns out, Drain Souls, even without Dark Ritual, can be pretty good deterrence to the opponent flooding the board ahead of your titan.

[A day after the patch release]

It has come to my attention that I failed to actually nerf the hp from 28 to 25. Consider Kozilek buffed back to 28hp. I'll be collecting statistics on the current patch to see if the winrate is out of line and the power level should be toned down.

Trig: attack 5! -> 7! Mana cap: 8->7. In playtesting for the previous patch, I had him at 6! I lost most of my games, but in one game my opponent was sleeping at the wheel, played meditate a bunch, and got curb-stomped. I got spooked and adjusted him down to 5! Further playtesting has proven my fears to be unfounded - a win is a win, and how dramatically you win them doesn't change that.

Honestly speaking, he's too weak at 7! It's part of my genious strategy to farm engagement. You see, as the most powerful character in the lore with a very exciting effect, players will be drawn to playing him. They're win a game in quite spectacular fashion, keep chasing that high, and then after 20 games they'll realize they're at a 25% wr. Once people finally give up, I slightly buff him and repeat the process again.

A rundown of the evoker class: