v1.2.7: Life Adjustments

Balance

Yeah, this update is coming a bit earlier because we ran into some balance problems the statistics didn't catch.

With A1/Ritual of the Apprentice, combined with Weakening Darts (Rank 2, 3, or 4), its possible to stop your opponent from EVER playing a basic card with cost 8 or greater.

Now, I tested this Ritual of the Apprentice / Weakening Darts deck. (Since the AI uses random decks, it rarely gets the two together.)

It's actually "balanced", win-rate wise. If your opponent gets small aggressive cards, you can get rushed down, and the Apprentice lock is slow to set up.

But this is terrible gameplay-wise, and if your opponent's basic cards are expensive and awkward, they simply don't get to play the game.

As such, Weakening Darts is getting a bit of a rework this patch; It fires about twice as many darts now, each with half the effect.

Life Adjustments

A lot of the cards have +5 life or something printed at the start of the effect. You saw these particularly often with cards with non-granular effects.

From now on, these will be a new parameter, a life adjustment, visible in the icon instead of the text box. As an initial test, this will be tried on the newly reworked Weakening Darts, but we are hoping to expand this to other cards in the future.

Weakening Darts (Abjurer Ranked)

! Darts hitting creatures give -1/-0.

@ lane. Shoot X darts there. Darts miss creatures with less than 1 attack.

1 dart missing reduces aether. 2 missing reduces basics. Every 3 reduces both.

Ranked

Because this effect is much more granular, it might not actually need a life adjustment anymore, but it's getting one anyways.

Okay, after testing I should adjust the level down a tiny bit..

And would you look at that, now it definitely does not need a life adjustment!

We'll be testing the new technology on Rising Fire instead I guess.

New Card

With every patch comes a new card. Today we have one for the clashers:

Elixir Collector (6)

R: +1 Fire. +1 Water. +1 Air. +1 Earth. +1 Aether

0/20

Yeah, it might just be (W11) in aether kthxbai