v1.2.9: Reminder Text

In this update, we update the text of some basic cards to be less confusing to new players, and remove the depreciated "Elemental." keyword.

In addition, Meditate and Arc Lightning/Burst Lightning now use the new Life Adjustment templating.

Balance

There's no stats to support this all (in the sense that I haven't been recording stats that would be relevant, so I'm going by personal experience), but almost all the ramp decks are elementalist. +6 life is just too big a deal in ramp decks, so the only reason to run a class in ramp is if the ramp target itself is classed. Even among non-ramp decks, many of these have been elementalist. On the other hand, universalist has felt quite weak, and it seems nobody has found a good universalist deck ever. To try to increase deckbuilding variety, life for classing has been adjusted from -6/+6 to -5/+5.

Unearthed Secrets has been overpeforming. The starting hp has been reduced from [44] to [42]

Elixir Collector had too suspect a comparison with Blind Prophet. It no longer produces aether. hp 18 -> 20

The combo between "Chain Darts, Rank 2" and (F12) is alarming, though I am not going to take the step of banning being dealt this combination yet.

Strong combinations are allowed, unless they're so strong that they're oppressive.

Currently banned combinations are:

"Emrakul" + (E6)

"Glacius, Lord of Freezing" + (E6)

I'm not convinced yet that this combination is oppressive to that extent.

New Cards

Crown Tower [29]

Auto-locks on unblocked enemies (leftmost). Start of Turn: 2 damage.

Another one for the clashers out there. Even if the enemy becomes blocked, the lock will remain until it is dead.

Channel [44]

! Modify this card's ratio to be 1 better. (Limit 1:1)

You may spend 8 life as 1 aether. (Any number of times!)

<8>

I'm sure this card looks broken as fuck to anyone who has played a card game before. I did not playtest every card you could combo with this, so have fun breaking it!

Comet Storm (Rank 8 and 9) ("Attack enemy creatures thrice. Attack ally creatures once." 7/0+ power) has been replaced with Cloudkill ("Destroy enemy creatures. Attack ally creatures." 18/9 power)

More Aggressive Balance Changes

Previously, I've been conservative with my balance changes, holding on until the statistics made me very confident that the balance change is likely to be good.

Now, I'm pursuing a more aggressive balance change policy, changing cards as long as I'm reasonably confident that the change is more likely to be good than bad. As such, the following cards are getting balance changes:

Rising Aether: This would warrant a nerf by the stats, but I think the class change hurts it hard already. Besides, Rising Aether is meant to be the baseline by which cores are compared, so if it's overperforming, it probably means that I should make the ramp targets scale slightly slower.

Young Witch: hp 11 -> 10

Griffin (A2): hp 12 -> 13

Ignite, Rank 7 (7): power 5 -> 6

Also, Musketeer Queen is now 5/21 to match the Musketeer.

HOTFIX: One of the undocumented features of this patch was to make Ritual of the Xmancer play the mana gain animation. In the process of making this hotfix, a bug was introduced causing said cores to add 2 mana regardless of the amount of charges on it. This has been fixed.