What's up gamers! Today I am happy to showcase a high level overview of the upcoming balance and mechanics revamp, which is currently undergoing final testing and will be coming to the live game soon! This revamp is extensive, but do remember that changed non-shiny cards will be refundable for full price for a short time after the patch. In addition, most (but not all) card redesigns are focused on cards that are generally underused or underperforming. Let's take a look at the overarching design and intent behind the changes, because there's a lot!
Early Game Rebalance: Our most significant shift lies in how we envision and design the early game as a whole - that is, cards costing between 1 and 4 gold. If you're a long time player, you may recall that at one point we nerfed a lot of draw and card generation in the game, as player's hands were running too hot throughout entire matches and leading to overdraw annoyances. Cheap draw is coming back, BUT this time we are shifting it toward the lower end of the gold curve. This means that cheaper cards can get progressively cheaper access to additional draw or card generation in our balancing methods. A 1-cost card can now be very efficient at obtaining an additional card, but a 4-cost card will have to pay a lot. This helps players fill up their hands in the early game, but leads to either starker card depletion or faster deck outs later on as their gold pool allows for dumping more of the hand at once. This also creates smoother matchups between various archetypes, which is particularly important for agro decks. We intend for agro decks to be slower overall with more intricate back and forth games, as players of slower deck types are now incentivized to run a solid early curve to cycle through their deck. Finally, RNG has generally been reduced for early game cards, as a devastating high roll into an extremely early win is not desireable.
More Small Combos: When looking at the game as a whole, we realized that while we generally hit the mark with big legendary payoffs and win conditions, many common and simple cards have repetitive and uninspired designs, and we are missing the small payoff combos that reward players for cleverness and planning in the early game. Many cheaper cards have been redesigned to either have implicit or explicit combos and payoffs.
Reduction of Castle Damage Spells: Fairly straightforward, but we've generally reduced the number of spells that can directly hit the opponent's Castle, most particularly for ninjas, who we don't want to see pigeon-holed into an agro role. We've very slightly increased direct healing and Castle defense as well. However, this is to compensate for the generally stronger early game, and our desire to not really see many games end before turn 8 or 9 at the earliest. Healing does not really scale into the late game, where combo lethality is generally improved, and we are seeing good paced games in playtesting due to the fast deck cycling and quick back-and-forth style.
Contraband Limitations: We've heard from many players that anticipating what a contraband opponent is going to do is frustrating, as the range of options on contraband cards is currently extremely wide. We are both reducing the prevalence of contraband overall, as well as having most contraband cards specify some sort of filter like cost or type to limit their options a little more.
Faction Identity - Vikings and Pirates: We feel that some factions have a stronger thematic and gameplay identity than others, and felt particularly that the vikings and pirates needed help here. Pirates have gained a new ability to permanently increase the player's max gold, allowing for a true ramp playstyle. Although this was only added to a few cards, it's a potent effect and will likely be expanded on a little in future card packs. Vikings have gained the SHATTER keyword, which formalizes the Halls of Frost ability to deal double damage against targets with frostbite. Penguin, Polar Bear, and other characters now have the Shatter keyword innately.
Gameplay Quality and Clarity: Tombstones are now immune to most AOE effects (except Cleave). This makes them much less matchup-dependent, and we feel having them be a generally reliable resource is better for players and the ultimate balancing of undead gameplay.
Armor has been removed from the game. This mechanic is not distinct enough from health to justify making the board state more complex. Don't worry though, there are plenty of cool new mechanics to replace it!
Dispel is no longer used on buildings, as the destruction of the building from dispel was inconsistent. Some cards that used to dispel buildings now explicitly destroy them instead.
Undead debuffing cards now destroy targets that are brought to 0 attack, keeping the board clean of (generally) useless units.
Redesign of Terrible Legendaries: Sorry Professor Headwood and Rat King, nobody plays you, maybe you should just do something else? Yes. Expect to see lame cards become cool again. Insert sunglasses.