Hey folks! We finally wrangled back control from the Robots, but as it turns out we liked some of their ideas. 🤖🧠
While most of the tech experiment we’ll be reverting today, we will be keeping some of the changes and making some slight tweaks. We’ll also be doing some more standard issue adjustments today alongside cleaning up after the Robots. Let’s get to it!
We will be reverting to the previous versions of the following cards:
- Killmonger
- Cosmo
- Shadow King
- Alioth
- Red Guardian
We will be retaining the modified versions of:
- Negasonic Teenage Warhead
- Enchantress
For Negasonic Teenage Warhead and Enchantress we feel like these were meaningful adjustments that will improve their play patterns as well as help downgrade the total impact that tech cards have on the metagame. Broadly, we would like to live in a world where players are playing a smaller number of tech cards and ideally many of them meaningfully impact the game with their points as well as their effects.
- For Negasonic, keeping this change will reduce the likelihood that she will come down and quickly snowball a location, and simply lower the amount of time that she looms over the game.
- For Enchantress, this movement towards a larger Point value helps to give her far more proactive applications. Simultaneously it will also dramatically lower the number of games where she is played on the last turn of the game alongside other tech cards to flip the table on how the game was being played up until that point.
We feel good about these changes for the long term outlook of the game.
Now Shang Chi.
We will be making a small adjustment to Shang Chi from the event:
Shang Chi
- [Pre Robot] 4/3 - On Reveal: Destroy all enemy cards here that have 10 or more Power.
- [New] 4/3 - On Reveal: Destroy an enemy card here that has 10 or more Power.
We felt like this limited time OTA didn’t quite give us or the community enough time to meaningfully gauge this subtle difference between Shangs.
Our hope is that if Shang Chi is single targeting that he will remain a potent check on solitaire-esque huge point decks running wild, but will also warrant players the opportunity to make interesting strategic decisions on whether to stack a location or not with multiple high Power cards.
Previously, you would simply never do this if it could be avoided due to how impactful Shang Chi was at countering this line of play.
Our hunch is that this dynamic will simply make the game more fun, and we’d like to keep running the experiment. For now, our plan is to gather more information through the next Golden Gauntlet tournament, then make a more long term decision for Shang Chi.
All things considered, we weren’t sure how the OTA experiment would play out, but generally we feel positive about it. We recognize that tech is a bit more prominent as a premier strategy than we’d like, but tackling the problem is tricky. We felt like this experiment generated a ton of useful information for how to position tech in the long term, and we’ll keep working on the issue.
Please give us feedback on what you did and didn’t like about the pseudo-imbalance event!
Ok, now that the tech section is primarily over, back to our more standard faire:
Colleen Wing
- [Old] 2/4 - On Reveal: Discard the card that costs the least from your hand.
- [Change] 2/4 > 2/3
Various flavors of Discard decks have been strong for sometime now, and we felt that long term warranted a change. However, it is difficult to meaningfully adjust points away from the Discard heavy hitters - as when they are working they can generate very large numbers where small nerfs won’t often be meaningfully felt.
As a result, we’re dinging an enabler, and given that Colleen Wing tends to be the strongest one, we’re taking a Power away from her so that the Power adjustment will be frequently felt, particularly in the more scrappy games where Discard’s synergies aren’t shining their brightest.
Agatha Harkness
- [Old] 6/14 - Game Start: Draw Agatha. She controls your cards on even turns.
- [Change] 6/14 > 6/12
Agatha is a tricky card to adjust. Similarly, she’s been performing above expectations for a while now. We like that a lot of her idiosyncrasies help to create a unique deck all by herself, and that’s something we generally like to preserve. However, a lot of her strength is that simply she’s a “free” card, but we also feel it is likely she will be relegated to 0 play if we remove that component, which puts us in a tricky position.
For now, we’re removing two Power to try to get her win rate down, but it is likely we revisit her again in the future.
Stardust
- [Old] 4/7 - Ongoing: Cards can’t be added to locations except by playing or moving them.
- [Change] 4/7 > 4/6
Stardust has been one of the stand out tech cards since its release, with both considerable usage and win rate. This continued and even increased as we expected during The Robot Take Over, affirming our beliefs that although we like Stardust’s tech role in the metagame, that it could stand to lose some Power.
We still believe that it will play its role well.
Viv Vision
- [Old] 3/2 - At the start of each turn, give all cards in your hand +1 Power if you’re winning here. Otherwise, move this to another location.
- [Change] 3/2 > 3/3
Dormammu
- [Old] 7/10 - Game Start: Begin a Summoning Ritual. (Add step 1 to hand.)
- [Change] 7/10 > 7/12
Destroyer
- [Old] 6/16 - On Reveal: Destroy your cards at other locations.
- [Change] 6/16 > 6/18
Alright, onto some buffs!
We’ve seen that Viv Vision’s win rate numbers have simply been poor since release. She was an exceptionally tricky card to land on in final balancing - we felt that 3/3 posed a potential risk of enabling her to snowball games too quickly, and as a result we decided to release her at 3/2 to hedge against this risk.
The numbers have proved otherwise, and while it is possible that 3/3 may actually move the needle too far in the other direction of making her too strong, we want to gather more data and consider more dramatic adjustment to her design if necessary.
Similarly Dormammu’s numbers have continued to be low, even after previous adjustments. We’re trying again by increasing his Power to 12. His play rate near his release was quite high and sustained for some time - and has plummeted with player realization that he just isn’t very strong. That implies to us that this is a card that folks find fun, so we’re committed to getting him into a spot where his fans won’t find their win rate embarrassing for enjoying playing with him.
Destroyer has been weak for a very long time. Given his considerable drawback and niche applications, we’re giving him some more numbers to play with.
Awesome Andy
- [Old] 2/1 - Activate: Give one of your cards at each other location +2 Power.
- [Change] 2/1 > 2/2
Lockjaw
- [Old] 2/2 - Activate: After you play your next card, swap it with one from your deck.
- [Change] 2/2 > 2/3
We’re buffing a couple of Activate cards ahead of Jocasta’s release. We hope that she will enable a variety of fun synergies, and we want to try to make those potential outputs as diverse as possible, so we’re giving some love to a few Activate underachievers.
In particular, we hope that folks will be excited about Lockjaw, as our previous buff didn’t quite generate the positive reception that we were expecting. We’ll keep working on him if that’s what folks want and the numbers permit!
Mystique
- [Old] 3/0 - On Reveal: If the last card you played has an Ongoing, copy its text. (if able)
- [Change] 3/0 > 3/1
Finally, a buff to a fan favorite, and a sneaky (small) nerf to Mr. Negative. Mystique has a variety of fun applications, but is most often played in Mr. Negative these days. That’s a deck that we have our eye on, and we think this is a nice happy medium change of improving Mystique’s performance in every non-Negative deck.
Ok that’s all for today. Please give us feedback on the Robot Invasion event. Did you enjoy the lack of tech? What do you think about the roll backs we made?
Until next time, happy Snapping!