November 14th – Balance Updates
A company holiday overlaps what would be the next OTA for November, so this week’s update will be something special. Rather than shoehorn in a make-up update, we’re planning to take a “balance break” and make this week a supersized OTA. Our goal is to knock a few of the top decks back down to Earth and provide some interesting tweaks to keep you all occupied in the coming weeks. Along with one big change to a particular snap-happy villain…
- Agent Venom
- [Old]2/4 – On Reveal: Set the Power of all cards in your deck to 4.
- [New]2/5 – On Reveal: Set the Power of all cards in your deck to 3.
Agent Venom’s gameplay goal was to fuel a variety of interesting decks, ideally by aiding a few cards that were struggling to find their place. In practice, that didn’t quite work out–4 Power was high enough to be a gain (or at least not a loss) to many existing strong cards, and we saw a number of Agent Venom variations of previously strong strategies emerge. This would mostly be fine, except that as the season ended these decks were growing their metagame share and becoming more dominant, while the decks we’d hoped to spawn are largely not competing.
To correct in the direction of those goals, we’re tightening the reward to narrow how many cards it can positively impact. Since we expect this to be meaningfully more restrictive to build around, we’re compensating Agent Venom’s base Power a bit.
- Surtur
- [Old]3/5 – After you play a card with 10 or more Power, this gains +3 Power.
- [Change]3/5 -> 3/4
For the bulk of Surtur’s internal development, the “Skaar deck” revolving around cards with 10 or more Power wasn’t a strong performer. We wanted Surtur to be enough of a boost to push it into the competitive limelight, and tuned accordingly. However, in the weeks after we finalized the card but before release, we saw the deck grow into its own quickly.
This sort of thing happens sometimes, and more often than you might realize. It’s a core challenge of coordinating fast-moving internal playtest environments alongside OTA balance updates to forecast dual outcomes. However, in this case it led to Surtur’s play rate exploding outside our tolerance for healthy metagame diversity almost immediately. We’re making a couple of tweaks to reconcile that and ensure that the Season Pass is fueling a fun deck that’s competitive without drowning out other enjoyable strategies.
- Skaar
- [Old]6/11 – Costs 2 less for each of your cards that has 10 or more Power.
- [Change]6/11 -> 6/10
Interestingly, Skaar has been a bit scary internally from time to time, but rarely made big waves in the live metagame. However, before Surtur’s debut Skaar was far and away the best card in that deck, and it’s still a fairly tight race between the two of them now. Trimming down a little Power here will similarly weaken some of the strongest draws.
- Silver Sable
- [Old]1/1 – On Reveal: Steal 2 Power from the top card of your opponent’s deck.
- [Change]1/1 -> 1/0
Over the last couple months, Silver Sable became one of the more dominant 1-Cost cards in the game. Our target was a good card, but we weren’t aiming to supplant as many other 1-Cost cards as Sable seems to have. The most popular and successful Silver Sable deck has been Bounce, so we’ve decided to go in this direction rather than with a 1/2 that steals 1 Power.
- Shadow King
- [Old]2/3 – On Reveal: Reset all cards here to their original Power.
- [Change]2/3 -> 2/2
We made this change to Shadow King with the last OTA to ensure that any deck could justify including this tech card, given the strength of Agent Venom and with Surtur incoming. That went fine–in fact, Shadow King’s actual win rate took a meaningful dip as the play rate grew. However, given the changes we’re making above, we’re hopeful it’s not necessary to maintain Shadow King at an above-average rate. Doing so could have a negative impact on some other strategies, thus we’re reverting that change today.
- Black Widow
- [Old]3/3 – On Reveal: Add a Widow’s Bite to your opponent’s hand.
- [New]3/4 – Activate: Add a Widow’s Bite to your opponent’s hand.
We actually considered this change for Black Widow when we introduced Activate, as one of the issues we saw with Black Widow when the card was 2-Cost was how strong it was to return to hand and replay. While Activate solved this Bounce issue, it turned out that 2-Cost Black Widow was still stronger than we wanted to cost the effect and the 3-Cost version didn’t have a lot of upside at the time. Since then, we’ve seen a deck coupling Grand Master and Misery with Black Widow to make a lot of Bites become fairly prominent. We don’t want that deck to be an ongoing “fun risk,” so the Activate change now lets us make a slightly improved Black Widow on rate.
- Destroyer
- [Old]6/14 – On Reveal: Destroy your cards at other locations.
- [Change]6/14 -> 6/16
We misjudged the impact of changing this On Reveal effect previously, as it added less strength than expected in the lower-Series metagame. We’re aware that this change also made Destroyer a bit weaker with Nimrod, but we’re seeking to balance the uses of Destroyer in multiple decks and metagames, and higher-end competitive play has a number of options on that front. We’re going to stick with the changed effect for now, and experiment with pumping in a little more Power to ensure Destroyer rivals some of the other big 6-Costs.
- Valentina
- [Old]2/3 – On Reveal: Add a random 6-Cost card to your hand. Give it -2 Cost and -3 Power.
- [New]2/3 – On Reveal: Add a random 6-Cost card to your hand. Give it -2 Cost and -2 Power.
Speaking of 6-Costs, we’re enhancing the one generated by Valentina slightly here by reducing how much Power gets taken from the generated card. Valentina’s a risky card to play with, but pretty fun for players who enjoy adapting to their circumstances. We like to position those cards as strong enough to be viable.
- Winter Soldier (Bucky Barnes)
- [Change]2/6 -> 2/7
Bucky Barnes is a fun card in the early Series metagame, and has some particularly nice variants to boot. It has struggled to find a home lately in the most competitive Destroy strategies, so we’re adding a bit of extra Power to the darker half of the duo to reward successfully destroying Bucky.
Admittedly, that new Thunderbolts* trailer has us hype.
- Jessica Jones
- [Old]4/5 – On Reveal: If you don’t play a card at this location next turn, +4 Power.
- [New]4/5 – On Reveal: If you don’t play a card at this location next turn, +5 Power.
Similarly, Jessica Jones is a straightforward and fun early Series card we don’t mind making a bit tougher. It might seem strange to buff another 4-Cost card into the 10-Power range given Surtur, but Jessica won’t trigger that card’s Power bonus and shouldn’t add any more strength to Skaar beyond being a viable alternative to existing cards.
To head it off at the pass, the answer is no–Shang-Chi doesn’t make having 9 Power better than having 10 Power. It’s true that the win rate difference between 9 and 10 may be smaller than 10 and 11, but it’s still an improvement to get the extra Power in every case we’ve measured.
- Heimdall
- [Old]6/9 – On Reveal: Move your other cards one location to the left.
- [Change]6/9 -> 6/10
Speaking of going to 10 Power, here’s Heimdall! Heimdall’s an exciting card and a pillar of “big mover” strategies, which makes it an ideal candidate to reward with a little more strength.
- Crystal
- [Old]3/3 – On Reveal: Each player draws a card.
- [Change]3/3 -> 3/4
Crystal has been a low-performing card for quite a while. However, we do like having some of these simple cards with “puzzler” effects available for players at weak rates, so we’re not keen to rework the card (again). We always want to tread carefully with drawing cards, because it can remove too much variance from the game to have it readily available, but a single Power on Crystal doesn’t seem like much of a risk.
- Agatha Harkness (text only)
- [Old]6/14 – Agatha starts in your hand. She plays your cards for you on even turns.
- [New]6/14 – At the start of the game, draw Agatha. She controls your cards on even turns.
This isn’t a functional change to Agatha–we’re just updating the card text for clarity, so that players can more easily realize Agatha doesn’t work like Quicksilver and that Agatha may move or activate your cards.
Admittedly, we weren’t sure about keeping the “evens only” effect for Agatha following the conclusion of Agatha All Along–as we said at the time, the change was primarily to celebrate the show. But it has made the card more fun and a more useful card for players, so we’ve decided to let it ride for now.
- Thanos
- [Old]6/10 – Starts in your opening hand and shuffles the six Infinity Stones into your deck.
- [New]6/10 – At the start of the game, draw Thanos and shuffle the six Infinity Stones into your deck.
This, however, is a functional change! Thanos will now no longer “take up space” in the player’s opening hand and instead becomes an extra card, like Agatha. We considered removing a draw from one of the Stones to soften the strength of this change a little, but our testing didn’t make it clear we needed to do that, so we’re going to let live play be the judge. Similarly, we have some buffs for a couple Stones we’re trying out in playtesting, but we didn’t want to change too much about Thanos given we’re skipping our next OTA. The real world is going to find a better Thanos deck than we will internally, so we’ll see what it looks like first and then add more once we have a clearer sense of what’s needed.
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That’s all for this week the month of November. Until next time, happy snapping!
