It’s balance patch time for April. Let’s talk about it

From Below

No longer creates a Sporophyte

One of the things you may have noticed in Roots is that Death’s cards do a lot of things per card. It was a bit of a theme that Death was all over the place because of the Everborn invasion messing with the transition of souls to the afterlife, and Mal and her Anubian buddies were having a real tough time keeping up.

One of the first cards we designed for the Everborn was From Below. Originally a neutral domain card named FROM BELOW!, it was meant to be both a reaction to the meta as well as provide the Everborn with removal and a non-Seal based way to create Sporophytes. In our early testing, Everborn were almost dead on arrival if you removed the seal, so our thoughts went to creating a few cards to act as stopgap solutions in matches where that happened.

We also felt that the 4 mana creature slot was getting a little too good. There is a much bigger ramp in power level for most 4 mana creatures as compared to 3 drops, and the delta between the two was much greater than 2 and 3. There was also not much for removal for those targets. Either you played some 5 mana removal spell much later on and generally as your entire turn, or you just had to hope your creatures could carry you through.

So why change it? Well the honest truth is that it is not being used how we intended. We think the removal aspect of it is good. There is a critical threshold of removal right now and you have to pick and choose, no one is playing a 29 removal 1 win condition deck. It fills a needed role in that regard.

We also think the pull to the void line is good. Most removal has to do something else to be playable nowadays and this represents the Everborn creating chaos when they appear from out of the ground. It is a thematic win and the pulling aspect of it is going to be important in future sets (you’ll see).

So that leaves the Sporophyte. On paper, it makes sense. Everborn come pouring out of a hole in the ground, a bunch of little helpers are going to be there to collect and aid the big guys. In practice however, it just enabled way too much stuff while generally not filling the role of backup generator. The Broken Seal is not as vulnerable as it was in early playtest, to the point where extra generation is really only needed to accelerate the larger Everborn effects, not just maintain playability of your bread and butter cards. From Below was almost always followed up on the same turn with an Untold Greed or dreadtouched spell, but rarely an Everborn or as a way to get something like Famished Thrasher online sooner.

Since the role we planned for it is not nearly as needed as we thought and because it is an easy more on switch for dreadtouched, we are removing the Sporophyte generation.

Reprocessor Xylaria

Now only gives -2 durability to a relic instead of outright destroying it

I always knew this card was going to be a very strong inclusion for most every Everborn deck, and it filled a very needed role for the tribe. Everborn do not otherwise have access to relic removal unless they are in a specific domain, so we needed to include something to ensure the tribe was viable.

The issue with Xylaria is not that outright destroying is too good, we have 3 mana creatures that already do that, it’s that the ease in which Everborn can generate more Xylaria is too high for that ability. It becomes rather oppressive to any deck that needs to get a relic online, and while having sympathy for Weapon War is an odd thing, the deck does have the right to exist.

A -2 is still a very powerful tool against most of the meta relics, and it still deals with opposing Broken Seals as if it was unchanged. But we wanted to make sure some of the other relics in the game could at least have a chance to shine or get in at least one activation, so we are changing this from full destruction to durability removal.

Saprotrophic Ghoul

Now deals damage randomly instead of to weakest creature

The Ghoul was intended to be a mirror match breaker. A solid stated creature with the high potential upside of killing 2 creatures per turn if you orchestrated it correctly. And we like the high skill play and sequence planning players had to consider with the Ghoul.

In another case of not doing what was intended, the ghoul was far too good at what it does. Generally the weakest creature is much more likely to have 1 health than the strongest, and by targeting that you are helping guarantee a higher likelihood of 2 damage per death. It removed a lot of strategy from the card which otherwise would force players into at least harder decisions.

To maintain the intent of the card, we have changed to random character. Make no mistake, the card is still a bit of a machine gun, but it is no longer as assured when combined with all the other tools Death has.

Powder Monkey

Now +1 power when obliterated instead of +2

If you would have told me last month that this would have been a card that needed to be knocked down a peg or two I don’t think I would have believed you. Powder Monkey on its face is somewhat unremarkable. Its stats are fair, in many cases its ability is just an afterlife that can fizzle, and it does not jump off the screen at you as being an issue. So why change it?

It’s about critical mass. Discard Deception works on the principle that when you pull your cards to the void, you are gambling. You are trading long term stability for a potential benefit, and there is a real chance that you whiff and get nothing but worse cards. Powder Monkey does not sacrifice much if arguably anything to give you that benefit, because in the worst case scenario it is a playable and well stated 3 drop with an effective afterlife that makes for a good Assassin’s Aim target. As we add more cards that benefit this strategy over time, not only does the risk pool go down, the decks really start to cross a threshold where it goes from risk to pure boon, and the monkey is a big culprit of that.

We think a lot of these discard boons should be fairly minor in their nature since you can get multiple of them at once and they tend to compound over time, and +2 just felt a bit too over the line. The card’s performance has also borne this out, with one of the highest win rates over the last 30 days of any card from Roots

But it’s not that alone. You may have heard whispers of an upcoming god powers revisit. Well it turns out Mayday and her crew have been heavily involved in some of that. We have a power that we really love and really want to release, but the Monkey became a barrier to doing so. You’ll hear more about this soon, believe me it is exciting.

So knowing all that, Powder Monkey has been taken down ever so slightly.

The rest of it

Many of you are likely asking why we didn’t change other cards. I know a lot of chatter has been around The All-Consuming, and there are probably a number of people who think that or some other card is over the line. Believe me when I tell you we thought about this patch long and hard. I cannot go too deep into details right now, but I can tell you some of the cards we did not change are because we know what is coming over the next few months. Some of the cards players see as too good are going to be taken down a peg by meta shifts with new releases, others that do not see quite enough play yet or just don’t have a home are going to find places to shine. The game is an ever-shifting landscape that will challenge the players and the deck builders alike, and we think the best times are still ahead.

Like the changes? Hate them? Let us know on the discord mortals. We do listen to what the players are saying (including those of you Balance Chat) and we do love some of the discourse that has been taking place. We may not directly respond, but we hear you and it does influence our decisions.