The first balance patch for Roots of Ruin is here and with it you may feel a slight shift in how everything works. Let’s talk about what we did and why.
Mitosis
Changed from Neutral to Nature
Mitosis was always intended to be a Nature card. We went back and forth in playtesting with it and decided Nature was its best home thematically and for balance. But alas we are but mortals, and the wrong version of the card went to print.
There are four gods that have Everborn cards, though any can play the core Everborn suite. That was an intentional design choice. The Everborn are a mindless and selfless collective entity, they don’t lie or deceive because they are incapable of it, and they don’t recognize morality or good and evil. Everything they do is instinctual. As a result we felt they just didn’t make sense in Deception or Light. Those gods are doing their own things in roots.
For the remaining four gods, we wanted to ensure they had their own thematic Everborn that tied to their themes.
- Nature is regrowth and madness, hence the clone mechanic of Sinious Nurturer. Madness you’ll learn more about in some of our future sets.
- Magic is ramp and big effects.
- Death is, well, death. And decay and erosion.
- War is about aggression, but strategically so
Brood Nursemother
Changed attack from 3 to 4
Brood Nursemother was not performing to our expectations. It is a pretty stock refill card as far as the Everborn go, but 2 sporophytes on board at once is actually a pretty high activation cost early on. We had far too many games where the card would just be wasted in hand looking for a place to play it, and would often get passed up for some other option in its place. With 4 power it is at least a little more serviceable in situations where you are just playing it as a body, while it’s top end is still very strong when you can play into it.
Evolve Upward
Removed the cost reduction
Cost reduction is far and away the most dangerous design mechanic we have in this game, and we are always very cautious when we create cards with it. Because Gods Unchained has a non-linear mana progression, reducing the cost of a card by one can often mean you are playing it 2-5 turns ahead of the curve, and since cards are balanced primarily by cost, this is very dangerous.
Evolve was doing too much. It was a stall breaker, a game extender, an insane value card, and a curve breaker. It gives you access to cards, including threats and answers, that you didn’t even have to include in your deck.
We knew it had to get toned down, and we felt the safest way to do it was to remove the cost reduction to prevent people playing multiple All-Consumings and Dissolving Horrors turn after turn.
The Academy, Rebuilt
Now delves 8 mana worth of spells
Pretty simple change here. We like the card and how it functions, but it was not quite where we wanted it to be. Raising the Attack or Health on a frontline unit presents it’s own issues, but it being a good speedbump was not the issue core to its power level. We know this seems somewhat tame a change and in many cases will not really change what most players get from their delve, but what it does do is allow for players to now get 8 mana spells from their delves. I assure you that making it a possibility to draw a Charm or End Times off your delves is very scary and has an outsized effect on the cards powerlevel, more so that the +1 would indicate.
Every Light card
Reformed Gladiator
Activation threshold lowered to 12
Custodian of the Faith
Removed the favor cost, changed the activation threshold to 30
Tutelary Spirit
Removed the favor cost, changed the activation threshold to 35
Argus
+1 health
Light got the most sweeping of changes in this balance patch. This was not because the cards were bad, they were pretty good on their own. It was because they were not playing well with each other and the players could feel that tension.
Light’s use of the favor mechanic was always its theme in this set and even started to poke up prior to this release with Age of Ascent. Charity is leading the innocent away from the oncoming horde of Everborn, and it is her piety and blessings along with Argus’ martial prowess that helps push them along and allows them to survive. Charity has faith that her devotion will reward them and spreads that gospel around. She wants to build favor for the course of the game, especially for her card and having cards that spend your favor ran counter to that even if they were powerful effects.
To fix this, we removed the favor cost from the cards. Now every card performs its effect if you have reached the correct level of faith and devotion through your blessings and actions. Your gameplan is to build favor perpetually to unlock new rewards. You are removing your ability to buy cards from the sanctum safely, so as a tradeoff we want to ensure these cards are useful and reasonable to activate.
Just removing the cost was simply not enough however, as without the cost the activation thresholds were way too low. Obliterating any of your opponent's creatures as a side effect of playing an on curve creature for 4 mana is VERY good. We don’t want this effect to be a given, you should have to work for it. So we adjusted the thresholds to give the creature suite a more understandable progression path. The effects take a little more devotion to achieve, but do not remove your ability to use them again later.
And then there was Argus. Argus, when he works as he should, is very good, but his overkill threshold was very high in a deck that was spending its favor and he was straight trading with too many other cards. The changes we made to the other light cards should help enable his overkill more often, but we also wanted to give him just a little bit more of a push so his role was not just crashing into something of similar size and dying. +1 health means there are not a lot of other 6 drops that can kill him outright, and we think that is probably enough to make him meet our expectations.
Everything else
In addition to the above, there were a handful of non-functional copy changes to cards to bring them in line with card templating standards. It is our hope that this balance sweep adds some new utility to the cards in Roots without feeling like a complete overhaul. We suspect the stuff that was already good will remain there, it just may be joined by a few friends going forward.
Sound off in the discord Mortals, let us know what you think and how your games play out with these new changes. We are always listening.