Hey, it's been a while! We're glad to be back to the routine with an OTA this week, and aim to resume our regularly scheduled programming soon–we know everyone enjoys a consistent pace. However, we will be having a slight stutter in June as well, while our team works on some architectural updates under the hood. That means you can expect to see OTAs on June 5th and June 26th, and hopefully things will be back to normal for July.
With a lengthy reprieve from OTAs, the metagame did settle into a more rigid structure than we'd like to see. To that end, we're making several nerfs to high-profile cards in our top decks, aiming to ensure some churn within the metagame.
We're taking aim at the current metagame tyrant with a smattering of small changes that should weaken some of today's strongest cards, fostering additional competition in the midrange archetypes especially.
An obvious candidate was Strange Supreme, who has proven to be a force alongside the Stones in Thanos. That's definitely a role we knew the card would play, but Supreme's strength has exceeded our expectations enough to merit a nerf. It may not seem that this Power update will have a big impact, but It's easy to remember the blowout games where Supreme got huge enough to force a retreat.There are plenty of close games that tend to be worth a lot more cubes!
Our first swing at Sam Wilson was light, in part because we didn't want to make a huge shift. While very popular, Sam was a solid card in a lot of decks rather than being the best card in a very strong one, which is generally what we'd like to see. Since then, Sam's stock has continued to rise and fuel the metagame's strongest decks, so we're shifting our approach to better compensate for the consistency Sam affords by moving base Power to Sam. This weakens the Shield's impact on the early game, and specifically makes it worse fodder for Strange Supreme.
Alongside these changes, we're taking more direct aim at Thanos by removing a draw from the Time Stone. A major strength of Thanos has become the deck's capacity to justify playing more "tech cards" with lower Power than other decks can sustain, because the Stones turn into Power without using slots via Strange Supreme while Thanos himself has become a very efficient play. We love to see that–we want Thanos in play! Time Stone has been the strongest Stone at enabling Thanos while adding access to all the tech cards, so this change should have a large impact.
While Thanos has earned the majority of players' ire, the other candidate for "best deck" has quietly been an afflict-based deck leaning hard on Hazmat, by far the worst matchup for Thanos. Beyond supporting a very strong deck, Hazmat also constrains our design space by being arguably the best enabler for synergy designs–a similar challenge we've encountered with Luke Cage. We'd like to create more room for those cards to exist at a more diverse range of strength, so we're going to explore weakening Hazmat in this role and monitor how that impacts the performance of other designs. This will also make the one-two punch of Luke Cage and Hazmat more difficult to deploy.
Backed by the relatively recent buff to 2/2, the Sauron deck has quietly positioned itself as one of the best decks in the metagame for a while. We've been fine to let it fly a little under the radar, but the changes above are aiming to create a lot of shifts at the top. We don't want to leave this heir apparent in the pole position, given all of its tough matchups are receiving nerfs and the deck itself is pushing out other midrange strategies that don't often deploy 20 power by turn 4. To that end, we're narrowing Sauron's effect to create more pressure on the drawbacks of cards like Ebony Maw and Starbrand, pushing players to navigate the downsides more often.
It's taken a while, but Makkari has begun carving out some significant space in decks, whether that's as a bonus 3-Cost in Silver Surfer or extra Power in decks that rarely fill locations or play their entire hand. However, she's also become one of the highest-performing cards in those decks, with a winrate on par with Silver Surfer himself! That's a bit too extreme for a card that's as random and "free" as Makkari, so we're taking away a little Power here.
These aren't the spiciest changes, but we're making a couple minor quality of life updates.
This is just a text update to clarify that Kahhori ignores herself for her buff effect.
We disabled Isle of Silence (oh, the irony) due to a VFX bug occurring with a few cards, especially Iron Patriot. We've addressed that issue and are simply adding this location back to the pool.
Beyond the updates targeting metagame balance specifically, we've got a variety of updates for aiming to push some underperforming cards into limier lights, and a few small changes for clarity.
We previously changed Storm to 4/5 primarily to weaken her synergy with Legion, as a War Machine + Legion deck was proving popular and frustrating. That gave us the opportunity to explore different potential executions on the way Storm worked, but along the way we also decided to evaluate how Legion should work with similarly timed locations, as Flooding itself was inconsistent. We built it that way in part because so many playtesters expected Legion to flood the board in a single turn.
In the end, rather than change the explicit functionality of Storm, we decided that copies of locations would not inherit the turn timing status of the original. This will weaken the interaction with Legion by delaying the copies of Flooding for another turn, meaning we can safely move Storm back to 3-Cost.
Toxie Doxie was aimed to be a novel addition to cards that benefit from "handbuff" effects, like Sebastian Shaw and Mister Sinister. However, the card released a touch on the weak side, and hasn't been able to earn its slot in those decks. We're taking the soft and simple approach here with a buff to Toxie's own Power, along with a text correction to make it clear that Toxie ignores skills.
This is a fairly minor change, but we've seen a surprising number of pleas to limit Hercules to your own cards. We're happy to try it out and see what happens, especially with more automated movers like Xorn, Batroc, and Topaz in the game now.
The story is almost completely opposite for Annihilus, who immediately joined the metagame in a big way before sliding into obscurity. With players filling locations a bit more often and additional disruption like Strange Supreme weakening "Clog" strategies, Annihilus has room to receive some more strength.
The Power will continue to increase until morale improves! Electro is a card that tells a great story and has a lot of interesting potential synergy options, such as War Machine and Blink. We don't want to disrupt the card's base function, as it's a pretty satisfying card–we just want it to win a bit more. To that end, we're once more increasing its Power.
Cerebro saw a small surge when we shifted from 3/0 to 2/0, but has since then had a rough go of things. Some of that is the "splash damage" it takes from cards that are targeting Ongoing, but there's also a stronger metagame and more cards that threaten to impact Cerebro. So we're going to try something a little stronger for one of our favorite deckbuilding challenges.
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That's all for this week. Until next time, happy snapping!