Patch Notes for next week's patch got pushed out a week early
Loki
[Old] 4/5 - On Reveal: Replace your hand with cards from your opponent's starting deck. Give them -1 cost.
[New] 4/6 - On Reveal: Transform your hand into cards from your opponent's starting deck and give them -1 Cost.
Developer Notes: Loki has been a force since release, fueling a new archetype that dominated the metagame for a solid stretch. Loki shrugged off our OTA nerf to 4/5it was a small hit, but probably about half as effective as we'd hoped. We needed another patch to implement a second change, so we took the time to play with some fairly different changes and monitor the metagame. As December began, we even saw Loki falterDarkhawk, Bounce, and Destroy were all winning the matchup convincingly. Blob-Thanos shook things up a bit, and Loki was able to squeak back into the mix on top.
Once we saw all that, we decided to soften our approach rather than pursue a larger rework. This adjustment will remove The Collector's role as a massive source of Power for Loki decks. The winningest card overall in the Loki decks has rarely actually been Lokiit was usually The Collector. That's actually fairly surprising because drawing The Collector earlier is much better than later when compared to Loki, meaning more "loser" Collectors are in the data. This change will be good for The Collector long-term, because future patches will be able to balance The Collector around its strength in other decks without the burden of Loki's glorious purpose.
Ms. Marvel
[Old] 4/5 - Ongoing: Adjacent locations where your cards have unique Costs have +5 Power.
[New] 4/5 - Ongoing: Your adjacent locations with 2+ cards and no repeated Costs have +5 Power.
Developer Notes: This is a small change in scope, but we expect it to have a meaningful impact. We released Ms. Marvel without requiring two cards in adjacent locations in part because we found it difficult to clearly communicate the effect when it had multiple conditions. However, something we learned from players was that for many of them, the default assumption was that two cards would be necessary anyway! Because we also weren't psyched about how well Ms. Marvel synergized with Professor X, this change captures better gameplay while shaving off a bit of the strength. Even though we adjusted the words, the card is otherwise the same as beforeyou just need two cards at an adjacent location instead of one.
Annihilus
[Old] 5/7 - On Reveal: Your cards with 0 or less Power switch sides. Destroy those that can't.
[New] 5/5 - On Reveal: Your cards with Power below 0 switch sides. Destroy those that can't.
Developer Notes: Even though internal playtests successfully "found" most of the Annihilus decks we've seen on top of the metagame, their performance was surprising. In particular, the strength of just playing Annihilus with Sentry and/or Hood in decks with no other synergies has been very good. During design, we widened Annihilus's condition to include 0 in part because we were worried it wouldn't be strong enough restricted to such a tight set of targets, but clearly that's sufficiently strong. Given that's the case, we're restoring our preferred design that requires cards to have negative Power, and taking a little base Power away from Annihilus. That might seem heavy, but Annihilus has been one of the most significant outliers in our card performance data for weeks now, at every level of play. Even more surprising, Annihilus was performing better in our most competitive samples than anywhere elseusually strength flattens up there.
Dracula
[Old] 4/0 - At the end of the game, discard a card from your hand. This has its Power.
[New] 4/1 - At the end of the game, discard a card from your hand to gain its Power.
Developer Notes: We're still monitoring the Discard decks' performance in the wake of losing America Chavez, and one of the cards most damaged by that change was Dracula. In addition to this minor buff, reworking Dracula this way makes his text more clear and provides us with additional balance knobs to buff or nerf him as necessary in the future. We like having more dials to turn.
Angel
[Old] 1/2 - When one of your cards is destroyed, this flies out of your deck to replace it.
[New] 1/2 - When one of your cards is destroyed, this flies out of your hand or deck to replace it.
Developer Notes: Hey, we did it! This change has been in the queue for a while, but we've delayed it to ensure we could implement and test the VFX. Angel's a card we give to players early, so we wanted to be sure we weren't breaking a charming piece of that new player experience.
Quake
[Old] 2/3 - On Reveal: If this is at the middle location, swap the positions of each location.
[New] 2/3 - On Reveal: Swap the positions of the other two locations.
Developer Notes: This is very similar to Angel, although our solution might have been less obvious. We expect Quake might become an interesting alternative to Scarlet Witch and a potent tech card against strategies relying on Storm or Legion.
Kingpin
[Old] 3/4 - When a card moves here on turn 6, destroy it.
[New] 2/3 - When an enemy card moves here, afflict it with -2 Power.
Developer Notes: One of the few remaining "loose ends" in our change to the move mechanic during the last patch was that Kingpin and Fisk Tower remained able to destroy cards thanks to Juggernaut. It's always been a source of confusion for some players, regardless of the outcome, and Kingpin's been weak enough that a rework was worth pursuing. This change makes the interaction with Juggernaut match existing expectations, because we consistently don't let unrevealed cards have their Power modified by other effects. We also made the effect asymmetrical and tried out an aggressive set of numbers to see if we could convince players to consider pairing Kingpin with Polaris or Spider-Man, in addition to being a tech card against cards like Phoenix and Silk. Another upside of this change is it adds good ways to adjust Kingpin via OTA and find the perfect spot.
does anyone even read this