Details for the upcoming World Championship qualifiers and design insights behind the Whispers from the Maze set releasing June 6 were the main topics in the May 21 WFM new season AMA with the Equinox team. Game Designer Charles Wickham and Organized Play Director Cédric Leblanc gave updates on upcoming events before taking questions from fans during the hour-long event.

World Championship qualifiers

The World Championship qualifiers are on the way, with multiple opportunities worldwide and on Board Game Arena, said Cédric. The soonest one is in Zoetermeer, the Netherlands, on June 28, and the largest one will be in Lille, France, July 5-6. That 1,024-player tournament will name multiple qualifiers for the next round. Equinox staff will be at that qualifier along with artists signing cards. Dates and details for the later stages will be announced soon, but covering qualifiers takes priority.

While there will be three online qualifiers on Board Game Arena, the dates will be announced at a later time, Cédric said. For the online events, there will be physical rewards for the Top 8 winners, but not every participant.

The qualifier events include a Last Chance event held just before the official Championship. Players involved in the Last Chance event must play the same deck they played initially in the tournament, said Cédric.

Casters haven’t been chosen yet for the World Championship event, but discussion is ongoing with goal of reaching as many viewers as possible with appropriate regional options, he said.

The official World Championship event will happen shortly after the launch of Set 4, he said. One of the difficulties that presents is stretching the tournament period not just across more than one set, but multiple balance patches.

Because the balance patch milestones are planned in advance (with the next one scheduled roughly two months after the release of WFM, according to the outline set in the TBF season patch), the team will do what they can to lessen the patch’s impact on competing players, says Charles. The objective is always to have some time before events for players to react and rebuild around a patch. The next midseason patch will likely land slightly before the beginning of the next Tumult Championship, which starts July 26. The TBF midseason patch landed March 21, two weeks before the start of the TBF Tumults.

Whispers from the Maze demo deck tournament

The WFM demo deck online tournament will showcase new mechanics introduced in WFM, with the premade decks available right now on BGA for a limited time, said Cédric. The 512-player event, scheduled for May 25, filled in 5 minutes after the registration link was posted. The team isn’t excluding the idea of opening a second tournament, maybe Sunday at the same time or the week after. Staffing is the main consideration in that decision.

This event is something of a test to see how future opportunities for larger tournaments on BGA might work, said Cédric. That will also give the team a lot of insight into the upcoming competitive play as well. The decks are balanced in what they are designed to showcase, but not necessarily balanced in terms of their competitive level to each other.

Adventure Pass/Promo boosters

The alt art for the six cards found in promo boosters have been published, as well as the alt art cards set as rewards for the Whispers from the Maze Adventure Pass. The team has been reworking the rewards, said Cédric. It’s possible that the badges weren’t very interesting to players, so they’re removing them and spreading the rewards out throughout the pass. You will be able to unlock one common, rare and out-of-faction much more quickly, which should make it easier for players who don’t have many opportunities to level up the Adventure Pass to get at least one of each for the season. By level 5, a player already has one of each rarity. Players will receive a reward for each event they attend during the season, with the remaining levels providing additional foilers.

Among the tougher questions were some less challenging ones.

Whispers from the Maze design

One of the objectives from TBF was to not push everything else aside, said Charles. At the start, TBF was aimed not to completely rewrite the game, and was more for adding ideas. Most of the cards were thought to be support for the heroes that were underplayed in the first season. That means that decklists that were already strong coming out of TBF weren’t likely to change heavily. But decks for heroes who struggled in BTG took more from the second set to give them more opportunities.

The Hunger, a 9-cost Yzmir common that shifts out of faction to Bravos, was suggested as an example of more removal options coming to factions that are still lacking them.

For WFM, the team already had a larger core set in mind, starting with the foundation built by BTG and TBF. That allowed them to approach WFM as a design challenge of developing a completed system. One of the goals was to add more removal options to lessen the damage done by some of the early, more powerful uniques, he said. He and Cédric pointed to The Hunger, which is an Yzmir common with Bravos out-of-faction that costs 9 mana, as an example of new token-focused removal options added for factions that still struggle to provide meaningful interaction with opponents, like Bravos and Muna.

Axiom is receiving several new tools to work with in WFM, and the team is especially hoping to see a return to form for the faction, said Charles. It represented only 6.1% of all wins worldwide during the TBF Tumult Championship, compared to the winners’ 29.2% (Ordis) and 27.2% (Yzmir). Since the WFM patch, the faction has already seen some gains, with a Sierra picking up second in the May 19 AWOL event and an undefeated first at the May 21 NUC event. Prior to that, Axiom picked up its first competitive first place for the entire TBF season in April.

With removal making such a strong appearance in WFM cards, defense becomes more of a concern. Protective elements can be tricky in Altered thanks to unique cards, said Charles. When a powerful unique comes into play, opponents are immediately incentivized to interact with it, and protecting an especially powerful one can cause too much of a burden on the game. As a design choice, he wanted to start the first sets of the game tilted more toward providing additional removal options rather than defense.

Powerful landmarks that can dominate the field if left in play for a turn or so are among the reasons that removal has been so prevalent in the new sets, said Charles.

Once he feels there are enough ways to remove threats, protection might become more of a design goal, he said. That’s especially true of larger landmarks like Grand Endeavor, the Ordis rare of which costs 6 mana and carries 2 Tough. When a landmark like that comes into play, it generally dominates the game if it is able to stay in play for more than a day or so, making a less enjoyable gameplay experience. It’s important to the game’s balance that there are answers for them.

One possible WFM effect that ended up getting shelved was an effect that allowed Auraq players to manipulate the top cards of the deck, making it easier to effectively use her hero ability, said Charles. In play, it turned out to be too powerful, providing 8- and 9-mana cards regularly free of cost. Additionally, discard pile manipulation has been skipped as a design option because the game’s focus should be on the reserve system that’s exclusive to Altered, instead of digging through discards.

An ongoing design struggle for the team has been working with heroes such as Arjun and Lindiwe, said Charles. While they can create specific cards to support their play styles, other heroes within their factions can simply use the cards more effectively. Neither hero is included in WFM’s limited play, and Lindiwe has not been included at all since BTG.

While tournament rules are still in development, comprehensive rules for WFM will be released in time for prerelease events, according to a clarification from Cédric in the official Discord server.

Hero balance and patch notes

References were made to a hero balancing system coming soon during the March 31 AMA. Unfortunately, soon is not now, said Charles. While the team is working on the system, it’s not ready to share widely. However, he wanted to make sure players understood that hero balance continues to be something under consideration, and the team is looking for outside-the-box solutions.

No new cards were added to the WFM season patch watchlist because there aren’t currently additional cards that seem to be causing enough trouble to warrant attention, he said. The objective of the watchlist is to be transparent about which cards the team is watching closely. When a card is released from the watchlist as Baba Yaga and Small Step, Giant Leap were, it’s likely because the team has taken some action that makes the card less of a problem for the time being. That could mean something a suspension, an errata or a rule clarification. When a change is made, but they’re not certain about additional effects, they’ll keep other cards on the list (such as the current members Ordis Attorney or Kadigiran Mage-Dancer). The team hopes that suspending Baba Yaga and Helping Hand will cause enough of a change that no additional effect will need to happen with the others.

Charles couldn’t commit to a specific errata or timeline for unique Moonlight Jellyfish, which have been suspended in all variants since the TBF season patch. Although the Bravos unique Foundry Armorer was released back to the field in the WFM season patch, other token generator uniques (as well as multi-anchor uniques) are currently still on the watchlist. If some of the new removal added in WFM in combination with additional set changes don’t provide enough of a counter, the team will work on other options.

Tumult Championships

The team is very pleased with how the TBF Tumult Championships came together, said Cédric. He thanked all of the players who were involved, as well as those who answered the follow-up survey about the event. They’ll be using those results to improve and adapt the model for the next round, coming July 26-Sept. 7. Ordis and Yzmir weren’t a huge surprise as the winners of the competition, but the results were still interesting and useful for the team.

There will be some evolution in the rewards for future Tumults, and possibly also in the format, said Cédric. Among those is the faction champion reward, which will be changing from the oversized Scout Card in the TBF Tumult to a playable version, similar to what’s being included in the rewards for the World Championships. The playmat will also be linked to the villain for this expansion. In regards to the format, the team will keep what’s worked well during the first Tumult, and make changes to what didn’t fit as well.

While it was a challenge for many players to find a Tumult Championship within driving distance, holding future Tumult events online doesn’t fit with the idea, he said. The goal is to bring people together in a store and center the engagement there. He acknowledged that’s not always an easy thing, but it’s what the Tumults are meant to do. If there are other online events, they’ll likely be a different setup than the Tumults.

He did not exclude the possibility for future online events with physical rewards, similar to the upcoming WFM Demo Deck event.

The team cracked open one of the new WFM prerelease packs.

Future design

Going forward, Charles hopes to see cards that have dual types, such as landmark or character. Gear has shown up as one way to find a compromise in this space for the time being. Cards might also be created in factions that haven’t been revealed yet. There are two factions in the lore that have yet to be fully revealed: The Lost Tribe that didn’t make it to Asgartha and the Exiles, who left Caer Eidos and were never heard from again (Editor’s note: Thanks to Chile for the lore reference).

Out-of-faction cards can cause design issues occasionally, he said. A card can be developed with a targeted use case within a faction, and the incremental changes between common and rare versions can make sense in that space. Bringing out-of-faction design into play provides a completely different challenge if it’s not a clean fit elsewhere in the game. Sometimes there’s a nice tweak that can be made, but other times, it can result in a finicky card that doesn’t play well.

The game’s low-cost meta might not be something that needs to be changed, said Charles. One of Altered’s themes is the back-and-forth play style from one player to the next. If the game’s style shifts more heavily toward playing only larger characters, that reduces the number of potential actions, making turns less interesting. What he wants to avoid is a meta that focuses only on situations where a player with 8 mana will play eight 1-mana cards. But a player who plays four cards using 8 mana is making plays that are likely more interesting. As a result, one of the design goals moving forward is shifting card advantage away from low-cost cards to make card choice more important and encourage players aiming for low-cost cards to have to boost them with higher mana investments elsewhere.

While a second alternative win-con card similar to Lyra Festival was teased in an earlier AMA (Editor’s note: In case Charles can’t remember, it’s here), no update was shared in this event.

Judge program

While the official judge program is a key project for Cédric, it’s also taking a lot of time, he said. The current aim of the project is to set up a model that will adapt for the qualifier events, potentially having a 1.0 version for those early events and a 1.1 version program for August/September. The comprehensive rules for the World Tournaments are being developed alongside the judge program, and a similar timeline should be expected for both. Cédric thanked the volunteer judge community for all of the help they’ve provided so far.

In the development of the program, he hasn’t been satisfied with what he’s seen from other TCGs, and is attempting to create something ambitious and new, he said. But with the World Championship announcements out of the way, he can focus more fully on the judge program, rules and guidelines. He hopes to be able to communicate more by the end of June.

Digital roadmap and ongoing goals

The next step for the team will be focusing on getting the Marketplace and Print-on-Demand services out of beta, said Charles. It’s worth taking the time to celebrate the achievement so far.

Beyond that, many projects such as the World Championships are already in motion, keeping the team busy, said Cédric. The Equinox team will communicate on the future digital roadmap soon. The Marketplace/Print-on-Demand survey filled out by earlier testers included a set of priority goals for the development team, and that’s been instructive in choosing what to focus on next.

Going forward from WFM, new marketing outreach will be done with influencers, streams and social media, according to Lokinox in the video chat.