Whilst I don’t necessarily agree with all the decisions made in the March patch notes and would love the remaining Unique cards released from suspension, I don’t feel that Magpeng Little should be listened to. After all, look what happened to him!

The Patch Changes

As an amateur game designer, I know that all game design decisions are hard, especially around balance. Equinox have some 6-8 full time game designers which is actually a very small number of people to create new sets and balance them, watch the meta game and look at what cards need to be suspended. Finding the right fix for the suspended cards in the light of existing cards and the future cards is not easy and with Haven the writers here all had different ideas. As such we don’t have access to future cards, so we can’t see that part of the balancing and we just have to trust Equinox on this.

This is an incredibly small team to do this, and it is even more complicated by the presence of unique cards. The whole unique algorithm is not a simple thing, and although to us players it seems like there are simple answers, this might not be the case. So, whilst I really wanted my uniques to be freed from Suspendo Jail, I understand it might not be as simple as I think.

The Meta – Healthy or Unhealthy?

The sheer nature of all trading card games is that there will always be a perceived best deck or decks at high level play. Very often in Magic the Gathering before a Pro Tour there were usually perceived to be two or three high level decks and at times that had even been one best deck and one that predated on it. These decks could have 40-50% of the meta and have win rates in excess of 60%. To me that is an unhealthy meta game.

The meta game presented to us by Equinox shows that the top faction has a 20.3% share of the meta and the worst one an 11% share of the meta game. In a perfect world every one of the six factions would have 16.67% of the meta. Obviously, it is difficult / next to impossible to perfectly balance a TCG so that each faction has that magic 16.67%. So, the best you can hope for is an acceptable tolerance around that golden percentage. I feel that a 4% tolerance is a reasonable level of variance. Now only Axiom falls outside that tolerance at 11% and that has largely been due to the suspension of Haven, Bravos Bastion. I hope that its release can bring the faction up, but for the most part, the standard deviation on factions is not way out of line.

The Best Decks

In any TCG there will always be a deck that is perceived as ‘The Best Deck’. For the first season it was deemed to be the Waru deck (until he got his teeth pulled) and now it is perceived to be Sigismar. However looking at all the online tournaments over the past few weeks since 17^th February (on 39cards.com) we have tournament wins for six different heroes. Now I do realise that Sigismar and Afanas are perceived the ‘best decks’ but it shows that there are at least six different heroes that can win events and there have been other heroes in the top 8.

To conclude, yes there are perceived to be best decks (there always will be), but they are not unbeatable. I beat a Sigismar deck the other day with my Kojo brew. Today we are complaining about Sigismar and Afanas, but next season it may well be another hero who becomes the bogeyman. With 18 different heroes it will be impossible to have them all ‘competitive’, but to have 6 different heroes that can win I feel is healthy.

So, I agree with Charles’ assessment of a healthy metagame even though you may not like having to play against a greater percentage of Sigismar decks online. Honestly having the top 2 decks being 25% of the decks you face is actually low for a TCG.

Low-Cost Strategies

Ever since Altered first premiered we have seen low cost (1-3 mana) cards being the mainstay of strategies for winning decks. The complaint I see is, “Why can’t we have decks with higher casting cost cards in them?”

Look at Ellio’s video featuring a Kojo deck with Benzeiten in it. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cT7hhidg62E). Here we have someone innovating and playing a deck (to a great win percentage – 20-0) with a card no one else is valuing as it costs 6 mana. So why is this good in the deck?

• It has good card advantage built in.
• It has good stats for the cost.
• It dodges much of the removal arrayed against it. Afanas is mainly playing ‘Off You Go!’ and Sigismar is mainly playing ‘Teamwork Training’ as no one else is playing big creatures, since its not perceived to be what people are largely playing. Playing a large creature or two as a surprise means that these decks can be caught off guard.

Now I’d like to see some more support for larger creature strategies (Atsadi would appreciate it), but it is certainly possible to run some in your deck at the moment.

Going Forward

Obviously, like some others, I would love the meta to be perfectly balanced, but I’m a realist that it can’t be. I hope that the next set brings a bit more balance for the factions and something to bring Axiom up the rankings. I personally don’t think the Haven change is enough to do that, but I haven’t tested it, and the Equinox team have.

We however still haven’t had the most important answer however to the question on everyone’s lips though – “Why does Mana Flare exist?”