Eternal Balance Update – 12/7/2022

Looking towards this year’s Eternal World Championship, we’re not looking to flip the table on anyone, but wanted to make a few Expedition-focused adjustments. These changes will be going into effect later today, December 7th, 2022.

Update 12/9: One additional change will be going live today to bring Valley Whisperer into line with the change to the Unleash mechanic:

• Valley Whisperer to “Units with Strength 4 or more in your hand have Unleash and can’t cost less than 1.”

Nerfs

• Stonebreaker Bow to “Contract 2: +2 Strength this turn.” (was +2 Strength permanently)
• Rickety Ramcart to 3/1 (from 4/1)

Stonebreaker Bow and Rickety Ramcart are both dynamic cards that lead to a lot of interactive games, but can be really punishing to opponents who fall behind. We wanted to maintain the fun of these cards while pulling back on how much raw damage they deal to the enemy player.

Stonebreaker Bow is still an effective unit-killer and fury-enabler, but is much less likely to deal 12 damage to an opponent when paired with a kill spell or two. Rickety Ramcart offers just as much resilience and tactics in combat, but will be a bit worse at ending the game before your opponent gets a chance to catch up.

Buffs

• Wyatt, Trashman to 5/4 (was 4/4)
• Skycrag Six to 6-cost (from 7)

We’re giving some incidental love to some fringe cards that haven’t seen much play so far. Wyatt gets some extra strength to help him compete against more popular five-drops, and The Skycrag Six gets a more thematically-appropriate cost.

Rules Changes

• Unleash – Now includes “The copy’s cost can’t be reduced.” instead of “Cards with Unleash can’t cost less than 1.”

We knew Unleash would be powerful with cost reduction, but we’d hoped that the one-cost floor would be enough to keep it from getting out of control. The combination with Miner’s Musket came in higher than we expected, but it was still in an acceptable range and we figured we could let people have their fun until it rotated out with the next Expedition format.

The Eclipse + Nesting Avisaur deck in Throne indicates that this is a larger issue. Rather than play whack-a-mole with each new version of the combination, we concluded that it was better to address the issue for Unleash in general. The new rule allows you to get a head start on Unleash by reducing the cost of the initial copy, but subsequent copies will always be full cost.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed an issue where Heirloom Blade could be partially played, leaving an empty space in the hand
• Fixed an issue where Equalize could affect the enemy player through Aegis
• Fixed an issue where “When you Inscribe this” abilities did not present the card to the opponent
• Fixed an issue where Devastation failed to kill cursed relics
• Fixed an issue where spells with Inscribe could fail to trigger Nacas, Bastion Prodigy
• Fixed an issue where spells with Inscribe could be incorrectly blocked by Tocas, Waystone Harvester
• Fixed an issue where Sleight of Hand didn’t trigger transform-matters effects
• Fixed an issue where Voprex, Hope’s End could still steal units if killed or transformed in response
• Fixed an issue where Skycrag Synthesis could be played without an enemy spell
• Fixed an issue where Snow Pelting and Deadly Confrontation didn’t trigger Amplify-related abilities
• Fixed an issue where Valley Spring didn’t show the cost change until after choosing the card to return with Second Sight
• Fixed an issue where Thieving Fox could fail to trigger if it had been transformed previously
• Fixed an issue where some effects that discard cards from a deck did not visualize the card movement
• Added the Mage type to Combrei Lawmage
• Fixed several formatting and translation issues in non-English languages