Eternal Balance Update: Praxis Trove

Hello, I’m Patrick Sullivan, one of the designers on Eternal. Though we recently made a live balance update to Throne, a new combo deck has emerged with the release of Valley Beyond that necessitates action, and so we are making another update today.

.Praxis Trove now: Same text as before, but with the additional text “Once per turn”

(Note: Because Praxis Trove appears in the Whispers of the Throne micro-campaign, refunds will be offered in Gold instead of Shiftstone.)

The deck that prompted us to act here was discovered by the community quickly after the release of Valley Beyond. It wins on the third turn with consistency. Unpacking the exact combo chain is too laborious and complicated for the purposes of this article, but the short explanation is that Abundance could produce a deterministic engine alongside Praxis Trove, with any one cost unit played after Praxis Trove casting an Abundance, which would then generate a 2-cost unit, which would then find Reweave, and so on. The majority of the deck consisted of cheap units to trigger Praxis Trove, a variety of Merchants and Smugglers to find the right pieces, and ancillary cards that could either accelerate power or protect Praxis Trove from the minimal windows of interaction the deck produced.

It is worth noting that certain elements of this combo have existed for some time, and that combo decks built around Praxis Trove are not altogether new. But Abundance is a significant gain in terms of power, speed, and reliability for this skeleton.

It is too soon to know if the deck was “too good”, or if people could have adapted over time. That’s besides the point. We aren’t interested in seeing if a deck like this can be “handled” by people overloading on destructive interaction. Nor is this meant to admonish “combo” more generally. But the following bullet points are each individually noteworthy, and their negative characteristics multiply on each other.

• Extremely fast
• Composed of nothing but search (through deck and Market) acceleration, and combo pieces
• Has no “secondary” gameplan, makes no effort to win through combat as a backup plan or as part of the range
• Barely acknowledges opposing cards, either in game or in deck construction
• Monopolizes the clock on the combo turn using a number of opaque individual cards and interactions

The above is an experience that we do not believe in for either player. This last bit is critical. Often these conversations are oriented around the needs of the losing or less-invested player, and with good reason. But this deck fails the test on the other side, too. We don’t believe the act of playing with or iterating on this is at all stimulating once the initial novelty has worn off, and based on the posts and forums we’ve read that has already happened within 24 hours of the combo emerging. Even if the deck didn’t turn out to be particularly powerful or if people found solutions, we don’t believe Eternal is a better game if people even consider if this is the deck they should be playing, and so we are moving as quickly as possible. We believe in the depth and fun of Valley Beyond and the Throne format more generally, and so even entertaining the possibility of preserving this engine is a waste of time.

Regarding the specific change to Praxis Trove, there are a number of options that could end the combo deck and preserve the intended purpose of Praxis Trove. To that end, we wanted to preserve the ostensible functionality of the card–building a scripted, random, or somewhere-in-between value engine over time–while removing the possibility of someone doing everything in one turn. We hope this preserves much of the spirit and functionality of the previous design without it emerging as a combo piece in a similar fashion at some point in the future.

Thank you for your continued support of Eternal, and we hope you have a good time playing with and against the exciting new cards in Valley Beyond.