Minion Masters News

Minion Masters!

[h2]New Expansion Reveal coming on the 1st of May - Don't Miss it![/h2]

[h2]Upcoming Balance Changes[/h2]


While we have the upcoming Wild Cards Test, we've still got a host of balance changes we'll be releasing alongside it. Here's just a few of the changes coming soon:

• Ting, Teng & Tung
  
• Damage 100 -> 90
  
• Projectiles cannot bounce off of dead minions
  
• Developer Comments
• Projectiles bouncing off of minions that were already dead was somewhat of an unintended behaviour, so half of this change can be classified as a bug fix, but we're listing it here as it's a significant change to the balance of the card.
  

• Snake Druid
  
• Speed 2 -> 3
  
• Developer Comments
• Snake Druid often seemed to have stayed on your side of the field far too long for your opponent to effectively deal with him due to his low speed. By giving him a speed increase in this way, we want to maintain his current strengths but allow your opponent to simply wait him out, or push other lanes, more effectively.
  

• Zealots of the Burning Fist
  
• Mana Cost 7 -> 6
  
• Developer Comments
• Despite being able to output some serious damage in the right circumstances, the mana cost for Zealots of the Burning Fist was too high to justify playing it in most scenarios. Hopefully a simple mana reduction can help out the card a lot.
  

• Dragon Ball
  
• Activation Mana Cost 6+ -> 5+
  
• Developer Comments
• Dragon Ball's activation cost was making the card significantly difficult to fit into decks, and we believe the meta has developed to a state where it's a good opportunity to ease up on the restrictive nature of the card's condition.
  

As always, there's more balance changes to come - Look forward to reading the rest with the release of the 1.12 Patch Notes!

[h2]BadAsAFish80's 2v2 Tournament #6[/h2]


BadAsAFish is back again with another installment of his excellent tournament series! Featuring a $100 Prize Pool provided by BetaDwarf, this multi-day event is a great way to team up with your friend and engage in some competitive Minion Masters if you're stuck at home during the quarantine.

Check out the Toornament page here: https://www.toornament.com/en_GB/tournaments/3298882341728886784/information

[h2]Awesome Fanart[/h2]
We're always on the lookout for great displays of creativity from the Minion Masters playerbase, and our eyes this week were drawn to some amazing fanart of Succubus by nekochelle!



We fully recommend checking out the original linked above - The resolution on this is massive! We fell in love with this piece the moment we saw it, and so did our users on Reddit. Check out nekochelle's Instagram accounts - nekochelle and miqchips for more of their great work.

Cheers from BetaDwarf!

Minion Masters!


Those that have been paying dutiful attention to our Road Map know that Stormbringer is getting a shiny animation overhaul. His current animation set has been with us since the very beginning of Minion Masters, and we think it's time to give him an upgrade. Our animator has been hard at work creating these great new visuals that we think better represent Stormbringer's acrobatic and showboating personality. Check them out and let us know what you think:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Stormbringer's new style will be arriving in Version 1.12, due for release on the 30th of April.



With the continued duration of the Covid-19 quarantine, it's important to all of us that we stay in contact in this period of isolation. We've already talked about how we're still working from home on the next Minion Masters update, but the BetaDwarf team have also taken to special remote gaming nights. We've been up to everything - Playtesting new (and secret!) things, or getting together and hitting public game servers with the might of the Dwarves. There's even been word of setting up a private BetaDwarf Minecraft server... Perhaps we'll have things to show you from that if the idea takes off ;)

But we also want to hear about you all - What have you been up to during the quarantine, productive or recreational? Everyone at BetaDwarf wishes you the best, and we want to hear from you!

Cheers from BetaDwarf!

Minion Masters!


We've made the difficult decision to put Expeditions on Hiatus from the game in our upcoming update. Our stats and survey indicated to us that only a small portion of the Minion Masters playbase actively engage with the mode, yet putting Season Tokens behind it that were significant to new players meant people would have to play through a mode they don't enjoy, and found confusing. We think it's time to retire the game mode for the time being as maintaining it was becoming a difficulty on our end without revisiting the mode, and we want to take the opportunity to have time to focus and improve the experience of the remaining game modes.

We'll replacing the weekly expeditions with a weekly quest that will grant tokens for winning 5 matches in Premade 2v2 Battles, as to not simply be removing earnable rewards. We'd like to thank everyone that's enjoyed Expeditions since its inception.



We're always on the lookout for inspiring tales of awesomeness from our community. With the recent Covid-19 pandemic, there's never been a better time for the Minion Masters community to come together, and nowhere has there been a better example of this than BadAsAFish80's week long charity stream!

Started as an endeavour to fundraise for the UK's National Health Service, BadAsAFish undertook the event spanning from the 6th to the 10th of April, with any and all proceeds from his Twitch stream being donated towards this great cause. As of writing (Wednesday the 8th), he's already raised a phenomenal $1350!

Make sure to check him out over this Easter period and give him our best wishes - Everyone at BetaDwarf is proud of what he's achieved!

And while you're at it - Why not consider signing up to his upcoming 1v1 Tournament? There's a $100 prize pool with a generous amount of time to complete your matches - Perfect for this period! https://www.toornament.com/en_GB/tournaments/3298863485632135168/information

Cheers from BetaDwarf!

Minion Masters!





Wild Cards is a topic that's been at the forefront of Minion Masters discussion for a long time. It's been a divisive issue that proved difficult to gain a consensus upon - Today, we'll be talking at depth about our plans with the mechanic going forward.

[h3]The Aim[/h3]
For those not familiar with the subject of Wild Cards, the main issue that we're attempting to solve is the usage of the mechanic for "cheese" strategies - Where decks would simply take one strong card that was usually perfectly acceptable on their own, and simply add extra copies of it in order to require more direct answers from the opponent lest a severe mana advantage be gained.

At the same time, we acknowledge that there are more innocent uses of Wild Cards - Users that make creative decks from them or simply use them to have fun with their favourite card even if the strategy isn't viable. Because of this we opted early on to not simply remove the mechanic, as we felt it would have been a significant loss to the game to outright remove a feature a sizeable portion of the playerbase enjoys.

As such, the direction we're trying with Wild Cards is to balance them as a mechanic and make them an alternative strategy - So that they can still be appreciated by those that liked Wild Cards before, but also making them more of a considered choice than a straight upgrade to most competitive decks.

[h3]What we're doing[/h3]

This is the solution we're trying:

• Wild Cards are now added as the 11th and 12th cards in your deck.
  
• You must have 10 unique cards in your deck to start a match.
  

This comes about as a result of a long period of theorycrafting, testing and design behind the scenes at BetaDwarf. We considered many, many solutions to Wild Cards and will go into more detail about why we didn't opt for specific solutions below.

The main idea with this is to create a significant drawback to the addition of Wild Cards in your deck - Having to cycle extra cards makes decks function much slower than those without, allowing non-Wild Card decks to be able to ideally reach their core cards or responses faster in comparison.

Regarding the Balance Changes we made in 1.11, we felt it was necessary that for this concept to work, significant changes would need to be made to the 1 drop Mana Cost slot to avoid a scenario where users simply included powerful 1 Mana Cards to offset the cycling disadvantage this would provide.

With Version 1.12, we intend to implement this change on the live server for the duration of the patch (Until Version 1.13) as a public test of the Wild Cards rework. While this change was tested with our PTR groups, it was determined that we would need a much larger sample size of games to get a comprehensive and accurate conclusion as to how effective these changes would be. To this end, we're trying out if a full Ranked season can provide the data we'd need.

As such, Version 1.12 can be considered as a "Wild Cards Rework Beta", and we will frequently be polling the community throughout the month to get your feedback as the meta develops.

[h2]Other solutions we considered (And why we didn't do them)[/h2]
[h3]Separate Queues with no Wild Cards[/h3]

Our main concern with this solution was that it would significantly shrink the populations of ranked queues regardless of which modes we implemented this in, and we had no intention of making this a solution purely for 1v1 modes - Wild Cards were problematic in every queue, and ignoring one or the other for the sake of what we saw as a potential bandaid fix wasn't justifiable to us. We also did not want to accelerate an elitist stigma within the Minion Masters Community - Be it "Casual vs Serious" queues, or "2v2 isn't a serious mode, because they still have Wild Cards". We wanted to fix the problem for all of our playerbase, and not to leave major parts of it behind.

[h3]Make Wild Cards cost more Mana[/h3]

This was probably one of our most frequently discussed options. Ultimately there were three elements that made us not go forward with this solution:

• It would also significantly hurt the "fun" uses of Wild Cards
  
• What about 10 mana cards - Would we implement Mana Freeze? Would that be too confusing to newer players? Would we have to instead make it Mana Freeze for all Wild Cards - At which point, would that have much of an impact?
  
• Higher cost Wild Cards are affected significantly less by this change - I.E. 3x Lord-Sentinel Thelec
  

[h3]Make Wild Cards unlock with experience/perks (with them being the 11th and 12th cards, but no changes to 1 drops)[/h3]

This change was tested behind the scenes at BetaDwarf, but we quickly found that it opened up a lot of opportunities for combo decks, both on certain masters (Ravager in particular) or with decks in general that wouldn't have much use for the combo pieces earlier in the game. It allowed you to create a very defensive strategy early game and then transition with game swinging power cards later on.

[h3]Remove one Wild Card / Make it so you can't Wild Card the same card twice[/h3

This was quite a popular suggestion, but ultimately we felt it wouldn't do enough - Removing one of the two wild cards felt like we were simply dodging the issue, while removing the triple wild carding didn't affect Combo decks at all. We're also committed to the idea that Wild Cards can offer something fun and interesting to the game, and this felt like a step backwards.

If you have other questions about this solution, please feel free to get in contact with us about the matter. Reworking Wild Cards has been a consideration for a long time at BetaDwarf, and we're very much looking forward to the results of our public test of the solution.



We have applications open for fan translators of Minion Masters - We're looking to improve the current state of localisation in Minion Masters, as well as create better translations for upcoming content in the future. You can sign up here - Thanks in advance!

Cheers from BetaDwarf!

Minion Masters!

The Zealots of the Burning Fist have made their way to the jungles of Jadespark to join the fight! Log on to Minion Masters within a week of this patch and receive a free copy of this brand new Supreme Card! We’ve also got a set of big balance changes coming up aiming to significantly shake up the metagame, primarily by way of targeting low-cost “cycle” cards.





[h3]A copy of this card is available to all users for free if they log on from the 26th of March to the 2nd of April. Don’t miss out![/h3]

The Zealots of the Burning Fist are battle hardened soldiers of the notorious Order of the Burning Fist and are loyal to High Inquisitor Ardera, fighting with a reckless abandon that demonstrates little care for their own safety. This fervor allows them to hit harder than the regular Warrior, dealing 100 damage instead of the regular 70, but it comes at a price - With each attack, they lose 10% of their own health. But that's not all - If you only control one Zealot, it gains Rage and Haste, capable of outputting massive damage if they aren't handled with care.



Developer Comments The main idea behind this set of changes is to re-balance the value of one drops. We currently feel that the mana slot offers far too much value for what should be primarily included in your deck for the cycling value, and we generally want 1 mana cards to be on the same power level as a Mana Puff.

There's a lot of interesting play space in both the control style and bridge grab metagames, and we believe that by removing the efficiency that most 1 mana cards have, we can create a more diverse spectrum of choices for players to make when it comes to those elements.

Additionally, these changes are going to help pave the way for an upcoming Wild Cards rework we’re planning to do. You can expect to hear more news about this very soon.

Illusory Cleaver

• Damage 20 > 10
  

Nether Bat

• Mana Cost 1 > 2
  
• Damage 20 > 35
  
• No longer has a reduced Aggro range
  

Screaming Scrat

• Mana Cost 1 > 2
  
• Damage 60 > 100
  
• Health 60 > 100
  
• No longer shares properties with Armored Scrats
  

Sewer Scrat

• Mana Cost 1 > 2
  
• Poison Duration 5 > 3
  
• Now an Armored Sewer Scrat. Turns into a regular Sewer Scrat once the Barrel Shield is broken (See: Armored Scrats)
  

Armored Scrats

• Rework: Turns into a Scrat instead of dying
  
• Damage 20 > 10
  
• Developer Comments
• Armored Scrats have always sat at an awkward position of being intended as slightly tankier, annoying minions to remove, but we felt they haven’t ever been able to fulfill that role. We took some inspiration from our previous game Forced SHOWDOWN for this change, giving them an identity as a group of pesky scrats that will typically require more direct combat to remove.
  

AtG Drone x8

• New Attack: Shoots 6 projectiles at random targets
  
• Damage 30 > 10
  

Bats Bats Bats

• Mana Cost 4 > 5
  
• Duration 6 > 5
  
• Developer Comments
• This change primarily comes as a result of the significant increase in damage on the Nether Bat unit.
  

Blood Imps