August Card Balance Update
Dear KARDS enthusiasts,
We here at 1939 Games hope that you are having a great summer! Our team is (mostly) back from summer vacations, full of energy and ideas, and ready to roll. Lot of interesting things are on the horizon for KARDS, even in the next few days, so keep your eyes peeled!
For now, however, we want to go over some changes to a few cards scheduled to go out in a patch later this week.
Balance update: Removal cards
We are going to update some of the more popular removal cards and here is why.
First of all, this is not a spur of the moment decision - we've been contemplating this change for a while now.
There are several reasons for nerfing some of the more popular removal cards in the game.
- Overuse. Removal cards are ubiquitous in almost all decks and the best ones, like From the People and The Desert Rats are an auto-include. While removal orders are still a necessary part of the game, the power level on some of them is simply too high right now.
- Stalled games. The high popularity of removal cards results in many of the best decks being so order heavy that they have few or no units, especially at low cost, relying completely on orders to keep fast decks at bay until their few, expensive units come later to take the game over. This can lead to very boring "draw-go" style duels where players, with hands full of removal orders, can't or won't play units until very late in the game and often the first one to blink loses.
- Reduced strategical options. The strength of removal also keeps most aggressive decks too heavily in check, apart from decks that don't care about cheap spot removal, like Japanese burn decks or Soviet token spam decks. So we are nerfing many of the most-used removal cards in the game (including the 3 most popular ones - From the People, Sudden Strike and Tactical Strike).
Not all removal cards are being changed this time around, we want to see the effect of the changes in this round before making a decision on further changes.
Change to nine cards
Let's dive right into it and see what cards we are changing.
It almost feels like a sacrilege to change The Desert Rats, the card has stayed the same for so long. But its ability to cheaply kill small units or buy you a turn with the pinning is just too efficient. Same as with the Naval Power change awhile back, we want British removal to be more reliant on delaying tactics through pinning. While undoubtedly weaker now, it can still deal with popular cards like the 15th Cavalry Regiment and Katyusha.
The glory days of From the People, when it dealt 3 damage AND pinned for just 2 kredits are now long gone. Its power is such that any deck with the Soviets is effectively at 36 card size, as 4 copies of From the People were an auto-include. Increasing the cost to 3 does weaken the card quite a bit - it is not as reliable as early removal against aggressive decks, nor as cost efficient when dealing with higher cost units. With From the People weaker, keeping Bloody Sickle as it is made more sense so that the Soviet standard rarity removal is not too heavily gimped.
The power of Sudden Strike was not just that it was a cheap removal against aggressive decks, but even more that it gave you a tempo boost by allowing you to spend 2 kredits to deal with something the enemy spent 3 kredits to play. Sudden Strike can still cleanly deal with early aggressors, but it no longer gives the tempo advantage and many important units are now out of reach, such as 42nd Rifles and 84th Infantry Regiment to name a couple.
Tactical Strike was not used much until we added a draw card clause to it, then it became on of the most played cards in the game, highlighting the power of cantrips (drawing a card as an extra effect). We're reverting this change now, but because we want to still highlight the cantrip theme of Germany, we are adding that draw clause to another card, see below.
Sky Barons on the other hand does not see much play, as it is much narrower than the similarly costed Tactical Strike. It will be interesting to see how things will stand a few weeks from now. We feel this change is like hitting two birds with one stone, because one of our fears with nerfing removal is that it strengthens air units, so beefing a card specifically aimed at those units seems prudent.That's it for the removal cards, there are a few other changes to mention:
The current version of Combined Arms does not showcase the combined arms theme the way we want for Germany and now that we have reduced the number of unit types it is much simpler to just give a bonus per unit type. This reads much cleaner and allows for more interesting scaling and deck construction than before. Expect more of the same in the future.
The Chaika is a mainstay of the Soviet self-sacrifice deck. While that deck as a whole is not an issue, the Chaika is a bit too efficient at the frontend against aggressive decks.
The reason for this change is two-fold. The first one is that the current Type 95 is simply very underwhelming and rarely used beyond just the starter decks. Secondly, and more importantly, the new ability is aimed at further curbing the order-centric metagame we're seeing right now. While a single card will of course only go so far, it adds to the arsenal of options available when adjusting decks for an order heavy environment.
Similar to the change above for the Chaika, the change to the Kittyhawk continues in making sure that long-range units do not dominate the game too much. The Kittyhawk is super efficient in what it does and even at the reduced stats it stills offers excellent value for its cost.
Game update this week
That's it for now, as you can see, some big changes coming in the next
patch.
Our hope is they contribute to an improved and more diverse metagame, one more focused on units. The upcoming patch will also include a fair number of bug fixes.
We will publish the full patch notes together with the patch later this week.
