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Review of Patch Version 0.81.2

We gave an early preview of the patch to Platform_Disciple, who's reviewed and gone into great detail about all the changes. Check it out here or below:

Minor Features

Inventory Card Filtering

We now have card filtering supported in the inventory screen when viewing your card library.
This includes filtering for Factions, Set, Alternate Arts, Foiling, Premium Borders and Stamped cards.
Note: The circular amount display on each card still represents the total amount of that card you own, so it does not change depending on your filters.

FPS Limiting Support

Added FPS limiting support. You can now cap the frame rate that the game runs at.
This can be changed in Options -> Graphics.

Balance Changes

Believer of Paragons: Cost:4 Morale:5
Character - Human
At the beginning of combat, if Believer of Paragons is deployed, the first Unique Character you control in the Assault Zone gains Indestructible until end of turn.
Pay 3: All Unique Characters in your Hand and Command Zone gain +2/+2. Activate only once per turn.
12/8
We were not happy with the previous design for a number of reasons, both treading on the toes of cards like Cassial, and not doing a good job supporting the Unique Characters themes. This rework we believe will better help the deck it is aimed at, especially with the upcoming Rift Run gamemode.

Carlota's Arbitrator: Cost:8 Morale:9
Character - Angel
You may pay 3 to deploy Carlota's Arbitrator, if you do, Remove it at the start of combat.
Flying
While Carlota's Arbitrator is deployed, enemy Characters entering the Deployed area don't cause effects to trigger
16/16
Arbitrator's effect is a useful tool to have against something that is otherwise often hard to interact with, however she came down too late in the game to impact some of the most important deployment timings. So we have added an alternate mode that can be used earlier. This rework also opens up some combos for the clever player.

Koro, Finder of Ways: Increase activation cost to 3. Fix Permanent element of the card.
Koro's redesign slipped into the previous patch, and we are very happy with her new gameplay loop, however she has a slightly higher power level than we'd like, so we want to slow her down a little bit, but fix up the bug that wasn't making the supply buff "permanent" as we want to see her used with reanimation or flicker effects to stack up buffs.

Death in Heaven: 8 Cost -> 10 Cost
Death in Heaven is incredibly powerful, falling into the rare style of board wipes that can hit the support zone. In addition to this, careful deckbuilding can make this board wipe often partially one sided. While overall we have seen some really fun new decks emerging from this card, we felt increasing the cost to better respect its immense power was necessary.

Serpent of the Western Wind: 4/4 -> 6/8
Earlier versions of this card where significantly cheaper, and thus an oversight occurred when the card's cost was increased without raising its base stats. While we want to flying lord effect to take focus over an efficient body, 4 health especially left the card far far too vulnerable.

Tormented Eidolon: Require battlefield for both effects. Wording changed to "At the end of turn, if a Character you control died this turn and Tormented Eidolon is on the Battlefield, it gains +2/+2, and next turn you gain 1 extra resource."
While sometimes difficult to enable, cheap resource increases are extremely powerful and so are ramping stats. To both simplify the wording of the card and lower the effectiveness of having this sit in your command or support zone, we have made both effects only trigger while on the battlefield.

Saber Tooth Snail: 8 Health -> 6 Health
Slow and steady wins the race. Snail takes time to enter combat, but its very efficient unstoppable stats we've found just a little too much, especially with health buffs from cards like Aleta. With its lower base stats it'll now need to rely on effects like that to get multiple hits in once it gets going.

Jade Golem: 8 Health -> 12 Health
Jade Golem was a bit too vulnerable in the defence zone and a bit too small if played from deck later in the game, so we have increased its survivability a little to encourage building a strategy around it more often.

Cassial's Grave: Reduce cost from 5 Cost -> 3 Cost
While certainly a powerful artifact, being locked behind having your Cassial die, and being relatively expensive wasn't very exciting. So we've made the generated artifact a little cheaper so you don't fall behind in tempo.

Dragon Tamer: Replace Exhaust with once per turn, only generates 6+ cost dragons
While designed more as a casual card and an option for Draft, Dragon Tamer exhausting itself made it's already huge overcharge investment too much, especially when you often needed to use the Tamer's body to survive long enough to use the Dragons it generates. In addition there was about a 5% chance to generate an Ao-Shun, Incognito which would be extremely frustrating. So to allow us to print lower cost dragons and to prevent this small annoyance, we have added a cost restriction as well.

Illegal Magitech: Reduce Cost from 3 Cost -> 2 Cost
Similar cards like Hunt have seen niche play, and there was concern during early testing that the ability for this card to find other copies of itself could be dangerous. However after additional playtesting by the community and the team, we feel that between the two faction requirements and the cost cap, this is safe to reduce in cost.

Project Hellfire: Morale increase to 3
Project Hellfire is extremely aggressive and can be combined with a number of other cards to double up hand or command zone buffs. We wanted to make using multiples of these slightly more risky with a minor morale increase. We'll be keeping an eye on if the card needs any future adjustments however.

Micro-Rift Research: Increase Cost by 1. Remove Pre-emptive.
This ability is incredibly efficient and flexible, able to prevent a huge amount of damage, save characters or repeat deploy effects. due to the broad range of uses and ability to stall especially, we have increased the cost slightly and removed the pre-emptive effect to make initiative matter more.

Nero's Experiments: Added permanent so it can raise multiple times
Nero's Experiments allows players to turn nearly any cheap character into their own Risen of Avarrach, grinding out a slow but steady victory. However because the effect wasn't permanent, its reanimation would only happen a limited number of times, playing against the purpose of the card.

Bile Imp: Increase Exile 2 -> Exile 3
Infect is a powerful keyword, and while we have been happy with this card's build around elements, this was often overshadowed by raw efficiency when deployed on turn 2, putting a stop to nearly any early Character play. This will now more often come down a turn later, when there are more counterplay options available.

Irial, Champion of Tenacity: Increased stats from 4/2 -> 6/6
Irial is another card that suffered from a last minute stat change after concern from early testing. However this lead to a particularly negative reception considering her prominence as a legendary and some of our marketing. We've given her a significant buff as a premium 3drop champion she was envisioned at, but will be be keeping an eye on her performance going forward in case we have overcorrected.

Spiritfire Disciple: Description changed to
"Vigilance
At the start of combat, if Spiritfire Disciple is attacking or blocking alone it fully heals and gains +8/+0 until the end of turn."
The attack alone trigger has been playing really well, but was hindered by the difficulty of having the Disciple survive it's first turn, often dying due to its vigilance. Thus we have modified the card slightly to still encourage this faction pair's gameplay style but with less awkwardness.

Drason's Revolutionary: Stats increased from 15/5 -> 15/8
While mostly a signpost synergy piece for the future rift run mode, and a deploy speed removal option with a heavy deckbuilding cost, we wanted to raise the floor slightly so that it didn't die to a stiff breeze.

Fickle Friendship: Increase Cost from 6 -> 7
While already a bit slow and expensive, it has the ability to both get past most immunities and give you an immediate attack or defence use as the stolen character remains in the same zone. Therefore we wanted to make it even a little slower to let if focus on its infiltration element and not create too much of a density of removal in Exiles.

Subject 1/MN-Y: Reduce stats from 5/12 -> 5/9
We've been seeing this good boy as a core pillar in a number of strategies, from tutoring specific cards to 15+ attack matters subthemes. However the base body is currently overly efficient, especially as a hybrid card with a very very low deckbuilding cost. This we are toning down the stats slight but still expect to see this doggo popping up in the right decks.

Rift Stabilizer: Reduce activation Cost from 3 -> 2
Rift Stabilizer is slow and expensive. So while it remains slow to activate, we are making it a little cheaper over multiple turns.

Vesta, Firebrand Commander: Increase Health from 10 -> 14
Vesta's attack trigger gives small but widespread incremental buffs, however it would often die on its first attack, making it difficult to stack up multiple triggers, so we've increased her health slightly to help make her a little more consistent.

Sceptre of the Deep: Two Demon Tokens to Hand -> One token to hand and another to your deck.
Sceptre of the Deep while effective in the grindiest of matchups to not get punished for playing Demons, the tokens where extremely slow to appear and would fill up too many crucial draws in multiples. Now one demon token is added directly to your hand, giving more consistency and allowing you to either apply pressure with a constant stream of free fliers, or save them up to use after a crucial board wipe.

Bugfixes

General Fixes

Fixed automated bug reports being sent multiple times in a game when a soft-lock occurs.

Fixed card reward granting happening if the user has invalid client credentials due to their system clock not being synced. Made sure to show a popup message with information regarding this.

Fixed Create Copy effects soft-locking the game when used on a filled commander zone.

Fixed granting Recall to a card causing the game to crash if the card already had Recall.

Fixed Draft Cards carrying over damage and modifiers from the source card.

Fixed legality not updating in the deck builder after selecting commander purity, which fixed the illegal text not updating.

Improved some slot repositioning behaviour, to be more efficient.

Improved in game logging performance.

Fixed "levelled up" text showing on the reward panel multiple times.

Fixed the prestige pass progress bar not hiding when in a replay mode.

Fixed prestige pass progress UI incorrectly scaling on match result GUI.

Fixed the news panel not showing upon logging in.

Fixed some UI display issues with the prize displays in the leader board screen.

Fixed Power and Health icons on card displays sometimes not rendering in the deckbuilder and pack opening screens.

Grayscale (the card) now makes the effected card grayscale (the vanity).

Card Fixes

Fixed Fiery Wish not correctly granting Charge.

Fixed Scepter of the Deep not applying it's Morale properly, resulting in negative Morale on affected cards.

Fixed Serennia, Champion Of Life not triggering Rebel Peacekeeper.

Fixed Lilariah, the Rebel allowing multiple activations in a turn.

Fixed Dugg's win condition not properly checking the correct player, and incorrectly triggering if Humbled from Purification Stone.

Fixed Costs for various Token cards.

Fixed Take Control effects not correctly moving the card to the opponent field.

Fixed Zuza, Angelic Siren not returning the controlled character back to the opponents Support zone and updated description to support this

Fixed Burning Prejudice exhausting cards in the Deck and Hand zones.

Fixed Denial of Rebirth dealing too much damage.

Fixed Interdimensional Phase Bot working from the Hand and Graveyard.

Fixed Cassial, the Selfless ascending when redirecting 0 damage.

Fixed Wall of the Dead preventing non-combat damage.

Fixed Lingbao's Will increasing the Morale Cost for Characters that have 0 Morale.

Fixed Made Mighty by Metal's death prevention effect and Cost reduction effect.

Fixed Agent Coyle Synergy not accounting for itself in it's Commander rule, as it is Unique

Fixed Crestmoor's card art animation.

Fixed duplicate Recall tooltip on Repel.


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