Greetings Spellslingers! The team was focused primarily on fixing bugs in this release. Thank you for your patience in testing during early access and your continued support of our game. 

Game System Changes

Ladder Season Reset

• As we continue to evaluate the trophy formula and figure out the cadence of our seasons, we have reset most players by one league:
• Players in the Silver league and above have been moved back to the start of the previous league.
• Mythic → Diamond
• Diamond → Platinum
• Platinum → Gold
• Gold → Silver
• Silver → Bronze
• Players in the Bronze league have been reset to the start of Bronze.
• Play league Spellslingers are unaffected.

Recycling

• The amount of mox shards rewarded when you recycle has greatly increased.
• Commons 6 → 12 mox shards
• Rares 36 → 48 mox shards
• Epics 180 → 240 mox shards
• Mythics 360 → 480 mox shards

Quality of Life Improvements

Challenges

• The “Donate 3 times” challenge reward is increased to 25 gems.
• Our shop goblin Zedzen has found a surplus of crafting materials (Damn supply chain issues!). To offload his excess inventory Zedzen has teamed up with Vin, who now offers two new challenges:
• “Play 50 creatures” (rewards colored Anima)
• “Play 35 non-creatures” (rewards colored Essence)

League Chest

• The amount of influence awarded by the league chest has been increased.
• Play 35 → 60
• Bronze 40 → 80
• Silver 45 → 100
• Gold 50 → 115
• Platinum 55 → 120
• Diamond 60 → 125
• Mythic 65 → 130

Teams

• The jump-to widget now ignores shared decks, so it will jump only to friendly duel requests and donation requests.

Deck Showcase

• Vin continues to update the deck showcase with new winning decks.
• The Suggest a Deck button now favors decks with cards you own over high-rarity cards.

Events

• The rewards for the Championship and Blitz event types have been increased.

Card and Gameplay Changes

Ashiok

• 23 Health → 25 Health

With Ashiok being less of a late game hyper carrying Nightmare monster, we’re giving them a bit more survivability.

Kaya

• Sly Spirit, Somber Spirit, and Stalwart Spirit - 2/2 → 2/1

Lowering the threshold to complete Kaya’s first mission to 3 damage was a nice buff. So nice that we decided to pull back a bit on the rewards by weakening her Unchained Spirits.

Nissa

• 25 Health → 23 Health

The elephant in the room is almost certainly Nissa’s upgraded special from the last patch. This was a complex enough topic that we wanted to go a little more in depth. First, we want to provide context on what prompted the update. Second, we want to consider how Nissa measures up against some of the factors we consider when deciding whether to buff/nerf cards or Spellslingers. Third and finally, we'll share the current and future plans for Nissa.

As far as context for Nissa’s update (along with several other Spellslingers), we wanted to make the Spellslingers' strengths feel more asymmetric and push on those as hard as we reasonably could. For Nissa, that meant enticing players toward cards that give extra mana gems and make those cards feel different when played in Nissa than any other Spellslinger.

For buff/nerf decisions, we take a handful of things into consideration, but we'll focus on performance and play patterns in this case. Nissa performed pretty well in v21 and saw much improvement over her performance in many previous patches. No surprise there. What might be surprising is that Nissa’s win rate is within the band of what we aim for and is in the upper-middle range of the rest of the Spellslingers cast. Contrary to how it can feel at times, the data doesn’t indicate that Nissa is currently the best performing Spellslinger and she does seem to have some natural predators.

But player perception is also important because ultimately, we make the game for you. If there is a strong sentiment among the player base that a play pattern is out of whack, it’s on us to figure out what we want to do about it. Nissa crosses the line by generating more negative feedback and potentially negative gameplay moments than we'd like. The feeling of facing off against an opponent healing themselves for 2 multiple times a turn can be disheartening, and the life buffer can sometimes make it feel like Nissa gets to ignore what the opponent is doing.

So now to get to our plans for Nissa. We’ll start with the less-than-great news. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to get the change we wanted in response to the feedback in for this patch. The current plan is to revert back to Nissa healing 1 per extra mana gem. The better news is that we can take away a bit of Nissa’s starting health for now. In full transparency, this was intended to be rolled out alongside Nissa’s update in the last patch, but there were complications that would have impacted other things in the game.

We recognize that there will likely still be frustration surrounding Nissa’s current special, and ask that you bear with us until we can get more significant changes implemented.

Card Changes

• Pinpoint Avenger - 2/4 → 3/4

Effects like Pinpoint Avenger's introduce some extra consideration on whether or not an attacking player wants to shove all of their creatures at their opponent. Pinpoint creates some nice dynamic gameplay, but its weak stats seemed to prevent this Avenger from showing up in decks as much as we might like. More power to you, Pinpoint Avenger!

 

• Mysterious Cocoon - 1/1 → 0/1

We still enjoy the creature summoning on Cocoon, but we don't necessarily want it to be able to trade with two enemy creatures for a single mana. Less power to you, Mysterious Cocoon!

 

• Ejected! - 6 mana → 5 mana

There's some danger in making colorless cards that are at a competitive rate. We don't want a card to be too ubiquitous or do too much to cover up weak spots for some colors. For that reason, Ejected was conservatively costed at 6 mana. We're going to try putting this at a cost that is still not expected to be a premier removal spell, but now it might be a bit more of a consideration for inclusion in decks.

Bug Fixes

General

• Fixed an issue that could cause Team Challenges to not be correctly flagged as completed or to vanish for some team members.
• Creatures will now summon where dragged instead of always in the lower right.
• Completed Challenges will no longer toast twice.
• Fixed an issue where rotating Challenges would appear with silver backgrounds when toasted.
• Rotating Challenges will no longer have an X-to-dismiss displayed when they toast their status.
• Fixed a case where a fizzling or autotargeting debut creature played at the end of turn could cause the client to disconnect silently from the server.
• Fixed several one-off crashes and soft locks.
• The audio of the game will no longer stack up and become desynced when the application is backgrounded.
• Fixed an issue that could cause a crash if the user conceded while targeting a debut ability.
• There will no longer be a red flash on the turn button when the mulligan is accepted.

Planeswalkers

• Hammer Home will no longer incorrectly trigger on the opponent's creatures in some cases.
• Fixed cases where sometimes Hammer Home’s visual effect would not appear.
• Fixed an issue where Ashiok would incorrectly generate Nightmares when redrawing a card that started in their deck but had been reshuffled or returned from the graveyard.
• Fixed an issue where Ashiok incorrectly required the player to be in Silver league or higher to recruit.
• Creatures generated by Vraska’s Throne now correctly list it as their creator.
• Fixed cases where the Nightmare visual effect would sometimes not display.
• Spill Over will now correctly fire a Nightmare on each card it mills.
• Kaya will no longer complete her mission if she defeated the opponent with the damage.
• Fixed the mirror match VO for Gideon and Nahiri.
• Nahiri's Stoneforge Blade will correctly be un-equipped if the equipped creature is stolen with Possessing Arcana.

Gameplay

• Multiple Sparkling Unicorn buffs will now show appropriately in the ongoing effect tooltip.
• Aether Figment will correctly discount when the user drafts with Zombify.
• Scour the Void will now correctly pull random cards from the graveyard.
• Sun Titan will no longer reveal what creature was drawn to the opponent via its tooltip.
• Regna, the Redeemer will no longer take damage on her controller’s turn if she is stolen by Possessing Arcana.
• Generating an Opening Salvo and using it (with Chandra’s Firecrafter for example) will no longer cause an error or crash when it activates.
• Fixed a case where Abyssal Chain’s visual effect would not display properly.
• Fixed multiple cards having a visual flash when they were returned to hand.
• Creatures with debut abilities that start a fight will now fizzle correctly if played against opponents with only warded creatures.