I wanted to hear your thoughts on this card. I have been waiting for this card since it was first showed way ago - really hyped to get some crackthron support. Now I buy the island yesterday and find out they arleady nerfed it, increased cost from 4 to 6.
Is there any article about it? Do they say why they did this? I do agree that maybe 4 cost would have made it to powerfull, but 6 faeria? Isn’t that too much? Especially considering that most of the time you will just use only one of its abilities - do dmg to some enemy creatures, or buff yours.
They never did this too, only with the whale (wich obviously needed adjustments), I kinda find it bad not letting the community test it out first then nerf it it was to powerfull.
I have played around 5-6 matches with it, and the best value i could get out of it atm is buff a groundshaker and a wood elly. Of course it could just be bad land placement or playing against rush and not being able to develop more creatures on board to get buffed, but still, feels a little underwhelming to me, most of the time just opting to play crakcthorn and not emerald salamander if I have both in-hand. What about you guys?
Crackthorn has higher land requirement and rng with pings and buffs, but no positional limitation. Number of pings and buffs are also set at 4 each, unlike Salamander.
Yes, I feel 6 faeria is expensive too but want to test it out first. 5 faeria seems reasonable. I guess you can feed it. In that case buffing 2 friendly creatures means +4/+4 for 2 faeria, but using 2 cards, which is not bad. But need 3rd forest for feed…
Or maybe a 3rd effect, like the creature gaining +1 attack for each enemy (or friendly) creature on the board? Or dealing 1 damage to all structures on the field?
You do make a good point, but like I said, most of the time if you hit the land requirments for crackthorn you wont use the salamander making it a dead card.
Also IMO salamander feels more like a defense oriented card, because if your opponent defends properly with lands, you wont be able to place salamander to buff your agressor anymore, so salamander shines on your own lands - on defense. Wich is counter productive if you ask me, since I feel that you need to be the agressor, not the defender with a crackthorn deck.
I was thinking too about reducing the cost to 5, seems best option to me, guess we’ll have to wait and see what happens.
That is indeed interesting, but i feel like that would mean you could use salamander on its own just for the last effect, ignoring the other two kinda losing the porpouse of the card.
Salamander seems well balanced. I included two in my Crackthorn deck and they’ve been useful in pretty much every match where I drew them.
When playing Crackthorn, you often end up in situations where there’s lots of creatures next to each other between the enemy wells. The Salamander is really good in those situations. It only needs to hit two targets for it to be worth playing, and it’s great if you hit three.
It’s a weaker card than Crackthorn overall, but the Salamander is more reliable and costs less lands, so the power level seems appropriate. It would’ve been OP at 4 faeria. It’s quite easy to hit two targets with the Salamander. It would’ve been a 4 cost card that regularly gets at least 6 faeria worth of value.
It might be okay to buff it to 5 faeria, but it doesn’t seem necessary. Crackthorn is already a strong deck, so it doesn’t need another great card. An average card that supports it is enough.
Compare to Blazing Salamander. Blazing might be a less-than-average card, but it’s not terrible.
Negatives:
+1 faeria.
+2 forest.
Positives:
can summon on forest.
+2/+2 for all adjacent friendlies.
The +2/+2 for adjacent friendlies is worth tons. If you could have an event that gave +2/+2 to all creatures in a meteor-shaped area, that’s be worth like 5f. Here you don’t get the center tile and you have to pay for a salamander in the same location too, but IMHO that’s still worth around 3f.
It’s currently very OP IMHO - well, not really when compared to other Oversky cards.
The problem is, do we have to revise what OP means now, to adjust to Oversky balance? If so, that’d make around half the old cards are seriously UP.
Then again, if you would need to meteor-shape your creatures to use it, how good would the card really be? In most cases you will buff 2 friendly creatures, which some would argue its good for 6 and others would say you could tweak it to 5. Either way watching Aquablad’s stream he seems to think the card is bad, sadly i missed his arguments, guess i’ll have to rewatch it later.
I still stand by what I suggested, the card is pretty underwhelming and a buff to 5 faeria to use it would be pretty good.
I do not know. The Emerald Salamander feels worse than Crackthorn Beast on average, so does that mean the Crackthorn Beast is also OP? The Crackthorn Beast especially can help you to come back from a worse board, something the Emerald Salamander really can’t.
If it’s the only creature you have on the board, you are summoning an Blazing Salamander that’s more expensive.
If you summon it adjacent to a single friendly creature and one enemy, it’s still worse than Crackthorn, and I have a feeling this is the most common situation. Even with two friendlies and one enemy it’s still worse than Crackthorn, actually, and for some reason I think that situation is exceedingly rare as well.
With a bit of planning it’s not too hard to get 4 or more, especially if you summon them. I’m using it now and I’m hitting 3+ targets usually. I guess it depends on what type of deck you put it in. Frog-toss an enemy on your forest or mountain adjacent to your creature and you immediately have 3 targets.
If it’s underwhelming now then Blazing Salamander is massively UP.
It totally depends on the deck your playing, but usually in a crackthron deck average cost is ~4.x faeria, so if you have that many creatures on board it simply means your already winning, of course things change if you play a deck with cheap creatures and you can swarm - yeah, then salamander is great value there, but rest? Not really.
Also, like Aasiger pointed out, crackthorn is a card with comeback potential, on the other hand, salmander isnt, if its your only creature on board, you lose ton of value.
Blazing Salamander was a dead card ever since the official release, it’s not really fair to compare to that. You wouldn’t even pick it in pandora unless you really have no good choices.
Obviously I would like it to be buffed so there are less dead cards in the game, but if you are balancing the game by bringing it to the level of Blazing Salamander, probably 90% of all cards will need to be nerfed.
I think Emerald Salamander is not bad now. If it’s at the level of Crackthorn, then it means there are 6 Crackthorn in one deck which is unfair to the other colour combos. It was one of, if not the best multicolour epics before the expansion.
I think this makes a lot of sense - there are just a lot of better 6cc cards to put in a crackthorn deck…perhaps the issue is just its cost. Perhaps if it was a 4cc card with a corresponding reduction in power (perhaps +1/+1 and 1 dmg to adjacents) then it would see more play.
See that’s the problem, other decks had op cards to add up > octopus tosser…
Salamender is never strong nuless you won already, good at best , not worth to include in crackthorn decks which is very sad. Not good to play on its own , bad stats , hard to use effect and high fearia cost ? I don’t get the 6 fearia for it.
Actually, recently I feel Salamander is not as bad as I initially thought. Salamander + Sky Yak or Salamander + Battle Toads… there are definately some workable combinations. Also Green Yellow Sacrifice can both take advantage AND be punished with a Salamander.
I have the feeling Salamander was never truly made for Crackthorn decks as it’s quite bad if you are in a losing position with that card. It strikes me more as a card to be included into the craziest tricolor decks you can imagine.
You want to have cheap ways to fill the board and then pop up this thing, and Crackthorn just cannot do that.
