The latest patch changed the game in many ways, some of which made the game worse. Here’s my opinions on the new and reworked cards:
It’s nice that Healing Song has legitimate uses now and it’s a fun when you draw it while you’re low on health. It sometimes lengthens matches in an uninteresting way, but it’s not really an issue when it’s usually used together with cards that regularly do self damage.
I still haven’t seen Rebel Glider used and I haven’t been tempted to try it out. The very weak stats and no faeria collecting makes its uses limited. Maybe it’s good for grabbing lands, but it doesn’t seem worth including a card just for doing that, especially when it costs that much faeria.
Radiance is a very cool concept, but it’s a very impractical card. It’s hard to get your life down so low that it’s worth playing without also losing the match. In most matches, I’ve only had an opportunity to play it when it’s at 8 faeria and it’s not that great at that cost. It won me one game, but didn’t make much of a difference in the other four I played it in.
The removal of the old Ruunin’s Shrine really sucks. The old one was one of the most interesting green cards. I used one or two in all of my green decks, mainly to protect against deathtouch. The new Shrine just seems like a bad version of Feed the Forest. I tried it, but your opponent gaining faeria later is too big of a downside.
The new Sagami Warrior is a very useful card. Green really needed a 3 drop with good combat stats. The dash allows for some cool positioning too. I liked this change a lot.
Sagami Huntmaster makes playing mono green a lot more fun. It allows for some very interesting positioning tricks. Teleporting is a strong effect, but mono green really needed something like that to be competitive, so it’s power level should be okay.
God Hunter is an overly simple card. It’s very easy to stop just by putting a taunt in front of your god. It’s very limited in its uses and I don’t think it adds much to green rush.
The Ancient Boar change is decent. The increased cost makes it harder to play many of them, but the better attack does help it trade a little better. I don’t think it really needed to be changed though, the old version was already good.
Giving Feral Kodama both jump and slam seems a bit ridiculous. It’s a fun card to play, but the keyword combination and the high stats makes it seem a bit OP.
The Oak Father is a more interesting card now. Giving it slam made it stronger without it really seeming OP, since it’s stats aren’t as high now.
Warstorm Champion is definitely better now, since it has an immediate effect that’s suitable for a late game card. Green red is still really lacking in synergy, though. Whenever I tried to make a deck around Warstorm Champion, either the green or red cards always seemed unnecessary. There’s too little benefit to combining the two colors, and Champion isn’t strong enough to compensate for that.
Removing Unbound Evolution was a good move. It introduced too much RNG into the game. Failed Experiment is a fun card to play around with and it allows for some creative combos.
Forbidden Library boosts faeria gain too much, especially if you play it early on. The downside isn’t anywhere near bad enough to compensate for the increased amount of power its user gets. You basically have to kill the library fast, or it’ll give its user too much of an advantage. I’m not a fan of how much it snowballs games.
Triton Banquet was an annoying card to play against, so I’m okay with the nerf. The new version is underwhelming, though. Jump is nice, but not worth 3 faeria and the +1/+1 is really minor for a 3 cost card.
Dream Reaver is ridiculously strong. It feels like a control version of Zealous Crusader, another card I really dislike. It’s so strong that it almost always ends the match after it’s played. Since it’s used in decks that collect faeria and have Windfall to accelerate it, it’s not hard to play multiples of it. It’s too hard to stop. Mirror matches almost always come down to who plays it first, which isn’t interesting.
Gift of Steel giving life makes it a card that’s worth including in decks. It’s interesting how you need to consider what targets to use it on, since it only gives life to combat creatures. Nice to see this card being buffed into a viable option.
Blood Song is significantly more powerful than the old bargain cards. It doesn’t snowball games quite as much as the other new faeria generation methods. It’s the best balanced out of the new faeria gaining cards and doesn’t feel as unfair as them due to the risk involved in the reduction.
Adding Slam to Seifer sounded like it would make him really strong, but that hasn’t been the case in practice. Still, it’s a decent buff to the card and makes it more interesting to play. It’s still not a tier 1 legendary, but it’s certainly viable and fun to play.
The new Boulder Thrower honestly seems like the weakest version of them all. You need to invest too much faeria into it for it to be worth it and it can still be killed quite easily. Slam is also quite easy to play around on a ranged creature.
Hellfire has the exact kind of RNG I don’t like in CCGs. It’s far too varied whether it kills creatures or leaves them alive. I’ve also had matches that I only won because it dealt 1 too little damage to my orb. The results depend on luck too much. It dealing 10 damage to the orb if there are no creatures is also ridiculously much for one card and allows for that really uninteractive combo deck to be used with it.
Ignus now seems like too much of a faeria investment to be worth using. If you could keep it on the board and could use +1 without it being an inconvenience, it could pay off. Still, it seems like too much effort for too little reward. It’s more fun to use and has more of an impact now, at least.
The Volcanic Colossus is odd. It can only be played late in the match, when you rarely need a ranged creature anymore. The old version was a fine card, the new one doesn’t seem to have a good use. A big ranged creature is interesting, but the card seems really impractical now.
Soul Pact could boost its user far too much in one turn before the quick nerf. It’s not as ridiculous now, but I don’t really get why it was changed to begin with. It was usable before already. It seemed more balanced when there was the downside of it losing a card. The 1 extra damage hardly matters and it just being a flat out power increase for the user is swingy. It having to end the turn makes it impractical and limits its uses. I liked the original version more.
Annoying Gnat changes matches in an interesting way, but it has too much RNG. It can do anything from going to a perfect double collecting spot to give its owner a constant +2 faeria each turn to uselessly summon itself in the center. I don’t like the amount of randomness it adds to the game. It seems too easily usable as a sac target too. The self damage only matters against decks that can utilize it. Healing Song removes the impracticality of it otherwise, as long as you don’t overuse the Gnat. Fun card, but it’s too strong for something with a high variance.
Doomsday is a cool idea. The downside is so severe that using it is very impractical, though. Your opponent gets the initiative afterwards, which means you usually won’t be able to turn the game around with it. It tends to just pointlessly stall out games for a few more turns without helping its user much.
Windstorm Colossus’s stat increase made it much more viable. It was too fragile before. Blue Yellow events needed a good finisher and the new version works well as that.
Overall, the new patch made the game much faster at the cost of board interaction and some strategy. A few of the cards also include too much RNG, which I really hope isn’t going to be a regular occurance in the future.
The changes really encouraged people to play overly aggressively, since Dream Reaver and early libraries are so hard to answer. Card drawing order also became more important, due to how strong the new faeria gaining cards are. They give a significant boost to the player who gets to play them before their opponent.
I’d like the game to be slower and more strategic than the patch turned it into. There’s too little board interaction in popular decks now. While Luduan decks had their problems, they were very interesting in how they required you to make clever use of movement tricks. I’d really like decks that require interesting uses of the board to be popular, rather than ones like Hellfire OTK that just ignores the board, or Gnat decks where board placement is decided by RNG.
