June 22nd - Balance Updates
Hope everyone has been enjoying the new Conquest mode! We’ve got a suite of balance updates for you this week before the first Infinite Conquest starts next week: one nerf affecting a wide range of decks, and three buffs. Let’s get right to it!
Doctor Doom
● [Old] 6/5 - On Reveal: Add a 5-Power DoomBot to each other location.
● [New] 6/5 - On Reveal: Add a 4-Power DoomBot to each other location.
Doctor Doom is our most played 6-Cost card by a large margin, and for good reason. His ability to spread power and bypass restrictive locations makes him an excellent card in many past and current top decks like Lockdown, Electro Ramp, and Lockjaw. In fact, he's so good at contesting "closed" locations that he actually encourages decks to be built around doing so more often. By taking 1 Power off his DoomBots, we’re looking to tone down his overall strength and improve the diversity among our 6-Cost cards in top decks. While we’re sad to lose the symmetry between Doctor Doom and his DoomBots, we hope this will bring his decks more in line with the rest of the competition–besides, Doom's tougher than a DoomBot.
Red Skull
● [Old] 5/12 - Ongoing: Enemy cards at this location have +1 Power.
● [New] 5/14 - Ongoing: Enemy cards at this location have +2 Power.
Red Skull terrorized our meta for a while in a strong partnership with Shuri. Now that Shuri has been nerfed, we felt it was a good time to restore Red Skull to a higher value. Red Skull is a more interesting card with more base Power and a more detrimental Ongoing effect. This has helped him perform well in decks with cards like Enchantress, Sauron, and of course Shuri. We hope powering up Red Skull will give these decks a boost and create more meta diversity. Sorry, Cerebro.
Nimrod
● [Old] 5/5 - When this is destroyed, add a copy to each other location.
● [New] 5/6 - When this is destroyed, add a copy to each other location.
This one’s been on our wishlist for a while, but we’d been wary of it for fear of making Galactus more popular as a consequence, since that was the most popular Nimrod deck. Now that we’ve shipped our Galactus nerf, we’re confident in giving Nimrod a small boost that will hopefully make him more promising fodder for Forge, Shuri, and Venom. We've also got some upcoming cards we expect to reward destroying cards even more, so stay tuned for those synergies!
Nick Fury
● [Old] 5/7 - On Reveal: Add 3 random 6-Cost cards to your hand.
● [New] 4/5 - On Reveal: Add 3 random 6-Cost cards to your hand.
Nick Fury has never quite found a place to shine. As a 5-Cost that grants 6-Cost cards, there’s not much time to take advantage of the cards he spawns. By bumping him down to a 4-Cost, effects like Titan and Quinjet give players the opportunity to play two of his reinforcements on turns 5 and 6. Plus, it gives Agent Coulson the ability to give Nick a call when he's in a jam and could use some avenging. We’re excited to see what you’ll assemble with Nick Fury’s new stats!
Pig
● [Old] 4/0 – “oink!”
● [New] 0/0 – “oink!”
Spider-Ham’s token wasn’t meant to consider its own base cost to be 4, and that has some interactions with cards and locations like Zabu and Asteroid M that just aren’t intuitive to play with. We’re adjusting it to 0-Cost to avoid those interactions.
Bonus OTA: KrakoNAH
With this update, we’re also taking Krakoa out of the game to be redesigned at a future date. Turn 5s everywhere rejoice!
Thanks for stopping by! Please note that we will not have our regular biweekly OTA on July 6th in observance of our studio’s summer shutdown, so our next update will be our full-sized patch currently scheduled for July 11th. Happy Snapping, and good luck in your Infinite Conquests!