Legends:Patch/August 26, 2016

Released on August 26, 2016.

Incoming Card Changes (Aug 25, 2016)

Hi folks, Merakon from Dire Wolf here.

We wanted to let you know about a couple of card changes that we're going to make within the next 48 hours. One of these changes – the one to Soulrest Marshal – was partially-pushed to live already, as many of you have already noticed. That was a mistake on our part; we were preparing these card changes as a separate patch and one piece got patched in too early. This was especially confusing because the game text string didn't get pushed at the same time as the functionality change, leaving the card in a state where it isn't doing what it says.

Here are the two changes you're going to see:

Change: Soulrest Marshal now reduces the cost of the next card you play by 5 instead of 6.

Reason: The Magicka gain from Soulrest Marshal led to extremely swingy games, and even served as a way to accelerate out more expensive cards. With this change, it still leads to powerful turns, but doesn't let you jump ahead on Magicka.

Change: Murkwater Savage to 3 cost.

Reason: Murkwater Savage gained stats at such a fast rate that it was significantly ahead of comparable cards, and contributed to lopsided games. The restriction of needing to include mostly Agility creatures was not a huge cost, and Savage frequently grew too large too quickly.

We don't take card changes lightly, and we realize that some players may have used soul gems to craft these cards based on their power level. In the future, we will have a special "full value sell-back" feature for such situations. However, in this case, we're going to grant soul gems directly to players based on whether they crafted these cards. For each Soulrest Marshal or Murkwater Savage that you soul summoned, we're granting you 80 soul gems. This gives you the option to soul trap these cards to get your full soul value back. Or you can keep the cards and spend your 80 soul gems on other cards.

Today's text changes (and addressing Bone Colossus questions) (Aug 26, 2016)

Hi folks, Merakon from Dire Wolf here.

Today, we pushed some text changes into the game. Most of these text changes are just meant to improve card clarity. Many of the changes are based on your feedback. For example, here is a card that changed: Raiding Party.

Raiding Party previously said "Draw two 1/1 Nord Firebrands."

Raiding Party now says "Put two 1/1 Nord Firebrands into your hand."

We made this change based on feedback where some players weren't sure if cards like this drew the cards from your deck or from "nowhere." We believe the new text makes it clearer.

We also have some other plans in motion dealing with creature types. We're planning to break up some creature types into more flavorful "tribes" so to speak. Undead is one of these creature types. We are planning to break up Undead into the following subtypes: Skeletons, Vampires, Spirits, and Mummies. We believe there are several benefits to breaking up the Undead into these subtypes. One such example is the Night Shadow card. We believe that adding the word "Vampire" this card will not only add clarity to the card concept but also establishes design space for future Vampire-based mechanical connectivity.

But in our haste to get the text improvements out to the live environment, we inadvertently pushed a change to the game text of Bone Colossus that doesn't make sense until the Undead are broken up into different subtypes. So, we are going to undo the text change of Bone Colossus and hold that back until we are prepared to push out different Undead subtypes.

As some of you have asked, if Bone Colossus is changing to buff only Skeletons and not all Undead, will this be considered a "nerf" worthy of soul gem reimbursement. The answer is: yes. When we do officially make this change in the future, any players who crafted Bone Colossus will be allowed to soul trap those copies for full Soul Summon value (1200 soul gems).

I should note, to be clear, that we consider the upcoming change to Bone Colossus to be a flavor-based change, not a change because we had concerns about its power level. And there will still be about half a dozen Skeletons in the card file that Bone Colossus can buff, including the Draugr.