Infinity Wars TCG #HO

With this patch, Infinity Wars' first expansion is now released! Players who pre-ordered Rise can open their packs as soon as it ticks over to August 17th 12:01 AM, GMT.

With the release of Rise we've taken a good long look at Infinity Wars, and we're bringing in a large number of changes with its release. I'd like to talk about these changes, and why we are doing them.

New Card Frames
At Lightmare, we believe in a development cycle of constant iteration. What this means is that we are constantly looking at our game and asking ourselves what we could do better. We are currently looking at the visual quality of a lot of the aspects in our game, and the first one we reviewed was our card frames. We felt like the previous card frames covered a lot of the card art, and could generally be much graphically appealing. Additionally, there was a lot of information we needed to convey on the cards, especially with the release of Rise, that the old card frames were not designed to give room to convey. We think the new card frames look fantastic, and while a part of us will always remember the old frames fondly, we're glad that every card in Infinity Wars is able to look so much better now.

In the future, we're also looking at iterating the graphical design of the user interface (both in-game and menus), the default battlefield, and anything else we feel we can simply do better. As a matter of fact, as we move towards our next UI iteration, you can already see some of the new design already implemented now.

All Numbers Doubled
Arguably the most controversial decision, we have decided to double all the numbers in Infinity Wars. Players will now start off with an even 100 health and morale at the start of the game, and the power and health of each card has been doubled as well. Thus, the change mostly does not affect gameplay (with the exception of morale, but this is taken care of below). The reason we have decided to do this is because we found that we were being quite restricted in our ability to balance card numbers. As a bit of an aside into game design theory, Infinity Wars, as opposed to other TCG's, scales linearly because of our resource system. The resource to power curve in Infinity Wars (using the pre 0.91 numbers), looks something like this:

• 1 cost: 2/2
• 2 cost: 3/3
• 3 cost: 4/4

Within that, there's not a whole lot of room. We found we were in situations where a card that was a 3/3 for 2 would be very weak, but the next level, 4/4 for 2, was very strong and above curve. We decided that this early stage of the game's development, while it was still in Beta, was our last chance to change the system, in the interests of the long term health of the game.

We understand that this change is quite a shock, and it may take some time for long-time players to adjust to the new numbers. However, we're confident that after a while of playing with the new numbers, players will become used to it, and years from now we will look back at this change and know that Infinity Wars is healthier for it.

Balance Changes to Existing Cards
With the new base values for health and morale, we have decided to change some of the existing IW2013 cards for balance reasons. Most of these are balance changes are changes that are now possible because of the new number scaling in the game.

• Agent Coyle, Firestarter has been a very strong card, and we wanted to reign it in a little bit. It is now a 7/7 for 7, rather than the expected 8/8 with the doubling. However, we did want to see the dragon transformation ability used a bit more often, and didn't want to nerf the card too hard, so we reduced the cost for transforming him by 1.

• Calamity has been the very definition of a format warping card. We have two main concerns with Calamity: there is very few 'tells' that an opponent is going to play one, particularly as it is factionless, and many decks that weren't designed to be the kind of deck that would want a card like Calamity were including at least one copy, 'just in case'. We have decided to raise the cost of Calamity to 11, up from 10. While a player will still be able to play a Calamity on turn 10 as before, they will need to spend their turn 9 resources to increase their base, clueing in an attentive player. Additionally, aggressive decks such as Flame Dawn decks will have to reconsider Calamity's inclusion, as they may not ever want to spend an entire turn increasing their resources just on the chance they need to Calamity in the future.

• Pack Leader's ability was always just a little bit too strong, (although the faction itself was held back by morale issues). We have decided to lower Pack Leader's ability to give +3/+3, rather than the expected +4/+4 from the number doubling.

• Secluded Constructor's ability has always been very strong. So strong, in fact, that it held the rest of the faction back in power level. We've decided to make Secluded Constructor's ability continue to only give +1/+1, rather than the expected +2/+2 that it would otherwise.

• All immolation effects (such as from Kali and Dragon of Summer Flame) now deal 5 damage per turn, rather than the expected 6. This was mostly done to keep immolation 'feeling correct' in the future, with a small nerf to the otherwise very strong Kali.

• Endless Horde and Radariah have had their text cleaned up with the new changes: Radariah now gains +1/+1 on each hit, and Endless Horde now gains +1/+1 for each other of its kind in the grave.

• Considering Rita's Thrall's art, it doesn't make much sense for him to be a 4/4 (8/8 in the new system). We've decided to lower him to a 2/2 for 1 with the same effect, which may give him new use in some decks, currently the card is very underplayed.

• Additionally, many cards that were part of the Rise set, which players have gotten through daily quests, have had their numbers and/or purity values adjusted.

Deck Size Limit
Previously, the limit for a deck's size was essentially unlimited, set at 400 cards. We have decided to lower this limit, particularly for future proofing for mobile releases. We originally announced this limit to be set at 60 cards, however after discussions with the community, we have decided to raise the maximum deck size limit to 100, so that we aren't limiting decks too harshly.

New Morale Rules
Morale is an interesting aspect of Infinity War's gameplay, and one of the reasons that its so unique. However, developing it has not been without its challenges. While looking at morale as a mechanic, we decided that we needed a better way to balance morale than the current system. Many mid-range focused factions, such as the Warpath and the Sleepers of Avarrach, are very poorly positioned in the metagame because they die so easily to morale. While reconsidering the mechanics of morale, we realized that tying morale damage to the cost of the card was hindering us more than helping us. With that in mind, from now on in Infinity Wars, all characters will have an additional 'morale cost' of the card, you can find this cost directly underneath the resource cost of the card.

With this change, we are now better able to balance cards with regard to morale. Big characters, for instance, no longer have such a massive morale cost, and the morale cost of many mid-range cards, such as Warpath and the Sleepers of Avarrach, is less punishing than before. 'Sad zombie deaths' should happen much less now, and thus make these factions much more viable. Morale costs are now tied to the field value of the card, which makes more sense. How valuable is this card to the player? Additionally, we can use morale costs as an additional place for flavour: zombies all have low morale costs, Aleta the Immoral Sorceress has a higher morale cost than the other incarnations of her, because she is the leader of the faction, etc.

Gold Borders and Foils!
Starting in Rise packs and from now on, players will have a chance to open gold bordered cards, and holographic foil cards in packs! Each pack has a chance to contain either a gold card, a foil card, or in very rare cases a gold foil card. The odds to get a gold or foil card are about 1 in 12. The odds of getting a gold foil are 1 in 144 (it has to roll to get both a gold and a foil). Additionally, players opening Rise pre-order packs will find all their cards are platinum bordered, and have a chance to get a platinum foil card. We made the decision not to include gold bordered cards in the preorder packs, as in time a platinum card would be rarer more than a gold bordered card.

Rise doesn't just bring new cards, but the largest batch of changes since Alpha! Some are exciting, some are scary, but we are confident that Infinity Wars is going to be a better game than ever before. Thanks for reading the longest patch notes I've ever written to date, hopefully your game has finished downloading all your files and you can play, and rediscover, Infinity Wars!

Known Issues
An opposing player's Cresill the Mad has a delay before your own hand is discarded if it dies. We are looking into this bug.
Subjugated Dragon and Hunted Dragon both have unusual desync issues were are looking into if chosen as commanders.
Location cards in Rise do not currently change the battlefield to a new model when played. While the art for these cards has been made, and looks amazing, we will release them after a rendering issue has been fixed, rather than releasing art that looks sub-par due to a bug.
Secluded Constructor is improperly exhausting after each use on OSX clients. Sorry Mac and Genesis fans!