Picking up from a couple of weeks ago we pointed out the potential problems created when an Aethermon’s most powerful moves are exclusively useful as part of a combo.
We’ll highlight an example of when I made this error and how the situation has been resolved.
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Sparkitty/Matchka/Harquat
Our Fire-Type player controlled Aethermon is built around boosting the power of its attacks by discarding additional Battle Cards.
To synergise with this, the moveset included a 5-Value finishing move “Afterburn” which deals 2 damage per card in the player’s discard pile. If the player has 8 cards in their discard pile (very easily achieved with moves that discard extra cards) this attack would do 16 damage – 4 damage less than the 12 damage we would expect from a blank 5-Value Move.
However if a player took this early, the player would only have a maximum of 4 cards to discard, capping this move’s power at 8 damage (4 less than the 12 damage of a blank 5-value move). Furthermore, most fights early don’t last long enough to put even that many cards in the discard pile, so it would usually yield even less damage.
We remedied this situation by changing this move to deal 10 damage +1 extra damage per card in the player’s discard pile. This change keeps the card’s flavour and relative strength, but protects players who take it early from having an unusable Battle Card.
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In this example we rebalanced the power of a single move, next week we’ll look at an example where we had to juggle around an entire archetypes moveset.
Be Steady AetherRen