Merry Kramp-mas - Patch #60

Team Horizon

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Dec 16, 2020

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Patch will be live Thursday, Dec 17th before 6:00pm ET!

It's holiday season in Sky! Decorated Elderwoods and Foxes gathered around the fire. But something darker stirs. The patron of all those who see the season as an opportunity to be naughty and have some diabolical fun is in a special event game mode! 🎁

Welcome all!

It's holiday season in Sky! Sporelings are decorating Elderwoods, Foxes are gathered around the fire, Songbirds are chirping, Tortugan are taking it easy, Zomboid are shuffling, and the Quadra are… doing whatever it is they do. All across the Sky, families and friends alike have come together to feast, share stories and exchange gifts. All look to the new year with excitement, and Skyweavers plus their allies all share in the celebrations and holiday cheer.

But that's a boring story that’s been told a hundred times, in a thousand ways. We’re here to talk about the far more exciting, darker and much less nice side of the holiday season in Sky, featuring the patron of all those who see the season as an opportunity to be naughty and have some diabolical fun! Welcome to Skyweaver’s first annual Holiday Kramp-mas celebration!

Hailing from far off, unknown lands, a possible third cousin to The Beast (we haven’t been able to reach him for comment), Krampus makes his rounds through Sky once a year, sowing chaos and unrest across the land by providing ‘gifts’ to those less than scrupulous individuals across Sky, allowing them to disrupt the peace and bring his own special brand of holiday ‘cheer’ to all the denizens of Sky. (Sitti always claims top spot on his list.)  

As the patron of holiday naughtiness, Krampus rewards those who act up, so make sure you take aim at him with your best Spells and Units, and see if you can’t knock some diabolically fun gifts loose from the sack on his back. But watch out! While Krampus appreciates a good prank, every bit of mischief and ill will you display will only empower him, as he likes nothing better than to inflict mischief on those who get too full of themselves, and help them to remember who’s the naughtiest of all!

Merry Kramp-mas, and Happy Holidays from the whole Skyweaver team!

New Features ⭐

  • New Krampus game mode! Simply enter through the main menu via the Krampus Kraze button or enter a private match with code word SNOW and any 2 additional characters/letters to pair up directly with a friend.

I need that spell to make some room
Otherwise this match is down the drain
But wait, another Doom Shroom
Well, sucks to be me, I welcome the pain

This next game will be positive and tame
The enemy's deck will be quaint and novel
Dang it, a Grandweaver playing Strength
Guess I'll just have to take another L

Life's not fair when you are playing Discovery
Every match is a rollercoaster ride
But hey, no space here for negativity
I'm just getting better for another fight

We at Horizon hope you find our gift and surprise
It's Krampmas in here, wish to see you soon in Sky!

- Marcelo

New Art 🎨

  • Updated 4 characters and 6 spells! Merry Kramp– wait we don't want to tire out this joke just yet 😅

Improvements 🦾

  • Slightly more noticeable purple glow on card selection for the "suggested cards"
  • Accepting a match at the very end of the timer now offers a small grace period to account for network latency
  • We now allow frame rates up to 240hz. The FPS (frames per second) slider in settings goes up and down by increments of 5fps, but we snap 145 to 144 for folks with 144hz monitors 😊

Note: We're ultimately limited by the rate at which your web browser calls our update loop, so if you have a 60hz monitor, you won't get frame rates greater than 60fps regardless of what you set the slider to. If anyone has a monitor that's greater than 60hz, we’d love to hear from you if this improves framerate, or if your browser still limits you to 60.

Bugfixes 🐛

  • X-cost cards will no longer randomly lose their mana gems
  • Redwood will no longer reduce your mana if it's not on the field when its trigger resolves
  • Fixed a bug where many death effects fired at once could cause the game client to freeze
  • Death's King no longer triggers cards like Vishiva that trigger on a unit's death, but aren't 'trigger:Death' effects proper
  • Fixed a bug where clicking ‘Accept Match’ could show the timeout message, but actually start your game
  • Selecting 4 cards—as the second player—and clicking ‘Confirm’ before your opponent does will now select the correct cards
A special surprise is looming nigh.
Tales of old and tides of joy.
Uncover the mysteries of the Krampus games
As the winter moon waxes and wanes

- Ashavari

ARC

Cards

Hey everyone! While the main focus of this patch was the new Holiday event, we’ve still got a few interesting changes to look over, mostly in service of tweaking and buffing some underused tools and offering a few more midrange options. We also have a slight game rule change to go over, which helps to simplify a bit of language and consolidate how certain unit and spell effects work.


Enrage (184)

Enrage - Target ally unit attacks a random enemy.

    Text: Target ally unit fights a random enemy. ➞ Target ally unit attacks a random enemy.

Enrage is included here as a representative for our new rules change. All effects that caused units or heroes to "Fight(s)" each other have been changed to cause them to "Attack(s)" each other instead, to further consolidate the language we use on cards and help to make the game rules simpler and more intuitive. In most cases, the change from Fight to Attack won't make a difference, but there are a few cases where Attack will differ:

A. If a unit with a Glory effect Attacks a hero via an effect (like enrage), it will once again allow that unit's Glory Effect to trigger.

B. Units with the Roots Enchant cannot attack, but this restriction will now also apply to attacks it would attempt to perform via effects like Enrage. In addition, if a card that attacks on Summon (like Bolt) is given Roots via an effect like Amaruath, this will block its attack. This is different to how it worked before, but is more consistent with the new wording, and in general.


Champ (219)

Champ - Play: Give target ally unit this unit's attachment.

    Power: 2 ➞ 3

A change people have been asking about for a bit, Champ is a card I think is fairly strong when compared to options like Howl Geist, as it can generate 4/4 worth of stats and draw a new card if you have a unit that can go face. However, Champ is also a worse turn 1 play with vial, so there are different considerations, which makes me willing to try a buff. I would also like aggro decks to feel incentivized to run more 3-5c cards, rather than 90% of their curve being 2c or less.


Honor Guard (745)

Honor Guard - Death: Summon Armored Guard with banner.

    Spell: None ➞ Lead

Another tweak here - we have a lot of lead but Honor guard feels pretty lacking as a 5-drop, especially next to other options like Toh Tem, which also doesn’t see a huge amount of usage in the current meta, so lead should help Guard endure a bit more punishment from stuff like flames and frozen, and also make it more reliable vs silence and dusting, giving it an unique edge over other similar options.


Mamba (964)

Mamba - Sunrise: Gets Fate.

    Power: 4 ➞ 5

    Health: 4 ➞ 3

This is a card I had heard a fair bit of talk about, and its expected stat pool, after one turn is fairly above curve. To me what stuck out most was the fact its well-rounded, bulky statline felt more STR than AGY so I made it a bit more fragile and aggressive via moving a point of its hp to attack, helping it fit into AGY more thematically and also making it easier to answer when rushed out turn two.


Khan (971)

Khan - Inspire Banner: Gain +1/+1.

    Power: 4 ➞ 3

    Health: 3 ➞ 4

Though he was buffed awhile back, he’s still been kinda underwhelming, so I’m trying another stat redistribution, moving a point of power to health, which should let him survive more often, and maybe allow his Inspire effect to do more work.


Sworn Oni (994)

Sworn Oni - The glory effects of ally units trigger twice.

    Power: 2 ➞ 3

Another cool card that hasn’t seen too much play, as a 3/3 it seems quite scary if it lives, but it tends to get its quest removed or just get outright killed, so it shouldn’t be too big of a buff, but it was something I felt was worth trying, since it’s a cool potential midrange AGY threat that is pretty unused currently.


Trident True (1001)

Trident True - Sunset: If you have no mana, gets Mana Potion.

    Power: 3 ➞ 2

    Health: 2 ➞ 3

A final stat swap, 2hp is always a pretty bad place to be, so wanted to try a bit more bulk and a bit less power. He used to be pretty overplayed as a 3/3 so I didn’t want to give him the stat point back, but hopefully the marginally stickier stat distribution will help him see more use.


Void Knight (1153)

Void Knight - Heroes can't gain health.

    Spell: Fate ➞ Grim Reprisal

A pretty unique tech card that’s been basically unused from day one, but anything above a 3c 3/3 with Fate feels kinda scary, so I decided to try a different route here, by swapping Fate for the perennially popular Grim Reprisal, making Void Knight into a more proactive option from 4 mana onwards. It also fits in nicely with how he blocks healing, letting him help to immediately kill off a mummy or Earth Golem, and also places more strain on his own players’s health, helping to emphasize that mechanic as a part of AGY, and possibly making his healing-blocking effect a bit risker for his user.


Trapper Keeper (39)

Trapper Keeper - When the enemy plays a spell, give this unit a copy of it.

    Text: When the enemy plays a spell, kill this unit, counter the spell, and add a copy of it to your hand. ➞ When the enemy plays a spell, give this unit a copy of it.

    Health: 6 ➞ 5

Another design I’d been considering for a while. I still like the old effect, and I’m sure it’ll return in the future, but as people had mentioned in the past, it would likely work better on a smaller, more Fly Guy-esqe unit, where the spell negation effect is valued more than the unit’s statline. I also feel that this design makes slightly better use of Skyweaver’s existing mechanics and works better on keeper, since it still has a similar spell mirroring effect, but now doesn’t kill itself, offering different play patterns, since it can still serve as a Guard unit, and its stats are more meaningful, since once it picks up a spell, your opponent can then kill it, to deprive you of it, or, if they are unable to kill it, may be incentivized to not play their spell at all, since it won’t instakill Trapper like it used to. Overall, though this is a fairly sizable change, I think this new design should fit Trapper a little better by allowing it to serve as both a spell deterrent and defensive guard unit, since the two roles it serves will no longer fight against each other.


Molten Heart (1045)

Molten Heart - Give target unit +2/+2. Trigger its death effects. (If any)

    Text: Give target unit Quest, lifesteal, and +1/+3. ➞ Give target unit +2/+2. Trigger its death effects. (If any)

We've got a bit of a wacky redesign here. Molten Heart was a pretty underused card, and the focus on being able to give allies Lifesteal has shifted to STR, giving it a unit/combat focused means of healing, so Molten Heart felt a bit odd in HRT thematically as well. As a result, I've tweaked it in a new direction to provide HRT another way for to interact with its own Death effects, via activating them on command, which should open up interesting options with cards like Fun Guy, Flame Phoenix, etc. It may still be on the weak side but it should have more to offer now. Keep it away from your Earth Golems!


Angler (1089)

Angler - Summon: Draw your lowest cost water spell onto this unit. If you have no mana, draw it to hand instead.

    Text: Summon: If you have no mana, draw your lowest cost water spell onto this unit. ➞ Summon: Draw your lowest cost water spell onto this unit. If you have no mana, draw it to hand instead.

    Keywords: None ➞ stealth

    Health: 4 ➞ 2

Angler has always felt kind of awkward. In principle, I like the effect of drawing a Water spell onto itself if you have no mana. It makes sense mechanically for our Water-themed spellseeker, since the “Low Tide” mechanic of triggering an effect if you have no mana is Water-centric, but practically, having a unit only get a spell when you will be almost certainly be unable to use it was pretty awful, and meant that Angler’s statline had to be uncharacteristically beefy to compensate, and maybe let it live long enough to use the spell next turn. This lead to it feeling more like a STR unit, having stats on par with Boulder and Redwood, and as a result, Angler was used primarily for its stats, rather than its effect, if it was used at all. This new change makes Angler’s effect far more reliable, while bringing its statline down to compensate, and still rewards you for emptying your mana, by letting you whisk the spell right to the safety of your hand, helping keep that fun “no mana” theme going while breathing new life into an often-forgotten member of the spellseeker family of units.

Krampus - Death: Give the player whose turn it is a Wrapped Gift. Summon this for their opponent with +1/+1. (Permanent!)

KRAMPUS IS HERE, ALONG WITH HIS DIABOLICAL GIFTS, WHICH YOU'LL JUST HAVE TO WAIT TO SEE!

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