Without a doubt, this is the most meta-defining feature out of all the new things coming to the game (disregarding the actual Underlords, who haven’t been revealed yet).

At first glance, this is an ingenious change because:

It will keep the hero pool a constant size, making sure upgrading units doesn’t become more and more difficult when new heroes get introduced. It will refresh the metagame every time the hero pool rotates in and out of the Jail and solve to a degree one of the biggest problems of Auto Battlers – that they get figured out and grows old quickly.

From the wording in the image we Assume 8-12 heroes to get jailed at random, making sure that each Alliance has at least the minimum amount of heroes to reach the maximum Alliance bonus. In other words, you can never have less than 6 Warriors, etc.

That said, I must admit that I’m a bit worried about the practical implications of the jail system for the meta. The Jail will make some strategies quite a lot stronger than others in an obvious way.

If one Alliance is untouched while another misses two key heroes, it’s pretty clear the first will be more powerful in this rotation than the second. An Alliance is not just about the number of heroes in it, as some characters are certainly more important than others. Moreover, there are hero costs to consider: e.g. losing the early-game heroes in an Alliance will make it harder to open with it, etc.

A simplified example: if Phantom Assassin, Slark, and Keeper are in jail, this will cripple significantly Assassins, Mages, and to a degree Elusive. In such a hero rotation, the meta is very likely to revolve around Warriors, Scrappy, and Knights.

This means it might be pretty clear which strategies are better and which worse in certain hero rotations. If the process happens at random, we might see some fairly imbalanced days in which most (high-level) players are going for the same strategies during the day.

(Disclaimer: this doesn’t mean we don’t like the Jail system, we think something like it is necessary with an expanding hero pool. It just might need refinement if our worries turn out to be true.)