HEX Update – Primal Arrival

Hi HEXers. It’s been a huge two weeks. Coming off our Steam launch, we successfully unleashed Primal Dawn upon the world! We’re already seeing a Constructed metagame form, and players are exploring the various new limited strategies that came with the over 250 new cards to collect. We’ve even heard rumors of first pick Gossamer Tears! Can anyone confirm?

With the Primal Dawn patch also comes a new budget-friendly way to play. Evolving Gauntlet only costs 500p to play (or a mix of plat/packs). You’ll open two booster packs, get a randomized pool made up solely of uncommons and commons, and build a 40-card deck. As you win matches, you’ll add booster packs to your sealed deck pool that will also go into your collection! For a complete explanation of Evolving Gauntlet, please read the announcement.

A special ‘thank you’ goes out to all our players and viewers who participated in the 48 hour Primal Dawn community stream on Twitch. It was a great success and we hope you were able to find some amazing new streamers to subscribe to.

Release Celebration

Today through this coming Monday 9:59 AM (PDT), we’ve added alternate art Lighting Skyhunter and Force of the Tomb to limited tournaments!

These events are a great way to begin collecting Primal Dawn and these alternate art cards are available only during the Release Celebration. Read Tuesday’s announcement for more information and good luck in your battles!

Evolving Gauntlet Bug

This morning, Release Celebrations started and Evolving Sealed experienced a bug where their in-progress entry appeared to end, then a new queue opened up. There was confusion in-game as to how to proceed. We’ve cleared up that bug and want to clear up that confusion:

If you weren’t logged in and had an Evo Sealed run in-progress, that exists as normal and you can play it.

If you were logged in and did not start a second Evo Sealed run, that exists as normal and you can play it.

If you were logged in and entered a second Evolving Sealed while the first one was being sorted out, your first run superseded your second run when we restored the original pre-Release-Celebration Evolving Sealed runs. No progress on either has been lost. When you complete your first run, you will resume your second run.

Only a small handful of players were affected, and everything should be sorted out. If you have any other issues, please create a Support account and open a ticket. Thank you.

Spectral Oak

As of the Steam launch, players have noticed that Spectral Oak (formerly Spectral Garden) can be seen in the game but it is not yet available and working for players. We had planned to release it this week, but we are delaying the release to a future patch.

The Spectral Garden was never intended to be traded. Though we did not make a statement on it being tradable at any point, we understand many in the community mistakenly believed it would be tradable. That became what players were told in community discussions by other players when the question arose. Now, we’re in a situation where many players mistakenly believed that they would be able to buy, sell, and trade their Oak. We at HEX have made the decision to make the Oak tradable to best serve those players.

This shouldn’t be seen as precedence in how we’ll act in all situations like these in the future, and it’s doubtful if such a unique situation will occur again. Ultimately, we came to the conclusion that the decision to make them tradable would not impact the intended goals of the Spectral Oak and it would help the affected players. So, this change will require some amount of work behind the scenes. We expect to have this to you relatively soon and thank you for your patience on this feature.

Correction

As we noted in our “known issues” before we opened the game up for Primal Dawn play, Fury Chant is currently incorrectly costed at 1 resource. It was to be released at 2 resources, and we will fix that with our next patch which should be coming shortly.

We’ve always promised that we would not change a PVP card, and that is true. This information was posted before any player was able to play with Primal Dawn and therefore should be seen as a bug. Ben Stoll posted the following in response to Fury Chant:

Ben Stoll here. I wanted to comment on this issue and clarify our perspective and why this is happening.

To summarize, when we launched Primal Dawn, Fury Chant’s incorrect cost was noted in the known issues, and this was due to a last minute development oversight that we corrected internally but couldn’t implement internally before launch, and that unfortunately would mean we would have a bugged card in the set until we patched.

While Fury Chant was on our watch list during our development cycle and was playtested in competitive constructed decks, R&D made an oversight when we initially concluded it was correctly costed at 1. A different deck with some previously overlooked interactions came to our attention very close to the launch of Primal Dawn. A development concern of this volume coming to our attention so late in the process is unfortunate, and is practically guaranteed to be an irritation on our end and on the end of the players, no matter how we address it. I hate that, and I’m sorry for the inconvenience. You can believe that we carefully considered what the appropriate action to take was when this development oversight came to our attention.

One obvious consideration was delaying the release of Primal Dawn a bit further, which would allow us to ship Fury Chant at the intended cost. However, we concluded that shipping the set with the card incorrectly implemented as a bug and known issue, and quickly fixing the card afterwards, would ultimately be better for everyone, especially since we feel that limited formats are not relevantly damaged by this issue. Constructed (where the cost difference is likely to result in a relevant harm to the metagame) will be quickly updated to reflect the intended card in the patch scheduled for Tuesday.

It is unfortunate that the messaging here is of course imperfect, since the card itself should be the ultimate communicative authority on what the card is intended to be. People who missed the messaging with the launch are operating with slightly distorted information, which we realize is majorly unideal given the collectible aspects of Hex. However, we don’t believe that launching a set with a card that functions incorrectly, with messaging in Known Issues, is the same as changing our intention for a card’s functionality after launch and then changing that functionality. In the latter situation, we are making an alteration to a digital item that we sold to you, which we believe violates the notion that we’ve given you a game item that you now have ownership over. That’s why we have the policy to instead restrict its application in Hex to the extent necessary, and only if absolutely necessary for the overall health of the game.

If we believed that banning Fury Chant upon release was the appropriate action to take to remain faithful to our players (and for any of you that do feel that way, you have my sincere apologies that I’ve made a call here that has us seeing things differently), we would do so–even though in this case that would have meant unfortunate damage to one of Primal Dawn’s most textured draft archetypes as well as an unintended distortion to what we believe is the optimal role for Fury Chant in the Constructed meta game. We maintain that we will not nerf cards as a reaction to a shift in our perspective on that card after launch, however, in certain circumstances we have made the decision and may still make the decision again to launch content with known issues that we hope to address asap. We know this isn’t ideal, and it’s not the sort of thing we take lightly. Apologies for the inconvenience, but we believe this was the best way for us to handle this.

Updated Images

Last weekend, we sent out high-quality card images to some of our fan websites and card databases. Cosmic Shaman, Canyon Runner, Storm Dancer, and Wakuna Brave card images were old images, not the current in-game versions. We’re posting these here for all players to access.

Feast of Abundance

When the Release Celebration comes to a close, Feast of Abundance begins!

To celebrate this renewal of life during the Feast of Abundance, Symeon will reward you with the Cheery Songbird AA sleeve just for visiting Entrath (Log in and you will automatically receive this sleeve)!

There are also alternate art cards, PVE cards, and equipment to be collected. Read up on the announcement for all the information you’ll need to join the party.

Kickstarter Rewards

With Primal Dawn, over the last four sets we’ve delivered over half of the vanity art cards that we owe to our Dragon Lord backers and above. We only have about six or so art descriptions remaining from what we initially received way back when, so we’re going back out and contacting players who are owed vanity cards, as well as design-a-card rewards and design-a-dungeon rewards.

You should receive an email and/or message on Kickstarter within the next two weeks if we have yet to receive a description from you, or if your description is one of the six currently in queue. You’ll also receive a message if you are owed card design or dungeon design rewards with information about that next step. If you are a Dragon Lord or above and do not receive correspondence from HEX Ent within two weeks of today’s date, April 29th, please contact us via Support and we will get that sorted out. Thanks!

That’s all for this week. Please leave any questions or comments in the forums, and don’t forget to Follow us on Twitter, Like us on Facebook, and Follow us on Twitch.

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