Upcoming Balance Changes with Patch 2.8

As we’ve watched the metagame develop post-Isle of Madness, we’ve seen several decks rise above the rest. To assist in keeping the meta balanced moving forward, we’ve identified a couple powerful cards, as well as one ability, that we’re changing the functionality of as part of our upcoming Patch 2.8 later this week.

When the patch goes live and these changes are implemented, we’ll be using the same refund policy we introduced in our last set of balance changes for the three cards shown below. These changes were made to simplify the process and ensure players didn’t have to get rid of affected cards to get a refund if they don’t want to.

Under the new refund policy, you will get to keep your card and the next time you log in to Legends (within three weeks), we will simply credit your account with the difference in Soul Gems between its Soul Summon cost and its Soul Trap value, based on how many copies of each card you own (up to three).

For example, if you own two copies of an Epic card that got nerfed, we will give your account 600 Soul Gems (since the difference between creating an epic card and Soul Trapping it is 300 Gems each). After this, you can either Soul Trap the card (which should give you the original 800 Gems back in case you Summoned them to begin with), or you can keep the card in addition to the 600 Gems you just got. This will be the case regardless of how you acquired the cards, so you don’t have to keep track of what you summoned, opened in packs and so on.

Siege Catapult

Stats changed from 5/5 to 4/4.

Aggressive Endurance decks have been very strong for a while and Siege Catapult is a big reason why. As a 5/5 that comes down as early as turn 1, Siege Catapult makes sure that, once a player loses control of a lane, they can never get it back. The introduction of Skinned Hound has also made it so that, even if the Catapult itself isn't "on,” its big body will still be useful.

By making Siege Catapult a 4/4, we're hoping that there will be more counterplay to a quick Catapult and that players will feel less compelled to warp their curves to turn it on as soon as possible.

Indoril Mastermind

Effect changed to “Summon: Draw a card.”

Endurance control decks are eclipsing other control builds and are generally more consistent than we'd like them to be. Our data showed that, of all the cards regularly played in control decks, Indoril Mastermind's was the one that correlated the strongest with winning the game. By removing its filtering effect, we're hoping to bring Endurance control decks to a similar power level as the other combinations; they will still have access to powerful effects but not necessarily whenever they want them.

This change might seem minimal, but enough copies of Indoril Mastermind get played in long games (especially since it's such a common Odirniran Necromancer target) that we believe it will make a real difference.

Slay Abilities

A creature destroying itself no longer triggers Slay abilities.

Right now, if you equip Sword of the Inferno to a creature like Archein Venomtongue, you will get two instances of the Slay trigger - one for the creature you're killing and one for Archein Venomtongue itself. Creatures triggering Slay abilities from destroying themselves was never an intended interaction and is quite unintuitive. Since we believe that goes against both good flavor and good game play, we are fixing Slay to trigger only when destroying another creature.

Note that because this change directly impacts the popular combination of Sword of the Inferno with Slay creatures, we will be refunding Soul Gems for Sword of the Inferno along with Siege Catapult and Indoril Mastermind.