Friday Update – Minty Fresh

Welcome to a round up of the week. We have our Cosmic Coin reveal, changes to the Battlegrounds, a Merry Melee mode teaser, and more:

Corinth Continues

For those who might not have seen the initial announcement, our Merry Melee is designed to be a rotating collection of fun and wacky formats. We have a bunch in the works (and a preview further down in today’s update!), but until we are able to bring these next modes to the client we have decided to keep the Corinth vs Corinth mode up for you all to enjoy. You can see full details here. These additional Corinth queues will only remain until our next patch, so be sure to enjoy them while they last!

Tickets have gone out to our qualifying players for this weekend’s $5,000 throwdown! Good luck to all our contestants. If you’d like to follow the action at home, join Hacky and Snake as they cast the CCS this weekend on the official channel. The action starts Saturday at 9am PT (See local time), so be sure to tune in for a fantastic show.

Battleground Updates

With our next patch, we will also be introducing some ladder updates. Kyle McGinty joins us with some more info:

Hello Hexers! Today I am excited to share our newest development changes coming to the Battlegrounds.

We are also making some changes to the ladder itself. Our goal here is to create a healthier ladder experience for everyone.

First, moving forward, players will no longer be able to drop below an earned division. This means that if you get to platinum and lose a few games, you can no longer drop to gold (and so forth). In addition, at the end of a season you will now only drop one division (or in other words exactly 5 ranks). This means that if you were a Cosmic Player at the end of the season, you will start at Platinum 5 in the new season. Previously, a Cosmic player would begin a new season in Silver. These changes should help prevent more experienced players from stomping on newer players at the beginning of the season.

Another factor that contributed to suboptimal matchmaking was that the road to Cosmic was too short. Basically, players reached the end destination too quickly, and this resulted not only in the rush I mentioned above, but also in players being paired against others who were well above their skill level or experience. To help remedy this, we have removed the bonus win streaks earned from going 2-0. The bonus star for winning consecutive ladder matches will remain. By lengthening the road, players will now play against others around their own skill/experience level more frequently.

Getting to Cosmic rank will now feel like that much more of an achievement, and the Cosmic Coin rewards you heard about here are going to be more exclusive. Getting to Cosmic rank to earn those rewards will require a little more effort, but those who do will be rewarded accordingly. The items you can purchase with Cosmic Coins are pretty sweet!

We will also be updating the Merry Melee mode with our next patch. We currently have a handful of Merry modes planned, and each one of these modes comes with a unique sleeve you can earn by achieving 10 wins in that gauntlet. In fact, these promotional rewards are hooked up to run indefinitely, so you don’t have to play all your matches at once as these modes cycle. For example, if you only earned 5 wins during the Merry Melee Corinth during the first time the gauntlet queue was open, you will only need to get 5 more wins to earn the Corinth Sleeve when it opens again. This allows us to turn the gauntlets back on without stomping on your previous efforts.

Another great thing about these timed gauntlets is that when they expire, they pay out each registered player based on the record they have earned at the time the event ends. This new tech allows us to create timed events in a way we haven’t been able to do before.

With that in mind, here is a preview of an upcoming Merry Melee mode, Who’s the Boss!

In this gauntlet format, each player will transform into a random Frost Ring Arena champion at the start of each game, granting you that champion’s powers and deck. You then battle it out for fame and glory and prizes!

…Prizes like the exclusive Permafrost Sleeve!

Pretty cool, right?

These are just a few of the chill things coming with our next patch, so stay tuned to HEXTCG.com for more info.

Thanks for your time,

Kyle Mcginty

It’s Your Card

The community has spoken and Jeremy Chong’s art has won out. Now we set ourselves to the ever important and difficult task of naming our community designed card! Be sure to stop by the thread and leave your suggestions for awesome epithets. The team will be taking the best community suggestions and putting those up to a vote, so put on those Cerebral Jack-hat’s and get crackling! As always, the team will also be discussing the card as you guys design it on our regular dev streams (which run from 2:30 PM – 4:30 PM Pacific Time every other Wednesday), so come join the fun!

This is a quick reminder that our new Bash & Clash structure is going strong. Come try out our new, short-form tournaments for your chance to win platinum, prizes, and exclusive alternate arts!

Here is the full prizing and schedule breakdown:

Schedule:

Saturdays at 8am PT – Bash

Saturdays at 4pm PT – Clash

Sundays at 8am PT – Clash

Sundays at 4pm PT – Bash

Bash:

Format: Standard Constructed

Cost: 700 Platinum

Length: 4 rounds, swiss pairings

Match: Best of three

Prizes:

1-0 Wins – n/a

2 Wins – 5 current set booster packs, AAA card

3 Wins – 12 current set booster packs, AAA card, AAA sleeve

4 Wins – 10,000 platinum, AAA card, AAA sleeve, Battleboard

Clash:

Format: Standard Sealed

Cost: 1500 Platinum (or packs + 300 Platinum entry fee)

Length: 4 rounds, swiss pairings

Match: Best of three

Prizes:

1-0 Wins – n/a

2 Wins – 5 current set booster packs, AAA card

3 Wins – 12 current set booster packs, AAA card, AAA sleeve

4 Wins – 10,000 platinum, AAA card, AAA sleeve, Battleboard

Door prizes will still be granted to a few lucky participants. We will be giving out a total of 2 random Battleboards to players without 4 wins, 4 random AAA sleeves to players without 3 wins, and 4 random AAA cards to those favored by Kismet.

Shardsworn Showdown

We are thrilled to announce that martypunker and Hex_Manifesto will be joining the official channel on Fridays starting at 4:30 PM Pacific. They will be running their Shardsworn Showdown, which as many of you know is an awesome casual deathmatch between friends. There they take viewer recommendations for deck restrictions and then pit those creations against each other for guts and glory (mostly glory). It is a ton of fun, so you should definitely say hi.

See you in the Battlegrounds~

The HEX Team

Got any questions? Want to chat with other players? Then discuss this article in our Forums! You can also follow us on Twitter, Facebook, our YouTube channel, or enjoy regular streams on our official Twitch channel.