Friday Update – Jingle House Rock

Welcome to a round up of the week. We have a ban, equipment tweaks, holiday cheer, and more:

Lyvaanth Collector’s Deck

We are excited to introduce The Lyvaanth Collector’s Deck to the in-game store! Available now, this deck will have you waxing the floor with your opponents:

With sweet new Animated Alternate Arts that can’t be found anywhere else, this deck is a great way to show your burning passion for the game. Read more now!

Rock On

We had a patch yesterday to bring a number of improvements and fixes to our client. In this patch we made a change to our Rock format. Here to share the details of that change with us today is Rules Manager Corey Burkhart:

We don’t specifically design our sets for Rock constructed play, but we do know that it is a popular way to break into the HEX constructed scene. Rock serves as an intermediate format for getting players into HEX and into Standard, and we want you to have the best possible experience when you sit down to enjoy the format. Rock is still a fairly new format, but we’ll be paying more attention to it going forward. That said, we balance cards and sets primarily for Standard and for limited play, so sometimes things in Rock can get out of hand.

Currently, we’ve seen that other strategies have had a hard time holding a candle to the Luminaries in this format. They have some of the most powerful commons and uncommons at the moment. Candlekin decks are fairly linear, and there aren’t many ways at lower rarities to prevent what this deck does. It should be noted that focal points for disrupting Luminary strategies do exist. In Standard, answers exist at higher rarity, and in limited Luminaries are less overwhelming due to the difficulty of reaching critical mass. In Rock, however, we have just the right recipe for these decks to thrive. Lots of powerful cards are available for the deck, but comparatively few answers. We combined community data with our own testing and came to the conclusion that we needed to step in to help out the Rock format.

At this time, we’re banning Choir of Lumos from Rock. This is the card that really snowballs the game out of reach and allows Candlekin decks to play an exceptionally long game (certainly longer than they would without it). Choir gives Illuminate decks the ability to play multiple cards in a turn and give a massive boost to their candle army. This is a bit too much for a card without strong answers. Choir of Lumos didn’t offer the counter-play we’d want to see from cards and decks in the Standard Rock format, so for this reason—and to increase diversity in the format—we’re removing Choir of Lumos from Rock at this time. We expect Candlekin decks to still be very powerful and popular, but not to the extent they currently are. Taking this piece away from the candle decks will force them to stretch deeper to get the Illuminates they need.

~HEXPureforce | Corey Burkhart

All Dressed Up

Speaking of changes, R&D has been tackling some equipment that is currently bugged on live. Here to tell you more is Jared Saramago, our resident player experience guru:

Hey guys! Jared here. So recently, QA let us know about a bug with Cereus Headdress, a piece of equipment for Life From Death. Instead of modifying your Life From Death to make your opponent lose health for each card in your crypt, the equipment currently caps out at 1 health lost before gaining you health as normal. Normally this would be the end of the story, but as we were testing how to best fix this bug, we began to revisit this equipment’s design.

At the end of the day, we want a few things for PvE. We want you to have a place to do all the crazy stuff that wouldn’t fly in a PvP match (the AI won’t mind), but we also want you to have some challenges along the way. Cereus Headdress, as currently written, runs the risk of packing just a little bit too much power into one convenient package. As such, we are making a tweak to the wording of this equipment with our next content patch.

The equipment will now read: Your Life From Deaths have, “Void a random troop in your crypt → Each opposing champion loses 1 health.”

We feel this change helps keep the fun thematic of the card while creating more interesting deckbuilding and gameplay incentives.

Jared Saramago-

Night of Bells is here! Kick back a glass (of Egg Nog, Hog Nog, or… Nogg Nogg??!) and party with us in-client for a festive holiday sleeve.

You can also get some sweet Alternate Arts and an exclusive PvE card. For more details, come check out our post here.

The HEX Bash and HEX Clash are back once more! Saturday and Sunday, starting at 8am PT (Timezone Conversion), you have another chance to prove your mettle and walk away with cash and exclusive prizes! Will you end up a proud owner of these fine cosmetics like last week’s Bash or Clash winners?

Join us this weekend and find out!

For full details on prizing, please check out our tournament pages here and here.

Tournament Support

Please note: if you happen to have technical issues with the Clash or Bash events, our support team requests that you submit an output log from that same day along with your ticket. This is essential, not only to ensure your ticket gets resolved in a timely fashion, but also to help us prevent similar problems from occurring in the future. Output, error, and crash logs can be found in the HEX: Shards of Fate program install folder on your machine.

Happy Holidays, all! We’ll see you in the Battlegrounds~

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