Templating Improvements

Many improvements have been made to templating!

Hey HEXers! My name is Corey Burkhart. I’m a Systems Designer and the Rules and Templating individual here within HEX R&D. With the upcoming Shattered Destiny patch, we’ve made a number of improvements to our templating rules and guidelines. We’re extending these new guidelines to Shards of Fate cards, so you’ll see updates to the text boxes on some cards in your collection.

The vast majority of these changes update the card with new text for improved readability. For the remaining cards that are being updated (three of them, to be exact) we are fixing bugs. You’ll see the comprehensive list in the patch notes, and we’ll highlight some of the key changes for you below for the three types of changes: cosmetic changes, bug fixes, and the “shuffle into” mechanic.

First, why are we doing this? We were worried that some of the cards in Shards of Fate were just too difficult to grasp. Whenever R&D designs a card, the goal is for people to be able to understand the card the first time they read it. The improvements aren’t meant to change the cards you’ve come to know and love, but instead make them easier to read, shorter in length, and make it so they all line up in their terminology. We will still make awesome cards with goofy language like The Mushwocky, but outside of these exceptions, we’ll be following this new set of rules to make the cards clear and concise for the players.

Cosmetic Changes

We’ve made many improvements to make cards easier to read and understand for players. These updates are simple cosmetic changes.

My favorite of these cosmetic changes is removing the card type from each card’s textbox. We no longer say, “Sacrifice this artifact,” instead, we just say “Sacrifice this.” This change is extremely minor, to the point where most people will never notice why this has changed, but it has helped remove some confusion in extreme corner cases.

For example, say I’ve played a Dream Dance and drawn one of the affected troops on the following turn. I play a Cavern Commando, and then transform it with Cosmic Transmogrifier into a The Fate Rack. The Fate Rack is then returned to my hand with Time Ripple, but it still reads, “When this troop enters play, draw a card, then choose and discard a card.”

Will I draw and discard a card when I play The Fate Rack? Fate Rack is no longer a troop, so most players would assume I no longer draw a card and discard a card. When in fact, when I play this Fate Rack I will correctly get the power. You can see the new one and the old one below.

Therefore, removing the “troop” from Dream Dance makes cards that transform into other card types much more intuitive. We also went ahead and removed many similar examples where cards would say, “this artifact,” or “Sacrifice this Troop.” With these changes Dream Dance reads: “Troops in your deck get ‘When this enters play, draw a card, then choose and discard a card.'”

These situations are extremely complicated, require a number of moving parts, and come up infrequently, but when they do they lead to confusion. We hope that removing the card type from troop and ability text boxes will correct a large portion of these confusions and will also make the cards quicker to read as it removes a number of words from each card.

Likely the most complicated of these changes include the changes made to some cards that used the word “get” or “gets”. These words were exceptionally confusing with revert, which is a complex mechanic that returns a card to its original state. It was difficult to know which modifiers were ones that could be removed. Thus, we’ve changed the cards that cannot have their powers reverted into “has” or “have.”

One card that highlighted this problem was Briar Legion. Tons of people wouldn’t know if they could use a Reversion on a 6 ATK /6 DEF Briar Legion to revert it into a 0 ATK / 0 DEF troop. The way the revert mechanic works is that it checks if it can change the number of Briar Legions played during the game. It cannot, thus the Briar Legion cannot be reverted and would remain a 6 ATK / 6 DEF troop. But without advanced rule knowledge, no one expects players to know that.

Changing the Briar Legion’s wording from using “gets” to “has” will make it more apparent to players that this is not a modifier that can be removed with reversion. Remember, not all cards are changed from “gets” to “has,” but any card that functions this way has been updated. The bottom line is that “has” or “have” effects cannot be reverted and “get” or “gets” effects can be reverted. You can see the new one and the old one below.

A number of other changes were made including lining up all costs and cost modifiers under the same symbol, all unique troops reference themselves in their textboxes, and Inspire has been rewritten to be more readable for players.

Bug Fixes

A functional change is a change that actually affects how the card plays in game. Early on, we made a promise that we would not change the way PVP cards worked once you owned them. This is still true. We originally meant for the three cards affected to work a certain way: Plant Garden, Pterobot, and Legionnaire of Gawaine. The way in which they’ve been changed is minor, as explained below.

Plant Garden has always been intended to make a Spore Stalks, Venus Fly Gorger, or Vine Goliath all with a cost of four, because the Plant Garden costs four. However, Venus Fly Gorger went out the door with a cost of three. In changing this, we wanted to make sure that this won’t affect many games, and more importantly the change wouldn’t take away the parts that make players that love Plant Garden love Plant Garden. So now, Venus Fly Gorger correctly costs 4 resources.

[Editor’s note: The Pterobot fix below did not make it into Patch Shattered Destiny. You will see it in a future patch]

Pterobot has a more complicated change. Like Plant Garden, we’re changing the cost of this troop in certain zones. Pterobot is the most expensive common in the set in terms of resource cost, and in part this is to play with powers like Fahrny. Fahrny and Pterobot were made for each other, but because Pterobot doesn’t cost 7 in play, we seldom see the Dwarf and Robot work together. Therefore, we’re fixing Pterobot to work in all your zones. Your zones are: your deck, your graveyard, your hand, and your underground, which means Pterobot will cost 7 while in play and on the chain, allowing the duo to work in tandem as intended from the start.

Legionnaire of Gawaine’s wording is not changing, instead we’re just fixing a bug that’s affected him. The legionnaire looks at the cards that have inspired him to deal damage to opposing troops and champion, which was playing oddly when he was returned to his champion’s hand.

For example, I have a Ruby Pyromancer and it inspires my Legionnaire of Gawaine, dealing 1 damage to each opposing champion and troop. If the Legionnaire of Gawaine is returned to my hand by a Time Ripple and I replay him, he’s inspired by the Ruby Pyromancer a second time. Previously, the Legionnaire of Gawaine was dealing 2 damage to each opposing champion and troop because it had been granted two separate inspire powers from the Ruby Pyromancer, but only one card had ever inspired him. This led to some confusion for players, as they didn’t know if the Legionnaire remembered which troops had inspired him, and the case is that he does. In the above example, the Legionnaire of Gawaine would only deal 1 damage to each opposing champion and troop when he enters play the second time.

“Shuffle Into”

The most common change that has been made is changing a number of cards that said, “shuffle into” your deck to now say “put into” your deck.

“Put into” is not a new concept, we say “Put into” when we create cards telling you what zone they’re put into. On Assault Technician we put a War Bot into play, and we put cards into your hand with Devoted Emissary. It only makes sense to add this terminology onto cards putting cards into your deck.

Putting a card into your deck will randomly insert it into your deck, meaning it doesn’t change the order of the deck outside of adding this specific card(s) in the deck somewhere. Because HEX operates in a digital space we don’t need to shuffle your deck, which gives our R&D team the ability to design cards that care about the order of your deck. Not every card with the word “shuffle” has been changed, but a number of them have, and we’re really excited for what’s on the horizon because of this change.

The last of the functional changes is adjusting the typelines on certain cards. Some cards were missing what class they belonged to and some were missing a subtype. Determined Zombie is a zombie troop, but it was missing an undead tag. With this patch, our zombies are both undead and zombie troops. While these subtypes and classes aren’t extremely apparent yet, they will be something to keep note of once PvE gets into full swing.

One of the changes occurred due to our wrapping up of certain thematic threads that haven’t yet been revealed. The Voidtouched aren’t changing to the Chaostouched because we think it sounds cooler, but because it will better serve future goals of the creative team as we explore the world and story of Entrath.

We want to make HEX the best it can possibly be, and that means making sure every single card looks and functions like you would expect it to from reading the card. We know that all of these changes will bring a better experience for our community in the long term. With the large number of improvements to Shards of Fate and the release of Shattered Destiny, I hope everyone is excited as I am for what’s on the horizon.

I’ll be in the forums answering specific questions you, the community, have regarding the templating updates or why cards have been updated, and I’ll see you on the fields of Entrath.

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