Minion Masters!




It's been a while, but we're back with another Minion Masters Emote Contest! The Emote Contest is a community competition that allows your custom Minion Masters emotes to be immortalized on the Minion Masters Discord Server! Here's how to enter:

• Make a cool Minion Masters emote! They don't have to be just puffs, but the general guideline for an emote is a 1:1 ratio emoticon, like the ones you'd see in-game. Make sure that it looks nice as a downscaled emote, too, as that may affect your chances.
  
• Head over to the official Minion Masters discord at http://discord.gg/minionmasters and post your entry in the #emote-contest-3 channel.
  
• Once the Contest ends on the 18th of June, 5 candidates and their emotes will be presented to the community for voting. The three emotes that receive the most votes will be declared the winners!
  
• The winners will have their emotes added to the Minion Masters Discord for everyone to use, as well as a special credit in the FAQ!
  
• Emotes must be Minion Masters related and not use copyrighted material that isn't from BetaDwarf.
  
• Entries must be your own original works. Any medium can be used to create them.
  
• Entries must be new. Emotes from the previous contests are not eligible.
  
• Entries must not violate the server rules.

Entries will close on the 18th of June at 0800 UTC. Good luck, Masters!



There's a big boost to Twitch Drops coming to compensate for the issues we had during 1.12. From June 11th to June 18th, you can get triple value from your Twitch Drops, making them worth 300 Gold each! Make sure to stop on by your favourite Twitch Stream while the event is ongoing and get your rewards!

Or, if you want to start streaming during this event and share the love, make sure to connect your Minion Masters account to Twitch to earn rewards while streaming - Learn more here!

Cheers from BetaDwarf!

Get the new $15 Charging Into Darkness DLC 100% off this weekend!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1324190/Minion_Masters__Charging_Into_Darkness/

CHARGING INTO DARKNESS - OUT NOW!

With Ardera's true agenda revealed, High-Mage Leiliel races to the Whispering Woods to find an old friend. Without his help they stand no chance against the evil that is coming in Jadespark Jungle - But the Elven armies are locked in battle with the accursed legions of Mordar the Mad. Can Leiliel secure Fanriel the Stormchargers aid?

Featuring new cards, a new Adventure, a reworked Battle Pass System, and more!

Read all about the new expansion on the update site, or just jump right into the game!

Cheers from BetaDwarf!

Minion Masters!

Our latest expansion, Charging into Darkness, starts now! With Ardera's true agenda revealed, High-Mage Leiliel races to the Whispering Woods to find an old friend. Without his help they stand no chance against the evil that is coming in Jadespark Jungle - But the Elven armies are locked in battle with the accursed legions of Mordar the Mad. Can Leiliel secure Fanriel the Stormchargers aid?

With this Expansion, we’re doing big changes to how we release new content, and how the Battle Pass system functions. We have a big write-up of the changes and our reasoning on our blog here. Here’s what’s being changed:

• Battle Passes are now known as Season Passes
  
• Season Passes last 1 month
  
• Season Passes are 50 Tiers
  
• 3 new cards are added to the game with each Season Pass
  
• Also includes 1 Legendary Skin, 3 Avatars, and 1 Emote
  
• Still includes heaps of XP, Shards, Rubies and Gold
  
• Includes lots of copies of other cards and 35 Power Tokens

• Season Tokens have been removed - You now unlock new cards directly through specific Season Pass Tiers. There’s no longer any randomness in accessing new content.
  
• All new cards can be earned in the free pass. They will also appear earlier in the premium pass.
  
• Cards introduced in the season cannot be crafted until the next season starts.

• If you complete the Season Pass, you will receive glory for the new Cards, both for the Free and Premium paths.
  
• XP Requirements for Season Pass tiers now scale - It’s easier to get started with a new Season Pass. It now starts at 25k Glory for the first tier, compared to 42k as before.
  
• Overall XP requirement to complete a Season Pass is the same as finishing 50 tiers of the old Battle Pass system.
  
• Season Pass price will be 1500 Rubies
  
• Expansions will last 3 Season Passes - Each Pass brings new content related to the Expansion.

Aid High-Mage Leiliel as she races through the raging battlefield in the Whispering Woods to find her old friend, Lord Fanriel. She needs his help to overcome the evil emerging from Jadespark Jungle - Can she secure his aid?

• Brand New Story - Venture through the woods and fight off maddened denizens and cursed Undead.
  
• Play as the new High-Mage Leiliel Master, exclusive to Adventures - Or play as returning favourites Jolo and Fergus as bonus content!
  
• This 1 Chapter Adventure is free!
  
• Completing the Chapter will get you some cool rewards, and will take you to a story introducing an upcoming Master!

Accursed Ascension

• Reworked: To obtain Accursed Ascension, spend 60 Mana on Accursed cards.
  
• Spectral Essence removed from the game

Arcane Bolt

• NEW: If the unit drops below 500 HP during the stun duration, destroy it.
  
• Stun Duration 9 > 5
  
• Mana Cost 3 > 4
  
• Mana Freeze 2 > 1
  
• Developer Comments
  
• Arcane Bolt has been difficult to find a good spot for due to the hard threshold in the card’s mechanic. By changing the requirement to allow for greater leniency we aim to make the card much more practical to use in regular gameplay.

Arcane Ring

• Radius 5 > 4
  
• Developer Comments
  
• It was unfortunately common for units to be missed by the Arcane Ring’s projectiles due to the circle radius, where they could simply walk through it and ultimately mean the majority of the spell’s damage was wasted.

ATG Drone x8

• Projectiles 6 > 7

Blastmancer/Spiritmancer

• Effect Radius 10 > 14

Blood Imps

• Attack Cooldown 1.1 > 0.9

Bridge Shrine

• Total XP 15 > 18

Crystal Construct

• Now gives Mana on Death, instead of on Play
  
• Developer Comments
  
• This change also applies to the new card Dormant Defenders.

Cursebearer

• Mana Cost 3 > 4
  
• Curse Aura Duration 4 > 8
  
• Developer Comments
  
• Cursebearer’s effect ultimately made it too efficient for its mana slot.

Demon Warrior

• Attack Cooldown 2.2 > 2.0

Dragon Whelp

• Attack Cooldown 1.0 > 1.1
  
• Also affects Flightless Dragons and Shadow Whelp

Ghost Turret

• Health 350 > 250
  
• Now grants an allied minion Spirit on death

Grasping Thorns

• Total Damage 160 > 170
  
• Enemy Speed 3 > 2

Jungle Jumble

• No longer grants a mana Discount
  
• Cards obtained now have Growthburst Shroom

Leiliel’s Vortex

• Pull Strength 7 > 10

Ratbo

• Attack Damage 6 > 5

Snake Druid

• Attack Cooldown 1.0 > 2.0
  
• Damage 25 > 50
  
• Attack Delay 0.4 > 1.4
  
• Developer Comments
  
• Snake Druid’s ability to deal with swarm fairly efficiently was an area we felt he needed a weakness in order to enable more counterplay.

Squire Puff

• Now a Minion
  
• New Effect: While on the bridge, give 3 random friendly ground Minions Shield every 10 seconds.
  
• Empyrean Army: Give 5 shields instead.
  
• Mana Cost 2 > 1

Ting, Teng & Tung

• Bug Fix: Rage and Growthburst Shroom now grant damage bonuses properly
  
• Health 360 > 300

Wall

• Duration 20 > 30

Zeppelin Bomber

• Mana Cost 2 > 3

• Dragon Nest and Priestess have received visual overhauls, including new Card Art and Models.
  
• Combustion and Black Hole have received updated card art.

• Fixed Blue Golems summoned by the Red Golem card doing 300 damage instead of 200 - Thanks KcToby101!
  
• Fixed minions in Chapter 2 of the Saving Jadespark Jungle adventure being permanently invisible.
  
• Fixed inconsistencies regarding Mana Surge and Stealth.
  
• Fixed Puffs being able to wander off the bridge and get hit by effects such as Mordar’s attack.
  
• Fixed a slight error with the Buffed HP indication - Thanks SoSiskodemon!
  
• Fixed Black Hole occasionally causing games to hang, making them unplayable.
  
• Fixed Haunting Hugger becoming Untargetable.
  
• Fixed Hypnotize still being able to permanently steal minions.
  
• Fixed Sun Burn’s size indication being too small.
  
• Fixed units granted Stealth by Mal’Shar not visually regaining Stealth.
  
• Fixed Twitch Drops not working.
  
• Potential fix for Twitch VIPs and Moderators not receiving Twitch Drops.

Cheers from BetaDwarf!

Minion Masters!

A quick note before we begin; there was a minor error on the Charging Into Darkness Update Site where it listed the available masters for the new Adventure as 6. This was incorrect, and has been altered to the correct amount of 3. We apologize for the miscommunication.




This week, we've got news of a rework to the Accursed Ascension mechanic coming in Version 1.13. A frequent issue we found with the mechanic was that, particularly as a new player, the condition you needed to fulfill wasn't always intuitive, and at times could feel somewhat clumsy.

The requirement of obtaining Spectral Essence was especially confusing in this perspective - It wasn't clear what Spectral Essence actually was at first glance and where it could be found, and could also cause confusion when a player obtained it without knowing what the mechanic was. This was doubly so for cards that had Spectral Essence but not Accursed Ascension - You'd receive a ghost particle from your Skeleton card that would go to your Master tower, but you had no idea what that actually meant, or if it even did anything.

As such, we're changing Accursed Ascension to be the following;

• Spend 60 Mana on Accursed faction cards to gain Accursed Ascension.

Our hope with this change is to make the mechanic easier to understand at a glance, and also encourage greater freedom when creating Accursed Ascension decks. Previously when building a deck centered on Accursed Ascension, you would simply look for the most efficient Spectral Essence cards to include, which had the potential issue of some Accursed cards being completely disregarded in those decks. While it'll clearly be the most ideal option to load your Ascension deck with a ton of Accursed cards, we're fairly confident that this isn't much of a difference compared to how you would build such a deck before.

Over the last few weeks during our Wild Cards test, we've been collecting a ton of feedback from community, leaderboards and in-game sources to gauge the effectiveness of the rework. Overall we've received positive reception to the changes compared to before the tests began, but we've also identified that there are various areas that require improvement going forward, and certain elements that were not impacted enough by the change.

For now, we're going to keep the Rework in the game while we investigate what directions we want to pursue for the future. In the meantime, we're going to continue to try and address the currently problematic Wild Cards in future balance patches. We want to thank everyone that helped us out by participating in the tests and answering our in-game surveys.



We've got a developer stream coming up for the release of Charging Into Darkness! We'll be doing a full showcase of the card Resonating Blast Crystal, as well as a full preview of all of the new contents arriving with the update. Join Community Manager That Sprite on the official BetaDwarf Developer Stream on the 25th of May, at 1900 UTC+2!

Cheers from BetaDwarf!

Minion Masters!

Last week, we launched our new Expansion Site for Charging into Darkness. The story of this new expansion follows High-Mage Leiliel searching for her old friend, Lord Fanriel. Fanriel himself is a bulky but slow-attacking leader who charges into the fray via his Stormcharge ability, and we're opting to showcase his signature ability:

https://gfycat.com/annualgenuinelamprey

Please note that the animations are not finalised yet, so things may look slightly different when the card is actually released. Tomorrow is the reveal of Dormant Defenders, so look forward to that!

We're opening our doors for PTR testers again to help us test upcoming content and balance changes!

As a PTR tester, you will test new content on the PTR and provide feedback for the Minion Masters design team through questionnaires and discuss feedback with the team directly in the Discord channel. Responses from the PTR testing group is an extremely important part of creating new content for the game.

To join, you must be able to write in English, be open-minded, and have time to test and discuss new cards, masters and other content with us. It is a requirement that you are open to testing new cards/masters through rigorous playtesting. You must also have a Steam account and be able to play the game on PC (you will have the full collection of cards at your disposal).

To sign up, answer this questionnaire here and we'll contact you via your Discord account if you're accepted:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdy4N1jO2PXJTy3R8UHqS6Aa0meFVyI2wD8CWrt1OhPPUyRuw/viewform?usp=pp_url

We just finished up the Week #1 Survey on the Wild Cards Rework Test. Did you respond to it while it was in the news? Next Monday we'll start the second survey and we want to make sure everyone from the community has their say as the meta develops. If you still want to submit a response to the week 1 survey, you can find it right here.

Cheers from BetaDwarf!

Minion Masters!



For the duration of Version 1.12, we’re testing a Wild Cards rework that attempts to put the power level of the mechanic in line with decks that do not use the feature. We have a full, in-detail write up of what we felt needed improving, and the reasoning behind the solution we chose, here.

Here’s the change we’re going with:

• Wild Cards are now added as the 11th and 12th cards in your deck.
  
• You must have 10 unique cards in your deck to start a match.

We’ll regularly be doing surveys throughout this patch, featured in the in-game news. Make sure your opinion is heard and express your honest opinions as the meta around this rework develops!

Note: Attack Speed is now being referred to as “Attack Cooldown”. Attack Speed usually has a connotation that would indicate - the higher a unit’s Attack Speed is, the faster an attack is. However, in our game it is the opposite. As such, we have decided to rename it to Attack Cooldown to better reflect what is actually going on.

Ardent Aegis

• Duration 5 > 4
  
• Developer Comments
  
• Ardent Aegis was proving a little too difficult to use due to the lengthy timer.

Caber Tosser

• Caber Attack Range 4 > 6
  
• Caber Width 3 > 4
  
• Developer Comments
  
• Caber Tosser often ended up missing large parts of a horde of minions you attempted to counter with him due to the narrow size of his Caber, making him feel frustrating to play in those circumstances.

Disruptor Puff

• First Teleport Cooldown 2 > 5 seconds
  
• Teleport Cooldown 6 > 5 seconds
  
• Developer Comments
  
• ”Teleport Cooldown” refers to how long it takes for the Disruptor Puff’s teleport to occur. We felt the shorter initial teleport wait was too strong for its job, being able to quickly take both bridges before your opponent could respond, but subsequent teleport times left it a little too vulnerable to pose much of a threat.

Dragon Ball

• Activation Mana Cost 6+ > 5+
  
• Developer Comments
  
• Dragon Ball has been seeing very little use due to the high requirement of mana expenditure in order to get value from the card. We feel this buff will make it much easier to fit into decks, but not as powerful as it was during its dominant era.

High-Inquisitor Ardera

• Damage 25 > 27

Jade Flingers

• Damage 16 > 20
  
• Attack Cooldown 1.8 > 2

Jahun, Keeper of Jadespark

• Sunder Mana Cost 1 > 0
  
• Now has Mythic
  
• Developer Comments
  
• Jahun was underperforming at higher levels, yet we felt the unit itself was for the most part at a decent power level. As such we’ve opted to improve his utility via Sunder, as well as letting him live with a small portion of health when targeted with a card such as Lightning Bolt.

Living Statue

• No longer has Call Slitherbound
  
• Developer Comments
  
• Living Statue was proving to be a strong card in Call Slitherbound decks, able to help generate an exceptional amount of value with the extra Slitherbound that we felt was ultimately unnecessary.

Morgrul the Swarmer King

• Mana Cost 4 >5
  
• Swarmer Count 2 > 3
  
• Developer Comments
  
• The Swarmer Count will affect both his on-play and on-death roars. Morgrul has been a very powerful Legendary card ever since his changes in Update 60. While we recently touched the card to align his stats better with Elite Swarmer, he still performs exceptionally well in all ranks, across all modes, providing a ton of value for the 4 Mana Cost slot that often enables a free trade with lower cost cards while putting a decent threat on the board.
  
  We felt that efficiency was too much for the 4 Mana Slot, and at the same time we saw an opportunity to reinforce the characteristic of being the Swarmer King. He should still be sufficiently useful at the 5 Mana slot, and the extra swarmers should help to keep him as a relevant threat with the strong DPS if left unanswered.

Snake Druid

• Speed 2 > 3
  
• Developer Comments
  
• Snake Druid often seemed to have stayed on your side of the field far too long for your opponent to effectively deal with him due to his low speed. By giving him a speed increase in this way, we want to maintain his current strengths but allow your opponent to simply wait him out, or push other lanes, more effectively.

Soul Stealer

• Speed 5 > 6
  
• Developer Comments
  
• Soul Stealer was able to hide behind defensive walls such as Living Statue a little too effectively, often making him difficult to answer with direct Minion combat.

Stormy

• Attack Delay 1.5 > 2.0
  
• Attack Cooldown 3.5 > 4.0
  
• Developer Comments
  
• Stormy was proving to still be too large of a threat in the context of 2v2 gameplay, being able to get out attacks a bit too quickly we felt. By increasing his overall Attack Cooldown, we hope that it’ll become easier to put damage onto it before it can attack again.

Sun Burn

• Radius 3 > 4

Ting Teng & Tung

• Damage 99 > 90
  
• [FIX]Projectiles cannot bounce off of dead minions
  
• Developer Comments
  
• Projectiles bouncing off of minions that were already dead was somewhat of an unintended behaviour, so half of this change can be classified as a bug fix, but we're listing it here as it's a significant change to the balance of the card.

Troubadour

• Health 1700 > 1800

Zealots of the Burning Fist

• Mana Cost 7 > 6
  
• Developer Comments
  
• Despite being able to output some serious damage in the right circumstances, the mana cost for Zealots of the Burning Fist was too high to justify playing it in most scenarios. Hopefully a simple mana reduction can help out the card a lot.

Zeppelin Bomber

• Attack Delay 2.0 > 3.0
  
• Attack Cooldown 3.5 > 4.0

• Expeditions have been retired for the time being. A new Weekly Quest to earn tokens by playing Premade 2v2 has been added to compensate.
  
• Attack Speed has been renamed to Attack Cooldown.
  
• Stormbringer has received new animations.
  
• Guardian, Dragon Ball and Shen’s Storm Staff have been removed from the Random Card pool.
  
• Minor improvements to the new way buffs are applied to the Healthbar.
  
• Defensive Spells are now categorised as such in the card view.

• Fixed Leiliel not reflecting AtG Drone x8’s attacks - Thanks Lazur!
  
• Fixed Leiliel receiving only half the expected health from Spirit buffs, and blocking healing - Thanks saytin!
  
• Fixed being able to permanently steal minions with two copies of Hypnotize - Thanks Broken!
  
• Fixed the Barrel Shield buff’s health not consistently being 60 - Thanks to everyone that reported this!
  
• Updated the Bridge Buddies tooltip - Thanks EricIsFreaker!
  
• Fixed Mountainshaper Volco saying he can attack Air units - Thanks BadAsAFish80!
  
• Fixed issues with Ting Teng & Tung’s weight - Thanks KestreL!
  
• Fixed Stealthed units being targetable upon spawning - Thanks Jimi D Night!
  
• Fixed Keywords not being searchable - Thanks everyone!
  
• Fixed Blaze Volco’s skin using the default by mistake.
  
• Fixed Gor’Rakk Gate tooltips being broken (Was fixed via a stealth patch)
  
• Fixed Sewer Scrat preview still being a normal Sewer Scrat.
  
• Fixed Agate Milloween not appearing in the Master selection.
  
• Fixed Brother of the Burning Fist appearing in the Sixes bucket for Adventures.
  
• Fixed a rare occurrence where Legendary Find would not reduce the mana cost of a card by 1 in Adventures.
  
• Fixed King Puff signs being mistakenly set to the bottom of the bridge when reconnecting.
  
• Fixed the global chat covering the News board when opening the game.

Cheers from BetaDwarf!

Minion Masters!




While we have the upcoming Wild Cards Test, we've still got a host of balance changes we'll be releasing alongside it. Here's just a few of the changes coming soon:

• Ting, Teng & Tung
  
• Damage 100 -> 90
  
• Projectiles cannot bounce off of dead minions
  
• Developer Comments
  
• Projectiles bouncing off of minions that were already dead was somewhat of an unintended behaviour, so half of this change can be classified as a bug fix, but we're listing it here as it's a significant change to the balance of the card.

• Snake Druid
  
• Speed 2 -> 3
  
• Developer Comments
  
• Snake Druid often seemed to have stayed on your side of the field far too long for your opponent to effectively deal with him due to his low speed. By giving him a speed increase in this way, we want to maintain his current strengths but allow your opponent to simply wait him out, or push other lanes, more effectively.

• Zealots of the Burning Fist
  
• Mana Cost 7 -> 6
  
• Developer Comments
  
• Despite being able to output some serious damage in the right circumstances, the mana cost for Zealots of the Burning Fist was too high to justify playing it in most scenarios. Hopefully a simple mana reduction can help out the card a lot.

• Dragon Ball
  
• Activation Mana Cost 6+ -> 5+
  
• Developer Comments
  
• Dragon Ball's activation cost was making the card significantly difficult to fit into decks, and we believe the meta has developed to a state where it's a good opportunity to ease up on the restrictive nature of the card's condition.

As always, there's more balance changes to come - Look forward to reading the rest with the release of the 1.12 Patch Notes!



BadAsAFish is back again with another installment of his excellent tournament series! Featuring a $100 Prize Pool provided by BetaDwarf, this multi-day event is a great way to team up with your friend and engage in some competitive Minion Masters if you're stuck at home during the quarantine.

Check out the Toornament page here: https://www.toornament.com/en_GB/tournaments/3298882341728886784/information

We're always on the lookout for great displays of creativity from the Minion Masters playerbase, and our eyes this week were drawn to some amazing fanart of Succubus by nekochelle!



We fully recommend checking out the original linked above - The resolution on this is massive! We fell in love with this piece the moment we saw it, and so did our users on Reddit. Check out nekochelle's Instagram accounts - nekochelle and miqchips for more of their great work.

Cheers from BetaDwarf!

Minion Masters!

Those that have been paying dutiful attention to our Road Map know that Stormbringer is getting a shiny animation overhaul. His current animation set has been with us since the very beginning of Minion Masters, and we think it's time to give him an upgrade. Our animator has been hard at work creating these great new visuals that we think better represent Stormbringer's acrobatic and showboating personality. Check them out and let us know what you think:



Stormbringer's new style will be arriving in Version 1.12, due for release on the 30th of April.



With the continued duration of the Covid-19 quarantine, it's important to all of us that we stay in contact in this period of isolation. We've already talked about how we're still working from home on the next Minion Masters update, but the BetaDwarf team have also taken to special remote gaming nights. We've been up to everything - Playtesting new (and secret!) things, or getting together and hitting public game servers with the might of the Dwarves. There's even been word of setting up a private BetaDwarf Minecraft server... Perhaps we'll have things to show you from that if the idea takes off ;)

But we also want to hear about you all - What have you been up to during the quarantine, productive or recreational? Everyone at BetaDwarf wishes you the best, and we want to hear from you!

Cheers from BetaDwarf!

Minion Masters!

We've made the difficult decision to put Expeditions on Hiatus from the game in our upcoming update. Our stats and survey indicated to us that only a small portion of the Minion Masters playbase actively engage with the mode, yet putting Season Tokens behind it that were significant to new players meant people would have to play through a mode they don't enjoy, and found confusing. We think it's time to retire the game mode for the time being as maintaining it was becoming a difficulty on our end without revisiting the mode, and we want to take the opportunity to have time to focus and improve the experience of the remaining game modes.

We'll replacing the weekly expeditions with a weekly quest that will grant tokens for winning 5 matches in Premade 2v2 Battles, as to not simply be removing earnable rewards. We'd like to thank everyone that's enjoyed Expeditions since its inception.



We're always on the lookout for inspiring tales of awesomeness from our community. With the recent Covid-19 pandemic, there's never been a better time for the Minion Masters community to come together, and nowhere has there been a better example of this than BadAsAFish80's week long charity stream!

Started as an endeavour to fundraise for the UK's National Health Service, BadAsAFish undertook the event spanning from the 6th to the 10th of April, with any and all proceeds from his Twitch stream being donated towards this great cause. As of writing (Wednesday the 8th), he's already raised a phenomenal $1350!

Make sure to check him out over this Easter period and give him our best wishes - Everyone at BetaDwarf is proud of what he's achieved!

And while you're at it - Why not consider signing up to his upcoming 1v1 Tournament? There's a $100 prize pool with a generous amount of time to complete your matches - Perfect for this period! https://www.toornament.com/en_GB/tournaments/3298863485632135168/information

Cheers from BetaDwarf!

Minion Masters!




Wild Cards is a topic that's been at the forefront of Minion Masters discussion for a long time. It's been a divisive issue that proved difficult to gain a consensus upon - Today, we'll be talking at depth about our plans with the mechanic going forward.

For those not familiar with the subject of Wild Cards, the main issue that we're attempting to solve is the usage of the mechanic for "cheese" strategies - Where decks would simply take one strong card that was usually perfectly acceptable on their own, and simply add extra copies of it in order to require more direct answers from the opponent lest a severe mana advantage be gained.

At the same time, we acknowledge that there are more innocent uses of Wild Cards - Users that make creative decks from them or simply use them to have fun with their favourite card even if the strategy isn't viable. Because of this we opted early on to not simply remove the mechanic, as we felt it would have been a significant loss to the game to outright remove a feature a sizeable portion of the playerbase enjoys.

As such, the direction we're trying with Wild Cards is to balance them as a mechanic and make them an alternative strategy - So that they can still be appreciated by those that liked Wild Cards before, but also making them more of a considered choice than a straight upgrade to most competitive decks.


This is the solution we're trying:

• Wild Cards are now added as the 11th and 12th cards in your deck.
  
• You must have 10 unique cards in your deck to start a match.

This comes about as a result of a long period of theorycrafting, testing and design behind the scenes at BetaDwarf. We considered many, many solutions to Wild Cards and will go into more detail about why we didn't opt for specific solutions below.

The main idea with this is to create a significant drawback to the addition of Wild Cards in your deck - Having to cycle extra cards makes decks function much slower than those without, allowing non-Wild Card decks to be able to ideally reach their core cards or responses faster in comparison.

Regarding the Balance Changes we made in 1.11, we felt it was necessary that for this concept to work, significant changes would need to be made to the 1 drop Mana Cost slot to avoid a scenario where users simply included powerful 1 Mana Cards to offset the cycling disadvantage this would provide.

With Version 1.12, we intend to implement this change on the live server for the duration of the patch (Until Version 1.13) as a public test of the Wild Cards rework. While this change was tested with our PTR groups, it was determined that we would need a much larger sample size of games to get a comprehensive and accurate conclusion as to how effective these changes would be. To this end, we're trying out if a full Ranked season can provide the data we'd need.

As such, Version 1.12 can be considered as a "Wild Cards Rework Beta", and we will frequently be polling the community throughout the month to get your feedback as the meta develops.


Our main concern with this solution was that it would significantly shrink the populations of ranked queues regardless of which modes we implemented this in, and we had no intention of making this a solution purely for 1v1 modes - Wild Cards were problematic in every queue, and ignoring one or the other for the sake of what we saw as a potential bandaid fix wasn't justifiable to us. We also did not want to accelerate an elitist stigma within the Minion Masters Community - Be it "Casual vs Serious" queues, or "2v2 isn't a serious mode, because they still have Wild Cards". We wanted to fix the problem for all of our playerbase, and not to leave major parts of it behind.


This was probably one of our most frequently discussed options. Ultimately there were three elements that made us not go forward with this solution:

• It would also significantly hurt the "fun" uses of Wild Cards
  
• What about 10 mana cards - Would we implement Mana Freeze? Would that be too confusing to newer players? Would we have to instead make it Mana Freeze for all Wild Cards - At which point, would that have much of an impact?
  
• Higher cost Wild Cards are affected significantly less by this change - I.E. 3x Lord-Sentinel Thelec

This change was tested behind the scenes at BetaDwarf, but we quickly found that it opened up a lot of opportunities for combo decks, both on certain masters (Ravager in particular) or with decks in general that wouldn't have much use for the combo pieces earlier in the game. It allowed you to create a very defensive strategy early game and then transition with game swinging power cards later on.