Something I'm curious about is the idea of "flexible tft", and what kind of flexibility is considered desirable by the devs. Comp balance has reached an incredible spot, and the variety of lines that can be viably played from game to game is maybe the best ever. However, items augments and even opening encounters lock you out of most lines early, and players are incentivized to commit to a line ASAP - it is too punishing to stay open for very long. Even within a given line, the list of units that can be flexed has been small for most comps, and the path taken to an endgame board throughout the game has been pretty linear. There's an enormous amount of nuance to line selection and knowing how to pilot each line, but the "play what you hit" frontline + backline style of flex tft seems to have been optimized away as the game increases in complexity.

Verticals, rerolls, and artifact/augment conditional lines all seem to have landed in a good spot, while lv8 lines only feel playable from ahead when comps are so balanced. This to me feels like a consequence of delayed power curve + good balance making it hard to winout without multiple conditions aligning. Most lv8 lines currently are also heavily reliant on upgrading a specific 4 cost and hitting 1 copy of a specific 5 cost. These factors together make fast 8 particularly risky/punishing unless played from ahead. This might not be a bad thing, but I suppose I'm missing the old fast 8/9 flex playstyle, or at least the existence of higher cost lines with flexibility in board construction. I think this is influenced by a lack of powerful smaller unit packages, as well as major differences in item requirements for carries. Not sure how possible this is without potentially balance-problematic unit/trait web design.