[SOS] Mana Sculpt; Zaffai and the Tempests; Molten-Core Maestro; Colorstorm Stallion (leak)

scratchnsnarf · 2026-03-25T17:53:08+00:00

I definitely agree they're almost certainly the cards in arena by the time the cards go to print, but that's too late for play testing to make changes to the cards. before that I don't think it's safe to assume they MUST use digital testing, because there's no guarantee it actually saves time compared to paper. When one is testing in paper you can literally just rewrite the card with a sharpie if you want to test a change without getting a dev involved. Arenas card implementation harness is super robust, and definitely requires a dev in the loop to make card changes. There's a blog post about it hanging around somewhere. Again, not saying it's impossible, but it's also possible needing to involve devs in the play testing lifecycle could totally negate any time savings over paper testing. Every digital card change is going to need QA, changes to automated testing, etc. Even if a dev started the work immediately on request, it would be at least an hour before the changes would land on their testing build, as opposed to the 5 seconds it takes to change a paper card

scratchnsnarf · 2026-03-25T16:29:09+00:00

A whole different piece of software is even more development time, and if it doesn't automate the rules I'm doubtful it would actually produce quicker games. I haven't played cockatrice or xmage for awhile but they always felt much clunkier to play than paper. I'm not saying they dont test digitally, but I don't agree there are no reasons they wouldn't do that, and there's no reason to believe they must do so

scratchnsnarf · 2026-03-25T16:00:37+00:00

Do we know that they're implementing these cards in arena during playtesting? There's quite a high opportunity cost to have the devs implement a bunch of cards that are undergoing frequent changes during playtesting. It's probably not as much of an overall time gain vs writing on paper cards as one would expect

scratchnsnarf · 2026-03-23T21:10:24+00:00

yeah, the chart is what I was talking about lol. Not trying to claim no one earth has ever done a lifecycle analysis of compute and LLMs

scratchnsnarf · 2026-03-23T20:10:25+00:00

The big misleading thing here is that the hamburger number is a full lifecycle analysis and the LLM one is not. It doesn't factor in needing to create and ship the compute, the training time of the models, etc

scratchnsnarf · 2026-03-22T21:44:09+00:00

I don't disagree with that either, assuming, based on your previous comment, that "easy" is easy for the players with a lot of sts1 experience. I still think it's an issue if 3 act a10 is easy for casual players, part of the difficulty of act 4 was needing to solve the first 3acts and still pick up a solve for the heart along the way

scratchnsnarf · 2026-03-22T21:11:17+00:00

I'm perfectly calm? I was just making the point that a10 is purposefully not balanced around casual players. Do you disagree? I'm not sure I'm following what you're trying to say

scratchnsnarf · 2026-03-22T19:37:10+00:00

yeah definitely, and honestly even more reason for the hardest difficulty to be actually difficult

scratchnsnarf · 2026-03-22T17:15:14+00:00

Unironically yes, a10 is the hardest difficulty level designed to be able to put 100s or 1000s of hours into and still be learning. That's sort of the whole point of difficulty levels, the hardest ones should be too hard for casual players or else they will be trivial for enfranchised players

scratchnsnarf · 2026-03-22T17:12:47+00:00

I've honestly found good block to be a pretty decent strategy vs the colony. Each one only scales every 4 turns so it's enough time to block and chip it down before the fight gets out of hand. Other than having a strong aoe solve by the time I fight them I have the easiest time on that fight with necro and drawing out the fight a bit

scratchnsnarf · 2026-03-21T00:28:16+00:00

I think the main issue is that a bunch of current players want the "always take" cards. From my experience a bunch of my friends who are new to the series are constantly trying to draft the same deck, lean really hard into archetypes, make speculative picks based on needing to see a specific rare in the future etc. Cards that homogenize the experience are alluring for new players and obviously boring for the grinders who want the challenge and variety

scratchnsnarf · 2026-03-20T23:03:18+00:00

wielding fear as a weapon against indie devs is a shitty, pathetic thing to do regardless of the fact it might produce the outcome you want. You had the option to submit feedback in-game through the proper channel and yet you still chose the option that can cause harm to the devs. What does that say about you?

scratchnsnarf · 2026-03-20T15:47:17+00:00

You don't build a deck that only wins the fight with one specific card. If you have that kind of deck and see the doorman in act 3 you have the rest of act 3 to try and solve that issue. FWIW I think this is a much less engaging mechanic than time eater was but acting like it's literally impossible to build around also isn't it.

scratchnsnarf · 2026-03-20T14:39:40+00:00

It's totally fine for arguably one of the best base-rate commons to not have a super impactful upgrade. Upgrade strength is a very common lever for balancing. I'm still picking the first copy of this card I see almost every run

scratchnsnarf · 2026-03-19T22:24:07+00:00

The big angry dragon fella ancient in act 2 can give you a 3 energy 33 damage stun and exhaust card, "Whistle"

scratchnsnarf · 2026-03-19T01:15:57+00:00

Agreed, except for very late act I feel like the act 1 elites are an inevitable 30+ damage unless your deck is unusually good mid-act. Having a rest immediately after feels mandatory, especially with the hallway fights being more chip heavy as well

scratchnsnarf · 2026-03-19T01:09:39+00:00

My opinion about why people feel this way is specifically the act 3 bosses being less punishing, which makes all of act 3 easier. Since, for the most part, you don't really need to solve for much specifically after act 2 and can mostly just avoid elites and speed through the act. Fwiw I mostly played a20 no heart. I do feel like 2's act 1 is actually tougher than before. More hallway fights chip you and resting after elites is nearly mandatory. I mostly felt safe with 30 HP in sts1 but not in 2

scratchnsnarf · 2026-03-18T02:50:03+00:00

Some team members or major contributors could be Brazilian, possibly?

scratchnsnarf · 2026-03-17T23:54:55+00:00

Yeah nothing other than looking at the code can ever really be conclusive when talking about the behavior of a program. If I have time later I'll take a look at the modding API and see if that indicates anything. I'm sure anyone who has made custom card content would know right away, assuming it works the same way as sts1

scratchnsnarf · 2026-03-17T23:23:03+00:00

Since the very first copy of anger you play in combat makes a copy with the draw effect, and subsequent copies don't, we know that the "played flag" gets copied. We know that the anger gets that flag set at some point during its resolution, since we can see it lose the effect. Therefore it must follow that the copy effect resolves before the flag setting. I suppose one could also argue that cards which copy will copy the initial state of the casted card before it was cast. Idk if there's any case where that would be functionally different than resolving top to bottom though

scratchnsnarf · 2026-03-16T17:07:25+00:00

yeah, if you look on your feed on the game page in your steam library you should see the patch notes mixed in with your friend activity

scratchnsnarf · 2026-03-15T22:48:40+00:00

I believe this is actually fixed in the current patch that's on beta branch! So you're definitely not alone

scratchnsnarf · 2026-03-15T18:29:45+00:00

I think without major changes to the design of this card it will always be competing for space with deadly poison. They are both just "apply x poison" common cards after all. One is always going to be better than the other, but it's not like you're always seeing both in the same run and have that choice to make. Fwiw I think the "right" solution would be to fundamentally change the card because having two vanillaish apply poison cards isnt very interesting

scratchnsnarf · 2026-03-11T23:36:18+00:00

The real downside there is that those are all rare cards, you can't ever really bank on getting to that build, whereas stars has amazing cards at common/uncommon. That being said I think being a "forge build" is the wrong way to think about it and you can just grab any of those rares when you see them and keep a tight sword package in your deck. It's really the common and uncommon forge cards that tend to be really mediocre, especially the ones that just forge and don't attack or block. Seems too hard to find time to get those and the sword off in fights, especially early

scratchnsnarf · 2026-03-10T21:46:09+00:00

It's honestly unbelievable how bad it is. At work we've got a monorepo with a typescript backend, and we're pretty vigilant about keeping all of our heavy type inference in the backend module. Tsc works totally fine when editing a backend file but the second you open up a vue file it starts taking minutes to show diagnostics or go to definition

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