Sky Phoenix (2043)

    Power: 6 ➞ 7

Starting off, a small buff to an iconic wisdom threat, making it a bit more powerful overall and allowing it to serve as a more reliable finisher.

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Swamp Walker (3009)

    Text: When an ally unit dies, do 1 damage to a random enemy without armor. ➞ When an ally unit dies, do 1 damage to a random enemy unit without armor.

    Power: 2 ➞ 3

A small buff + tweak to a weak Heart card - now has slightly more power and can no longer snipe the enemy hero’s face, which allows it to be more valuable as a means of pinging down enemy units at the cost of some incidental burn damage.

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Getum Gang (71)

    Text: Summon: Spend your mana. Gain +1/+1 for each mana spent. ➞ Play: Spend your mana. Gain +1/+1 for each mana spent.

A small ‘nerf’ to gang to help with some confusion and backfiring plays, gang’s ability is now a Play effect, so it can only spend mana when played from hand, which allows it to grow before cards like cloud guard and Queen of Jacks can kill it with their effects, and means that it will no longer randomly drain its players mana when summoned off something like Rhumbo, which should eliminate some random RNG losses. It does mean that it also has less synergy with cards that revive it from grave, but this seems like a fair exchange for making the card simpler and more consistent overall.

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Wall of Dead (3022)

    Text: Dust your top dead unit to summon Zomboid with guard. Repeat until your board is full. ➞ Dust your top two dead cards to summon Zomboid with guard. Repeat until your board is full.

A tweak/nerf, it now consumes 2 cards per zomboid, akin to bone mask, and rather than 1 unit, which should make it harder to max out in the early and midgame. It also means it will consume a larger number of cards, making it a bigger investment for Heart to commit to.

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Teenage Witch (3046)

    Traits: stealth ➞ None

A small nerf based on some community feedback, teenage witch grabs a ton of value for just 4c when used with her attached doll, so nerfing her slightly by dropping stealth.

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Timber (4069)

    Power: 2 ➞ 3

A small buff to an underperforming card, making it slightly more impactful on curve + moving it out of the range of eradicate. Having a 5c unit get dusted for 2c is pretty harsh.

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Speed Boots (1076)

    Cost: 4 ➞ 3

    Text: Ready target ally unit. Attach Fury to it. ➞ Ready target ally unit.

A slight tweak/rework, speed boots is now 1c less but don't attach fury, making it a more straightforward aggressive tool and dropping a bit of value off it, making double attack combos a bit more reachable in Constructed.

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Blaze of Glory (97)

    Cost: 5 ➞ 4

A buff to one of the weakest cards in Strength. it seems quite powerful at 4c, but it seems similar in power to something like Dirge, and is much worse vs an opposing board of units. Still, we’ll be keeping an eye on it as we don’t really want to force players into a metagame where they are required to clear every enemy unit each turn.

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Drum Up (1005)

    Cost: 5 ➞ 4

    Traits: banner ➞ None

A buff/move down the curve alongside Speed Boots, moving Drum Up down to 4c and dropping banner. In the past, 4c Drum Up was incredibly powerful, but with the gradual power scaling of units and the game at large it should be more manageable.

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Frigid Blizzard (4004)

    Cost: 6 ➞ 5

The first of three buffs to Int Board Clears - part of aggro’s dominance is due to the awkwardness of a lot of board clears, and some of int’s clears have the issue of either being unreliable or too expensive, so we’ve moved some of the stronger ones down the curve a bit and reworked a weak/unreliable one slightly to be more reliable at a higher cost.

The first of these is Frigid blizzard - for the same 6c curve slot as a card like burninate, Blizzard had several weaknesses over it, being far worse vs lead units and lacking a bonus attachment in the form of scorch. So we’re buffing blizzard to 5c to increase the power of Int’s AOE and reinforce its identity as a prism with powerful/reliable AOE and removal.

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Mass Confuse (4007)

    Cost: 7 ➞ 6

Mass Confuse has been buffed a number of times but never really seemed to fill the role of ‘effective scaling sweeper’ that it was meant to, so we’re moving it down the curve to allow it to fill a more midrange sweeper role and buy time against aggressive decks.

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Extinction Event (4040)

    Cost: 5 ➞ 7

    Text: Do damage to each unit equal to its cost. ➞ Do damage to all units equal to the highest cost among units.

    Traits: None ➞ wither

A rather sizable revision to extinction event, keeping the original theme intact while increasing its efficiency considerably. Now, rather than dealing damage to each unit equal to its own cost, it inflicts wither damage to all units equal to the highest cost among all units, allowing it to serve as a proper nuke against fields with even one large unit, and has the versatility to debilitate smaller boards of aggressive units at least partially thanks to wither.

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Shrink Ray (4035)

    Text: Set target unit to 1 health and attach Silence. ➞ Attach Silence to target unit. Set that unit to 1 health.

A slight buff in the form of an ordering change - now places Silence first, so it will trigger any potential Anima enchant Before adjusting the unit’s stats, allowing its effect resolution to set its health to 1 properly, rather than setting it to 1 and then buffing it via overwriting Anima.

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Deactivate (4075)

    Text: Give target unit -8 power and attach Silence. ➞ Attach Silence to target unit. Give that unit -8 power.

The same ordering change as Shrink Ray.

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Cobalt (4061)

    Power: 1 ➞ 2

A small +1pow buff to a low-statted and underperforming unit.

C - A simple but extremely valuable card that I’ve been waiting to add to Skyweaver for upwards of a year now, Insight is a fantastic ‘tutor’ tool for Intellect, allowing it to draw what it needs right when it needs it, or pick up a card to save for a future turn. It seems like a really powerful card, so we’ll need to keep an eye on it, but I think it should be a fantastic addition to the metagame and really help reinforce Intellect’s themes of planning and combo assembly

M - Insight makes you feel like a mad genius when you pull off perfect plays. Tutoring for that final few points of damage or a sweeper to rescue you from the brink of defeat feels extremely thematic for Intellect. The card feels strong, especially in high level play, and I can’t wait to see what everyone can come up with.

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C - One of Agility’s core subthemes is that it damages its own Hero during gameplay. Its playstyle supports attacking with its Hero, and some of its spells deal damage to its own Hero to offset their powerful effects or low costs. This thematically represents the idea of Agility pushing itself to and beyond its own limits to win, straining itself like an athlete would to reach the finish line.

Disciple of Gusto is a straightforward expansion on this self-damage theme, allowing Agility to prevent all damage its hero would take on its own turn, letting it make use of its recoil damage spells and smash its hero into enemy units with impunity, and also avoid any OOD damage it may take due to cards like Burn Out.

M - Disciple is powerful with cards like Vile Vial and can often get incremental value from cards like Blitz and Grim Reprisal if you draw them later. It’s also nice to see another Shroud/Stealth unit, giving resilience to its fairly weak statline. Fun fact, when we first playtested this card it accidentally made your opponent indestructible on your turn, a less than ideal effect for an aggro deck.

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C - A very complex and thematic card, Maiden pulls a unit into itself and then releases it when destroyed. However, if you dust or otherwise remove Maiden without killing it, the unit will be lost in the Dreamfield forever! Furthermore, if you use cards like Molten Heart on a maiden, it will produce additional copies of the unit it consumed, and if you make copies of maiden itself, each copy will have a copy of the dusted unit inside it, allowing for some awesome combos if you dust your own units!

Just to note - a minor oversight led to maiden initially being previewed without its barrier enchant. This is the correct version, with Barrier.

M - The versatility of this card is fantastic. It can remove a key blocker, while still feeling fair if your opponent uses hard removal like Mortal Blow. You can also dust your own unit to make your board more resilient against AOE, or combine it with Molten Heart to duplicate your own units, making for some powerful interactions.

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C - The Skyweaver Ada is a paragon of Strength, truth and justice, who works to defend the weak and downtrodden wherever they may be.

This is reflected in Ada’s Valor, which allows you to deal damage to an enemy unit, and then Blind all enemy units while giving your own units stealth, meaning your Hero will become the only target that the blinded enemy units can attack, reflecting Ada’s determination and willingness to put herself in harm's way for the sake of others.

M - Whenever I cast this spell I want to jump out of my chair and yell “Get behind me!!!” Ada is driven by her love for others, and would give her life to save those in need. This feels like the perfect card to represent her character.

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C - The Skyweaver Bouran is a character that serves and protects ‘The Cycle’ of life and death within Sky, at times helping to heal those in need, and at others bringing swift justice to those who would seek to subvert The Cycle by trying to raise the dead against the Cycle’s will, or those who would mock the Cycle by killing for sport or greed.

Reflecting this duality, Bouran’s Ethos is a simple but versatile card that represents Bouran’s outlook on the world, and fits into Heart’s themes of flexibility, and life and death. Sometimes The Cycle gives healing and life, and at other times it brings swift death.

M - The meta was really calling for a way for Bouran to remove 3 health armor units, and this does a great job at it. The “Emergency Bandaid” effect, as CardboardMonka put so eloquently, feels great for rescuing you from death’s clutches. Pair it with Carrion Crow for a pretty powerful package.

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C - The first of our final Five cards in the mini-set, Oni Smith is a fairly simple but flexible card for Strength, allowing its user to either smite an enemy unit for 2 damage, or buff up another ally unit by +2/+2, helping to provide new players with a simple signpost and learning tool that helps demonstrate play effects, buffing effects, damaging effects, and the core strategy of Strength as a whole.

M - Oni is a great teaching tool, and its flexibility makes up for its fair statline. It’s a nice piece of aggression for Fox and a great way to kill any cheeky stealth units.

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C - The Skyweaver Samya is a superstar athlete who participates in an extreme sport known as Skyslinging, which is essentially a Parkour race using mechanical grappling hooks.

Fitting into Agility’s theme of Hero attacking, Samya’s Speed allows Agility decks to attack with their Hero repeatedly, using their health as a resource to clear away opposing units, and helps showcase Samya’s dedication to pushing herself in her sport, and the immense speed she possesses. It also works in tandem with Agility’s other new card, Disciple of Gusto, to prevent your hero from losing health when attacking multiple times a turn.

M - On paper this card feels extremely powerful, but it really showcases the cost of using life as a resource. In some of the games Coulter and I played, you could take 14+ damage to the face clearing a board, leaving you in a winning position if you could survive the massive health inequality.

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C - The Skyweaver Lotus is a great sage and teacher, founder and protector of the Great Library of Alcazar, an ever expanding repository of all Sky’s knowledge.

This spell is a bit of a top-down design based on the art, capturing both the idea of ‘reflection’ as it pertains to a reflection being a duplicate of something, hence the copying effect, and reflection as in meditation and ‘reflecting’ upon oneself, tying into the mana-banking effect for the next turn. The design helps play into Wisdom’s focus on ramping and card advantage, and showcase’s Lotus’ commitment to accumulating knowledge and planning ahead.

M - This card was so much fun in playtesting, the value you can get is pretty varied but the ramp gives you a way to play some key threats earlier. It’s definitely one to watch for me, as I know our Banjo players love finding powerful combinations and interactions.

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C - A particularly fun option for Intellect - unlike other cloning effects in the Prism, Mercurial Mimic will become a perfect replica of the unit it is transforming into, allowing you to copy massive creatures like Titanic or Krakus, or units you’ve buffed up via spells, to overwhelm your foes. It’s a fantastic addition to Intellect’s overall options and really helps to solidify and represent Intellect’s theme and specialty of cloning/copying units.

M - Int often has trouble matching the statlines of other powerful units, so this felt like a really thematic way to punish your opponent for overextending. Mimic + removal feels really unique, especially with Mira.

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C - Finally, we come to the last card in the Mini set. I’ve saved my personal favorite for last. The First King of the Kingdom of Rashida, who ruled millennia ago, and still serves his people even now, Pharonis!

Pharonis has a tough but slightly underwhelming statline for a 9c unit, but his real power lies in his effect. Each turn that he is alive, he will resurrect your oldest dead Unit as a 4/4 and give it guard, creating a never ending stream of undead soldiers to protect you, just as he does for his own kingdom. He’s a truly formidable finisher for the Heart prism, and offers them a massive Light element unit as a curve topper and resurrection target for cards like Undragon’s Pact. Pharonis will send all who oppose you to the afterlife!

M - ARISE MY MINIONS! Pharonis packs a punch, bringing back Crypto or Fun Guy feels really thematic and gives Hrt another powerful avenue to victory. The First King of Rashida honors Kha Mhet with an army that strikes fear throughout Sky.