Elemancer v9.3-9.5

It’s been longer than normal, a lot longer. But I’ve been updating Elemancer when I can. I’m attempting to track individual card changes better and I’ve updated my testing. With all that, as of the conclusion of v9.4 testing, things look very balanced. Since these changes have taken place over the course of several months, the older ones aren’t at the top of my mind, but I can tell you about the most recent changes.

I think the big change of making the game a strict number of turns has been good. In-person playtesting will determine if the game is still longer than it should be, but for now I think there are enough turns in each of the phases to acquire new cards.

I’m restructuring some of the boss abilities so not every Element has a passive ability, and I’ve shuffled them around to better incentivize certain builds. For example, some of the generic power abilities (Aeromancy and Hydromancy) have been moved to the Dragon bosses, which are immune to other Elements.

As for individual Element changes, Earth needed a buff, so there are new abilities that you can Channel to play directly to combat as a simple “X damage, [color] Gem” abilities if you really need a different color Gem or straightforward damage. I buffed some Time cards but nerfed the overall ability to reanimate cards and draw additional cards. Time is mostly in-check now.

Earth, Electric, and Air abilities in particular ran into an issue where they didn’t have single cards that could beat the second half of a Beast monster fight. For reference, the Beast mechanic is that you fight the monster then fight a second, smaller version of the monster. A common practice is to use four cards from your hand on the first fight (ideally) and your last card in the second half. The Beast boss is pretty unforgiving, as you have to beat both halves, whereas in a normal monster fight you can opt not to fight the second half if your hand doesn’t work out that way. The above Elements had highly synergistic effects with typically lower base power, even in Tier 3, so I had to change some abilities to give these Elements the power to defeat a Beast boss.

To reiterate, balance-wise the game seems to be in a good spot, so I’m hopeful that the next stage will be pitching the game to publishers or go the crowdfunding route. With the game in a relatively stable spot, it seems like a good time to make a physical prototype again.