Supercell-Seth

I am genuinely shocked how many people remember those draft tournaments! I met some YTers recently and they brought up multiple times how much they enjoyed it. I am surprised that its both so beloved and yet no one else has really taken up the mantle. I would happily watch or even guest-cast a draft event, its still my favorite way to play card games. Have a good day!

Seth (handshake emoji) OJ

Looking like someone more famous

This is so good! I love the face on the Goblin, this is just filled with a lot of character/personality!

Coming right up, sir!

Whoops sorry! I forgot to mention, the multi-tick heal actually does a great visual job at showing the healing. We initially had BHealer (and Heal Spirit) doing an instant burst but it looked weird buggy or like you missed it. If a bunch of damage was happening at once, you might miss the heal altogether and think it didn't work. The 1-second blinking effect was a big leap forward in helping people 'see' the effect of the card

Don't tweet late at night - SPAWNER buildings should not be a reliable defense. They should be something fragile you need to protect. Of course defensive towers like Tesla or Cannon should be a reliable defense against Hogs and Giants.

We can playtest for power, but its really hard to predict usage. Playtesters might say "hey this feels much better.... but I wouldn't put it in my deck" and we think "well great, its much better for the people who want to play it, maybe it jumps from 1% to 5% usage and that's good." But Goblin Hut jumped up to 20% right after, which is way too high for a card of that role. The winrate in testing wasn't that high, but its hard to predict how people will use a card, or what new decks will emerge with it.

Why not emergency nerf? Well, because we don't know if its an emergency type of problem - the usage has been trending down and hit 13% yesterday. That's still high, but hardly a panic situation. We can take the month to...

Hey! Always great to read these posts, I think the most likely of these to happen would be the EQ Change + Goblin Hut health reduction. I agree EQ has become a bit too RPS - as cards like Bomb Tower and Goblin Hut become catch-all defenses for everything, EQ (or Poison) becomes increasingly required. Making Spawners be high value if *untouched* but very vulnerable to *any* Spell is likely the direction we move in. Spawners used to have high health because they needed to survive in order to generate value. The death spawns are great at solving the value problem, but they don't need to be super tanky buildings on top of that.

For Battle Healer, two things I just wanted to add from a design perspective - if the active healing is too high, the BH can outheal the tower DPS (or keep it so close, barely losing health) that it becomes basically unkillable if ignored. While we can certainly move around the healing amounts, we did playtest a version with higher active healing and fou...

Bit of a design diary here, from my notes on this change:

• Skeleton Barrel was long ignored because the win rate was okay despite 1-2% usage. Card lacked a clear purpose - any defense would stop it. With this months focus on low usage cards, it was time for a change
• Wanted another fast win condition like Wallbreakers but with different game play. This was the card hinted at in the AMA.
• Balanced on the strong side intentionally, we were cautious with Zappies and the rework didn't move the needle enough. Didn't want to repeat that.
• Provides more options for Spell Bait decks - the Prince <> Skeleton Barrel change in those decks we had playtested.
• Its possible that both Wallbreakers and Skeleton Barrel are too strong - this may be a fast cycle month, but we are willing to react quickly if they both dominate the meta.
• Potential nerfs could be: further reduced health, reduced Skeleton count, removal of drop damage, or speed back t...

True story - the first time I met Ernie was at World Finals this past year, before he did a face reveal or anything like that. He walks up and I just INSTANTLY knew it was him - he looks exactly like his cartoon face avatar. I never thought I would be able to pick someone out from like a street caricature artist drawing but you absolutely can with Ernie.

Great meme dude, I've sent this to like 6 people already and its not even 11am here

i swear, Drew showed up to the filming session with a print out of this meme and gave it to the editor like "we are doing this - one of these, do you know this meme? you dont? okay still, we are doing this"

The Creator Program! It started as a crazy little idea but now that we have it up and running, its awesome to see how much support the creators get. Especially for these new challenges, each creator saw a spike when their challenge is run. We hope that everytime we run Legendaray's 7x Elixir Challenge, he gets a little boost of creator sales for coming up with such a fun challenge.

Can you find where that was said? I don't think that's ever been our philosophy - on the contrary, using the same Troop/spawns/effects across multiple cards is rock solid CCG best practices.

Honestly, if we do change Wizard it would be directly because of community brainstorming. There's no one on the team who has personal crusade to get Wizard to 4-cost, but there are lots of productive and intelligent discussions happening across social media that make compelling points. It's worked its way into playtests because of the collective wisdom of our best strategy posters.

CRL East Spring season is going to use Triple Draft as part of their sets! Hopefully we can see all the strengths and weaknesses of it as a competitive format. Certainly we can tweak draft tables based on that, and ideally it would become a tighly-balanced, CRL-quality format for players.

We've always aimed for a more offensive metagame. It can be tough because Clash Royale has a very stronger defenders advantage for a competitive game, so we tend to make Building-targeting cards very strong for their cost. If the competitive metagame was just defensive spell-cycling because nothing could break through, that's the ultimately failure state of the meta.

We have been playing around with a 6-cost Bowler rework we've talked about for a while. Making him as tough as he looks and a bit more a clear counterpushing win condition. But it's not a high priority - Bowler is viable, and not the sort of card that you want to be in 10% of decks. He's a spell-proof repeatable knockbacker that doesn't cost too much - it's probably good for the meta that he's not balanced on the stronger side.

There is no serious consideration to changing rarities at this point. That ship has long sailed, those aren't the sort of changes that would benefit Royale today. We could probably change around the rarities, but what would be the point? It would cause massive short term confusion, and would not affect anyone's progress through today. If you had a max Royal Giant before, you would still have a max Royal Giant, it would just be rare now. Plus imagine all the negative scenarios, like people who had requested a Common suddenly unable to keep requesting it because its now Epic.

All that trouble just to chase some academic design ideal? Ultimately we are servicing players and causing them a bunch of trouble/confusion is something we would only do if we felt it was seriously necessary, and we don't think a few mis-raritied cards rises to that level.

We still have avid discussions about rarity for each new card, but once a card is launched, we can only take learnings from...

We've got a fun one - instead of nerfing Wallbreakers we are going to buff a vaguely similar card that oughta fill a similar role.

Most of the team has been working from home offices this week on recommendation of the Finnish government, but I don't think it has impacted our productivity too much. We are very lucky to have a job that allows us to work remotely and still get stuff done. Maybe we'll go stir crazy in a month but at least this first week has gotten a lot of new stuff in the game :)

Initially we wanted Royal Delivery to be a defense against swarm troops and fragile things at the bridge, but its clear thats not quite enough use cases to justify a slot in your deck. We are playing around with significantly increased damage or perhaps even spawning 2 Recruits. We are playing around with more interactions but it feels clear that there needs to be more awesome trades possible with it to make it into the meta.