Two balance changes to Tempo Mage have been announced:
- Evocation will cost 2 mana (up from 1).
- Solarian Prime (from Astromancer Solarian will cost 9 mana (up from 7).
Those two changes will be released in a patch “towards the end of next week” – most likely around the same time as the big announcement stream planned for October 22.
See official post below:
Hey everyone,
We’ll be making the following balance changes in a patch to be released towards the end of next week:
Evocation
- Old: [Cost 1] → New: [Cost 2]
Astromancer Solarian
- Old: Solarian Prime [Cost 7] → New: Solarian Prime [Cost 9]
Both cards will be eligible for a full dust refund for 2 weeks after the patch has gone live.
Additionally, Game Designer Alec Dawson explains the nerfs more thoroughly on Twitter:
While looking at the current environment and future metas, Evocation helped enable a lot of early game swings that could feel insurmountable. We want to smooth that out. At 2 mana, it’s not as fluid with Sorcerer's Apprentice and won’t be generated from Wandmaker/Cobalt Spellkin.
For Solarian Prime, we stepped back and evaluated where it stacked up compared to the other Primes. With that and some of the power spikes it can generate, moving it to 9 mana felt appropriate.
On our side, we are continuing to discuss opportunities to bring up some of the weaker classes and/or touch up other play patterns in the near future. Thank again for your feedback, we read all of it (no matter how long that twitlonger is).
Constantly playing against 2-3 evocations was really annoying and Prime could solely just turn around a game, so I am super happy to get less of these toxic cards.. Good changes without killing the deck!
“Evocation won’t be generated from Wandmaker/Cobalt Spellkin” ok, for the same reason you should nerf also priest card like renew and apathy to 2.
Evocation gives you a full hand of possible answers for the board. Renew let’s you discover from a giant pool of cards, which hardly ever let’s you take care of the full board. But if they would make renew 2 mana, in some aspects that’s fair. In my eyes it’s not comparable to getting a hand full of cards, but that’s just me. I also don’t see why they need to nerf two Priest cards just because Evocation is going to be two mana. Mage will still have ways to get it, just not 3 – 4 times in one match anymore. Don’t see why that is such a bad thing. The RNG in Mage is super high. I for one am glad they changed Evocation and Prime. However, I still find it annoying that you can discover it with Primordial Studies, but since it will cost 9 you can use it less I guess. We will see.
I disagree – that’s the point of Wandmaker / Cobalt Spellkin, to play them in classes with good 1 mana spells and get extra copies of them. This by itself is not a problem, because both cards have weak stats for the cost (2 mana 2/2 and 5 mana 3/5), so they have to make up for it with the effect.
The problem came from Evocation in particular – the card was just TOO powerful. It was one of the strongest cards in the deck (combined with Sorcerer’s Apprentice and Mana Cyclone you could have a huge tempo turn that ALSO gives you tons of value), and a Legendary card for a good reason (so you don’t play multiple copies of it), yet Mage often played 2-3 of them per game. That was simply too much, way more impactful than another copy of Renew or Wave of Apathy.