Balancing is an issue that barely any trading card game ever gets right, especially over the long term. I'd even go as far as to say that it's completely impossible to have a balanced gaming experience over a prolonged time as long as new cards with new abilities and different configurations of stats added. No matter how much play testing goes into designing these things, eventually, unforeseen and sometimes completely broken combos will arise and haunt the game.
Sometimes these are very obvious, think of the Black Lotus in Magic the Gathering:
With the knowledge of how the game works that we have today, it's obvious that this card is beyond broken and way too powerful. But back when it was designed, 3 mana at the cost of sacrificing a card to gain 3 mana seemed somewhat reasonable. But more often than not, these issues are not apparent at first and only develop over time as more cards are added to the game. Either way, trading card games usually have two ways of dealing with these issues:
- Physical games will usually just restrict or outright ban the usage of a certain card
- Digital games will nerf and buff cards as they see fit, usually breaking something else along the process
Both of these options generally work, but they also come with huge, mostly negative, consequences for the owners of these cards. Just think about the recent outrage that followed the updated ban list of Commander cards in Magic the Gathering. Restricting or banning a certain card can often times utterly crush it's value, sometimes bringing a $50+ card down to a few bucks of even pennies. Players that invested heavily in these cards are obviously not very happy when these things happen and it might even make some of them hesitant to spend money on power cards again in the future.
The other option, buffing & nerfing cards, is a bit better, as people still get to play with the cards, but the overall effect is the same. Any time a card gets nerfed, it's value is very likely going to tank, albeit not as extremely as if it was banned. Nevertheless, players are rarely happy when these things happen, even if they are for the better of the game. The simple reason is that for obvious reasons nobody likes to see the value of their cards diminished, and any nerf is always going to do just that.
In the past, Splinterlands did this as well, heavily changing single cards like the Gremlin Blaster or poor Prince Julian, sometimes turning them into a useless card (like the Gremlin), sometimes rightfully adjusting their power level to a more reasonable value (like Julian). I mean can you believe that this guy once used to debuff the whole opposing team with -1 health on top of being a Dragon Summoner for only 2 Mana?
The good thing is, here at Splinterlands, we've seem to have moved beyond that issue for now. Not because we've become so good at balancing our cards, though. There are still terrible mistakes make on a regular basis and this trend is very likely going to continue. For example giving thorns to Eternal Tofu without changing anything else fells like such an obvious mistake in hindsight. But instead of outright nerfing that card, the team tries to build on top of that and balance things in other ways. To do so, they mostly use 2 options:
- Add new cards that are strong against existing power houses
- Add new rulesets that shake up the meta
There's a lot to be said about the former as well (Just try forcing Yodin Zaku today compared to the Meta back in the Untamed days), but for now I want to focus on the rulesets.
A ruleset in Splinterlands either changes how a certain rule works for the match (Magic damages Armor instead of bypassing it) or what cards you are allowed to pick during team selection (Only cards with odd mana costs may be picked). When a match is created, up to three rulesets are picked and combines randomly to determine the rules for the game. Just yesterday, five new rulesets have been introduced to the game:
At first glance, some of them have very obvious effects while others are more subtle or have more relevance than you might think at first. Deflection Field for example is pretty straight forward. All units have reflection shield, so the Thorns from Eternal Tofu simply won't have any effect, thus considerable nerving that summoner for the rule set. But at the same time, that ruleset makes it a lot more interesting to play all kinds of glass cannon damage dealers, that have that weird tendency of killing themselves due to Magic Reflect or Return Fire.
But it's not like the other rulesets don't have an effect either. Might Makes Right for example removes any Monster without an attack, so Weapons Training, another very relevant concept in the current meta, suddenly becomes a non factor for that game. A lot of healers also have either no or only a low attack, so that naturally will remove the amount of Tank Heal/Triage available in the game by a lot.
Need for Speed also has a lot more going for it than you might think. Grimbardun Smith and Mantaroth, arguably two of the strongest cards of the edition, both operate at below 3 Speed, so two of the beefiest tanks for the set suddenly can't be picked.
Or take a look at Heavy Metal - only armored units reduces the cards you can pick considerable. At the same time, you now know, that all your opposing cards will be armored, making melee and ranged attacks less effective compared to magic ones. If you go with the right Element, you might find ways to heavily exploit that:
So each of these rulesets changes how you look at any given game and sometimes completely turns the power level of certain cards and combinations upside down. That's not to say that certain cards aren't still considerably stronger than others. Obviously, Eternal Tofu is still the strongest card in the set, but one card has to be the strongest card after all. And with each new rule set that favors other cards and combinations, the overall meta will be more and more balanced.
Personally, I really love the way the team addresses this, and while I can understand that people are unhappy especially with the power level of Tofu, it's only a matter of time until this is going to balance itself out.