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The Balance Philosophy document was a really interesting read, but I felt like an important piece is missing: in your opinion, how does each faction look like ideally? You briefly mention how "the game helps us by providing clear archetypes via the four elements", so I was really expecting you to follow that up by describing how you see those four elements and how a mix of them is supposed to look like. You later briefly touch on this when discussing the design goal of "Thematic Correctness" by giving the examples of Stonekin and Lost Souls, but I really feel like it would be interesting if you expanded on that.
In the context of PvE here's how I think the elements ideally look like
Fire - Pure offensive playstyle
Strengths:
Units with the best DPS Best bursting spells Extremely good at sieging (think Firedancer, Wallbreaker, Juggernaut, Earthshaker, ...) Weaknesses:
Bad at area defense (lack of good defensive buildings or wall-mounted units) Little to no CC  
Frost - Slow and steady playstyle
Strengths:
Tankiness (large HP, wide access to damage reduction and shielding effects) Access to freezing effects Extremely good area defense (best in class defensive buildings, wall-mounted units and building-supporting spells/units) Weaknesses:
Slow movement Very low DPS (even their main CC reduces DPS) Nature - Supportive playstyle
Strengths:
Healing (duh) Wide access to different types of crowd control and ways to debuff enemies Better in large groups (Linked Fire mechanic, chain effects, ...) Weaknesses:
Not particularly high stats in either damage or HP Unimpressive damaging spells Tends to depend on other elements/players to get the job done Shadow - Daredevil playstyle
I think it's hard to define Shadow via a comparison of strengths and weaknesses, because this element is all about having drawbacks to each strength. It's also about bending the rules of the game and forcing you to play differently in order to not hurt yourself. Shadow cards also tend to be better at working alone and impatiently.
In my opinion, examples of quintessential Shadow cards are Lifestealer, Stone of Torment, Shadow Phoenix, Ashbone Pyro, Church of Negation and Soulshatter. These cards are all extremely strong when used adequately, but they can be terrible when used carelessly.
So I guess in a way it's all about high-risk and high-reward, which rewards good micro execution.

But then it gets a little more complicated to describe the hybrid factions. As you pointed out, Stonekin indeed feels like a very good mix of the characteristics of frost and nature... but then Lost Souls has none of that "playing on a knife's edge" feeling that Shadow is supposed to have. I think ideally Lost Souls would have some of those Shadow mechanics that bring drawbacks to its strengths, but at the same time the Frost element in it would allow a slower less mechanically intensive playstyle. Meanwhile, I feel like Bandits have no good identity other than the lifestealer mechanic (which is good thematically IMO, but not enough to carry the whole faction), while Twilight cards are all about being good stat sticks (they can be strong, but most of them aren't particularly interesting).
As for Amii and the potential Fire-Frost faction, honestly those hybrids confuse me a bit. This is mainly because I see Fire as an opposite of
Frost and Shadow as an opposite of Nature, so I have no idea how they should play like. It seems like it's easy to run the risk of them being
"jack of all trades master of none" sorta factions. Maybe they could be cool if they worked around a cool new mechanic, but I can't think of anything in particular.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on these things!

Hello everyone.
I'll keep it short. Past few months, I've been working on our web API that is completely public and available for everyone to use. I've also created simple, functional (but stylistically not very pretty) user interfaces that visualize and consume the said API.
User interface applications are open-sourced on my GitHub. The repository also contains complete instructions on how to consume the API yourselves, if you were to decide to create your own frontend applications. But, you have to be somewhat profficient in web development to understand and begin doing stuff on your own. 
Issues tab is to be used freely for any and all suggestions and bug reports.
Pull Requests that improve and extend the existing UIs are more than welcome. After manual review, they might get merged into the master branch and appear as a part of the next website update. 
Links:
GitHub repository: https://github.com/fiki574/Skylords-Reborn-API-UI Statistics: https://stats.skylords.eu/ Auctions: https://auctions.skylords.eu/ Leaderboards: https://leaderboards.skylords.eu/ All applications are caching data periodically, so you're actually "querying" the in-memory data, and not the database directly, which does not have any kind of impact on the game servers and database itself. Have in mind these applications are also the first version, they will definetly get improved and extended, as well as the API.
For some of you, these applications and the API open up whole lot of possibilities.
For example, now you could create an application that tracks the average price of every card and makes a nice graph. You could even extend the search options with card orbs, expansion, rarity, etc. 
Or you could create an application that tracks all auctions for a specific card and sends you a mail or push notification when a card appears on the auction house, but is equal or below the specified price.
Average concurrent players/matches graph could be visualized by querying the Statistics API every 2/5/X minutes.
Those of you who understood everything said and know what you're doing, will use this to its maximum potential.
Have fun!

Greetings fellow Skyfolk,
after reaching a point where it just wouldn't make sense to continue working on the now outdated version of the SMJ-Website, I decided to completely rebuild the website with different tools and development strategies.
The redesigned site is now at a stage of development where I think it is viable enough to replace the old version, which broke with the anniversary patch of 2021 anyway.
The new version can be found here:     https://smj.cards/
The old version is no longer available due to changes made by the hoster heroku that would require paying to host it, but it didn't receive any more updates anyway.
The old version was available here:     https://smj.herokuapp.com/
 
The new site provides a lot of the features the old one did and more.
There are a few exceptions though, which I haven't implemented yet due to time issues, as I wanted give you access to the new site since the old one doesn't work anymore, but I will reimplement them in a later version:
Deals page Filtering/Sorting the cards by powercost, damage, lifepoints, abilities Using URL parameters to set filters/sorters Aside from these, the new site has other things going for it, which are best experienced by playing around with the site, but just a few that may be of interest to you:
Bigger variety of filters (excluding the ones mentioned above) like:   Playable with certain orb setup   max charges, squad size, starter card, gender, etc.  More price details for each card:   1W/2W/3W/4W Median/Mean/Min/Max   7 Days Daily Meadian micro-chart in the main table view   Differences of current price to 1W median / yestedays daily median to the daily median of one week ago   Short Term chart that updates every 10 minutes but only shows 4 weeks worth of data (limited because of data size reasons)   Long Term OHLC-charts that update every day and give a better sense of price development over a longer period of time compared to a regular single point chart   Card Auction details of what auctions currently exist for each card, when the auctions were approximately started, when they will switch and when they will end (still a small bug in the calculation sometimes, but I will fix that independently of the site)   Average value of the reforged card, when destroying 4 of the same card  General card info:   Maps to get the upgrades from for each card   List of cards that share 5/4/3/2 similarities with the selected card for easier reforging decisions   Button to the wiki page for the card   Button to copy the shorthand card url for sharing  Some other info:    The main search field has a "fuzzy" functionality, try searching "LSS" and you will see what it means 😉    I created my own card IDs to not be as vulnerable to changes to official card IDs (Plague), Promo status (Lord Cyrian), affinity (Sandstorm R -> B), as well as potential name changes    In some cases SMJ IDs as well as official card IDs can be used for some things: The following links will all redirect to https://smj.cards/card/grinder-promo-p: https://smj.cards/7z https://smj.cards/[1607]    All card images are automatically generated from their static data through an api that you are able to use as well, but I will explain how to use it at a later date  
The site is still in development and some things might still be subject to change in the future, but I didn't want to make you wait any longer, seeing as the old site doesn't work anymore.
Also, just as an info, the features that the site currently provides represent about 50% of the features that I plan to add in the future. 😉
Just like the previous site, the new one will also only provide information about the prices, the cards were put in the marketplace for and not actual sell prices!
 
If you find anything that is not working properly or is irritating, please let me know and I will look into it. Also, if you have any specific feature ideas that you think would be useful, don't hesitate in telling me about them and I'll see what I can do. Design/Layout suggestions are also appreciated, as I'm not a designer and just did what came to mind, especially the boosters and card details tables with their cells that display the prieces, which I am not entirely happy with yet.
I hope this little project of mine will be somewhat helpful to you all, as that was my foremost goal from the beginning. 🙂
Thanks and I hope to see you all in the Forge. 😉
 
PS:
I would also like to mention that I have a discord server dedicated to the whole SMJ project, where I post about the project more regularly than on the forum and where it's easier to get in touch with me regarding everything related to the SMJ.
You can join the discord server here:     https://discord.gg/m5Dm5fweSV
Over there you are are also able to interact with a discord bot that allows you to set price notifications for cards that you want to buy/sell and a few other usefull features.
Most of the features the bot provides are only listed by the bot itself, but you can read up a little bit of info about it in this forum thread: https://forum.skylords.eu/index.php?/topic/7300-smj-bot