Card's special abilities

[grunshac]

I was thinking about card's special abilities (like infused provoke for grinder), most of them should not have an addition cost because, from my point of view, it takes some content away from the game, players wont cast them either because they dont do much or they cost too much or both. So I would rather make some of them free (which are not worth the cost) and maybe tweak the numbers for the other abilities or the cards themselves in order to balanced the cost of the actual card and it's special ability. This could be done before actually balancing the cards 1 by 1 cuz a lot of cards are unbalanced and by that I mean more or less useless.

What do you think?

[Metagross31]

Changing the cost of special abilities is indeed a great tool to use during balancing. However, some special abilities are already super strong for how cheap they are, so that removing them would just make them way to strong. Take for example the special abilities of Tremor, Timeless One or Stormsinger - they all have amazing effects for a super low cost, especially compared to spells, which do the same (for example: Timeless One's freeze costs 10 power, while Coldsnap costs 75).

So, I think some ability costs might need some tweaking, but removing them all together overshoots the goal by a lot imo.

If you want to talk more about specific topics regarding balancing, also check out the Skylords Balancing Discord.

[Majora]

We definitely consider ability costs when we look at the balance of a card. For example, Spearman had their Switch-stance cost removed. But this is not something we can or will shortcut to all cards. Sometimes it has to do with the effect instead of the cost, sometimes the cost is already too cheap, and sometimes the ability makes no sense, either by their cost or the units role. The next balance patch already covers a lot of cards again, so please bear with us while we get through them all 🙂