We have the next TOT update, so I figured that I'll share some thoughts about it.



Most notably is that one of the bugs that happens when using Almalexia will be fixed. That's great. It's taken a while and I hope that the reason for it taking a while isn't that my initial comment of the bug here being missed, but how nice it will be for the Patron to function the way that it says it does. Big props - I send you a personal thank you for this one.

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The second biggest change is the balance update to Ink and Blood. This change is abhorrent and I recommend that the designers don't go through with it. Mora already does enough. You are diminishing the risk reward theme of the Patron by adding such a strong economy card for those who opt to play Mora in the game. That is to say that you are making yet another card unecessarily strong. It seems to me that once designers go through all of the high brow "hokey-pokey" philosophical reasons as to why the do what they do, making game pieces that are too overly-strong is really what modern game design is all about.

And allow me to expound on the Ink and Blood topic in a simple way. This is a hypothetical scenario, but the hypothetical can be applied to many scenarios. Let's say that one purchases Ink and Blood in their first round and keeps Unsealed Glyphic instead of trading it in for a Writ of Coin. A third or fourth turn possibility is now that they combo Ink and Blood with Unsealed Glyphic and have 6 gold to spend ceteris paribus. The future version of Ink and Blood allowing for such possibility is a balance issue. Now such player will be able to more easily make plays such as purchasing the 6 cost Unsettling Aura or Chromatic Reservoir. They will be able to not only buy a 6 cost card, but even put another Mora card that may be in the Tavern into both players decks via giving the Mora patron the 3 power which they also generated along with the 6 gold. This line of play, I won't mince words, disgusts me and I don't believe that it should be possible in any serious game.

Isn't Endless Archive, where people get the deck from, free for all? So it's not like the deck is being made more appealing to just make money or something silly. The effect of the Mora Patron is already to make the game not really fell like TOT, but instead some other weird mini-game that I'm not that interested in. Adding more wacky air-balloon ride variance via any change doesn't do any good. What's next? Pact or Lantern giving 2 gold? Please don't get any ideas.

That does it for the ranting portion of my Ink and Blood thinking. Maybe this next passage will be more relatable if you aren't on board with what I'm writing yet. Mora is supposedly all about risk and reward. Card games, in general, have many risk and reward aspects and that is ESPECIALLY with fast strategies. For example, the cost of adding Armory or Siege Weapon Volley to the deck, both cards that generate power and help end the game, is that those cards can severely limit the players economy. There is the cost with Midnight Raid as well. Midnight Raid CAN win the game, but a Raid strategy can also be overcome by someone who starts doing MORE on each and every one of their turns due to building up their economy as they slowly bide their time against the Raid opponent who is more oriented toward gaining as much Prestige as possible. The change to Ink and Blood helps ensure that someone drafting into Mora, a power generating strategy, doesn't actually have to deal with this risk reward factor as often since they will now be more likely to have access to 6 gold, an extremely important amount of gold in TOT, during the early game.

One last piece of more rational information that I'll give regarding the situation is to look at Scratch. Scratch gives the exact same amount of gold now as the future version of Ink and Blood will give. Both cards require combo 2. Both cards can give you 2 power which an important amount. Scratch used to cost 3 gold from the Tavern and was balance adjusted, I think in a good way, to cost 4 gold. Now Ink and Blood can impact the early game in a VERY similar way that Scrath does and Ink and Blood doesn't cost 4 like Scratch. It doesn't cost 3 like Scratch used to. It costs 2! The fact that purchasing Ink and Blood and making a Writ of Coin on the same turn is an extremly likely play for a Mora drafting hopeful goes to show that the concept of risk and reward isn't rationally being applied to the Mora Patron. A Crow drafting hopeful can sometimes make a Writ of Coin and sometimes they can't. That can be a huge game defning differenct that may require skillful play to play out of in the bad case. Drafting Ink and Blood just doesn't have that balancing factor as the Crow card does. Not only that, but Ink and Blood always generates 2 gold and that's huge. Scratch has a good chance of generating just 1 gold and greatly limiting play. That all doesn't make sense from a balance perspective nor from the perspective of what the theme of Mora is. Tsk tsk.

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One last change is that it is somewhat interesting that there will be simultaneous leave play triggers for Agents that leave play at the same time. This is a mechanic that I understood, but there was no reason to think that the designers wanted simultaneous effects to actually happen, so I never brought it up as a bug. I guess that I'm writing this out to clarify that I MISS NOTHING. Okay, that's an overexaggeration, but then again... I have my eye on you! My expectation is that these types of issues that have never been discussed on the forums being fixed out of nowhere could possibly show us the design direction of future releases.