Dev Comment: It’s been a fun few days since the launch of Showdown in the Badlands. We’ve heard a lot of yeehaws, but we’ve also seen one clear sentiment outlier for players: there’s a snake in their boots! It’s still early, so we’re not at our balance window for the set yet, but we know we want to adjust this negative play experience regardless of where the power lands, so we’ve decided to do a temporary adjustment now, ahead of our scheduled balance patch, coming soon.
However, there are limits to what we can do a server-side hotfix. First, we can only adjust the “big numbers” like stats and cost. Stats are not the problem on this card, so we’re increasing the cost here. This is NOT the change we plan to eventually land on. When we get to our balance patch, our plan is to revert this mana cost change and make a different adjustment that still meets our goals, but is more cohesive with the set overall. Second, server-side adjustments mean that cards have different versions between the client and the server. That means the card will appear as it currently does in places like your Collection, but then will have the red “adjusted stats” when you try to play it in-game. We know this will cause some confusion—which is part of why we don’t often make balance changes in server patches—but we think it’s worth it for the overall enjoyment of the launch period. Finally, we’ll do things like dust refunds with that balance patch, so keep that in mind when making your collection decisions.
Azerite Snake (the Warlock Excavate Treasure)