Hi, everyone! I'm very pleased to announce that in v3.16 we will finally be replacing the 10 digital Class Decks with 20 digital Hero-specific Starter Decks.
There are many good reasons for this, but the primarily goal is to offer decks that have been carefully crafted to suit each hero, rather than a pair from the same faction/class. To help with making that all important choice of first hero, each deck will come with a little blurb about the style and/or theme of the deck and a full deck list - perhaps even a way to preview all the cards in the deck as well.
This long-awaited change should lead to a much better experience as a new player, whether going into Quick Match directly or taking on the forthcoming campaign. (We hope most will do the latter first as the early missions act as a tutorial where it is assumed a Starter Deck is being used and it's a great way to earn cards to bolster your deck!)
I could talk for hours about all the thought that's gone into these decks, but I think it's best if I just post them here and you can ask questions after, if you have any. (I reserve the right to save my answers for my forthcoming DT Q&A stream/video.)
Please note: To allow us to use a wider range of cards from a much higher combined gold value than their predecessors, these new decks will be priced at 200 Shadow Crystals at the Merchant. (The first deck for an account will still be free, of course!)
Be sure to share your thoughts below and feel free to run some tournaments using these if you want. (They are intended to be fairly balanced against each other.)
If you want to see any in action, check my Quick Match history because I've been trying out all of them there. They seem good enough to get about 50% win-rate around 200-rating, which is about where we'd want them to be. But, as I said above, the hope is that players would start out with the campaign and earn more cards (and gold) to improve the decks before they venture to Quick Match.
One final thing: HUGE thanks to everyone who helped with this project. It was being done unofficially for a long time with some volunteers from the community, and for most of that time we were including Dark Prophecies and Shattered Fates cards. It was only recently that I realised it would be better for the narrative of the campaign and learning the game to only involve Call of the Crystals. My bad!
EDIT: I'm sorry but I originally stated that new players will be able to use a Shadow hero from the outset, but I was incorrect on that. By keeping the Shadow heroes accessible only via collecting their cards (or buying their starter deck) we can pitch their campaigns at higher level compared to the initial Human campaigns that can be aimed at new players with their free deck. (Similarly, the campaigns for Shattered Fates will be much harder from the outset.)
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