R3 Release Notes

Today marks the release of Light Ascending, but also includes a number of fixes and game changes.

Changes in today's release include:

Fixes

1) Fae Mischief will no longer trigger the On Death effects of Gear being stolen.
2) Nomad's Grand Theft will no longer trigger the On Death effects of Gear bring stolen.
3) All cards that grant a random ability no longer grant Corpsecraft, as it is not useful once a creature is already in play.
4) Dirty Fuel's text has been fixed, so that it properly shows the Banish effect.
5) Akatril's Angel now has a cost of 4 again.
6) Enigma of the Unknown has been fixed.

Buffs

The following cards and heroes have been improved:

1) Belnir's Sanctified Burial now grants Indestructible in addition to the +1 ATK.
2) Diffusion Blade reduced from 5 mana to 4.
3) Realm-Guard ATK raised from 1 to 2.
4) Stormborn Combatant now has Invoked.
5) Seraph Enlightener reduced from 5 mana to 4.
6) Abomination now has ATK/Health equal to 1 + the number of corpses destroyed.

Crafting For All

1) Card crafting is now fully open to all players, regardless of crafting level. The maximum Essence allowed is set to 300 for all levels, allowing you a chance to craft Epics whenever you have collected enough.
2) All cards scrapped will now give some essence. If a Stone appears, it will always be in addition to the amount of essence given. Commons now always award 1 essence per scrapping.
3) The Tribes Crafting Stone has been added to the game. It can only be acquired through scrapping cards at this time. All Tribes Commons-Epics can be crafted with this stone.

Marketplace Changes

The Marketplace has two significant changes:

1) The Gold price of Eve and Rise packs have been raised to 15,000 Gold. The entire Kingdoms economy has been built around the idea that 1 Gem = 1000 Gold. These prices were set too low by Antic and, as numerous players have stated, made paying Gems for these packs a waste. We are raising the prices to where they should be based on the Gem costs of these packs. Note that we have decided to leave the price of Core packs as they are.

2) The singles market has had significant price adjustments. Legendary and Epic cards have been set to fixed costs. Epic card costs are now lower than their previous highs, will not go down as they once did. Commons to Rares have been left with dynamic prices, but the price ranges have been adjusted so that single prices will not drop as low as they once did.

This change was made for the key reason of making Booster Packs a more valuable part of the game. When it is actually cheaper to purchase cards directly than to pull them from Booster Packs, the balance of the game's economy isn't correct. And with the dynamic pricing system's tendency to drop prices from the highs to their lows overnight randomly, it meant that even key constructed singles could be found at less-than-booster prices. For the long term financial viability of this game, a change had to be made.

Note that when developing the no-longer-supported iPad version, Antic removed the singles market entirely. This was a concious financial decision, not something that they couldn't implement. We had this option as well, but decided to adjust the pricing, rather than remove the feature.

Again, it is our goal to make Kingdoms CCG a popular and successful card game for years to come, with new heroes, cards and features coming out regularly. To do so, we needed to make some changes to the system that Antic had created. We will continue to monitor these changes and make further refinements as we go forward.