Preface
"Oh, heavens- Not again!" the good villagers of the Scrollsguide forum cry out; a scraggly bird creature descending upon them. The creature drops Scrolls upon the good people. Upon examination, however, these are not the Scrolls that the good people love. Forgeries, mockups, retools. The faint, gravelly cackling of the mad engineer, Wynzer taints the village. Ominous clouds hang overhead- thunderclap takes 4/4 time at 120bpm, harmonizing with the lamentations of the innocent.

Batch 1

Goal: Better adjust the curve of removal for a better paced game (by improving elements of soft removal, and eliminating hard removal.)
Why: The VD and DC nerfs made it clear that the devs want to move away from "hard removal" (Destroy X) effects. However, if the potency of threats is increased, and the power of hard removal is diminished, games are likely to become lopsided on the back of threat generation. This pushes many styles of play out of contention (as we have seen with the recent meta.)
Irony: This is probably the first one of these where I won't make suggestions regarding Thunder Surge. While I still feel the scroll is in need of some level of buffing, it is functional soft-removal that plays well.


My proposed goal with Decay is to increase it's reliance on Curse, rather than poison. (But still have poison be a valuable tool.) A large part of that, however is making Decay choose between it's passive and active options more carefully- by producing more downside effects (to make Decay's reactive features less tempo oriented.) Decay's creatures have a habit of simply being stronger than the other factions- and the removal suite has to be conscious of that.



Just one entry this time...



Growth's removal suite has always been... tumultuous. The suggestion isn't particularly new, but generally is to move Growth away from boardwiping. I don't really wish to deal with the resource ramp Scrolls in this particular update (they're a different can of worms.)



These errata are aimed more at having Energy's damage suite scale more- because damage spells are integral to how Energy plays. More specifically, the idea is to shift Energy towards caring about AoE moreso than nailing down units with targeted removal (walking into hosing via Ward and MA.) Four Scrolls not listed here are Thunder Surge, Burn, Darkstrike or Machine Chant.

Previously we have has our disagreements as the one of dangers of having (too good) removal will allow kicking a player into the mud and keeping him here; Without board presence you can't win a match.
It's not fun to be on the receiving end of that, and Magic Armor (and taxing) was a counter to that.

This on the other hand, is something completely different, and there are some really nice concepts here.
I definitely like your reasoning behind necrogeddon, as some scrolls at that resource level should force an end to the game when combined with the correct setup.

The energy suggestions were quite interesting.

I like the mechanic of scrolls returning to your hand i've seen several suggestions/fan art that do that. I would love to see it in scrolls.

Thanks for the kind words.

One thing I was trying to illustrate with the designs is that better disruption isn't just for stalling, or putting your opponent too far behind. Most of the designs here are about impacting defenses or offenses enough to either finish the game before it turns to a struggle of holding their head under water, or keeping the parity close enough to keep the real tension in the game.

Many of the designs I made were about outright punishing stalling and cheesing- because that's a quality-of-life issue for whole spectrum of strategies.

In some ways, these changes would be limiting the deck arcehtypes for each resource types, turning them into narrower philosophies rather than expand them. If implemented as new scrolls though, they would widen the identities of the resource types.

The proposed changes to Bloodline Taint and Damning Curse would cripple Decay.

You claim it would be too powerful a 1-2 punch combination of cards, however, the casting order of Bloodline Taint -> Damning Curse on a board full of Humans in a Decay vs. Order matchup would kill more creatures on the side of the Decay player. This could potentially be the case in DvD and some DvE/DvG matchups.

Hard removal should not be removed from the game entirely. I like the change they made with Taxing 1 on Damning Curse. It makes you think before casting it, as was the intention with Taxing.

I'm going to need you to extrapolate about these suggestions narrowing the playable archetypes as erratas. That's a bit of a bold claim, and I'm sure you have your reasons for feeling that way, but I can't see them (obviously.)

I think this really splits the Decay decks down the middle as decks that have passive elements to trigger their curses, and decay decks that primarily use combat damage to trigger their curses. Then splits them further by the poison/no poison options. It moves Growth away from Quake if it's creatures aren't large- Making it stronger than the taxing errata for the Growth decks that need the help, but weaker in Aggrowth because of it's double edge. It moves Energy away from only structures, and only 6-drop removal (Surge/VD),from SE's ubiquity in ME builds and from Burn's ubiquity (by having an alternative for gradual CA, and an alternative for the crucial 3 damage spell.)

I appreciate you combing through it all though, and look forward to your response.

I just read this thread. I didn't see it before for some reason. I really like these suggestions though.

I definitely agree with the Order, Growth, and Energy changes. As for Decay, I like the focus on Curse, but in some cases it seems like it might be too slow. You'd be able to curse units and trigger them, but would it be fast enough to actually gain board control? This isn't really answerable and I don't play decay much, so I may just not know what I'm talking about. But that is the only concern I really have with these ideas.

Also, Curse decay versus AoE Energy would be kind of funny to play. Both sides would just be saying to the other, "Play a unit if you dare!".

I'm also assuming that in some cases there would be balance changes, but that's not really the point of a suggestion.

Bit of a necrobump.

Thanks Broth!

It's rather interesting how Mojang has opted to change Decay's removal suite (straight nerfing) since I made this post :X That makes me rather uncomfortable, because now Decay's removal suite is about Curse for all of the wrong reason (where in this thread, the suggestions was to holistically change to Curse-oriented removal suite to make Decay care about strategic placement of curses.)

Now, the game is in a situation, where it would seem where poison has been made so bad that curse is the removal of choice, but the suite itself hasn't been calibrated to care about that.

I'm sure the devs are listening and plotting, but I'm unsure that the "nerf poison, make curse stronger, without drawbacks) angle is really a direction that the game benefits from (especially considering that Quake and Frost Gale still combine with Curse for total board wiping.)