Nerfs or buffs?
The eternal question when it comes to any balance patch discussion.
Think back to the month of October 2023. Loot Sword and Heal Haven were both dominant in performance for the entire month prior to the balance patch. It was clear that the meta needed a shakeup, to which the question became: Should we nerf Loot Sword and Heal Haven, or should we buff other decks to, or above their level?
The decision from Cygames was to buff Dirt Rune and Buff Dragon.
Fast forward a few weeks, and the RAGE Pro Tour spoke for itself. A 3 deck 0 Ban Format with 6 players. The decks brought? 6 Dirt Rune, 6 Buff Dragon, 6 Loot Sword. Much like the meme on Twitter, Barbaros managed to create a new age of delinquency.
Make no mistake, this outcome was very much intended by the balance team.
Fundamentally, the reason why decks like Loot Sword reigned supreme is because it doesn't have any real weaknesses. It has a strong early and mid-game that can consistently allow the deck to survive until turn 7. And, as many of you know, they can consistently deal 17+ damage from Turn 7 onwards.
Considering the maximum HP in the game is 20, it's an absurd amount of damage for a deck to be able to consistently pull off. This is not even considering the fact that Loot Sword has a high amount of healing to allow them to reach that point, and also lethal combos that deal 20 damage from Turn 8 and onwards.
People often make reference to whether to buff decks or nerf them. Let's consider the following:
- Loot Sword has no weaknesses
- The deck consistently does 17 damage on turn 7
- The deck consistently does 20 damage from turn 8
If we consider the strengths of Loot Sword, there's two options for buffs to make an impact on the meta:
1) A systemic buff that affects multiple classes at the same time
2) Buffing individual decks to become as strong as Loot Sword
What I mean by Systemic Buffs (which relatively speaking, act as nerfs) is buffing a neutral card that every deck can play, and directly weakens Loot Sword's gameplan. For example, one possible buff could be adding an evolve effect to a commonly played card like Asuka & Shiori, or Kyrie, so that all effect damage is reduced by 1 until the end of your opponent's next turn. Considering Loot Sword's win conditions, this would significantly weaken the deck without directly nerfing it.
The other method is to buff individual decks instead. Your baseline requirement is to make the deck strong enough to beat Loot Sword. Unless these buffs are designed specifically to counteract Loot Sword's game plan (which is very difficult, because it has no weaknesses), then any buff merely creates a deck as monstrous as Loot Sword. To reiterate, if you buff two decks to be able to compete with Loot Sword, then all you've really done is create three Loot Sword tier decks in the meta, leaving every other class in the dust.
The balance patch which power crept Golem Lord and Dion was flawed in this respect. To compete with Loot Sword, a deck that does 17 damage on turn 7, they buffed the consistency of the two decks that had the potential to do as much burst damage, with Dirt Rune being able to do 16 damage from Turn 7 (Undying + Levi + Genesis) and Buff Dragon being able to do 15 damage from Turn 6 onwards (Joe + Striker).
Dirt Rune
- A deck that can consistently deal 9 damage with 5 mana (Levi)
- A deck that can consistently create 11/11 in stats on turn 5, dealing 5 AOE damage to enemy followers and deal 4 leader damage.
- 16 Damage turn 7 combos with Undying Witch active -> Levi + Crimson Sorcery + Genesis Dragon
Buff Dragon
- Able to create 3/5s with 4/3 rush from as early as turn 3
- Able to create large 3 damage direct damage followers from as early as turn 3
- Has a card that singlehandedly does 12 damage to enemy leader by itself
- Commonly seen combo of Turn 7 Joe + 3 storm damage for at least 15 damage
This doesn't even begin to describe all of the other strengths available to these decks, especially their tempo and survival tools. The buffs to Dirt Rune and Buff Dragon were designed solely to push these two decks to the front of the meta, not to help any of the other struggling classes in the meta.
The case for nerfs
See the illustrated example of a simplified scenario on how nerfs can vastly increase diversity in the metagame. The proposed balance change considers a world where the Tier 2 and 3 decks are quite close in strength, and nerfing the top 3 decks can create a hypothetical 8 archetype meta by nerfing three decks.
When you give huge buffs to Dirt Rune and Buff Dragon, the outcome is fairly predictable. However, nerfing is not always as predictable as it would appear on the surface. For example, what if Loot Sword was countering a set of decks in the meta (think decks like Control Portalcraft), and the moment they get nerfed, we get a very unpleasant metagame instead?
Final thoughts
Nerfs require a lot more foresight than buffs because it's not easy to predict the outcome of nerfing the top decks. On the other hand, overbuffing archetypes has a very obvious outcome of those decks simply becoming the strongest.
It's a lazy approach, and many players are not a fan of the new three-deck metagame we're currently seeing, particularly the dominance of Buff Dragon on Ladder. This is not the first time Cygames has made intentional attempts to make certain decks top of the meta. Who could forget the completely unnecessary buff to Anne & Grea earlier in the year?
In and of itself, I am agnostic to whether we see buffs or nerfs to freshen the meta and gameplay of the Shadowverse metagame. What I am not a fan of, is thoughtless buffs that create a worse environment than the ones it sought to solve.
If the best solution the Cygames balance team could come up with was to buff Dragon and Dirt Rune like this, then please, for the love of god, just nerf Loot Sword next time instead.
