![[Opinion] Removing expansion-specific traits saved Heroes of Rivenbrandt](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/o1hv0it0/production/eb53f6fa782f12e2470254f8cee7523c71b37d35-1200x675.png)
At least amongst the English Community, Academy of Ages has been one of the least well-received sets in the past year. In this opinion piece, we explore the impact of set-specific traits and how they can inadvertently affect game balance.
When I think back to the Academy of Ages meta, there were three traits that were ever prevalent across a number of decks. Festive, Condemned and Academic. At one point, all three traits were active in Rotation at the same time. With the release of Heroes of Rivenbrandt, the Festive trait disappeared from the format, moving the total from 3 -> 2.
These traits were cool in certain ways - they often fit into the overall theme of the expansion and opened up creative deckbuilding options. An example is when some players ran Bahamut Dragon with the Festive Engine, utilizing Stay in Paradise to consistently search for Si Long and March of the Dragonspring. This rewarded creative players who identified these opportunities and capitalized upon them in deckbuilding.
However, unless the cards are set up in such a way that the "optimal" synergies are dependent on the meta (for example, I use X festive card in an aggressive meta, but Y festive cards in a control meta and Z festive cards in a mid-range meta) and the meta has a realistic chance of shifting to facilitate the transition of what is "optimal", then once one person has solved it, then everyone will just netdeck the same build. It essentially becomes a puzzle which can only be solved once. There is nothing exciting left after that.
The second reason why this can cause issues is because of the way that set specific traits are designed. In Edge of Paradise, they released Stay in Paradise, a card that searches for two different Festive Followers. In Eightfold Abyss Azvaldt, they released Azvaldt, a card that searched for one Condemned Follower, with a number of in-class tutors that do the same thing. In Academy of Ages, they released Lainecrest Academy, yet another tutor.
The issue with these cards is that they heavily incentivise you to run as few of the trait as possible. By reducing the amount of possible options that can be be tutored, you increase the consistency of which you can hit the cards you want. This consistency tends to make decks a lot stronger, at the cost of making the rest of the trait cards obsolete.
An example of where this came to its largest extreme is with the Mysteria decks in recent times, but let's just take HoR as an example. The most popular build in the current expansion has cut the copies of Mysteria followers down to the absolute minimum in exchange for higher consistency. While this is creative in the first instance, the problem is if this is the optimal build, because this means that all your other Mysteria cards are no longer playable, cards that take up valuable space in the overall cards available to your class in Rotation.
Some might ask why it's a problem if many cards are ruled out of rotation from the get-go? It's because there's less variety to build decks and less opportunities for creativity from the moment people figure out the optimal trait allocations. This is exacerbated when you have 3 set-specific traits in Rotation at the same time, such as when some people used a build of Mysteria last format where Stay In Paradise was used specifically to search Story of a Lifetime in a deck running 1x of the highest priority Mysteria followers.
The lack of support for older set traits
When was the last time you saw a Festive Trait, or a Condemned Trait, or an Academic Trait?
Excluding Judith, if I'm not mistaken, they have never printed direct support for any of these three traits outside of the base expansion of the set. They don't even do it for the mini! This is not only a missed opportunity for narrative reasons, for example, a part 2 to the story of Azvaldt that could expand on the character arcs or the jailbreak attempt itself, but also a way to strengthen weaker Condemned decks or add a new way to play existing archetypes.
Is there really a need for every class to get the set trait?
The biggest offender of this is Academy of Ages. The set trait provides practically zero advantages to a number of decks, as the key neutral is Lainecrest Academy, which is in practice, never played in any deck outside of what, Heal Haven and Vengeance Blood?
I look at Sword, and there is practically no theme actually tying these cards together. There's no creativity in deckbuilding that can be had unless someone one day decides to run Academy to tutor Twinblader (haven't seen this happen at the time of writing this article). Dead-Eye Trainee and Fervent Fist Fighter are literally Take Two/Token cards for Galdr.... You can't even run Freya in the class effectively because officer/commander is on every sword card.
There's no real gameplay reason for it, outside of making sure every class has the trait "Academic" on it, which honestly, kind of cheapens it for me.
What Heroes of Rivenbrandt did differently
Putting the exact state of the meta to another side, what the current expansion did extremely well was printing cards that are generically good. No set-specific traits means that there's no real penalty to slotting in cards from the HoR expansion. Examples include cards like Jeanne, Worldwalker, a card that, balance aside, can be played in multiple Haven decks.
Sure, there's still the classic archetypes like Artifact, Machina, and Mysteria, but when we consider "set specific traits", this current expansion doesn't have one. This means that when we build decks in the future, the staples of this set can all be part of the deckbuilding process, and the meta becomes less constricted as a result.
Despite the obvious dominance of certain decks in the meta right now, we've seen a number of interesting archetypes do well regardless. Machina Portal, Chess Rune, Vengeance Blood, Armed Dragon, Evolve Blood etc have all seen varying levels of tournament play and success in the expansion thus far. Printing cards that are generically good and flexible allows players creative freedom, which in turn, makes the game more fresh as a whole.
It should come as little wonder that Heroes of Rivenbrandt has offered players a breath of fresh air, as they figure out what the new cards mean for their specific decks, rather than being forced into set-trait-specific optimization, and I think that's worked out really well so far.
