Patch 0.7, the last balance patch before the Crimson Cup: Twister Toss reworked, three cards cost more

The last balance patch before the Crimson Cup

"This is the FINAL balance patch before the tournament", the team writes. The Crimson Cup starts on 20 October with the EMEA qualifier, during Steam Next Fest, and is played in three-deck Conquest (the rules). On 24 September the team had said the last balance patch would come two weeks before the festival: it arrived on 29 September, three weeks before. If the plan holds, these are the costs and stats the tournament will be played with.

The official image calls it Steam Demo Update #2, version 0.7: it is the second update of the demo, after the one of 21 September.

All the balance changes

Format: mana · Power/Health for characters, mana only for spells.

No Legendary changes cost, stats or ability: Dorothy only gets a clearer explanation of her keywords.

Twister Toss reworked

Until now Twister Toss, a 1-mana spell, did one thing: move an ally. After the rework it moves an ally to any space, and if another card is already there, the two swap places.

It can also target occupied spaces. The team gives two examples:

• move a character away and then right back in the same round;
• destroy your character with Trash for Treasure and immediately move another character into its space.

On OriginsMeta Twister Toss is in three published decks, among them the Dorothy Combo: Dorothy grows every time an ally moves. The patch notes don't give the new text of the card: its page shows the old one, with a warning, until we read the new one in the game.

Three cards cost 1 more

Among the 35 decks published on OriginsMeta (count at 00:13 CEST on 30 September), Mind Palace is in 22 and Spellbook in 17: they are the two most played cards on the site. Bagheera is in 13. The full ranking is in the most played cards.

Bagheera: 2 mana

Bagheera stays a 1/1 whose On Reveal ability gives it +2⚔️/+2❤️ on a middle space. At 1 mana it was a 3/3 from the first round; now it comes down on round two at the earliest.

Mind Palace: 3 mana

The spell that draws 2 cards now costs 3.

Spellbook: 4 mana

For the rest of the game Spellbook adds a random spell to your hand at the start of each round, to be played before combat or it is discarded. It now costs 4, and its random spells can no longer be Spellbook.

Ability changes and fixes

Humpty and Spellbook no longer give themselves

The random cards they give you can no longer be themselves. Humpty's On Death ability adds a random card to your hand: it can no longer be Humpty. The random spell Spellbook adds every round can no longer be Spellbook.

Full hand: a returned card burns

When a card is returned to a hand that is already full, it now burns (it is lost) instead of the ability fizzling. Among the cards of the Demo 2.0, this concerns the ones that return a card to hand: White Queen and Stroke of Midnight, which return ANY character to its owner's hand, and Koschei and Dracula, which return themselves.

Freeze! and Dorothy: keywords explained

Hovering over them now explains the keywords they use, and they turn up in the collection's keyword search.

Bug fixes

Heroic Charge

Heroic Charge gives allies +2⚔️ and Trample this round. If a character it buffed loses its abilities, the +2⚔️ now stays; Trample is still removed.

More than one Defender

When you have more than one Defender at a location and one of them is stunned, the other one now always defends instead.

Locations now have a rarity

Every location is now common, rare, very rare or ultra rare, and the rarity decides how often it shows up. The team puts it this way: expect the familiar ones in most matches, and a few you'll only see "once in a blue moon". The patch notes don't say which location has which rarity: the Locations page lists all the locations of the Demo 2.0 with their effects, and we'll add the rarity as soon as we know it.

13 languages in the game

The game now supports 13 languages: English, French, Italian, German, Spanish (Spain), Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Russian, Simplified Chinese and Spanish (Latin America). On 30 September the Steam page lists the same 13 for the interface, with full audio in English only.

Boogeyman

The summary at the top of the patch notes says that "Twister Toss, Heroic Charge and Boogeyman now behave differently", but no line of the notes says what changes for Boogeyman. Its On Reveal ability destroys the ally at its location with the lowest Power, even itself. We'll update this article when the team explains it.

What we don't know yet

• Which location has which rarity.
• The new text of Twister Toss, and whether a swap counts as one move or two for Dorothy.
• What changes for Boogeyman.

What changes on OriginsMeta

• The pages of Bagheera, Mind Palace and Spellbook show the new cost, and every card in the patch has the change in its balance history, with a link to the Steam post.
• The page of Twister Toss still shows the old text, with a warning, until we read the new one in the game.
• MetaShifting lists patch 0.7 at the top, and the deck builder uses the new costs: Bagheera is now a 2-drop in the mana curve.
• Published decks keep their list, with the date they were created and the patch live that day; their mana curve uses the new costs. The deck guides with these cards are updated.

Where these notes come from

• The official Steam post of 29 September, "A small demo update is about to land!", published before the servers went down for the patch.
• The number 0.7 and the name Steam Demo Update #2 come from the official image of the update, the cover of this article. Some creators had called the 21 September update "patch 0.7": on this site that one stays "Demo · 21 Sep".