Now that the demo is available again, it seemed like a good time to dive into the origins of some of the changes that have come to the game between the original demo last March and this new demo.

It's a peculiar choice to create a card that heals you to full health, costs nothing to play, and starts in your deck every run. Why is this what ended up in the game?

If you played the original demo, then you may recall how after each fight you received a choice of either a relic or to gain some health (there was no concept of max health). You may also recall how minions dealt their full attack value as damage to enemies (and players), not just 1 damage each. I never liked this battle system because of how volatile it was. If your board wasn't up to par, you could very easily have gotten one shotted, which discouraged risky or greedy play. There was also the issue of stalling. If you could get your board into a situation where you could guarantee a tie every round, you'd be able to stall infinite turns and buff yourself up infinitely at no risk. The counter to this in the original demo was the much maligned Fatigue battle spell, which dealt damage to you directly every turn after the first of any encounter. This also felt bad because it discouraged slower, more defensive, play styles.

After we released the first demo, our goal was to redesign the battle and health system to better facilitate all styles of play, without any possibility of stalling tactics, and less ability to get one shot from full health. The result was the battle system that exists now, where minions always deal 1 damage and battlers have an attack stat which is used when minions can't kill the opponent on their own. I really like this solution because it prevents stalling (no enemy encounter can last more than one round) and it reduces the chances of getting one shot (with the old system, if one minion with 50 Attack survives, it's game over, whereas now it does the same damage as a minion with 1 Attack.) This means that players can afford to fall behind for a few rounds without a guaranteed death.

This is also where Medi-Crab comes in. We liked how you could afford to play a little riskier in this new battle system, and wanted to lean into that more. Medi-Crab adds a perfect layer of risk reward to the game. If you're at half health, do you play Medi-Crab and heal now even though you're not getting full value out of it? Or do you wait and risk death. Rerolling draft cards plays into this as well, since you can spend your health to see better cards. The current demo isn't quite long enough to really feel the impact of Medi-Crab, but the full game is much longer, and the consequences of making your deck too large, or playing Medi-Crab too many times, become apparent very quickly!

So this new battle and healing system was a huge improvement to the game overall—or at least we think it was! Let us know if you feel the same!

Not every change is perfect though, there was one consequence of this new battle system, which is that one-minion challenges become significantly harder since your one minion can only ever deal 1 damage. To alleviate that, we'll be adding some cards and relics to the full game which will make one minion challenges less impossible. One of those is a card that's in the demo right now, although it's not available to players, it's instead used by an enemy.

Solo Practitioner will be a draftable card in the full game! It's very niche, but if you only have one minion on principle, it's the perfect card! The full release will include even more support for one minion strategies, although we'll save that for a future card reveal post.