Yesterday evening, achroma released a significant update to their Chapter 1 cards. If you want to see the excellent video, check it out here.

I thought I’d summarise the changes all in one place. The changes I’ll be going through are errata, heroics, and non-functional changes.

First up, errata. Only 4 cards had wording changes that altered the way their abilities functioned. Those cards were: Murky Manor, Magus Elite Enforcer, Gisle, and Solveig. Here are the updates.

Murky Manor is the only card of the 245 released so far to received an ability nerf, and rightly so. I described this card as utterly gamewinning in my Grand Tournament Review article last week. Searching for literally any achrom card and playing it for free and having a drain 2 was too good. The change is you now REVEAL the card you’re playing, rather than FIND.

The REVEAL keyword is new and works as follows:
Turn over the top card of your deck. If it matches the requirement of the REVEAL (in this case, has an achrom shard) place it in your hand. If it doesn’t match the requirement, turn over the next card and repeat until you get to a card that does, add it to your hand, and shuffle your deck. In the case of Murky Manor, you then deploy that card for free.

This makes this card either much more random, or requires you to build around it. You can still use it to guarantee playing your copy of Issadora or Otrix if that card is your only other achrom card (assuming you haven’t drawn it yet), but a less restrictive build is just to leave out cards like Prism Sapper, Curdle Lane, and other very cheap achrom cards and just take what you get. You probably will have to also leave Achrom Surge out of your deck, and only ever play this if the opponent has a location out you might like to Hostile Takeover.

I think this is a positive change. I will now still consider Murky Manor for my decks, but it’s not an auto-include.

Magus Elite Enforcer has undergone a subtle change to increase their strength rather than shard value by 1 when attacking. In practical terms, now you can erase a 4 strength character with them, but if you attack a 3 strenth character the Enforcer will now be erased. I find this change a little strange. I understand this was the intention all along, but it does strike me as a little unneccessary.

Gisle (pronounced Gees-le) and Solveig previously had their gain/steal tied up in their “3 or more trolls” ability, meaning that often they would cost 6 shards for essentially nothing but a 6 strength character, which was terrible value. Now their resolve happens regardless, these characters are much more playable. Good change.

Next up, heroics. 8 cards have been given the heroic status compared to what the card database says, and those are:

6 of these cards are rare or legendary anyway, so the impact on regular canvas games will be minimal. However, if you have any of these on your canvas, if you copy it with Mirror Sanctum or claim an opponent’s copy, you have to erase your first copy.

The cards most effected by this change are the 2 uncommons, Monastery Nest and Chroma Storehouse, as you will commonly find yourself wanting to play a second copy of these cards. The former is now brought in line with the heroic 3 for +3 Rangled Wood from Curdle Hill. The latter was a slightly surprising but very sensible change. This card is extremely powerful. However, it’s worth noting that you can still play a second copy for its ACTION. If you do, you resolve the ACTION fully (with both Storehouses on your canvas) and then erase one of them.

A large number of other cards have been edited slightly for the purposes of grammar, consistency, and clarity. Issues like cards that trigger on every turn or just your turn, or cards with multiple effects, will have much tidier wording in the unlimited release. As these are non-functional changes, I won’t go through them here. However, if you want all these changes summarised in one simple document, you can download that here:

And finally, there were several new spoilers in the stream. Needless to say I will be reviewing these new cards; there were some very interesting ones in there. Keep an eye out for those reviews in the coming days.