Design-analysis post. Not playtest data — the test is young and I’ll publish real numbers when they exist. This is what the card pool looks like from the design side.
How a card gets mispriced
Every card pays essence for board effect. A card is mispriced when its power curve doesn’t match its cost — too cheap for what it does, or paying for power it can’t use.
The five I keep circling
- Low-cost aggro enablers — cards that let a faction dump the board early price well on paper but compound hard in practice. Fast factions with cheap pressure are the classic misprice.
- Regrow targets — Sylvan’s Regrow returns a defeated low-cost unit. The units it loves are cheap recursive bodies; if any of them is one essence too cheap, the engine runs forever.
- Board-wipe equity — sweepers price by how many units they expect to kill. Price one for a slow meta and it’s unplayable in a fast one.
- The Convergence payoff cards — cards that reward holding the neutral zone. If the payoff doesn’t beat the tempo cost, they’re decoration.
- Defensive stalls — tools that make losing slower feel cheap until they make losing inevitable late. Undercosted defense warps metas quietly.
Why I’m writing this before the data
Because the playtest is where these get answered. If you playtest Wave A and any of these feel true — Discord. The reports feed the v0.3 balance pass.
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