Balloon Design Strategy V 2.0

Vanilla stats

So the plan right now is to have a vanilla stat line for a balloon be size 2 with a limit of 3, limit still scales as size does, so a size 3 will have a limit of 4 and so on.

Balloon limits are biased by color

Red acts as a the baseline for size/limit ratios, but green get's away with having balloons with 1-2 more limit than other balloons would.

Blue and purple however tend to have lower than average limits.

• Red vanilla: size 2/limit 3
• Green vanilla: size 2/limit 5
• Purple & Blue vanilla: size 2/limit 2

Blue is somewhere in between purple and red, but purple consistently has the lowest limit of balloons relative to other colors.

Size 2 balloons are "Basic"

Either being vanillas, blockers, or balloons with a single "Slow" ability

Size 3 balloons are more staple/workhorse balloons

These tend to carry 1-2 abilities and fill more specific strategic functions, and tend to have "Fast" abilities

Size 4 Balloons are more power/reactive pieces.

Size 4 balloons are typically going to be stuff that has strong board impact, so far the big stars of this is Green's Windsage Bear and Blue's Slayer. Blue's Stone guardian is also a good example as it comes down as a gigantic blocker. as well as Green's Insta-Dragon (Formerly Woods defender) being a large blocker that comes in early if you have no other balloon on the field.

size 5+ balloons are usually finishers/win conditions

Very often these have expansion, and possess ability sets that allow them to apply heavy win pressure on an opponent. Contrary to how size 4 balloons are handled, these tend to be slower, but are also harder to remove and tend to threaten a win more often than others.

Size 1 balloons need to be specialized and deliberately designed

The advantage of being a size one balloon is being a size one balloon. These balloons can be thrown out cheaply to either chump block for the player or overwhelm an opponent's offensive resources. Because of this, one cost balloons need to have some kind of downside that limits their ability to be used liberally.

So far this is being done with commitment and (dis)abilities like fragile and defender. Purple's bolt spellbeasts cost one but have a commitment of 2 and have either fragile or defender. That way they can't be played any sooner than turn two like other two cost balloons, and they either can't attack or can only attack once.

Commitment is no longer part of the cost/power ratio

So far that strategy resulted in pushing the power of low cost cards too much by justifying it through a high commitment value. now limit is applied more as a either a way to gate how early a card can be played, and a back end constraint on how focused your deck should be on that color to be able to reliably play that card.