Images courtesy of Equinox
Hello everyone, and welcome to a bit of a different Altered TCG article! A lot of news has been announced for Altered recently, spanning organized play, competitive balancing, and even a whole new expansion. So I thought I’d take the time to run through all of them. Next article will be a deep dive on one of my current favorite decks to play, but for now, we’ve got a lot to get through.
Whispers from the Maze Announced!
Set 3 was announced! Whispers from the Maze is scheduled to release June 6, 2025, and the piece of art revealed shows Basira and Waru as two of the heroes potentially featured in the set.
While this is very exciting (new cards always are), this also puts a hard deadline on Equinox to have the Print On Demand (POD) and Marketplace features up and running before that date. I think it’s safe to say that there have been some growing pains across the various beta tests of these features and their initial Q4 2024 launch date may have been ambitious, but this is something that is integral to the game’s survival and longevity.
The digital aspect of the game generates so many questions, and is such a huge selling point of buying in even when there’s no local community, that it’s actually wild the main online functionalities aren’t live yet. Equinox needs to get their ducks in a row and get this stuff out the door and working before Whispers, or we might be in for a rough time.
Altered Tumult Championships
Also recently announced was the first set of Tumult Championships! Similar to a store championship level event in other card games, these Tumult Championship events will be running from April 5th to May 11th, in the format of Standard Constructed, best-of-one swiss tournaments with a recommended top cut.
The prizes include: an exclusive Gamegenic playmat for the winner, featuring the alternative art for Sunisa, Dedicated Ensign from the Season 2 Promo Boosters; Top 8 will each receive a foil set of Tumult cards with the wintry art from Trial by Frost; and the player who performed the best in each faction will each receive an oversized copy of their faction’s scout from the Promo Boosters.
On top of that, the winner’s faction will win their faction one point. The faction at the end of the Tumult Championship window will be awarded the common and rare copies of Kuraokami Unbound, while the faction in second place will get the faction-shifted rare copy. Everyone will also receive these cards digitally when it releases, no matter when they create their account, so the primary incentive here is to recruit Kuraokami to your preferred faction.
There is so much positive here. More structured organized play initiatives at the local level are always welcome, and the prizes look both functional and premium. I’m glad the prizes aren’t specific cards or anything like that, as the single faction nature of the game currently makes it difficult to create a prize card the winner would always want to use.
My one critique here is that the mandated format is best-of-one. Personal preference on best-of-one or best-of-three aside, it would have been nice if the stores at least got to decide on the format.
The push to further integrate the digital aspect of the game by being able to quickly implement a whole new card and giving it to players is reminiscent of a mobile game, and that speed from inception to release is one of the largest draws Altered has as a hybrid card game. It’s a large step in the right direction to take advantage of the digital half of the game, but also one that hinges once again on POD and Marketplace being in place soon.
I know that you can easily prove that you own a card digitally and then proxy it for a local in-person event, but there are still players who just want the physical card. The Adventure Pass and packs throw so many foilers at you that are currently sitting dormant on accounts because they literally have no purpose until POD ships. Overall, a great step forward, but also another reminder on what Equinox needs to prioritize.
Mid-Season Altered Patch and Watchlist
I won’t recap the entire article, but the main takeaways I got was that they’re actively scraping the data from Board Game Arena and looking at the play rates of each faction and its heroes. Now there’s a little wrinkle here in that they don’t display any win rates, only saying that each faction has a hero in the top six most played. So on the surface, it looks quite balanced, but Yzmir has crawled out in front with over 20% play rate online.
I wonder what Equinox’s metric for a balanced metagame is, as until we see win rates, these play rate numbers don’t mean anything.
They also published the most played common for each faction, and here it really reinforced the hyper tempo-oriented nature of the game’s current state. Axiom, Bravos, and Lyra all had commons that generated card advantage as their most played, while Ordis and Yzmir’s most recurring common in decks were the two most efficient pieces of spot removal. I suppose that Muna Druid as Muna’s most played common is also a form of card advantage in tandem with all the Noon triggers capable of being generated from that deck.
The most important bit of news from this announcement was the creation of the watchlist: a list of cards that Equinox is keeping an eye on in case of needing a suspension or erratum, and boy are Sigismar and Afanas almost solely responsible for its creation. Yzmir Helping Hand, Small Step, Giant Leap (all versions), and Kadigiran Mage-Dancer are all now being closely watched by the game design and playtest teams.
It makes sense that now that the game has been out for a year or so, that Equinox is starting to get a sense of what types of card advantage is permissible, and watchlisting Afanas’ main tools at generating extra cards is certainly the approach I’d take to keeping the deck in line. Interestingly though, Ordis Attorney and the Ordis-shifted Baba Yaga are the main cards being looked at by the teams as ways to neutralize Sigismar’s win rate. They actively cite the win rate as something they’re looking at, so we know that data is available, but it also seems a bit late to be looking at the Attorney now that Ozma is back off the suspended list with an errata.
I’m still repeatedly surprised that Teamwork Training hasn’t been put on the watchlist due to just how efficient it is in combination with cards that Sigismar already wants to be playing. Maybe I’m just not cut out for game design or balance if we’ve gone through two cycles of the suspended list and it hasn’t even been called out.
Conclusion and Current Health of Altered
Besides the singular large sore spot of POD and Marketplace still not online, the rest of the game seems to be active and in a healthy spot. There are growing paper play initiatives, online tournament attendance is still doing well at 50-100 players for the big weekly events, and the active communication between Equinox and the players about their plans for balancing the game is a huge stride in the right direction.
Now comes the hardest part, getting everything up and running smoothly before Whispers drops. There are still some issues with the event locator as well as various small bugs on the app and website that needs to be ironed out, and I sincerely hope that the team at Equinox can get it sorted out.
Looking to get started in Altered? Check out our guide here.
