The hit rogue-like deck building card game Monster Train that made a big splash in the indie scene when it launched on May 21st, and has just been updated. Developer Shiny Shoe’s game about protecting last pyre from forces bent on destroying it has joined the ranks of other games like Slay The Spire as an incredibly addictive mixture of card based strategy and deck building with the random elements of games like The Binding of Issac.
Fans of Monster Train will want to take a good look at what this new patch entails, as there are quite a few nerfs that may ruin your favorite cards or synergies. The primary focus of the update, appropriately named Wild Mutations, was adding in new optional mutators that add new levels of challenge and twists for future runs through the game. There are 35 new mutators to chose from, with up to 3 being able to be applied to any individual run. These can range from allowing shops to duplicate your cards, forcing your units to automatically descend floors each turn, or even double the amount of gold gained.
Those who feel they have mastered the game and are looking for more of a challenge were not forgotten, though. New “expert challenges” push you to beat the game under new restrictions such as lacking a champion card.
In terms of balance changes, Shiny Shoe reportedly wanted to target “the outliers” for their nerfs to eliminate any card being objectively good on every run. They also focused their changes with a more experienced and skilled player in mind. Knowing their audience, and the audience of the genre in general, they wanted “to make sure the end-game depth is as diverse as possible with the biggest practical impact being around updating the scaling values on certain cards to make sure they’re viable at all covenant levels”.
Monster Train had a few “broken” card combinations and synergies at launch, but finding and capitalizing on those were part of what made the game so exciting. While these balance changes are sure to make each run less likely to become overly one sided, getting those overpowered decks every once in a while was part of what made the game so great to a lot of players. As with all balance changes and updates, it will take a while for the dust to settle and players to really get a grip on how the game functions going forward.
Source: Rock Paper Shotgun
