Sleep 2.0 PTR ends: here are our findings

The Sleep 2.0 PTR test is now over! Thanks to all who took part and provided your feeback on how the mechanic performed.

These tests are a great way for us to see how proposed changes affect overall gameplay, and with your feedback we can make decisions on whether they will go live or not, or if we need to do more work well ahead of time, without affecting rewards, winrates, and the live server.

After some in-house tests, looking at community play-styles, and from gathering opinions from the community, here are the team’s thoughts about the proposed sleep 2.0 mechanic:

What was good with this change:

• The change directly impacts Siren of the Grave, one of the strongest cards in the current meta, giving players the chance to break the loop we constantly see in a majority of Board Wipe Death (BWD) games.
• On BWD, the change will tune down this really strong archetype, one that has been difficult to to balance due to the Genesis lock. Even with these changes, a BWD deck with the right adjustments would still be playable/hold its own in competitive play.
• The change will reduce the power level of Demogorgon, which is very powerful in the current meta, but would do so without removing it as a strong option in any deck of the control archetype.
• The change helps level the playing field for players using Welcome and Core set cards, ensuring free to play decks are viable in the meta.

What was bad with this change:

• The balance update we delivered this month can be undone by a huge change like this one.
• The nerf would damage BWD as an archetype a little, but the proposed change shoots almost 30 cards out of the meta – mostly belonging to Deception.
• The change will impact some domains more than others. For example: Magic has a ton of ways to deal damage and wake things up using spells and god powers, but Magic was already favored against BWD. It’s actually other domains that need help to face BWD, like Nature and Light, who have way less interactions with the new mechanic.
• The Core card changes we implemented to test alongside sleep 2.0 can be used in a variety of ways, like doing direct face damage to proc frenzy for Nature/War. Overall, we think the power level of those cards can be slightly above average.
• Aggro decks already make the best use of the Sanctum, with these changes, this would become even more severe.

Conclusion:

Given the above, this change won’t be pushed to the live server. This was a concept we wanted to explore, but we believe the downsides in practice outweigh the benefits brought with this patch.Thanks for all your feedback and participating in the PTR test, it’s back to the drawing board for us!