@Eika determines what is meta. 
Be afraid when the avatar changes to Nymph…
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Relax, Creeper will be the next one, after getting too much love in 2017…
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Argument intermission time!!!
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Sadly, it is true, why do people go after the new stuff. It does however need a much needed buff by lowering its mana from 9 to 6.
A lot of back and forth here and my original post was pretty long, so I’d like to re state my previous points in a more concise manner.
- Neither troop is really “overpowered.” Both could probably benefit from a mana cost raise of 2, but that wouldn’t affect much on them being used on defense.
- Manticore’s combination of spell and traits are just strong enough for it to become an actual threat from sky drop skulls if in the front, unlike other mana drainers. Anywhere in the group, its mana cost is low enough to stall out nearly every legendary, which is generally what people will invade with (and should want to use, given the overall goals of the game), as well as anything that uses a status effect. Khorvash’s is just low enough mana cost to out charge most other legendaries, even without a generator backing him.
- The combination of said things had made it an emergent meta.
- The mana drain meta is can be annoying to fight against. Unfavorable boards feel like sub-level-20 games. Neutral boards extend the time to charge and start casting by several turns. Even favorable boards you are stalled a bit, unless you can kill the Manticore (or the entire team) outright, or drain it, since you cant use status effects.
- Slight nerfs are not even enough to cause a defense meta shift - it is nearly impossible to “balance” something off the meta. They need to be extreme enough to make the troop not cover the previously intended purpose at all, or not be “the best”. This ruins the original troop design, which I am categorically against.
- The only way we can affect any permanent fluidity in the defense “meta” is to make the most profitable thing to use stuff that everyone else isn’t using.
PS: It is perfectly okay for us to have overpowered things to use, and to have stuff you actually have to think to combat. The problem with manticore is that it is a pacing killer, and removes a huge amount of agency by limiting your play to only the board. Having it be “meta” slows the pace of the PvP as a whole, in a way that makes for not-fun, much in the same way The Silent One did long, long ago. I had no problem with Great Maw, because it could be occasionally fun to try and make a comeback after losing a troop to devour, you still had a large amount of agency even with 3 troops, and if you don’t feel like it, take your loss and move on. This new meta is already getting old, though.
I guess I’m one of the few that enjoys longer, tougher matches. I wish the “need for speed” was eliminated completely, that would go a long way towards fixing some of the hard feelings.
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Amira is also very strong. She seems designed to be the Khorvash counter, then you see all the troops she one-shots.
You’re right on with both comments. I think Manticore being empowered and a very cheap recharge for a great ability is the more annoying for me. Of course it is probably the first troop that really had me looking at all the Stealthy troops.
Before you head out, sneak Stun onto that’s Stone Song ability. 
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Longer, tougher matches are fine sometimes. For me, its more a lack of agency. Trading moves back and forth and waiting for sky drops to align or a random board shuffle is something I’m glad was left behind in the very early stages of the game. Finding the right way and time to use board modifying spells to your advantage is the main thing that sets this apart from generic match 3 in the core gameplay. And since the AI plays “perfectly” in terms of primary 4/5 gem matches, its the main thing that sets me apart from an AI. When the decisions I can make are roughly the same as what an AI would pick anyway and the determining factor of whether it was a good or bad move is more what appears from the top of the board, that is not really the kind of gameplay I appreciate. To be fair, mana drain teams only occasionally reduce it quite this far (if the board does not give you enough mana to even get your generator or other controlled board modifier up), but still far more often than I would like.
See I just don’t see it. Lack of agency, to me at least, was Maw’s original 3rd trait. I don’t feel mana drain teams are any more (or less) RNG-dependent.
i found that my goblin team (green seer, gob shaman, gob, and hobgob) wiped the floor against this team… so its easy to work around.
Huh. I wonder why that is.
Or if it still would have been the case without all the constructive balance discussion that occurs on the forums.
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Well, I think it’s fairly obvious from how I’ve continuously framed my opinion that I think it’s because of the new troops introduced. The same ones that people now want to nerf.
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And you think those troops would have been introduced as they are if people hadn’t indicated that there was a problem? Sometimes the suggestions people give on how to solve a problem aren’t as important as simply them indicating that there is a problem, why they feel it’s a problem, and listing the ways they’ve unsuccessfully attempted to address it on their own.
I’m not suggesting that any opinion should simply stop and be quiet. I certainly see the value in discussing OP troops and the like.
It’s the immediate jump to “nerf it” that I personally don’t like. But that’s only my preference, I don’t pretend to impose my wishes on the entire community at all.
Nerfing means to take something dangerous and making it harmless.
Rebalancing is not nerfing, as the Troops are still dangerous and viable.
Rebalancing implies that, at some point, underpowered troops are going to be balanced as well. We don’t really see that though. We just see alleged overpowered troops being changed, at least recently.
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They have done some rebalancing with older Troops a Kingdom at a time