It’s also a trend they seem content with. There are a number of %devour troops in the works, for instance.
At this point, I’m not really sure what the solution is. It seems like mana is easier to come by now and that inflation has led to our current problems, but I’m not sure where the inflation came from in the first place.
Insanely huge gathers caused by random fills (vs Gem patterns achieved by contiguous transforms) is becoming a gargantuan issue. Add in the depreciation of Link traits due to Proc adjustments plus increased board entropy and these issues seem to multiply.
Can you explain further? You’re throwing out a lot of terms and I’m not sure what you mean.
They’ve changed how much Mana you get depending on how the Mana is grouped at the time of collection. This has had the functional effect of increasing Mana gathers when done with Spawn troops and depreciating gathers when done with Transform troops, because Transform tends to make one kind of shape (or more but smaller chains) and Spawns tend to make fewer but bigger shapes. (Translation: more RNG = more better-er in terms of gathering Mana)
@Silvergem i have a question about your OP… Do you want all the cascades reduced or just the ones for the AI?
So my little video got one comment?
Holding onto a spell is just like playing Russian roulette. It’s a tactic that has become far too risky due to way the game now plays, which is a shame.
I did watch your video, but I wasn’t really sure what you were getting at, to be honest. I didn’t see the connection to your comment about “the game deciding that you will not win” (though I have certainly felt that way myself often enough).
Edit: just re-watched your video and I’m still not sure why you would have held off on casting Artema at the beginning. With a charged Spirit Fox on the other side and a Psion-lead, I’m not sure what the potential upside would be. I can see the potential down-side being that Spirit Fox is going to drain somebody as soon as you pass the turn and there is a good chance that something stupid happens when he removes all the yellow (like a skull match drops in or trips on a cascade and Artema gets drained by Psion).
If I could offer some general observations about fighting that deck:
Thanks for the clarification. I knew I felt the more RNG and that mana was “cheaper” but I didn’t know the cause. The only clear thing to me was that Trolls were OP as hell (and still are really strong), and explorers in general seemed strong (Ragna, Gorg, etc).
Mithran is spot on as usual. The RNG behavior is actually changed my play style and I’ve found the cascades quite exploitable. I rarely take a four match anymore.
I had a good laugh as I was re-reading your comments before bed.
This part had me busting. I cannot count the number of times I said to myself watching FT get ready… “Oh I’m totally safe there’s only 4 Greens on the board”… only to find myself dead 30 seconds later and grabbing the calculator to work out the odds of every single gem clumping together in a nearly perfect square + 1
I mean I’m exaggerating for effect but as Kurt Angle would say “Oh it’s true - it’s damn true!”
LOL g’night everybody 
I’m happy with the nerf. I’ve had FT cast with 0 Greens and get an extra turn.
New dimensions of insanity are being discovered daily.
It was just to show how things can work for both sides. I’m fully aware of the builds that cause particular problems and of using different troops but I was using a particular team and was trying it against everything to see how it faired. I also struggle to notice things with the new ui, it’s just such a poorly conceived mess and visually, well… It’s just not fit for purpose.
Honestly the UI is so awful I just don’t know what to say any more.
I would love to be hired on as a consultant. My analysis and report on the current UI would be probably 40-60 pages long, and I cannot imagine a conclusion which would come to anything other than compete teardown/rebuild. The metaphor needs to be completely reworked and it has to stop looking and behaving like a skinned Enterprise application. But the time for feedback is over, since they didn’t even show it to us until the opportunity to change it was long gone. We have to live with this piece of shit.
And I know there is a lot of confusion about what a UI is. It is a User Inferface and it is NOT the graphics despite what other people say, although what graphics are skinned on after are VERY important. I spent 20 years making professional games so I guess I might know. A UI is how a user interfaces with the program and vice versa. How information is grouped and presented, how inputs are collected and processed, how tasks are structured, how outputs are presented. How accessibility issues are anticipated and therefore prevented. How happy paths are presented to achieve the most common interaction chains. Oh god I could go on, but I’m not going to because I’m not getting paid for this. The UI is a disaster in almost every single area.
It’s vogue now to call it “UX” for “User eXperience”. That helps highlight it’s not just looking pretty, but careful thought around your workflows and user interactions. More people get the sense of that, “UI” sort of got appropriated to mean “graphical presentation”.
Don’t know what’s going on today.
It feels like for every first turn I take, the AI does one that just cascades into having its team fully on Mana before I can get to my second turn. And if it doesn’t cascade anymore, then 4 gems lay in a way that it can just do that, and continue the cascading pattern.
Also, isn’t it weird how sometimes 3 of a color fall in succession? Instantly continuing the pattern?
It’s so frustrating.
I’d like to have a turn too, please!
“Gems of Watching-The-AI-Play”
How come these things never happen to me?
Because everyone has different tolerances for random volatility, and everyone has different hyperbolics. Where others have, “No drops go my way and the CPU gets mega chains, grrr CHEATING,” you have, “This clearly-OP troop just gained 1 mana cost and lost 5% Devour chance, 
tier!”
Mine are about the existential horror that is living inside the new UI, but I’m keeping it to myself now and just playing a lot less than I used to.
They happen, you have recall bias. 
Some people remember bad things better and these are the majority of human beings while minority forgets bad things right away and only remembers good things. In the place where I come from, we call the latter “happy fools”. Sorry, did not mean to troll, it is intended as a joke.