Speaker #0Hello! Can you understand me? Hello everyone, Kier here, and welcome to the Infinite Podcast. I'm focused on the casual nature of the game, and each week I discuss the new patch, the new card, and my feelings on the game. I am also a part of the Snap Judgments podcasting network, and I'm going to talk about Snap Decisions today before the pod starts. Snap Decisions is hosted by Joe, your Snap... DJ and if you really want some quality content where you can dive more into the comics and get to nerd out with one of the coolest guys I know, definitely check it out. He's the one that inspired me to do this show, so big shout out to him. Alright, let's hop into it. This week, obviously, we have a brand new season, the What If season, which just has me super giddy. I am a huge fan of the show and the comics, so having the ability to see these cards in game is super, super awesome. Um, and, uh, that means that we have two cards to preview this week, which is Captain Carter and Goliath, and then, uh, we have some patch notes to go over. Uh, so, uh, let's, let's do that, shall we? Captain Carter is the season pass card. She is a 4-3, and she says, Ongoing, add this card's power to your back row cards here. Can't add to itself. Uh, I wasn't sure how they were going to do the VFX, but it actually makes it pretty easy. When you put her down, the... Back row becomes lit up with the Union Jack. So it's very, very easy to tell where you're supposed to put the cards. And because of that, it also makes sense that she can't add to herself. You know, it specifies that, but if you put her in the back row, she'll take up one half of the Union Jack. I honestly really love this card design. It's powerful, but you also aren't going to put this in. every deck, right? I think there's a, there, there's a case to, because I, I've argued in the past, like, I like Jessica Jones as just a 410, um, that you can put into a deck sometimes, and if you fill her requirement, she's like a 4-9, which isn't bad, uh, it's, it's not bad at all, uh, but obviously to get the most out of her effect, you're going to want to add to her power somehow. Easiest way to do that is with things like Captain America, uh, doing something like Blue Marvel or Spectrum, which... automatically makes this card scale way, way above its cost. The only restriction, of course, is that since she needs to be in the front row to get the most out of her ability, you have to have pretty cheap cards or have the ability to maneuver cards in order to get the most out of her positioning. That's why I think Sam Wilson's shield is a natural fit into this, right? Because if you want to, you can make the shield fill the first slot in an empty location. throw Captain Carter down, and then put two cards after her pretty easily. So I think in that respect, there's a ton of ways you can play this, and I think that despite her lukewarm landing for a lot of people, I think that she's just a good card. Her stats look pretty great right now, too, looking in the 50% to 60%. Now it's early in the season, so there could be bots and other things, but that's pretty good, right? That's pretty excellent. So... I think this card has a future. For me, it's a 5 out of 5. I think it's a good design. It's very strong, but not overbearing, right? She has some requirements to fulfill. So until somebody breaks her, I think this is the right place for a Season Pass card. Next up, we have Goliath. Goliath is a 2-1 that says, ongoing, plus one power for each other ongoing card you have in play. And if you're sensing a theme here, Yeah, I mean, the Spectrum deck is getting just a huge buff with this, and it feels good to have a little scaler in a Spectrum ongoing deck. You know, oftentimes in that two-cost slot, you're thinking, like, Colossus, Armor, but, you know, the amount of times those come in handy are going to be pretty low. So, this actually gives you a chance to add some pretty significant power to the Spectrum deck, and... Assuming that we get some more ongoing cards in the future, this card is always going to have value, right? So yeah, really simple, really, really big. I mean, oftentimes you can get him to like 2-7 or 2-9, which is just bonkers for a 2-cost card. Like 2-6, you should be happy, but he scales way, way above that. So like, yeah, I think this is a great card. It really fits in here, and it sort of fulfills that Morbius role. We're seeing a couple of archetypes get that sort of thing, including later in this season, Move is going to get Hydra Stomper, which has a sort of similar effect, right? It scales and it works with the deck naturally. So yeah, this is a 5 out of 5 release for me as well. I think it's strong in the archetype that it needs to be in. And yeah, great card. Okay, let's go over the patch highlights. So like, obviously there are a bunch of bug fixes in here, which is good. I'm glad that they're addressing some of these, especially a lot of like the VFX in the game are getting patched up. There are a lot of issues that they fixed with like discarded cards not showing correctly and more. So that is super, super appreciated. The more this game feels polished, it's going to only help in the long run. So yeah, super happy with that. But let's talk about some of the other stuff. Laufey now has VFX and SFX. And if you remember, I actually complained about this when the card released. I actually like the card. I think it has a really cool place in the game. But I was really disappointed it didn't launch with some VFX. But it has it now. And it looks awesome, by the way. You see, like, the cold expand from him. He draws in power from everybody and then slams down. Really cool. I'm glad that he has that now. Some other things that they include is, and this is probably, there's a thing in a moment we're talking, we're going to talk about that applies later. But in this specific patch, this is probably the most important thing. So, players will be able to unlock the custom card feature with only one insplenity, excuse me. infinity split or acquisition of a collectible finish or flare from character mastery uh so what this means is like if you get more than one variant of a card and you haven't split it yet your character mastery will will do the job for you and then you'll be able to unlock the custom card feature which is really generous that's uh yeah i think that's cool because if you already have two and you're not even done upgrading the card yet it means you must like the card right so i i like the the logic behind that Another thing to consider is that they're launching a new type of reward called a mystery and premium mystery border. So in the same way that you have like a mystery variant or, you know, whatever, you'll now have the ability to get a mystery border, which is slightly less cool. But, you know, I mean, borders are cool. I'm a person who really likes matching the border color with the logo color of my card or anything in between. Right. So like. I'm cool with getting free borders. There are so many cards in this game, I'm bound to find one that'll match. So that's pretty neat. And let's actually talk about the thing that a lot of people got confused with. So in this patch note release, they talk about changing the way that ladder rank decay works, but they're talking about how it's going to work next season. This season, it's still applied like it normally would. But this new update is going to change the way that it's going to work in the future, just as a heads up. So they say, we've made some changes to how your ladder rank decays between seasons. You will now lose fewer ranks than before after each season, and you'll lose fewer ranks the farther you are from infinite. We want the goal of climbing ranks by making season over season progress to be more achievable, and we want the experience of skipping a season to be less punishing. Check out the chart below. to see how the new rank decay formula works so i'll read this out really quick if you are infinite rank you'll go to rank 75 if you are between rank 90 and 99 you'll go to rank 73 uh then it goes down from there right so 80 to 89 you'll go to 65 70 to 79 you'll go to 63 60 to 69 you'll go to 55 53 to 59 you go to 53 and if you're in ranks 1 to 52, you will have no decay from where you left off previously. And, you know, I like this. As somebody that plays this game a lot, you know, if I'm sitting in, like, the 80s, it sucks getting knocked all the way back to, you know, 20 or 30 ranks. I don't even know off the top of my head. But, like, being able to skip that process entirely and, you know, start in the 60s for me... Or, if I get lucky, in the 70s, that feels pretty good. Like, that gets me a lot of the rewards that I want. I don't have to get through the slog of snapping through a ton of bots. So, like, I'm totally down for that. I know that Infinite players are not going to get the most benefit out of this either, but, hey, you made it to Infinite. You're probably going to be okay. So, yeah, that's all of the main patch highlights that they talk about here. And, you know, it makes sense. This is a slower week, so there's not a ton more to cover. But I guess I'll give you guys a little bit of an update before we go on that Loki deck I was playing. And I have to say, I think... I think I figured it out. I'm not gonna lie. Now, part of the problem is that when I was playing it, I was playing against a lot of discard. Just so much discard. And I'm still playing against a lot of discard. A little less than before. But this deck, I feel like it has potential, man. I'm like, I've never been so passionate about a deck. Like, my previous good cards list was really fun. And I still play that from time to time, but right now it's all Loki, man. I'm like, it's so fun to be able to, to get something out of this card and feel rewarded. Like it's awesome. Right now it's running a 60% win rate. And that's, that's like, that's more than I could ever ask for. So like, I'm, I'm super happy that I was able to, to figure it out. And this is the list that I was telling you guys about where. um you have mockingbird and blob at the top end uh and then you use all the cards in between to sort of get to that loki and get the best value out of things um so like yeah i'm like i'm super stoked i've been having a lot of fun with it and uh it sort of got me over that hump i was feeling during the 80s uh i got to the 90s thanks to that list so like yeah i'm i'm super happy uh with the progress that it's made so Yeah, that's in totality everything that I have this week. Bit of a shorter one, but if there's one thing that you can remember, it's that I'm Infinite. Thanks for listening.
