Get ready to explore the Frontier on BGA

The Frontier format has arrived and is ready to launch on Board Game Arena, and we’ve got a few additional notes to share with it including the official release date for Roots of Corruption on BGA and insight into our plans around balance updates. For the time being, we have one small emergency suspension that we’re putting into action right away. We feel that these changes support the health of the game as we lead up to the release of Roots of Corruption.

As we covered in our most recent Roadmap, we’re working on rebuilding the competitive circuit with rewards as well as resources for tracking competitive decks. That’s going to require some time, but we’re taking a few of those steps today to build momentum. Our plan for this summer is to release new features and events in a few waves to refresh play on BGA both casually and competitively

To start, we’re ready to announce the launch of Frontier format! Frontier is one of the two new formats developed and chosen by players in our recent Call to Community event. This format provides a pool of about 30,000 uniques from all available options (drawing an equal number per faction and with parameters for percentages drawn from each set) for players to add to decks, refreshed with the release of Set 6. The deckbuilder will check against which are currently allowed in play automatically. Standard deckbuilding rules apply otherwise. 

A new filter is available in the uniques filter tab on the Altered Re:Union site to see the uniques currently in rotation. The hunt to find the best uniques begins now!

Frontier will be available to play on Board Game Arena as of July 20, and decks can already be built and tagged for the format on the Altered Re:Union deckbuilder. Get started making the best deck you can to take on these unexplored territories!

When Frontier launches, it will become the chosen mode for Arena going forward rather than NUC.

The Living Legend format, the other chosen winner from the Call to Community event, will be coming along soon to join Frontier. At that time, we’ll release more information about how we’re approaching formats going forward. For the time being, we want to provide notice: We’ll be reducing the number of formats that are actively playable to encourage players to keep wait times shorter for new games. The featured modes will be voted on soon. Regardless of how formats are rearranged, please remember that any format will always be playable in our Sandbox mode. Please give us a little more time here.

We’re just about ready to reveal our plans for organized play going forward from the end of Seeds of Unity. Our goal is to encourage some revitalized gameplay on BGA in the leadup to RoC. We’ll have separate news posts to share about these events, but look for a big tournament to celebrate the end of the Seeds of Unity organized play season in early August, playing the Frontier format.

In mid-August, we’ll be running some prerelease sealed tournaments, with the official Roots of Corruption release on BGA coming August 17.

As a team, we’re still working on developing our approach to seasonal balance updates. Our initial instinct was to maintain the same routine of deploying an update at the start of a new organized play season, and then another at roughly the midpoint of the season. We’ve also discussed more responsive, shorter intervals between balance updates, as our organized play seasons may be longer in length going forward. 

Regardless how that structure develops, we want to be clear about our intention: We want to restrict major actions against any single card to balance updates except in cases where a card becomes too frustrating for players or dominates the meta. We want to make balancing changes feel predictable and in support of the game’s growth rather than reactive and punishing.

We’ll share news with you soon on where we’ve landed there (and we welcome your input and ideas in our Discord, as well). For the time being, we’ve determined that we need to take action on Lyra Festival right now for the health of the game.

Since the game’s release, Lyra Festival has been a mainstay among archetypes, providing another route to a win that catches out an opponent who’s been focusing on advancement. Festival wins have been a powerful option in competitive play, requiring many decks to at least have some direct response to this setup. Most players know the feeling of watching a Festival win materialize as the opponent delays play until removal options are exhausted. Even with responses available, current decks running Festival include too many “After You” options. Having too few interactions possible make Festival decks stronger than they should be and frustrating to play against.

Lyra Festival has come under tighter review multiple times in Altered’s history, though more often the cards related to making it easier to achieve were targeted, such as Counting Sheep. In the time since Re:Union has managed BGA play, Lyra Festival wins have become pervasive in both casual and Arena play, actively discouraging players from experimenting and building different deck archetypes. It has both become too frustrating for players and dominant in the meta, triggering both of our conditions for a quicker response.

For these reasons and the overall health of the current game, we are suspending Lyra Festival in common, rare and out-of-faction. We’ll provide an effective date as soon as we’re able, likely within the next week or so. Decks containing the card will need to replace it in order to be considered legal in play outside of the Sandbox format.

Suspension here doesn’t mean that the card will remain suspended permanently, or even that it will receive an errata. We’ll provide more details on our plans here when we release our next post about balance updates. 

Adding Frontier and Living Legend formats, hosting events and managing game balance are all further steps along our Roadmap, and we’re doing our best to keep reaching new milestones as quickly as possible. As a fully volunteer team, Re:Union’s mission is to preserve the future of Altered’s gameplay, making it accessible and open to as many players as possible. Help us out by sharing your talents and volunteering! Join our Discord to connect with the community and show your support.