Shattered Empire:
... In With The New (Part 2)

Hello, all, and welcome to the second, Fate focused, exploration of some of the new things you'll be seeing in Shattered Empire.

First, we'll take a look at some of the Follower replacements you will expect to see. Followers, in particular, were a section where there was a lot of 'draft chaff', though ultimately we didn't hack and slash through it as much as we could have. We also included some minor 'glow ups' of other cards.

Similarly, items were another area where there were multiple opportunities to see something new put into the place of subpar 'common' options. We've already addressed the replacement of the problematic Bo of Ritual Blessings. We also opted for a 'glow up' here as well.

It's no secret that Spells and Shugenja have been a dominant force in much of Onyx Edition, so when it was time to take a look at Spells, several of them we felt were undercosted for their actions, or were simply too strong. We've already addressed the change to Call the Inferno elsewhere, but it was only the most egregious of the offenders. In addition, we went through and made some replacements as well.

Ultimately, we opted to leave Rings alone. which leaves Strategies, where we saw tons of room for improvement. Cutting problematic Strategies was something we aimed for, as well as trimming out some more select 'draft chaff' or otherwise underperforming cards, in favor of reprints that either helped address existing or emerging issues, replaced cards involved in potentially degenerate combos or decks that we've been internally testing, or that support new deck concepts. We also created some new ones as well, of course.

One of the things done way back in the development cycle of Onyx in 2015 was to give each clan a 'Clan Strategy', a long tradition in the CCG. These Onyx Edition cards were meant to highlight the playstyles and strengths of each Clan. When designing Shattered Empire, we examined each of these, and ultimately decided to replace these with new "Way of" Edicts for each of the Clans, including of course the then-absent Mantis.

In terms of Sensei, Some were cut to make way for other cards, and others were MRPed or adjusted slightly or significantly to address issues of over or underperformance, or to simply take into account things that simply weren't conceptualized way back in 2015. Others were tweaked to address storyline changes that have occured since the Onyx base set.

While these aren't all the changes you'll see among the Fate side of Shattered Empire, we hope it gives you a good idea of some of the areas we were looking to address, and we hope it gets you genuinely excited for the shifts to the metagame environment these changes are sure to bring.

Thank you all again for your continued support, and we hope you look forward to the completed Shattered Empire set to release later this month!