My god! anytime there's a change must there also be a collective "WAAA!" from the community. This is merely another evolution of the game. You guys act like you want it to be exactly as it was when it launched; if nothing ever changed the game would get stale. I think the 15 life will be interesting and promote more life gap play, which will lead to new strategies being developed. Granted, it would have been nice to play with just the 15 life before all the new bans since i think some of these won't be as overpowered with the increased life, but I suppose that's why this is a trial.

> During the weeks to come it will no longer be possible to play “semi-evolved” characters in this mode.

So... the strategic use of unevolved cards is now gone? That's BAD.
The best thing to do is prevent cards from evolving in Elo to make the gameplay MORE strategic and
less stressful to the market.

> In addition to this, the starting life points in the ELO room will be set at 15.

IF ANYTHING, this should UNBAN the big damagers in Elo mode.
Why? because they're less rewarding since 2HKOs are more avoidable.

Every time there is an ELO change, everyone complains as if it were the end of the world. Now time for me to explain why this is a GOOD change:

Copper: A 9 powered card with 8 damage. Unless you have SOA, this is a killer. With him gone, SOA is less essential in the game.

Bridget: Playing against any Leader is a huge deficit, no matter who you face. ELO is about playing strategically and pilling correctly on each round, but leaders really can't be played incorrectly. It takes out a small margin of luck by banning her.

Rolph: He's a powerhouse that often got banned. But Wardom(or even Lin Xia) should replace him fine enough.

Rowdy: He got banned very often and he can easily be replaced with Gibson and Qubik anyways.

Lou: Very underrated at first, her 8 damage along with the other 4 damage cards in her clan made it a crapshoot to face. Plus Ojibway is now a fantastic card, being able to effectively deal 11 damage!

Shann: Another card underrated at first, became the scariest card in ELO, especially paired with Chlora or Blaaster. I abused her too, but she needed to go.

Emeth: And yet another powerhouse that once was overlooked. It now leaves room for Ray.

Oshitsune: My favorite card out of the bans. Easily overpowered thanks to its ability to massacre 7-powered cards.

Semi-Evolved bans: I enjoyed using 2* Burt and Deebler, but this was perhaps the best decision out of the bunch. Now time to bring back Wanda to ELO.

Well the Roots might as well go bury themselves. They are more harshly banned than any other clan. GHEIST has the exact same bonus yet nearly twice as many Roots are banned than GHEIST. I may as well give up and sell all my Roots. I could care less about Bridget and the others, but the Roots?? Really?! Another perma bann??! Side note I Love the 15 life. It will make Elo even more about strategy instead of whim. But how about increasing the elo star limit? Heck even 26 would be better. Especially with 15 life, those 2 star are looking pretty weak. Why does UR staff pick on the Roots so much? They're nearly nonexistent in elo while Puranas and GHEIST dominate. Oh, and are there any improvements on the way for the iPhone app? Next month when verizon offers iPhone in the states, there's a potential for an explosion of new players(personally I didn't know the game existed before the app)

(rant continued)


15 Life: We all knew it was coming eventually. But perhaps staff jumped the gun on this one. As the power creep grows, 12 life becomes easier and easier to take down. Now, it makes things a lot more interesting, as well as giving new life to cards such as Ojibway, Lin Xia, and Arawaka. But hopefully, staff doesn't see this as an excuse to make new super-powered cards.

In closing, this is good, but I would be lying if I said this would be an easy adjustment.

I need to read entire message posts. THIS IS ONLY A TEST! Whew! Really had me worried... New banns are cool bit you need to re evaluate the original banns. UR isstill beast.

15 life is too much imo, all the other changes are good, i personally think it would be kinda cool to make this like a theme week kinda deal, like some weeks more life, some extra pillz,

Regarding Semi-Evos:

Why not give an option in the deck builder to click the star count you wish to use for a card? So if I own a maxxed out Vermyn N and add him to my deck, I can click his third star and he would be played as a three star version without leveling up. This would avoid the problem of rich vs poor but allow more flexibility in deck building. I'm going to miss 1-star Unagi or 1-star Denise but neither were grossly abusive.

My thoughts...

A)Love the 15 life thing. Makes it a different environment. And creating seperation between the formats is a great thing.
B)The perma-bans are not shocking, those guys have been consistently banned in ELO by people anyway. This will free up those spaces to make it a bit more interesting. (One thing though, I would suggest that ELO bans consist of a max of 2 people per clan outside of the perm bans. It's frustrating when you see like 19 Rescue people banned in a given week or something akin to that)

C)I'm not a fan with removing the semi-evo folk. I think a completely counter-intuitive yet equally stimulating idea would be to simply not allow characters to evolve while in ELO, so that under-evolved could stay with permanence, thus making it less of a bartering process.

There goes my Chan-Tsubame 2hko strategy. Now it's called Fei-Tsubame.
2* make no sense anymore. Yes, this does make my deck a lot more useless, it killed a lot of the 2hkos, but it has it's upsides. Now all the random odd and even damage in FPC makes sense - Sayura (and Nakata with fury) kills with Kero or Kuei, and Tsubame kills with any 4 damage card - if only there were any good ones other than Rei and Fei. The star count will make building a 2hko deck really hard though. I may have to start using Sigma or Freaks' poison to 2hko with.
I hope this will reduce SoA amounts in elo.