Summary
I don’t think anyone was expecting this: after just six weeks of spreading terror across the Inklands, Ravensburger has decided to nerfBucky, Squirrel Squeak TutorDespite launching in Rise of the Floodborn, Bucky is the centerpiece of a highly-oppressive discard deck that has gained popularity since the launch of Ursula’s Return in May thanks to its synergy with new, low-cost Floodborn characters.
To fix the problem, Ravensburger has decided to increase Bucky’s cost, remove his Ward keyword, and change his ability to only trigger when you play a Floodborn character using Shift. This is the most extreme errata we’ve seen inLorcanaso far, and the first time a card’s text has been altered for the sake of power balance. Not only is this a first for Lorcana,but this also isn’t something trading card games typically do at all.
With so many cards added to the pool so frequently, overpowered cards and unintended interactions are inevitable in any card game. Whenever this happens in games likeMagic: The GatheringandPokemon, the developers will often decide to ban the card outright, making it illegal for competitive play. Magic’s ban list is ever-growing across all of its various formats, and while it’s less common for The Pokemon Company to ban cards (there are only 24 on the Expanded list and none in Standard currently), it has banned cards from Standard as recently as 2020.
Bucky’s Errata Seemed To Set A Wild Precedent For Lorcana
Both companies have errata’d cards that were either too strong or not strong enough before, but it’s rare. A lot of the iconic Pokemon items that have been part of the game since the very beginning have needed updates to bring them up to a competitive standard over the years.Magic famously changed the Companion mechanic shortly after its debut in 2020, and required you to pay a three-mana cost to move them from the sideboard to your hand before playing it, instead of being able to cast it from outside the game outright.
What Ravensburger is doing with Bucky is something you never really see outside of digital card games. Hearthstone is notorious for routinely changing card costs, keywords, and abilities, sometimes multiple times on the same card, as a way to balance and, sometimes, just to shake up the meta when it gets stale. But for obvious reasons, you can’t just change a physical card the way you can a digital one, so while most Lorcana players are happy to see the Bucky go away, the method chosen here has proven to be controversial.
It’s a strange approach. Taking away Bucky’s Ward or changing his ability to only trigger off of Shift likely would have been enough to bring him in line, but by changing both,andincreasing his cost by one, Ravensburger has seemingly made the card unplayable, effectively banning it without banning it. It makes sense to be heavy-handed here. You can’t make incremental changes in Lorcana the way you can in Hearthstone, and one errata is an unfortunate situation, multiple errata on the same card would be a disaster.
Still, why make the card unplayable, and potentially risk confusing new players, when a ban would be so much simpler? More importantly, is this indicative of what Ravensburger’s approach to balance problems will be in the future?
Here’s Why Bucky Was Given Such A Big Nerf
I started writing this to weigh the pros and cons of errata, but further clarification fromLorcana’s community and engagement manager Richelle Brady on Wednesday evening cleared up most of the confusion. Brady says the Bucky nerf is a special case because Ravensburger is planning support for additional languages and wants future players to have a “fully playable experience”, rather than having one less card in Emerald. Brady also explains that Ravensburger is willing to ban cards in the future if necessary, and that that strategy is preferable to this kind of drastic errata.
Reading between the lines a bit, it seems like the issue is that Ravensburger plans on printing Rise of the Floodborn in other languages sooner rather than later, and given the choice between reworking the card and shipping the set with 203/204 cards, it chose the former. This is an important context that should help alleviate concerns about this strange errata.
Magic: The Gathering had a similar situation with the recent release of Modern Horizons 3 including the recently banned-in-Modern card Fury. However, Magic’s multiple formats meant it was still playable elsewhere, so it wasn’t as dead a card as Bucky would be.
Does this nerf go too far? It’s too soon to tell. While a three-cost Ward-less Bucky that triggers when you Shift a character into play is pretty much unplayable in the current format thanks to a plethora of new cards that target low-strength characters (Sisu, Daring Visitor; Brawl, Madame Medusa) we don’t know what Shimmering Skies will bring that could make this new Bucky relevant.
Making this decision so quickly could indicate that the discard archetype is getting even more powerful tools in the next set that would have made Bucky even more oppressive. The squirrel might be dead for now, but there’s no way to know whether this nerf was too much until we see the next set, i.e., when the nerf actually goes into effect.
I applaud Ravensburger for taking immediate action to address an issue. While it performed well this set, taking the top win at DLC Chicago last month and over-performing at cash events all over, the real issue isn’t how good it is, but how miserable it is to play against. That’s what Ravensburger identified as the reason for the nerf, and I’m happy to see that the studio is weighing both win rates and player sentiment when it makes these big decisions. Whether you agree with the errata or would have preferred a full-blown ban, it’s just good that the reign of the squirrel is ending.
