Last few weeks I was busy with rebalancing my prototype. I did few major changes to my card and level design to make the game more engaging. Here are the issues I wanted to solve:

1. Early stage of the game was not challenging enough.
   I addressed that by reworking first six levels. I also improved level generation and tweaked number of turns for each level. I also changed level completion logic. Previously player had to complete entire level. Now 75% is enough to pass through. This gives me the extra margin in terms of difficulty. Level can be easy to complete, but hard to max out. I also introduced 3-star system which grants extra rewards for better players.
   
   
      
2. Existing cards were not generating interesting enough choices.
   I tweaked the starting mana pool and cards costs. I have now more possibilities regarding cards modifiers. For example reducing cards' cost from 2 to 1 mana feels totally different than reducing it from 4 to 3. I have better granularity in terms of card cost vs value.
   
   
      
3. Existing cards categories (pattern, random, bomber, swift) were to rigid. It was hard to create interesting synergies within specific category or cross-category. I also think they were not intuitive. I thought it will be cool to introduce something different than standard magic elements. However after the play tests I think it was bad idea.
   I fixed it by introducing well known categories: air, earth, fire, water. They are more flexible - can group various card types that play different roles in a deck. All players are familiar with these - no new mental model. Moreover it should be easier to introduce various spells to the game. It will be pretty obvious what Chain Lightning or Firewall cards do.
   
   
      
4. Based on points 2 & 3 I also reworked the starting deck. I think it's pretty solid right now. Basically I hope that with this version Players will experience much better flow:
   1. First they will have to figure out how to use cards in proper order - to maximise cards synergies and connected bonuses.
   2. Standard draft contains 4 cards of average cost of 4. Staring mana is 12, so Players will be challenged to figure out how to reduce cards costs or increase the max mana, so they can utilise all 4 cards.
   3. Using all cards every turn is not enough on later levels, so Players will have to find a way to use more cards or more powerful cards (compared to standard pattern-based ones).
   4. Another issue that comes with new levels and some card categories are the leftovers - fields on the grid that cannot be filled by any pattern card. This leads to an interesting problem - cards that we relay on in early stage of the level become useless at the end. On the other hand more random (e.g. Fire) cards are pretty cumbersome at the beginning (ruining our perfect order), but are very precious at the final stage of the level. I've introduced bunch of cards that help to mitigate this problem. I'm also expecting some exploits from super clever guys in this area :D