Our sincere apologies to anyone who who will be affected by this change, but things are out of our hands as the browser makers have decided that they no longer wish to support Flash.

Steam access to Card Hunter will be unaffected by this change. If you want to keep playing and you don’t have the Steam client, you can easily obtain it here (for free). You can login using any existing Card Hunter accounts and your progress/collection/etc will be unaffected.

In order to prepare for the pending discontinuation of web access, we will no longer be selling any pizza or bundles through the web client as of October 1st 2020. You will still be able to purchase these items through the Steam client using Steam Wallet but direct Paypal purchases (in the web client) will no longer be directly supported.

Once again, we’re very sorry that this change is happening. If you have any concerns or issues with any of this, ask in this thread or contact us via support@cardhunter.com.

Void Bastards ia a return to our roots in first-person shooters (like BioShock and System Shock 2) but it’s got a whole new strategic layer that really shakes things up. We won’t be posting a lot about VB here but you can find out a lot more at voidbastards.com.

You’ll get daily chest rewards just for logging in and the Loot Fairy—who has maybe eaten one too many cakes—will be spreading their loot-enhancing magic across all of Cardhuntria!

The Loot Fairy has been gracing campaign play with their presence for a long time, handing out rare, epic and legendary items. Tracking the Loot Fairy’s location is a fun activity in itself but you don’t need to be on top of it to benefit this weekend as the Fairy will be waving their wand in just about every adventure!

The fun will start at 12am UTC/GMT on Friday the 14th and wrap up three days later. Some local times:

• US (PST): Thursday 13 Sep, 5pm
• US (EST): Thursday 13 Sep, 8pm
• Europe (CST): Friday 14 Sep, 2am
• Australia (AEST): Friday 14 Sep, 10am

We hope you enjoy the festivities as we enter our sixth year!

Card Hunter is four years old! As always, we’re throwing a party in-game, and you’re invited. Once again we’ll be offering free leagues which are your once a year opportunity to acquire the special cat costume prizes. You’ll get daily chest rewards just for logging in and the Loot Fairy—who has maybe eaten one too many cakes—will be spreading their loot-enhancing magic across all of Cardhuntria!

Special promotional leagues will be running all weekend. These leagues will be free to enter and winners will walk off with the hard to collect Kee-Tenh figures. This year all three are available: the cuddly Marroo, the not-so friendly Growler, and the wise Meowquith. The leagues in which you can win them will be Monkey Magic, Lost City Quick Draw, and Triple Duel. Kee-Tenh figures are not available in the costume store and have only ever been offered in our birthday leagues.

The Loot Fairy has been gracing campaign play with their presence for a long time, handing out rare, epic and legendary items. Tracking the Loot Fairy’s location is a fun activity in itself but you don’t need to be on top of it to benefit this weekend as the Fairy will be waving their wand in just about every adventure!

The fun will start at 12am UTC/GMT on Saturday the 16th and wrap up two days later. Some local times:

• US (PST): Friday 15 Sep, 5pm
• US (EST): Friday 15 Sep, 8pm
• Europe (CST): Saturday 16 Sep, 2am
• Australia (AEST): Saturday 16 Sep, 10am

We hope you enjoy the festivities as we enter our fifth year!

On Halloween, the blight began to issue forth from Castle Mitternacht. Now it threatens to consume all of Cardhuntria! The Baron of Shieldhaven entreats you to take action. Travel to the distant reaches of the land, protect the townsfolk, and stop Countess Jovana!

Three new high-level adventures are coming soon. Beginning with “The Spreading Blight,” a free adventure for all players, you’ll embark on a perilous journey through the lands of the late Lord Makhail. Over the course of your adventures, you’ll encounter dastardly new foes and overcome treacherous obstacles… and, of course, find priceless loot!

The new adventures are level 21, and will show up on your campaign map automatically once you’ve beaten any one of these other high-level modules: The Metallic Monstrosity, The Troll Tyrant, or Return to the Caverns of Chaos. Note that these are serious challenges: you’ll need every hit point and power token you can get, especially if you’re planning on completing all the quests for these adventures!

Figure Sale!

In conjunction with the release of this content, we will also be putting all our foil figures on 50% off sale. Deck out your inquisitors for the low price of 80 pizza each!

New Starter Packs

Finally, we are refreshing our starter party shop with the addition of the all-new Inquisition pack! Play as three inquisitors with a variety of silver attacks, bringing werewolves and vampires to their knees! We’ve also redesigned our Veindrinkers pack to include many Castle Mitternacht items. This unholy trio has never been so deadly! Each party includes 3 powerful epic items.

All this great stuff will be available after our new build is released. The deployment is scheduled for Wednesday the 21st of June at 1am GMT (click here for some local times). Things will be back up and running an hour or two after that.

We’ve been previewing and playtesting the Castle Mitternacht set for over a month now and we’re super excited to release it!

The new content brings fun new mechanics like transformations—Form trait cards that turn your character into a powerful creature of the night—silver damage attacks, and fun new toys for acid mages, melee priests, human warriors, elf wizards, and more! With 35 cards and 290 new items, we know the set is going to shake things up!

The new content will go live around midnight GMT on Friday, October 28. You can check the time in different time zones on our forums.

At the same time as we release Castle Mitternacht into the wild, we’ll be launching our annual Halloween festivities.

• Spooky ranked boards!
• Creepy limited release costumes in Cuthbert’s shop!
• A Halloween Shop full of cool trick-or-treat props!
• The five winning items from the Aloyzo’s Arsenal #14 competition will also be in the Halloween Shop!

Halloween content will run through mid November.

This release also includes a new Mauve Manticore (#20) with challenging player-made scenarios. If you beat them, you’ll win two player-made items, including the epic 3-Stage Rocket Boots!

For more information on Castle Mitternacht, including a full visual spoiler of the new cards, check this page.

This expansion contains a LOT of new content: 35 new cards and around 250 new items. You can expect to crazy new card mechanics and items that should really shake up the metagame. Although the name and theme of this set is still under wraps, we can tell you that it features appearances from many new characters and places as well as old favorites like Crazy Sal, Wym, and Dzedd Grimsong.

Let’s get a little more specific. Expedition to the Sky Citadel brought you a ton of new cards and mechanics but missing from that set were any new race or class skills. Not so with this set! We made sure to cover every item slot this time around, and skill items actually got a little bonus love.

First let’s talk about racial skills.

Humans get Vanguard, a duration 2 trait capable of small, but significant, marginal bonuses to your party’s position. Vanguard comes on our new “Positioning” skill line, which ranges from Bossy Positioning—pairing Vanguard with Attack, Soldier!—to Savant Positioning, which adds Vanguard to an unprecedented double Forward Thinking. Of course, the advent of a bronze trait for humans means there’ll be some better tokenless human skills coming to the mix to compete with the likes of Raging Battler and Cautious Mobility.

Dwarves don’t get any new traits—they maxed out their trait luck already with Blind Rage and Immovable—but they get a new armor card that’s almost as good at preventing damage as Reliable Mail… and that’s not even looking at its special effect! Dwarven Resilience is in full force, a variant on Arrogant Armor that kicks in whenever your character takes damage… purging both them AND their attacker!

Elves are known for being nimble, and now they’re nimble like never before. Fleet almost makes their racial move card, Dash, into a Fly—they won’t get over rivers with it, but they can skirt enemies, jump over caltrops, and more, all while moving quite fast. In fact, they move so fast that area-of-effect attacks and harmful terrain deal them less damage. Elven Rapidity skill items combine Fleet with other Elven staples like Pathfinding and Elven Maneuvers.

Elves actually get a second new trait, but we’re not going to reveal it quite yet, because it ties more directly into the set’s theme. Here’s a teaser:

=D

What in Cardhuntria could be this be?

Now let’s talk about class skills!

There are six new trait cards for class skills in this set, two per class. One each per class is tied to the main theme of the set, and we’re going to keep them under wraps for now. But below you can see the other three traits!

Each is designed as a way to give the class something new to do, and as a more incidental benefit rather than a deck-defining thing. Wind Dancer helps step attack warriors put up some mediocre defenses (it’s also quite nice with Leadership!); Blight makes melee priests pack a little extra punch; and Acid Leak… wait, what does Acid Leak do? Is it really just a random effect that will probably never help you?

Stay tuned for more acid shenanigans. =)

That’s it for now, but expect more spoilers soon. We’re currently working on finishing up our item art and fixing a few bugs, and then we’re planning to get everything thoroughly playtested (details forthcoming).

Card Hunter is three years old! We’re throwing a party in-game, and you’re invited. Celebrations will include free leagues with special cat costume prizes and daily log-in chests. Additionally, the Loot Fairy—who has maybe eaten one too many cakes—will be spreading their loot-enhancing magic across all of Cardhuntria!

Special promotional leagues will be running all weekend. These leagues will be free to enter and winners will walk off with the hard to collect Kee-Tenh figures. For the first time this year all three are available: the cuddly Marroo, the not-so friendly Growler, and the wise Meowquith. The leagues in which you can win them will be Monkey Magic, Lost City Quick Draw, and Triple Duel. Kee-Tenh figures are not available in the costume store and have only ever been offered in our birthday leagues.

Quick Draw is a great way to try out multiplayer even if you’re not an expert as everyone drafts their cards for each match. You can be competitive without having an item collection or knowing what’s going on in the multiplayer meta-game.

The Loot Fairy has been gracing campaign play with their presence for a long time, handing out rare, epic and legendary items. Tracking the Loot Fairy’s location is a fun activity in itself but you don’t need to be on top of it to benefit this weekend as the Fairy will be waving their wand in just about every adventure!

The fun will start at 12am UTC/GMT on Friday the 16th and wrap up three days later. Some local times:

• US (PST): Thursday 16 Sep, 5pm
• US (EST): Thursday 15 Sep, 8pm
• Europe (CST): Friday 16 Sep, 2am
• Australia (AEST): Friday 16 Sep, 10am

From all of us at Blue Manchu, we’re really grateful to our players, and we hope you enjoy the festivities as we enter our fourth year!

Summer Balance Changes

Before I get into the meat here, I should clarify our goal. The goal is to deal with problems. What qualifies as a problem? Cards or whole strategies that are huge outliers in terms of power or how unfun they are to play against, for instance, or item slots for which all players use only one or two different items. We are not trying to rationalize the ratio of quality to power for every card. We are not trying to create a flat power curve. We could fine-tune endlessly, but that’s not the point. There are a lot of items in Card Hunter that aren’t competitive and we aren’t trying to change that today.

We’re always very careful when nerfing cards or items and will do this only when we don’t feel we have other options for dealing with a serious metagame problem. The following changes have been made based on a combination of data analysis and attention to user feedback.

Telekinesis has been one of the least fun cards for our players to play against—on certain boards. Unfortunately, its ability to put characters on the other sides of walls translated into a real design constraint for us when we’re making boards for ranked play. With Fly instead of Teleport, this card retains most of its fun and power—you can still move characters over water, enemies, etc.—while losing the aspect that made it obnoxious (and undervalued!).

Elven Maneuvers was designed at a time when elves were much worse than other races, in part due to dwarves’ ability to fly halfway across the map with a single Nimble Strike. The environment has shifted many times since then, and it’s become hard to justify this card’s power level. While reducing both the duration and the search depth may seem like a hefty nerf, the new version of this card is still both A) quite powerful in the right deck, and B) undervalued for a bronze card. We expect these changes to make Elven Maneuvers less oppressive to face while also making it possible for us to introduce Elf Skill items in the future that are playable without needing to meet an impossible bar.

While we’re talking about skill items, the Arcane Skill slot has been extremely unhealthy as a result of Electroporter Novice, the only tokenless 3-trait item in the game. We are replacing that item’s Spark Generator with a Powerful Spark. Electroporter Novice remains a level 8, tokenless item.

   

Parry and Defender’s Block are known to be best in class, and our data reflects this with very few shields seeing play besides Parrying Buckler and Aegis of the Defender. Buffing these three blocks—reducing the required roll across the board, in addition to making Shield Block draw on any block—will edge more shields toward playability.

   

The difference in movement between Dash and Sprint has always been greater than allowed by the logic of our quality system. We’re nerfing Sprint and Sprint, Team! to make these cards less splashy. The reduction in Sprint, Team!’s ability to corner characters early will improve interactivity. Muscle Through is getting a small buff to justify its quality and diversify playable Boots. (Yeah, this makes Scamper look even worse. Too bad for Scamper.)

We’ve all heard our share of complaints about builds built around Volcano. Accelerate Time isn’t a constant feature of these builds, but making it require some vestige of positional play will improve interactivity and give more builds counterplay options.

 

“Burfft”—builds mixing damage buffs with area-of-effect Burst Attacks—has been a particular scourge in the game recently. Our data showed that using more Searing Pains and Skulls of Savage Iljin was the biggest factor in improving your rating past 1400, by a wiiiide margin. Obviously, this is problematic because it not only reflects imbalance producing monoculture, but burfft isn’t even usually fun to play against: because of how these attacks go around corners, it’s incredibly tricky to “play around” burfft. We discussed this issue at length internally, and paid close attention to both game data and player feedback. In this balance pass, we are only changing two cards. Savage Curse‘s damage addition to magic attacks is getting halved here (worth noting it’s still TWICE the effect of other paper quality damage buffs). Flash Of Agony can have devastating damage output, and is relatively easy to position for optimal effect; making it self-damage will be a small nerf that increases players’ need to think about how and when to play it. We know these two changes won’t solve the problem outright, but they should ameliorate the situation while we work on a more thorough solution (keep reading!).

 
 

Finally, some more buffs =)

We’re bringing up the minimum damage on these emerald quality rare laser attacks to better justify their quality and provide more interesting Staff choices. For the mystical hides, we really wanted them to be more reliable. When you equip them, you’re including them as counters, so they should function as counters. With a 2+ roll for their secondary triggers, you’ll now be able to count on them to serve their purpose more often than not.

That’s all?

The above changes don’t address every known issue with our competitive environment, but they will begin to deal with many of the worst problems. They aren’t all we’re doing, though! Blue Manchu is pleased to announce that we are already working on a new set of cards and items, which are being designed around the twin goals of giving players more fun toys AND addressing remaining issues in the environment. We can’t say more right now, but this work is already underway and we’re very excited!

Playtest Info

The above changes are all implemented on our test server and you can check them out today! If you haven’t used the test server before, read this guide to get started.

The test server will remain open for testing for a couple weeks at minimum. During this time, we will be collecting feedback.

How to Give Feedback: start a conversation with Flaxative on the forums. You can discuss the changes with other players in the Summer Balance forum thread.

Nature of Desired Feedback: we are not looking for snap judgments of these changes, nor any considered opinions from the armchair as it were. We want feedback from players who are testing these changes. Feel free to discuss your feelings about the changes with other players, but when submitting feedback to Flaxative please only do so on the merits of competitive games you’ve played on the test server.

Rewards for Testing: When you send Flaxative feedback, include your in-game username. Every playtester will receive 80 pizza, enough to buy a costume from Cuthbert’s. Additional prizes may be distributed at Blue Manchu’s discretion to players who identify serious issues or otherwise contribute materially to the success of these balance changes.

Thank you for reading. Now go get your feet wet on the test server and let us know how it goes!

Update: Bonus Changes!

During testing, we added the following two changes:
• Raging Battler: Replace Reliable Mail with Toughened Hide Strips.
• Apprentice Ferocity: Replace Desperate Block with Unreliable Block.

We’ve been teasing you about our “AI” expansion for the past couple months, and it’s finally here. Blue Manchu and Penny Arcade have teamed up to bring you six new adventures based on the Acquisitions Incorporated role-playing sessions. In these adventures you’ll control Omin Dran, Binwin Bronzebottom, and Jim Darkmagic as they quest for profit in Cardhuntria. Interview potential interns, shop for cemetery ornaments, and save the day at a deliciously dangerous wedding in a series of battles that introduce completely new gameplay mechanics to Card Hunter. Get acquiring now!

Acquisitions Inc.

Omin, CEO of Acquisitions Inc., is a half-elf cleric whose singular obsession is corporate dominance. Binwin, the dwarf berserker who moonlights as an ale brewer, specializes in cracking skulls. And Jim, ever the narcissistic troublemaker, is a human wizard who’s often more magician than mage. This trio has expanded their franchise into Cardhuntria and quickly run into finance troubles. Will their new office make it into the black?

Acquisitions Inc. is a series of fantasy role-playing sessions played by the creators of Penny Arcade that has been entertaining audiences at PAX since 2008. Our new expansion is full of the zany antics fans have come to expect. If you are unfamiliar with Acquisitions Inc., you can catch up on their adventures here: https://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/acq.-inc

New Adventures

Acquisitions Inc. expands the Card Hunter campaign with three treasure hunts and three bonus adventures to challenge players. The new treasure hunts are revealed when you successfully raid the Viscous Tombs (level 10) or defeat the Goblins in the Woods (level 11). Alternatively, they will reveal immediately if you purchase the new AI bundle — which includes all six adventures, three new figures, and a month’s membership in the Card Hunter Club, all for the low price of $5.99.

• Preconstructed Treasure Hunts: The main storyline of the expansion takes place over three treasure hunts in which you control Omin, Binwin, and Jim using prebuilt decks. Being treasure hunts these adventures each provide an epic item reward upon completion. Because these adventures use preconstructed decks, you can play them regardless of what stage of the campaign you are at.

• Hard Mode Challenges: Beating each of the main adventures unlocks a special “hard mode” challenge adventure in which you play through the same battles using your own party. Some of these battles include harder monsters, so beware. These challenge adventures guarantee a rare item on each completion and also include five quests each to baffle skilled players. Hard mode challenge adventures are pitched at level 12.

• Caverns of Chaos: With the arrival of Acquisitions Inc. in Cardhuntria, the Caverns of Chaos will now include traps, denizens of the Negative Energy Plane, animated food, and more! Also, rumor has it that Omin, Binwin, and Jim might randomly show up in the caverns… These changes to the Caverns of Chaos affect all players, whether or not they buy the new adventures.

If you don’t feel like purchasing the Acquisitions Inc. bundle, you can purchase the new treasure hunts individually with pizza. And, of course, you’ll be able to access the corresponding hard mode challenge adventure for each treasure hunt you’ve purchased.

New Items

There are 16 new items in this expansion — one for almost every item slot. As with all our expansions, the new items can drop in any chest you open regardless of whether you’ve purchased the new adventures or the bundle. The new item set gives players access to powerful new effects like Uncanny Dodge, Delegate, or Double Axe to the Face. Here’s a preview:

Multiplayer

Four new ranked boards are rotating in as part of the expansion. These boards either necessitate or reward emphasizing movement in your deckbuilding. Good luck mastering these new battlefields!

We’re also introducing four new leagues: Office Mixup, Smash the Jar, Musical Chairs, and Filing Fracas Quick Draw.

Player-Created Content

We’re not missing a beat this month with Mauve Manticore #15 and Aloyzo’s Arsenal #8 coming out in tandem with the expansion. This month’s Mauve Manticore is a bit trickier than the last several, but we trust you’ll find it a worthwhile challenge as it guarantees TWO epic drops on completion — Magic Elves’s Pressing Problems and Adunien’s Mad Centaur Spear. We are always on the lookout for great adventure and item submissions from our fans, so send something in today!

Mauve Manticore Submission Thread

 
      Aloyzo’s Arsenal Discussion Thread