First of all, we would like to thank you for playing and supporting "Force of Will" all these while.
Today, we would like to make an important announcement to all players who are enjoying our products.
Until now, we have been releasing four products in one cluster as one series throughout the year, but for Duel Cluster, its last product for the series will be D3, which will be released in May 2022.
Moving forward, we will be designing separate clusters for each theme.
For the current Duel Cluster, the theme was resolving around [Revolution Order], and subsequently we plan to release the first new cluster with a new theme starting with the products that will be releasing in August 2022.
For these new clusters, the plan is to release an average of two to three sets per cluster. We believe that this will provide players with more unique rulers and cards.
Till date, we have designed an average of about 15 new rulers per cluster. However, designing a large number of rulers within the same cluster makes it difficult to give them unique characteristics, and since the cards that synergize with them are spread out among the many rulers, there are fewer support cards for each ruler.
As far as possible, we try to design rulers that are unique and favourable, so that players can enjoy playing their favorite rulers for a long time.
However, due to the high number of rulers within the same cluster, we will inevitably have some differences in balance and some rulers that are relatively similar to one another. Also, when designing the support cards required for them, the number of support cards per ruler will inevitably be spreaded out and in lesser quantities.
For this reason, we have decided to increase the number of themes we offer throughout the year in order to produce many fresh and unique rulers, and hence the reduction in the number of sets per cluster.
Rest assured, of course, that there will be no changes to the rulers or the types of cards per set, and they will maintain just as they always have been!
Also, we will continue to release new sets every three months as before.
Due to changes in cluster specifications, we have decided to discontinue the "New Frontier" format and will be removing it from the regulations.
After the August 2022 product release, there will only be the "Wanderer" format, the "Origin" format and the "Limited" format which includes "Sealed" and "Draft".
Also, after the release of the new products in August 2022, the regulations for all competitive tournaments such as GPs, including store tournaments, will be unified to the "Wanderer" format.
We were very troubled by this change, and of course we can understand your concerns about this change. There are a few reasons for this.
The current "New Frontier" regulations have been maintained to make it easier for new players to play even if they don't have the cards from the past.
This format was a playable environment with about 1,200 different cards over the past two years, but it had a few problems.
The first is the type of rulers and the support cards that compliment each of them. As we mentioned earlier in the section on "The Change of Cluster Concept", when designing support cards for a large number of rulers, it is difficult for us to design additional support cards in the next new set. As a result, players tend to enjoy the Wanderer format, which allows for more card selection, since support cards are not easily available to their favourable rulers.
Fewer support cards means fewer combinations that have synergy. This makes for fewer choices to play and fewer changes. We believe that the fewer options during game play is a major factor that reduces the enjoyment of the game.
The other thing is that we started focusing on the Wanderer format back in the summer of 2021. We knew that there were a certain number of players who liked to play this format, and now, every time we release a new product, we update the banned list to provide a healthy environment to play the game for players. In addition, due to the wide variety of cards, we believe that players can build decks featuring the same theme in both past and recent clusters, giving them a wide range of options to play the game.
This has also made it easier to feature popular themes from the past in new clusters.
We will continue to update the banned list once every three months as new products are being released.
Due to changes in the official website, it is currently not possible to search for cards from the past, but rest assured that we are also preparing an official card database for August 2022.
With the change in regulations, we are planning different products apart from the usual booster packs so that new players will not have difficulty getting cards from previous clusters.
After August 2022, we plan to release a set of products that will allow players to obtain past Rulers, as well as more PR cards of popular cards in Wanderer, and booster packs that feature not only new themes but also popular Rulers from the past.
