Good morning, to our 8,189 backers! Thank you again for helping us to reach such a wonderful number and bring us that much closer to our next achievement. Today, we bring you something a little different than everything we’ve done so far. You’ve gotten different card types. You’ve gotten Spirits, individual cards of various kinds, but nothing about Aspects! Those of you wondering about all the Aspects mentioned on the main page of the campaign — get excited! We’ve got three of them here for you, all Spirits from the core Spirit Island game, each one with a write-up from different members of the dev team! Let’s hear what they have to say about the Aspects for Ocean’s Hungry Grasp, River Surges in Sunlight, and Thunderspeaker (but with a few tasteful redactions to the cards, so as to not spoil everything).

Most of the time, we expect Spirits to be the most exciting parts of expansions. Aspects are nice, and offer some much-needed play variety, but it’s rare for an Aspect to be so splashy and novel that people will get excited about an expansion just for that Aspect. Deeps is a notable exception: from the first time we saw this Aspect, we knew it would be extremely exciting, and that we needed to get started with iterating on it immediately, since it was so radically different from what’s currently in the game. The core concept of Deeps was that, instead of drowning individual Invaders with its Innate, this aspect of Ocean would drown whole lands, gradually eroding them over time before collapsing them into the sea. If you got far enough into the game, you could sink a whole board, or even more. In return it was a little harder to deal with Invaders quickly popping up on the coast, since sinking a whole land takes time.  

Initially, that was all the Aspect did: you put down Deeps tokens, and any land with 3 or more Deeps tokens Drowned everything. The issue with this was that it was both too slow and too powerful: the first few turns, your Innate did nothing, but after that you had a huge spike in power that let you wipe out even the most entrenched lands. We experimented with a bunch of different ways to curb this, with Deeps tokens giving permanent Defends or Isolates, but ultimately settled on splitting the Innate into two different powers, one of which added Deeps, and one of which capitalized on Deeps (sometimes in ways other than just sinking the whole land). And at the same time, we made it replace both Innate Powers, to let us make the land-sinking more powerful and frequent. 

All-in-all, Deeps is a very different take on Ocean that’s a blast to play. If you’ve ever wanted to build your own Cast Down Into the Briny Deep, Deeps is the Aspect for you. 

When we make Spirits, we try to avoid giving them a hand of Unique Powers that is laser-focused on their core strategy. Unique Powers that aren’t perfect mechanical matches have a few benefits. From a theme perspective, they let us show off a different side of the Spirit. From a gameplay perspective, they serve as a bit of a break from performing the main strategy with every single action. And from a design perspective, they let us make Aspects that shine a spotlight on that card as part of a new core strategy.

So what if River’s Bounty were the most important card in River’s hand?

Haven presents a side of River Surges in Sunlight that is focused on protecting Dahan. Every version of this Aspect had some way to move Dahan and Defend multiple lands, most of them were way too strong. We tied the focus to a single haven each turn, with limited ability to protect other lands, and that brought strength down to a reasonable level.

Between Energy track scaling and low thresholds, this Aspect also gives River a lot more options for how to grow off its Presence tracks. Focusing on Energy lets River play a Major Power every turn and strengthens the haven, but you’ll usually only hit one or maybe two of the thresholds that require secondary Elements - you have to carefully plan around which one you want that turn. Focusing on Plays, on the other hand, lets you use most or all of the thresholds every turn, but the individual effects will be weaker. Which strategy suits Haven better will change from Adversary to Adversary, and sometimes even from turn to turn!

When it became clear that Incarna Spirits were a big part of this expansion, we decided to include Incarna aspects. Incarna is the kind of mechanic that could come back in the future, but definitely won’t be in every expansion. So we wanted to take advantage of that opportunity.

We reviewed each of the 24 published spirits (obviously excluding Horizons of Spirit Island) to decide which ones would be most likely to have an Incarna, thematically speaking. And Thunderspeaker was at the top of that list. Thunderspeaker literally manifests in a form that looks similar to individual people it has fought alongside or worked closely with in the past. The original idea was to mix up the standard Thunderspeaker gameplan of steamrolling invaders with a huge stack of Dahan and presence via Manifestation of Power and Glory. Instead, the Warrior aspect for Thunderspeaker focuses on the Incarna itself and powers up the Dahan in its land with quick tactical damage strikes.

There’s a lot going on here. First, because the focus is on the Warrior Incarna, this version of Thunderspeaker no longer gets the Unique Power card Manifestation of Power and Glory. Instead, it starts with the Call to Bloodshed minor power. Most importantly, it gets to deal 1 Damage each time it moves Dahan into its Incarna’s land. And this includes when using Ally of the Dahan to have a moving Dahan bring Thunderspeaker’s Incarna along with it. This means the Warrior provides a lot of broad tactical offense, as Thunderspeaker has multiple ways to move Dahan every turn.

To help you really lean into this, we gave an additional Dahan push every turn. That’s a lot of strength in this aspect, even when accounting for losing Manifestation of Power and Glory. So to compensate, the Aspect thematically has a bargain-like effect where the spirit has -1 energy and -1 card play per turn, meaning it technically starts at 0 Energy and 0 card plays. Viewed another way, you can think of the Energy and card play loss like this: every turn you get to play a 1 cost Minor Power that Pushes one Dahan.

If you enjoy Thunderspeaker but wish its early game was even more aggressive like Sharp Fangs Behind the Leaves or Heart of the Wildfire, this is the Aspect for you.

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Thank you again, dev team, for your amazing work on this game and this update on Aspects! There are even more Aspects for both core game Spirits AND expansion Spirits, but we’ll get into those another day. To make today even more special, we bring to you not one but two bonus cards for the day.

We knew for Nature Incarnate that we wanted to retire exactly one Power Card, Growth Through Sacrifice, and print a replacement Minor. Eric designed this Minor Power with the same elements, cost, and speed, but totally different effects:

Eric also wanted to include a Major Power as an homage to Growth Through Sacrifice, with the same concept of destroying Presence to get a benefit. This turned into Transformative Sacrifice:

This Power lets a Spirit Destroy 3 of their Presence to grab and play the top 3 cards of the Minor Power Deck for free (as well as keeping the Powers). The threshold gives a fourth free Power in “exchange” for removing a Presence from their tracks, which strengthens the Spirit. Now everyone can pretend they’re Grinning Trickster!

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There you have it for today! We’ll see you on our next update on the spookiest day of the year for another spirit reveal! Bye for now!