Basic Trope: New content gets added to a game, and it is more powerful than pre-existing content.
- Straight: In Heroes of Troperia's newest extension Empire of Evulz, the newly-introduced Bobh the Beast is a card that has the same stats as the pre-existing Alyss the Abomination, but attacks harder and costs less.
- Exaggerated:
- Then comes the even stronger Charll the Cruel, which itself gets powercreeped by Da'mhian the Defiler, and so on.
- Alyss is a bottom-tier Joke Character, Bobh is a Game-Breaker that singlehandedly wins games.
- Downplayed: Alyss was known among the community for being so weak, it's useless. The buffs Bobh has in comparison merely allow it to be Not Completely Useless, but it is still considered bad.
- Justified: Alyss was originally designed by the creatores of Heroes of Troperia to be the centerpiece of a kind of decks that never really took off. Bobh was introduced to make it more viable.
- Inverted: Empire of Evulz retires Alyss as a card for being too powerful, and introduces the weaker Bobh as a replacement.
- Subverted:
- In the following expansion Journey to Ruritania, Bobh get nerfed to Alyss' power level.
- Conversely, it's Alyss which gets buffed to Bobh's level.
- Double Subverted: These balance changes fail to close the gap between Alyss' and Bobh's power level.
- Parodied: The expansion that introduces Bobh and others is called Greed of the Developers.
- Zig Zagged: Bobh is stronger than Alyss in a vacuum, however another card introduced with it in the extension only works with lower attack cards, which means Alyss actually becomes more useable than Bobh. However, the expansion following it introduces Charll, which is stronger than both, but it gets nerfed quickly.
- Averted: Compared to Alyss, Bobh is stronger on some points, but weaker on others. There is no clear stronger card between the two.
- Enforced: The developers made Bobh stronger on purpose so that people have to buy Empire of Evulz if they want to keep their ranks.
- Lampshaded: In the story accompanying the game, Alyss gets frustrated at Bobh for being The Ace.
- Invoked: "Maybe if we make the cards in Empire of Evulz a bit stronger, it will encourage the players to buy them more?"
- Exploited: New players, having studied the meta before committing to the game, start buying packs from Empire of Evulz before the ones from the base game, as they tend to be stronger.
- Defied: The developers extensively playtest Empire of Evulz to make sure the new cards are on the same power level as those before.
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: "New expansion? Ugh, I'll bet they'll make the cards even stronger this time."
- Implied: Bobh's stats are not shown on screen, we just see Alex, a known fan of Heroes of Troperia repeatedly compare it to Alyss in disbelief.
- Deconstructed: Repeated power creeps end up creating a severe paywall for newer players, and veterans are slowly driven off by the lacking balance.
- Reconstructed: The developers introduce a new game mode where power creep doesn't matter as much and Win Back the Crowd as a result.
- Played for Laughs: The reason Bobh is so strong? The developers' cat stepped on the keyboard while they weren't looking and added a bunch of zeroes to Bobh's attack power. Subsequent playtesting somehow never caught that.
- Played for Drama: Heroes of Troperia's parent company is in a financial rough spot, and they need to boost their sales one way or another, even if they have no choice but to antagonize their player base.
- Plotted A Good Waste: The developers want to make a point at how common this trope is among the Collectible Card Game genre.
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