YMMV / Spellstone

• Annoying Video Game Helper: The Raven. He's not so bad in the tutorial, but afterwards his squawking presence is never pleasant to see, since he's usually telling you you're prohibited to take a certain action. After February 2023, the Raven also became associated with the "11 glitch", making him even less welcome in the game proper — though this had the exact opposite effect on his reputation with the fanbase.
• Anti-Climax Boss: The Big Bad of the postgame, Remi the Banished, is built up as an extremely powerful threat who plans to bring back the Void at all costs, with no limit to his pettiness, cunning, and technological skill. Yet as of January 2023, his most recent appearance, he is captured and imprisoned without much fanfare once the Angels sic Midas on him. He doesn't even get a much-anticipated Lightning Boss rematch, nor does he try to escape prison like his lackey Caesar did. If you weren't paying attention to the story, you might not have even realized you beat him at all.
• Anti-Metagame Character: With how powerful and commonly used Hexbolt can be as a strategy (as explained under Game-Breaker below), a useful counter-strategy to it is to use Backlash, which deals damage to an enemy that targets the card with a skill. Faced with multiple Backlash cards, using Hex All or Bolt All will quickly rack up damage against your deck, if not an outright Total Party Kill.
• Enjoy the Story, Skip the Game: A story about a war between Jerkass Gods and a cult worshipping a Forgotten Hero makes for a pretty interesting fantasy tale, particularly once it seems like anyone can be a part of the Crimsonwing conspiracy. Too bad it's wasted on a mediocre Card Battle Game with lots of microtransactions. However, for some players, instead it's the reverse.
• Game-Breaker:
  • The Rogue Seraphim was infamous for this when it was first released. While this card has a delay of 4 (meaning it takes 4 turns to activate), it made up for this with a greater health pool than similarly slow cards (as the max-level Unchained Seraphim, it had 60 HP, which was a lot at the time), and it passively Regenerated 12 HP (later 11, and then 9) every turn. Not bad on its own, but Seraphim has two Counter-Attack skills on top of that: Vengeance, which deals 12 damage (later 10, and then 9) to anything that attacks it directly, and Emberhide, which applies 10 HP's worth of burns (later 8) to anything that attacks it directly. Any card unlucky enough to Dualstrike Seraphim would take 24 damage from Vengeance and another 20 from burns. Note that in Spellstone, Regenerate, Vengeance, and Emberhide are all passive skills, which completely bypasses the speed issue of being a 4-delay card — the only thing Seraphim can't do out of the gate is attack directly. It had an attack stat of 17 (later 15), to boot: more than capable of dishing out serious damage. It's not a Champion^note Champion cards are special cards, sometimes with plot relevance, that are Purposely Overpowered. Because of this, a player can only ever own one copy of a Champion card, no matter what, either, so decks that used nothing but Seraphim were not only commonplace, but enough to ruin pretty much anyone, in or out of BGE. It was still one of the best defensive cards in the game after a much-needed Nerf in early 2022, which later prompted a second nerf along with...
  • 4-delay cards with Emberhide and Backlash (Viofire Deathmoth, Boilfin Punisher, and Blazing Ragecrow) were another oppressive force in the metagame, since they dealt Emberhide damage to Empower decks and Backlash damage to Hexbolt decks. Not only was it difficult to play against them, they're all Premium cards, so the majority of players couldn't use large numbers of them without spending large sums. Thanks to that Emberhide, they could also easily be mixed in with Unchained Seraphim, adding Vengeance damage along with all the burn damage and Backlash for an even more frustrating experience. They still appear from time to time, but they were eventually nerfed in 2023, decreasing their Emberhide damage and base HP to a more reasonable level.
  • Legendary runes, which typically increase the power of one skill by 1.5 times, are incredibly useful, but one takes the cake: the Rune of Greater Health (aka Leg. HP), which increases a card's max HP by 30 percent rounded up. In a game where HP is the One Stat to Rule Them All, the Rune of Greater Health is just about the only Rune you'll ever see used in high-level play, as it can turn otherwise weak cards into bulky defensive titans. About the only downside to using this rune is that 1-delay cards don't have enough HP to get the full mileage out of it... but you can easily alleviate this by giving these Fragile Speedsters the +10 HP runes from Dungeons. It's a godsend on pretty much everything else, and is best used on the most overpowered Champions to really milk them for all they're worth. To alleviate this, Legendary runes other than Greater Health got a Balance Buff in 2023, adding a 15 percent maximum HP increase on top of improving skills.
  • Cards that can apply Hex, the game's Damage-Increasing Debuff. This applies to direct attacks and offensive skills like Bolt and Frostbreath. As a result, a common strategy for skilled players is "Hexbolt": setting up for big damage with cards that can Hex everything on the field, then spamming Hex-boosted Bolts and Frostbreaths until all the opponent's cards are destroyed.
  • Freeze is one of the strongest skills in the game. Unless your card has Invisibility left, Freeze will render it completely unusable for a turn, allowing your opponent to gain a tempo advantage over you. While this skill is normally balanced out by a cooldown of 2 or 3 turns, there are a few Champions that can use this skill every other turn, making them incredibly frightening to deal with. With enough Freeze cards, it can usually render any deck completely useless, as the cards are too busy being frozen to fight back.
  • High-level Champions tend to have more health and stronger skills than most Legendary cards of the same speed tier, as a sort of reward for grinding 4,000 Champion Stones or simply Bribing Your Way to Victory. The result is that Champions absolutely dominate the upper levels of the metagame, particularly hexers, freezers, bolters, or some unholy combination of those three. This trend doesn't seem to be going away anytime soon, either, as three new Champions release every four weeks. Even among these, a few stand out above the rest.
    • Lok'thor, the Reborn. In much the same vein as Seraphim above, Lok is a 4-delay Champion with an annoying combination of Emberhide and Regenerate, allowing it to deal tons of passive damage and heal off its injuries while it waits to activate. With Legendary Health equipped, it's an outright Nigh-Invulnerable monster without a way to deal lots of damage to it quickly. Plus, its ease of use means it can find a home in tons of decks, even outside of its own BGE. Unlike Seraphim, Lok'thor isn't a premium card, so since any player can get Champion Stones for it, it's a staple in many decks and considered a premier defensive pick for free-to-play players, whether you've reached endgame or are totally new. And once it activates, it starts going on the offensive with Bolt All, which helps it synergize with hexbolt decks.
    • Kensho, the Aeromaster is a foe to fear. Boasting a nasty mix of high Ward, Frostbreath, and Freeze, Kensho is an incredibly versatile choice that can be put to good use pretty much from the get-go. He has a little of everything: a surprisingly strong Attack stat for a wizened old monk, a solid defensive skill in Ward that makes him pretty much immune to Damage Over Time without lots of concerted effort, and the dreaded "Freeze every 2". That's right — in spite of only being a mid-speed card, a high-level Kensho can cast Freeze every other turn! The devs have taken note of this and created premium champions with the same gamebreaking ingredients: 2-delay, Ward, Freeze every 2. Have enough Shards to collect them all? Congratulations, your Kensho is now, in effect, spammable!
    • Leroux, the Macabre. Leroux's skills (Valour, Siphon, and Dualstrike) result in a card that reaches an extremely high Attack stat right off the bat, strike whatever card is in front of it twice for that amount, and then heal off whatever damage it may have taken. At higher levels, particularly once it hits level 7 and gets Dualstrike every 2 (read: every other turn), it's very easy for an unchecked Leroux to blitz through anything and everything foolish enough to come near it. Combine his toolkit with Aria, who gives every card Berserk, and you make him into an Increasingly Lethal Enemy on top of that.
    • Nuvis, the Eye Collector. On paper, Nuvis's skillset of Invisibility, Empower Goblin, and Empower Mecha is offset by his low base Attack and Fragile Speedster nature, and he looks like he could be a decent fast support for Goblin and Mecha decks. In practice, Nuvis is perhaps the only Goblin or Mecha you'll ever want to use outside of a Mecha or Goblin BGE, since without other Goblins or Mechas, he's guaranteed to use both of those Empowers on himself. With only 1 turn of delay before Nuvis activates, that means you had better think fast or risk losing a few cards to what amounts to a 30-damage nuke on whatever's in front of Nuvis, every single turn. Even Leroux has a brief cooldown on its Dualstrikes — Nuvis has no such limitation. Oh, and in case you missed his description above, he has Invisibility, so he's difficult to defeat with the conventional hexbolt strategy. Your best bet against Nuvis is to pray you draw a card with Nullify, a highly situational skill which pretty much cripples him outright, or try to kill him with Counter-Attack skills like Vengeance and Emberhide.
    • Alyel, Rush of Fury. What else can be said about a Champion that activates instantly? Just by existing, Alyel can bypass killing anything else and soften up the Hero a bit, which becomes quite a problem when her Berserk increases her Attack from a measly 6 by at least 8 points (with a Berserk rune) on non-Dualstrike turns. Once Alyel gets going, she's quite difficult to stop: she has a solid defensive skill in Invisibility, letting her dodge up to 4 skills aimed at her. In what is perhaps the most unfair strategy in the entire game, placing Alyel next to Razi the Fallen Light, who can Empower an Angel card by 18 with the proper rune, opens the possibility of getting your Hero wiped out in the span of a single turn with no warning, thanks to Alyel Dualstriking with her souped-up Attack. However, this was addressed in 2023, where she was nerfed into a 1-delay card. While still powerful, she's now far from the unstoppable force she once was.
    • R3-M1, the Channeller. When the developers started increasing Armor values in 2022, they went much too far when they designed R3-M1, who combines Armor 11 (unheard of on 1-delay cards, which typically have Armor 7 at most) with two already-solid skills in Empower Void 12 and Confuse. Void cards are few and far between, so R3 usually appears as the only Void card in a deck to power itself up in a similar vein to Nuvis. In fact, with an Empower rune, a max-level R3-M1 deals 30 damage with each attack, which matches Nuvis. All of this adds up to a Lightning Bruiser who can dish out loads of damage, take Scratch Damage from attacks in return, and then Confuse you at the most inopportune time. Its only saving grace is that it lacks Invisibility, making it vulnerable to Hexbolt and Freeze.
• Inferred Holocaust: This happens a lot thanks to the lack of real cutscenes, but we're never really told how the once-beautiful Red Feather Valley was obliterated by the Void, and we only get to see it through the aftermath. Same with towns like Beetleton Bunker and Duskwillow, which both seem to get destroyed Once per Episode.
• Low-Tier Letdown: Froggit, the Puppeteer was derided as the worst Champion in the game for years due to his weak skillset, which tried to fill many roles but couldn't do any of them well — namely, Siphon, Scorch, and most infamously, single-target Hex in a game where a common strategy is to cast layers of Hex All across the entire enemy deck. However, Froggit's reputation as this disappeared after he received a Balance Buff in 2023. This replaced his Hex with Confusion, a much rarer and more useful skill that allowed him to fill a niche once exclusively occupied by premium card R3-M1.
• Memetic Badass: Scorgon Ambusher, a rather unassuming 0-delay Epic who makes up for his extremely low stats and weak skills with poison damage comparable to powerful Legendary cards like Plyn Poisontrek and Venomtouch Siren, is jokingly referred to as one of the strongest cards in the game and a Master Poisoner that can sting cards like Kensho and Lok'thor to death with ease.
• Memetic Mutation: "Ooops! Something unexpected happened." This message shows up when a player is disconnected from the game, which can happen at inopportune times. As a result, players have started referring to being disconnected as "getting oopsed".
• Memetic Troll: The Raven became one of these in early 2023 after he became the face of the "11 glitch", where players were unable to get past the title screen because the Raven's dialogue portrait would appear out of nowhere, saying only "11". Since then, fans have exaggerated him into a capricious, unstoppable force with the power to destroy the entire game by uttering one simple Arc Number.
• Padding: Most of the postgame can feel like this, what with the Excuse Plot in each level and the lack of real dialogue as compared to the main story. However, the devs have gotten better with this as of 2022, introducing a new overarching plot involving the return of the Void and a new, mysterious antagonist.
• Play the Game, Skip the Story: Compared to more in-depth Card Battle Games like Magic the Gathering, Spellstone is a lot easier to pick up and understand, with simple mechanics and addictive gameplay. The way the plot is shown off, through Flavor Text in the levels rather than cutscenes, may make you wonder what the point is to having a plot at all. However, for some players, instead it's the reverse.
• Scrappy Mechanic: The crafting table. Some cards (many Legendary Reward cards and Mythics), as well as all Runes, require you to go to the crafting table and combine items found during gameplay. Crafting cards is annoying because there are so many of them that just filtering to "Cards" is still a list that's multiple screens long, and you have to scroll down and find the one you're specifically looking for. Crafting Runes is easier, but your choice of three (later four) Runes is entirely up to the Random Number God, so there's no guarantee you can get the one you need — and when Legendary Health was better than every other rune in the game, saving up your resources only for the RNG to offer other runes was a disappointment much more often than not.
• Stress-Relieving Gameplay: Wiping the enemy deck with Bolt/Frostbreath, watching enemy hexers and bolters die to your Backlash, and having enemy cards kill each other under Confusion can all be very satisfying.
• That One Boss:
  • Dyrnwyn's Spirit, the boss of "Dyrnwyn's Test" in Frigore, is a huge obstacle for the relatively early point it appears in the game. No matter what phase of the boss fight you're on, Dyrnwyn has a huge amount of Lightning Bruiser Legendary Angels to throw your way, such as Brilliant Bennu, Fatal Betrayal, and Everstorm Ace — and all at a point where you're not likely to own more than a few Legendaries yourself and still rely on your very first Mythic Titan as a Crutch Character. Dyrnwyn's boss-exclusive cards make this fight even worse, particularly "Dyrnwyn's Wisdom", which heals her entire deck by 30 points every turn and can't be hurt with conventional attacks thanks to a whopping 23 Armor. Add in the boss's Imbue All Scorch, which essentially puts the entire thing on a time limit, and you have a recipe for a VERY frustrating fight.
  • Ebonclaw, Silencer. Normally superboss fights don't make the cut for this trope, but Formos manages to be much more annoying than the other two Crimsonwing Champions combined, to the point where he is widely considered the hardest boss in the game. Why is this? Well, unlike most bosses, Formos uses a highly variable deck with every tribe represented (besides Mechas and Goblins). This means that there's no safe time to approach him, as the odds are that at least one thing in his deck will benefit from a BGE just like you. More frustrating than this is his skillset, which includes Invigorate All 16 — a skill that not only heals his entire deck by 16 points every single turn, but permanently increases their maximum HP by that amount. With his deck mainly consisting of extremely fast 1 and 0-delay cards that couldn't even benefit that much from a Legendary HP rune, this essentially means a Zerg Rush of enemies that activate nearly instantly, have a huge Healing Factor, regularly have 40 or more HP in spite of their speed, and have boosted damage thanks to the boss casting Hex All 4 every turn. Even veterans of the game quake in their boots against this boss, and for good reason.
  • Lightning Boss Ashanti. Though only available for three days, this boss quickly developed an infamous reputation for his highly frustrating cocktail of skills. To counteract the high physical damage of fast Dualstriking Angels and the high magical damage of Evil Eye-casting Avians, Ashanti protected his deck with Barrier All 13 — for reference, even lategame bosses like Kensho had Barrier All 5, with Mythic Master Bluefire's Barrier All 10 being the only boss that even came close. This would all be well and good if Ashanti didn't have a blatantly overpowered offensive skill to go with it: Freeze All, a skill only the Final Boss previously had access to. The skill was bugged, making it even more difficult — if the Freeze All failed to freeze even one of the player's cards, Ashanti was coded to treat the entire move as though it had failed, and he'd start spamming Freeze All again and again and again. And if you thought you could avoid this with Invisibility, you'd be wrong, as Ashanti also had Barrage 8 to strip that away and practically guarantee his Freeze All would hit. Players were essentially forced into one of two strategies: a full Invisibility deck that could weather the Barrage, or a deck with no Invisibility at all, so as not to trigger the Freeze-spam glitch. Many could not defeat the boss in time, potentially missing out on valuable Champion Stones and the powerful "Aikido Master" reward.