I have updated the SWAG today to include new Reliquary cards and all of the new equipment as well. I also finally got around to a whole lot of metagame-related changes to how skill calculations work. If you haven't checked SWAG recently you should do so now to see where cards are currently ranked! Note: There are currently a couple of issues with Assault and healing walls (Great Gorgu and Meat Stores) in the rankings. I am working on those in the background, but please note that affected cards' rankings will be a bit off until fixed. -- Sir V

I have made some updates in the past two days so everyone may want to download a new copy (or simply refresh if you use the web version). Updates include adding new cards and some bugfixes, but also some adjustment to skill calculations based on recent meta shifts. I've also fixed the long-standing issues with healing walls not calculating their skill values properly (this should affect Gorgu and Meat Stores). --- As a side note, we've now passed 200 registered users! Thanks everyone for using SWAG ... it looks good on you. :) -- Sir V

I have updated the SWAG to include all of the spring rebalancing of cards in our past several patches. I also fixed a few outstanding bugs. Please note that the rankings in SWAG will not be fully accurate again until I rebalance the skill weights to accommodate all of the stat balance and metagame changes over the past half year. I will try to get to that soon, as well. -- Sir V

Thanks Sir_Valimont! If I may ask, how are you able to compare the apples and oranges that are all the different skills in the game to say which cards are better and worse?

The SWAG itself has all the abilities in it, along with information and weightings on what type of skills benefit from which stats and which strategies and what categories the abilities are in. e.g. damage dealing, balooning(where a creature gets stronger and stronger) etc. it then uses a bunch of formulae to refer to these values for each of the abilities on a creature, along with their stats, to arrive at a final score. it takes into account things like raw numbers, the synergies between skills, what the current meta is like, etc. for example, L Daos has regenerate and frenzy. if you look up those skills, both have been marked as having synergy with balooning(regen lets you continue to baloon longer, frenzy makes you baloon). so the formulae looks at Daos, sees that he has two skills which synergize together to help him baloon, and gives him a boost to his score. His score is reduced by a high cooldown(6 is considered neutral for the formula). And then high damage and high health are both raw boosts, and well as synergizing with each other(you can survive to deal damage for longer). High health synergises with regen(you can survive to take advantage of regen). etc. Then obviously consume reduces the score. (If you look at consume, it has a negative weighting in the same category that recover and rebirth have a positive weighting in). I'm not sure, but even his creature type(infantry) and faction(nameless horde) might factor in too. Basically every possible interaction between any two attributes of the card(abilities, stats, etc.) has a score assigned in fancy ways, and then everything is applied together in fancy ways to arrive at a final score.

Yeah Killerprogrammin, but the question is how does he make all those fancy formulas?

if you want something to increase a score, either add a positive value, multiply a value greater than 1, or power or exponent by a value greater than one, depending on exactly how you want that to scale. do the inverse to decrease. rinse and repeat until you've taken everything into account. If you're wanting ELI5, then thats about as simple as it gets. if you want full details, go look at the formulae in the sheet, and look at the functions in them, and which values they are applied to, and plot out the curves for each of those. rinse and repeat until you understand. Edit: To clarify, my previous post ***IS*** both the fancy formula and how it's made. You just might not recognise it as one because it doesn't have any math symbols in it. Then you turn it into a mathematical equation using my first sentence in this post.

killerprogrammin has got it right in what he said. I should point out that it's a good question though; ultimately it's not that easy (or even possible) really to weight everything perfectly, as the skills are not immediately comparable to one another. Actually, designing the card pool with horizontally comparable skills rather than vertically comparable ones is a major goal of the Storm Wars team in the first place. As always I therefore want to point out that the rankings should be taken with a grain of salt; they are a general guide but not an authoritative claim on how "good" something is, per se. Incidentally I am also still editing formulas so rankings are not quite accurate yet ... I will update this thread once again when I've finished the process.

On that note, while you're at it, can you change "Drain Strengths" synergies to include damage output synergy? One or two of the synergies it has aren't used on any creature that has it, whereas damage synergy is used on Beholder and would cause it to be in it's rightful place in the standings, somewhere much closer to the top.

Hey, I play Storm Wars and bought the 15 gems a day for 30 days deal. Don't know how to claim them though. My Storm Wars account is Akatsuki17