I love YGG but I can't agree with this.

To me this is one of the greatest mistakes Splinterlands has ever made. I'd take a Soulkeep mistake because that's an honest mistake, this one isn't. It takes away the whole point of ownership.

To start, the community should not be making decisions like this. Nor any gameplay decisions. But the team should not change cards after they are released, except for very few exceptions. Making small changes to stats, especially adjustments below max level is perfectly fine. Fixing abilities that aren't working as intended is also fine. The rework to Armored Strike makes it function like most people would expect, which is much better. The rework to Weapons Training was less ok since it was a pretty big buff and it had nothing to do with expectation on how it should work. Heloise added ability was ok because it existed before Final Rest and it would be much weirder to have Final Rest having added text to exclude Heloise.

Nidhoggr sucked. I saw Eternal Tofu and bought it right away. I saw Nidhoggr and I knew I didn't need it. Changing cards later takes away from these decisions. The moment I saw Nidhoggr I knew it wouldn't be good and most people did too. They had more than a month to change it before it was actually released. But that's not a reason to change it. Being a legendary dragon summoner also isn't. Being an airdrop also isn't.

All TCGs have cards that are amazing cards that suck and everything in between. A card sucking is no reason to buff it. Even ignoring non legendary dragon summoners, we can take a look at Sheng Xiao. It might have been better than pre-buff Nidhoggr in many scenarios but there was also almost no reason to use it over Akane, while there were some games for pre-buff Nidhoggr. So, while it might have been easier to use Xiao than Nidhoggr, Nidhoggr had more uses. Where's the buff to Sheng Xiao?

Dragon with Akane was pretty powerful in 99 mana. None of the dual splinter summoners could use Rage or a few other big mana dragons.

The problem is that now Nidhoggr is strictly the best summoner in Modern for any game with 70+ mana (not just for Dragon). And it's also probably the best even down to 50 mana. That means that any game where dragon is available and there's enough mana, if one player has Nidhoggr and the other doesn't, Nidhoggr is gonna win unless they mess up the team. This is terrible design. I've been losing a bunch of games to Nidhoggr. It's Nidhoggr spam season in Modern.

Also, cards don't exist in a vacuum. It's not like buffing one card doesn't affect the others. Akane became way less useful because Nidhoggr is simply better in almost every situation now unless it's very low mana.

This is the web3, we pay for the cards and we pay a lot for them. This isn't the same as web2 games doing buffs and nerfs.

On top of that, in regular games there's usually a prohibition of participating in the competition and the market for people on the team and sometimes even family members. That doesn't happen here. What's stopping someone with knowledge that a card is going to be buffed to buy a bunch of copies? Especially because it's easy to have alts that the community doesn't know about.

Apparently this was also talked about before in a random non-official podcast but why did some people have access to this information and were sharing it like that? Players should not be expected to watch podcasts to know something so important.