Today we have a special preview, we're talking shop about enchantments in Academy. You can find the article >>HERE<<. Enjoy this SUPER preview before Gen Con! See you all there!
This changes everything.
I mean, at a glance, these are just weaker/different versions of Rhino Hide, Bear Strength and Regrowth, which already exist in Arena. But when you consider that you can have these on creatures in addition to the existing Enchantments, it means you can build more powerful beasts than are currently possible.
Equipment is sort of self-limiting by having various equipment slots that fill up; e.g. you can't have more than 1 chest armor, or more than 1 glove/bracer/gauntlet, or more than 1 cloak. Thus, to max out your armor, you would put on a chest piece, maybe gloves and/or boots, maybe a cloak, and you could include the 1 enchantment that added extra armor, Rhino Hide. That allowed you to get 4 armor with only 2 spells (1 chest piece and 1 enchantment), and up to 7 total (ignoring temporary effects like Brace Yourself, incantations, etc). But now you could equip both Rhino Hide + Gator Toughness for 3 armor (+2 life) without taking up an equipment slot, revealing them both only when attacked (e.g. before the apply damage/effects step). Or you could enchant with both Bear Strength + Wolf Fury for Melee +3 (and Piercing +1), similarly only revealing before the "roll dice" step of the attack. Of course, these also add +1 to the maximum cap for attack and armor.
And they're fairly cheap for what they do. Only Iguana Regrowth gets prohibitively expensive for larger creatures, and is unplayable on a mage, but that's OK because Regenerate doesn't stack anyway (e.g. use Iguana Regrowth on a level 1-2 creature and regular Regrowth on level 3+).