Hello dear Thrones community. Today, I wanted to take the time and highlight how the balance team has been operating for 2025 before I talk about changes coming for the upcoming year.
First things first, we started the year 2025 with a polarizing decision of testing how the game would look like with the rotation of the first 2 FFG cycles. Without reopening the debate, the decision in the end was to not continue with rotation for the time being. While not going forward with this decision, I still want to highlight the success of such a test period without popular plots like The First Snow of Winter and Valar Morghulis, which gave way to Battle of the Trident enjoyers to build new decks with a lesser drawback. This period gave way to the creation of a deck now known from the community after seeing Baratheon Battle of the Trident take down Online Worlds.
Next up is how the restricted list has been handled. For a while now, we have been following a model of 4 restricted lists per year, once every 3 months. This model allows us to react quickly to problematic interactions and adjust quickly if needed. I’ll talk more about this in the overview for 2026, but expect changes to come from this side of the Balance team.
Lastly, I want to give a nice round of applause to the members of this team for their continuous implication in the shaping of the game. We have increased the number of members in late 2025, with the addition of 7 new members, bringing the total up to 20 members. These discussions often become quite volatile as we all have different opinions and rarely is there a clear consensus on things, but in the end, we as a team fully support the outcome of the Restricted List even if on a personal level we disagree with certain decisions.
With all that said, I can say with confidence that 2025 was successful for the Balance Team, while also seeing how much work still has to be done to make the complete process more enjoyable for the team members and also seeing how we can change certain things in 2026 to make the meta feel fresh and balanced. Stay tuned.
