Currently Defenders of Cardom has (or I guess had) a MASSIVE issue with balancing. There was a serious imbalance of power between the 3 card types: Heroes, Enchantments, and Spells. The best "strategy" was just placing as many heroes as possible, since it was the easiest and most effective strategy in 90% of cases.

I absolutely hated this strategy and believed it was unhealthy for the game, but instead of nerfing this strategy, I decided to flat out remove it (not completely, but it's effectively removed) by making hero cards be removed from your deck upon playing.  Hero-spamming has long been an issue in our internal testing, and the change to hero cards is what we deemed the "Nuclear Option", because it seemed so drastic when we first brainstormed it.

Why did it seem so drastic?

For 2 reasons:

1) It required us to stop procrastinating the inevitable card system rewrite. (Hey but thats out of the way now! so is part of my sanity D:)

2) We thought it was caused by just flat out better stats on towers, but recently we realized that the idea of hero spam limited us on many possible hero mechanics, and we literally could not nerf most heroes without them being totally useless

The benefits this brought

This 1 change didnt just remove hero spam, but had many other knock-on effects!

1) The card system is now rewritten!

2) Hero spam is finally dead

3) Your deck very often carried A LOT of dead weight because of the hero cards that you couldn't afford, slowing the pace you could use spells at. Decks feel much easier to manager and "lighter" (would that be the right term for it)

4) We can have cheap heroes again

5) Tons of new mechanics are able to be added without destroying the games balance.

What you can take away from this

You hear this a ton  when discussing game design, but please DO NOT BE AFRAID TO EXPERIMENT! Always consider possible solutions to problems, even if they seem too drastic.

We also were blinded by the vague concept of "player choice", and thought by directly removing unhealthy strategies, the game would be less fun or have less depth. This was a major factor in us being reluctant to try out this idea.

Thanks for reading my deranged rant. For the 2 of you that care: Update v2.2.0 is going to be out soon with some major rebalancings, mostly the one I just spent this entire devlog talking about.