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Some spicy Hush discussion today. I'm very interested by that conversation. I don't have anything to add, but will be interested how it plays out next week. In the mean time, I'm happy to offer the context on how Hush and Sunburst silencing champs came to be.
Having answers is important to the interactivity of LoR. The best answers aren't complete - Mystic Shot is efficient but only kills small targets, Vengeance is expensive and activates Last Breath, Detain dodges Last Breath, but gives the opponent an out to get back their card.
With set 1, we liked Purify as an answer to utility effects that didn't give you card or board advantage. But we couldn't let it hit champs - if you kill a champ, your opponent can play a new copy. If you strand a champ in a powerless state, they still have a champ spell in hand.
This creates an unhealthy incentive, where you want to silence a champ and then leave it in play alive & useless. Unfortunately for Purify, without hitting champs, it ended up with a low playrate. Being narrow is okay, but this would limit our ability to make more silence cards.
We had always planned for silence to be a Targon mechanic, but found, like Purify, mostly they occupied a very narrow niche and when pushed more would create weird incentives like teaching playtesters to only play buffs on champions.
Noah Selzer (final design lead for Call of the Mountain) and I came to the same solution at the same time - we could allow silence to hit champs if we limit the duration.
Permanently making an enemy champ into a vanilla would cause problems, but doing it for one round turned out great - you turn off utility effects and create windows to interact, even incentivizing that interaction by both players.
We may make more cards like Purify that permanently silence followers, but for now if a card can silence champs you can expect it limited to one round.
