The campaign ran downhill

Three descents are on record, one from each position in a campaign, and they say something a campaign should not say.

The first took forty-nine turns, spent both Echoes, sat on the brink fifteen times and ran the Gathering down to two cards. The third took thirty-three, spent nothing, reached the brink three times, and never went below twenty-four.

Both banished thirteen of thirteen, perfectly. The harder one scored Bronze and the easier one Gold, because the medal counts a spent Echo against you. It was rewarding the sitting that demanded less.

What was causing it

The cards you carry were dealt on top of a full hand. So the first descent opened on eight and the two after it opened on eleven: a thirty-seven per cent larger hand, against Empyreans that were identical, because their statistics were stored by rank and a rank cannot say that one Empyrean is harder than another.

The campaign was arming you faster than it was arming itself.

Four changes, and they are live

What you carry is what you begin with. Not a bonus on a full hand, but the whole opening hand. What survived a descent is what starts the next one. The first descent is untouched: it carries nothing, so there is nothing to change.

The Empyreans escalate. Fifty, sixty, seventy. Dominion rises and the Strike holds at twenty-five, which is a rule this game learned once already: scaling the blow makes a fight unsurvivable rather than expensive, where a longer fight is attrition, and attrition is what a finale should be.

Nyarlathotep opens the campaign now, and the Nameless Mist closes it. The order had been reversed since the mode shipped, so it ended on the entity meant to begin it.

Nothing but the cards carries. Bloodstones used to, and the argument for it became the argument against: a stone is a thing you hold and time, so carrying one meant a descent opened holding its own emergency. Every campaign on record shows them banked and never broken.

What is not settled

The medal still counts a spent Echo against you, so the harder descent still scores lower. That is left alone on purpose: changing a grade and a difficulty in the same week means neither can be blamed for what happens next. It waits until these four have been played.

Two of the three Empyreans are also still only larger, not different. They are meant to teach three separate lessons, and at present they all teach the same one, at increasing volume.